10.26.09
John Williams: Stoner
The cover design of the NYRB Classics edition of John Williams’ novel Stoner might have been expressly chosen to emphasise that, even though the book was published in 1965, this is not a sort of literary Cheech and Chong. It is a sober study of one man’s slow journey to finding out who he is, and it is quietly magnificent.
Williams hits the reader straight away with a devastating summation of William Stoner’s career in the University of Missouri:
Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.
This is a tease, because the next 278 pages explain why such a dismissal is unwarranted. It gives us a chronological account of a life, and of a man, who grew up on a farm, with a father “stooped by labour” and a mother who “regarded her life patiently, as if it were a long moment that she had to endure.” The anticipation of a life with little expectation and fewer rewards is withdrawn from Stoner when, in the year 1910 aged 19, he attends the University to study agriculture at his father’s suggestion. Standing on the campus for the first time, “he had a sudden sense of security and serenity he had never felt before.”
Stoner switches from agriculture to English, and realises that he will never return to the farm. This is a ‘talky’ book, with a good deal of the development coming through dialogue – a difficult and welcome achievement. First is when Stoner’s tutor, Archer Sloane, takes him aside for a conversation.
“But don’t you know, Mr Stoner? Don’t you understand about yourself yet? You’re going to be a teacher.”
Stoner felt himself suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” said Sloane softly.
“How can you tell? How can you be sure?”
“It’s love, Mr Stoner,” Sloane said cheerfully. ”You are in love. It’s as simple as that.”
Already we see a pattern developing, of Stoner following the direction of another. However he does often branch out from these directions and make his own decision in the end. He comes to see the future as “a territory ahead that awaited his exploration.” When the First World War breaks out and the US becomes involved, his colleagues sign up to fight, with one saying, “I suppose I’m doing it because it doesn’t matter whether I do it or not.” Not for Stoner such a spirit: he remains in Missouri and courts, and then marries, a girl called Edith.
His marriage starts out as lukewarm and follows the laws of thermodynamics, and so it is through his work that he finds it “possible to live, and even be happy, now and then.” At home, his refuge is his study. ”It was himself that he was attempting to define as he worked on his study … it was himself that he was slowly shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible.”
Work means the university, and if you thought that ‘electrifying scenes of campus politics’ was an oxymoron, then you need to read Stoner. It is a book which is structurally unadventurous but emotionally and intellectually engaging. We see a man struggling to be allowed to do the one thing he has learned to do well, and to find the dignity in labour (“I think he’s a real hero,” said Williams of his creation), and to exercise love in the only way he can.
The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and the heart showing themselves in the minute, strange and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print – the love which had to be hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, at first tentatively, and then boldly, and then proudly.
10.09.09
Vivant Denon: No Tomorrow
Back in the mid-1990s, when novella trumpeters such as Pushkin Press and Melville House were not yet born, the grandaddy of cheap paperbacks Penguin quietly issued a series called Syrens. (So quietly, alas, that they quickly disappeared without trace.) These were slim paperbacks with plain covers in contrasting colours, covering a wide range of fiction, poetry and essays such as Kafka’s Aphorisms, Beckett’s Modern Love First Love, Hardy’s Poems 1912-13, and less well known titles by writers including Proust, Wilde, Voltaire and Perec. I noticed recently that two titles have now been issued by NYRB Classics: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter, and this book. My acquisitive nature meant that I picked up most of the Syrens titles at the time, but still haven’t read many of them. Fourteen years from purchase to reading must be a record even for me.
No Tomorrow (Point de lendemain, 1777) was first published anonymously, though its author, born Francois Dominique Vivant de Non, was no self-effacing recluse. The introduction to the Syrens edition tells me that, with interests in art, antiquities and the theatre, he became a favourite of Louis XV and travelled on official service to Russia and Italy as Baron Denon. Returning to revolutionary France, he astutely dropped his title and, before ingratiating himself into Napoleon’s service, survived by his engravings of official uniforms and obscene etchings. This combination of interests in social status and the erotic arts are perfectly preserved in this, his only work of fiction. (Its skimpy length – 38 small pages in the Syrens edition – makes it hard even for a novella publisher to justify as a standalone work. NYRB get around this by presenting a dual language edition.)
Denon was 30 when he wrote No Tomorrow, but his narrator is a mere boy of 20. Nonetheless, the qualities that made one academic sum up Denon in the phrase ”hedonist and scholar” are clearly present in the fiction. It opens with what Milan Kundera praised as “the playful elegance of repetition in the first paragraph of one of the loveliest pieces of French prose.”
I doted on the Countess ______; I was twenty, and I was naive; she deceived me, I was incensed; she deserted me. I was naive, I missed her; I was twenty, she forgave me; and because I was twenty, was naive, and, though still deceived, no longer deserted, I believed that lover was never more loved than I and I was therefore the happiest man alive.
But this dizzying opening – I had to reread it a couple of times – is deceptive. The Countess does not feature in the story. Instead, our hero’s journey begins when he encounters her friend, Madame de T____, in the theatre. “‘I see,’ she said, ‘that I shall have to rescue you from your solitary splendour. You look quite ridiculous all alone. Like patience upon a monument!’”
Through subtlety and sleight of hand, Madame de T_____ persuades the young man to accompany her home, where she is to meet with her estranged husband. “I was afraid that I should be dreadfully bored alone in his company.” Finally, left alone, they fall to the inevitable:
Now, kisses are like secrets. One leads to another, they quicken, they grow more heated by the process of accumulation. And so it proved now. The first had scarcely been given when a second followed, then a third, each crowding closely on the heels of the one before, interrupting our talk and then replacing it entirely, until at last they hardly left any path for our sighs to escape by.
The story proceeds by further passion and subterfuge, a slinky, cynical treat. Hedonism and libertinage are the order of the day: no tomorrow! (Though an earlier English edition translated the title, oddly, as Never again!) Madame urges her boy to believe in “the power of pleasure, our sole guide and only excuse!”, while he seeks an emotional crutch for this new love affair, fearing that “unbridled passion murders niceness of feeling. We run toward pleasure and ride roughshod over the delights which precede it. A ribbon is snapped, a bodice is ripped: desire leaves its mark in its wake and soon the idol of our heart looks uncommonly like its victim.” However he, by cuckolding his own mistress, is a player here as much as a victim.
It is only later, when he is permitted to enter into her highly symbolic “secret chamber”, that our young man learns just how ruthless Madame can be. At one point, as she initiates him in the rituals of cynical love, he “felt that a blindfold had been removed from my eyes, but failed to observe that a new one had been put in its place.” Blindfolds and masks are worn by all the players in this society, so concerned with surface that they decline to acknowledge their own feelings. David Coward, in an introduction to his translation in this Syrens edition, calls it “a masterpiece, as clear and self-confident as a line etched on glass with a very sharp diamond.” With its beautiful prose, seductive eroticism, precociously mannered methods, and clever ending, No Tomorrow itself resembles its central femme fatale, about whom another of her lovers cheerfully tells the hero: “She provokes, she arouses, but she feels nothing herself: that woman is a block of marble.”
07.07.09
L.J. Davis: A Meaningful Life
What a pleasure it is to write about a book that I loved without complication. For those academics even now preparing studies on whether or not the new social media can actually sell books, chalk one up for me. Already an admirer of NYRB Classics, I bought this book when they mentioned it on Twitter or Facebook or, you know, one of those sites. We owe a debt of gratitude to novelist Jonathan Lethem, who lobbied for its reissue, and to NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank, who listened.
A Meaningful Life was first – and last – published in 1971, and until now had not even reached a paperback edition. Says Davis in this fascinating piece about the background to the book and its rediscovery, “It came out and nothing happened.” (Hugo Wilcken, take heart.) There really is no excuse for this, as it’s the most miserably funny book I’ve read all year.
The meaningful life of the title is sought by Lowell Lake, who one day shortly after his 30th birthday, wakes up with “the sudden realization that his job was not temporary.”
He’d found his level, and here he was, on it. He was the managing editor of a second-rate plumbing-trade weekly, a job he did adequately if not with much snap. It was, he realized with a dull kind of shock, just the sort of job for a man like him. Someday he might rise to the editorship, either of the plumbing trade monthly or of something exactly like it. Big deal. But it was all he was good for, and he was stuck with it.
Here we are then, in the territory previously occupied by any number of dissatisfied suburban workers: Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary Road; Sinclair Lewis’s George Babbitt; Bob Slocum in Something Happened; Tom Rath in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The ease with which I can recall examples indicates how much I’ve enjoyed these books; but do we need another? Did we in 1971?
Well, it didn’t hurt. Davis executes his tale with much more open wit than the others: Something Happened is a very funny novel but is “black humour … with the humour removed”, in Kurt Vonnegut’s words, as the author “cripples his own jokes intentionally.” A Meaningful Life is more straightforward, more seductive than that, and in that sense all the more impressive for allowing no light at the end of the tunnel for its ‘hero’. It is different from Something Happened in that there, the narrator makes his own miserable comedy; here, the jokes are all on Lowell Lake. But like Heller’s book – like the best comic writing – it comes unsweetened, tempered by an undertow – an overflow – of despair.
Lowell, an inadequate man, is surrounded by inadequates, such as his boss, Crawford, the editor of the plumbing trade monthly, who fears an office coup, “that someday they would contrive to get him no matter what he did to stop them.” Or his father-in-law, Leo, whose relentlessly droning smalltalk drives Lowell to distraction (“Lowell was afraid to open his mouth for fear of screaming in the little man’s face”). It even, in a nicely astute moment, begins to infect Lowell’s perception of his wife:
“Great”, said Lowell, noticing with a sinking feeling that her last sentence had been spoken with her father’s inflection and ended with her father’s phrase. He’d never noticed a thing like that in her voice before. He began to listen for it, and shortly his fears were confirmed. It was there all right, coming and going like the odor of burning tires in a rose garden.
This is how he got here. Lowell, frustrated in his job, silently bored by his marriage, decided to do a Frank Wheeler and move to a new life: not to Europe but to New York from his western home. Unlike Frank Wheeler, he never got around to putting it off:
There was no getting out of it. Afloat on a tide of events and furiously propelled by his wife, he gave notice at the library, renouncing his scholarship at the Berkeley, and told everyone in sight that he’d decided to go to New York, desperately hoping that someone would give him some smart-sounding and compelling reason for doing no such blame-fool thing, but no one did. On the contrary, the more people he told about it, the more it seemed like he was actually going to go.
As Lowell brings himself with him, the new life feels very much like the old life: and not a very meaningful one at that. What he does to try to overturn this is the central plot of the book: he buys a Brooklyn brownstone “of such surpassing opulent hideousness that Lowell could scarcely believe that someone was actually offering to sell it to him. It was just the kind of place he’d always really wanted with a powerful subconscious craving that defied analysis.” His project to refurbish the building is undertaken on the very good grounds that busy fingers are happy fingers; but it never occurs to Lowell that the question “How can I have a meaningful life?” is one which, once asked, cannot be satisfactorily answered.
The chapter which shows Lowell meeting the existing tenants of the building, who will need to be evicted, is the weakest section of the book. Davis is by far at his best when trapping Lowell in the crucibles of family and work. There are some brilliant set pieces, masterclasses in comic writing, including one where Lowell tries to bribe a city man during the planning process, and another where he is accidentally anti-semitic during an argument with his mother-in-law. Davis excels in taking the comedy of discomfort and stretching it further than it should go.
The prose in A Meaningful Life is fast on its feet and often surprising. You can read the first chapter here; if you like it, this is a book for you. In a book where the central character’s “concrete desires” seem to him to be “almost facts”, it’s a relief when hopes and expectations for a book are more than fulfilled in reality.
06.08.09
Roundup: Nigel Balchin, Elizabeth Hardwick, Gerard Woodward
I read – consecutively – three books recently which didn’t thrill me enough to devote a whole post to each, but I wanted to cover them briefly nonetheless.
Nigel Balchin: The Small Back Room
The Small Back Room (1943) is best known as the source of a film by the great Powell & Pressburger, though one of their minor works. I picked up a cheap copy of the recently reissued (and even more recently remaindered) Cassell Military Paperbacks edition, the cover of which is less handsome than that shown above. It is not as good in my opinion as Darkness Falls from the Air, which I enjoyed last year. The narrator, Sammy Rice, has the same sort of brittle wit as Bill Sarratt in Darkness, and there’s a cracking opening line:
In 1928 my foot was hurting all the time, so they took it off and gave me an aluminium one that only hurt about three-quarters of the time.
What’s interesting is that this is rarely mentioned in the rest of the book, other than an occasional reference to Sammy’s limping gait. Similarly, his alcoholism, a major thread in the film (there is an – unintentionally, I think – hilarious visual metaphor of him being crushed against the wall by a giant whisky bottle), is only explicitly addressed once or twice. This is thoroughly admirable, as someone with ongoing problems doesn’t necessarily dwell on them all the time, though it did leave the book with a lopsided feel for those, like me, who saw the film first.
The content of the book is mostly Sammy’s struggles with the bureaucracy of the government department he works for, developing scientific ideas which might help in the war effort. There’s a good deal of office politics and the trouble with politicians (as there was in Darkness). This has the ambiguous effect of faithfully representing the nausea-inducing boredom of committees, demarcation and internal power struggles while being occasionally boring itself.
The book ends with a tense bomb-defusing scene, which is less tense than the filmed version, and the story thereafter sort of peters out. The thing that The Small Back Room brought home to me is that, while a book composed mainly of dialogue might seem an easy option, it can actually make for a tougher read than a more narrative novel. Balchin does well to progress the story largely through dialogue, but the end result is only moderately interesting.
Elizabeth Hardwick: Sleepless Nights
I bought Sleepless Nights some time ago after seeing it recommended by Colm Tóibín in one of those end-of-year roundups. It’s a quite singular book in that I ‘enjoyed’ it hardly at all, yet think it so fascinating and full of good things that it should be more widely known. First published in 1979, it’s not hard to see why it had fallen out of print until NYRB Classics reissued it: it’s a difficult book, and a tricky one too which by its brevity leads the reader to expect plain sailing. (In fact it reads something like a 300-page book compressed to 128 pages.) Difficulty, in this context, means nothing more than that the reader should pay attention – hardly an arduous challenge – but also that we should admit there may be structure in apparent chaos (and not be too hung up if we can’t find it). The prose, certainly, is beautiful:
More or less settled in this handsome house. Flowered curtains made to measure, rugs cut for the stairs, bookshelves, wood for the fireplace. Climbing up and down the four floors gives you a sense of ownership – perhaps. It may be yours, but the house, the furniture, strain toward the universal and it will soon read like a stage direction: Setting—Boston. The law will be obeyed. Chests, tables, dishes, domestic habits fall into line.
Sleepless Nights is a book of “transformed and even distorted memory”: but “if only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember.” What the narrator does remember is a series of splinters from a life, often very like the life of Elizabeth Hardwick (whose name she shares too). That is, the reader is encouraged to confuse the book with a fractured memoir. In his introduction, Geoffrey O’Brien observes that
Sleepless Nights might be taken as an exploration of the problem of genre, the problem of distinguishing fiction from what is so coarsely described as ‘nonfiction’, except that the book is more like a demonstration that the problem is illusory.
The spot-memories which the book explores are intense through brevity. Real figures, such as Billie Holiday, come and go along with old flatmates such as ‘J.’, who barely appeared on the page before he died in a traffic accident, when a car “rushed into an ecstatic terrorism against J.’s neat, clerkly life at the curb.” Time passes and repasses, back and forward, “a decade falling like snow on top of another, soundless.” It is a bold, admirable work which I found quite impossible to appreciate fully – or to write about adequately. To redress the balance, I offer you a helpful contemporary review of Sleepless Nights, which compares it with Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
Gerard Woodward: August
If, as Alan Bennett says, “all families have a secret: they’re not like other families,” then Gerard Woodward’s Joneses top the table for idiosyncratic individuality, with a glue-sniffing mother and a psychopathic pianist son, and everyone else (and those two as well) an alcoholic. Ever since reading, and loving, I’ll Go to Bed at Noon a couple of years ago, I’ve been eager to read August (2001), the first volume in the trilogy. Eager but reluctant, for fear that it might disappoint.
It disappointed. It didn’t strike me as being near the high standard of I’ll Go to Bed at Noon – but then, what is? Indeed, if I had read August first, as intended by Woodward, I don’t know that I would have gone on to read the second volume.
This is not to say that it’s bad. It’s well-written, with the peculiar and seductive mixture of compassion and wit that Woodward does so well. Perhaps part of the problem was the structure, which loosely describes the family’s camping holiday in Wales each summer during the 1960s. Really, however, the meat of each section is in the flashbacks, which means there’s a lot of dense rehearsing rather than getting on with it: not something I object to in itself, but it did slow the reading down a lot for me.
As with I’ll Go to Bed at Noon, the central characters for me were Colette, the glue-sniffing mum, and her son Janus, a fascinating and frightening figure whose great giftedness for music we are never really given much evidence for. It’s horrible to read his taunting of the other family members, but impossible to tear yourself away.
‘I’d like to know why you did it.’
‘Did what?’
‘I’d like to know,’ Janus lowered his binoculars, the eyepieces having left a pair of red pince-nez on his nose, ‘why you were intimate with my father.’
Janus’s eyes looked stupidly small. Colette bent forward with incredulous laughter and repeated the word ‘intimate’ to rehear its quaintness.
‘Am I embarrassing you?’ said Janus.
‘You’re embarrassing yourself.’
‘Am I causing you pain?’
‘Only of laughter.’
‘Sometimes I feel it is my vocation to cause you pain to counterbalance the pleasure you had in conceiving me.’
It’s all downhill from here, and knowing where the story is leading probably did not help. My fault perhaps, as much as Woodward’s. I will certainly read A Curious Earth, the third volume of the trilogy, but with a lot less urgency and excitement than that with which I approached August.
04.24.09
Daphne du Maurier: Don’t Look Now
It’s typical of my wrongheaded priorities that the only time I’ve been inclined to read a book by Daphne du Maurier – author of Rebecca! Creator of The Birds! – was when I saw a book of her stories issued in Penguin Modern Classics. That volume – Don’t Look Now and other stories – was a collection published in her lifetime (original UK title: Not After Midnight). Other than the title story, I had mixed feelings about it. Now the du Maurier estate have clearly decided to have another crack at my defences, with a double whammy of a selection of her stories chosen by Patrick McGrath, and published by NYRB Classics.
I felt the stories here – nine of them, filling 360 pages – to be of better quality than the Penguin book – which they well might be, as a sort of best-of. Having read the title story, I can see why the film it inspired – which I haven’t seen – is so famous (and not because of the realistic sex: none of that between these covers): it’s brilliantly creepy and sinister, wonderfully reducing Venice from city of romance to a tawdry, soiled backdrop for cruelty and paranoia. I knew the vague bones of the story – dead child, couple go on hols to recuperate, spooky goings-on, child in red cloak omnipresent, lots of water – and that’s all you need to know too if you’re a newcomer like me. The opening line is good:
“Don’t look now,” John said to his wife, “but there are a couple of old girls two tables away who are trying to hypnotise me.”
- and, cleverly, is actually a joke and not a sinister opening … only for it to become sinister very quickly. The only weak point is the very last sentence, which risks reducing the whole thing to bathos – it’s very badly judged and should have been removed, leaving the penultimate sentence to do its unsettling work.
Du Maurier’s other most famous story, ‘The Birds’, comes next. It’s a story that’s hard to come to fresh, so famous has the Hitchcock adaptation become (achieving the sort of cultural osmosis so that even people who haven’t seen the film know what it’s about). This doesn’t matter, as it’s quite different, and better, in written form. The build-up of atmosphere is superb, and it ends up a Wyndhamesque thing, bleak, apocalyptic and really quite frightening. And English. As with Wyndham, too, du Maurier’s characters tend to be stout, hearty types, everymen to whom strange things happen. McGrath in his intro calls ‘The Birds’ “a starting point in the popularisation of an entire genre of environmental-catastrophe narratives” – or perhaps not quite the starting point, as it was published a year after The Day of the Triffids. (‘The Birds’ in fact exceeds Day of the Triffids as a concept – where Wyndham had to blind everyone to make plants threatening, flying creatures with sharp beaks need no such assistance.)
Endings are one of the strengths of du Maurier’s stories, particularly when they open the story up further rather than closing it down. This is exhibited well in ‘Blue Lenses’ which, like many of the stories here, could be summed up in a single sentence, a high-concept pitch. The one where the birds start attacking people. The one where the woman gets her sight back but... This simplicity in summary risks making them seem one-dimensional, and some of the time I couldn’t help thinking that critics were right when they “dismissed with a sneer” her work, as du Maurier unhappily put it. Like Nevil Shute, she is a popular writer with just enough critical kudos to drift in and out of print. But there is more here too. ‘Blue Lenses’ has a faintly silly premise, but it succeeds where others do not because it offers not only an indication of life extending beyond the story (the last lines are deliciously suggestive) but beneath the story too.
‘Split Second’, by contrast, spends most of its 55 pages treading water so that the characters can gradually catch up to what the reader had worked out early on (in fact they never do quite catch up). The same goes for ‘Escort’, a moment of crisis on a wartime ship. In a way this playing for time is a necessary motif of suspense stories – the slow building of atmosphere is an essential element of such work, and in that sense requires a little length to get going – but the problem is expectations. The sort of supernatural or sci-fi elements that arise here might be surprising in a story read out of the blue, here we know that in a du Maurier story that sort of thing is de rigueur, and so I just kept thinking, ‘Get on with it!’
Some of the stories resemble Roald Dahl’s adult fiction – his ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ – though lack his skittish charm. Du Maurier wrote her short works throughout her writing life, between the 1920s and the 1980s, but all have a period feel, slightly fusty and formal. Weakest of all are a couple of early works, a dozen pages or less each and pretty unmemorable.
However the last story, and longest at 80 pages, ‘Monte Verita’ is every bit the equal of ‘Don’t Look Now’ and ‘The Birds’ – and even, with its novella length, has the scope to dig a little deeper than those, and be more unusual still. Instead of Roald Dahl I was reminded of Stefan Zweig – story of two obsessions, one we can see the workings of and one we can’t. Like the others, it is best discovered page by page, so I will say nothing more of it, or of the book, except that now I’ve covered a selection of du Maurier’s short fiction, all I need now is to find a way into her novels. Any recommendations?
10.01.08
Georges Simenon: Monsieur Monde Vanishes
I thought I wasn’t much of a fan of crime fiction, until I remembered what great reading pleasures in recent years have come from the likes of Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith – oh, and Richard Price. Even so, I never considered Georges Simenon, even when he was reissued in the UK recently by Penguin Modern Classics, and in the US by NYRB Classics. His Oates-like prolificness – 400 or so books, half of them novels – means the prospect of quality must be vanishingly small. But I decided to investigate after John Banville recommended him – and this title in particular – in a recent interview.
Most famous for the Maigret books, Simenon also turned out a number (suitably vague term, that, revealing my ignorance: was it dozens? hundreds?) of romans durs, “hard” or psychological novels: more suspense than crime, rather like Highsmith.
Monsieur Monde Vanishes (La Fuite de Monsieur Monde, 1945) is a surprisingly bleak tale which wrongfoots the reader almost from the beginning. We open with Madame Monde bustling into a police station: “I have come to tell you that my husband has disappeared.” She admits it is three days since this happened, and that it was on his birthday, which she had forgotten, but otherwise nothing was untoward. She is telling the truth, “but sometimes nothing is less true than the truth.”
Rather than becoming a detective story, after the first ten pages the narrative switches to the missing Monsieur, and stays with him for the rest of the book. Although we spend 160 pages in his company, we get to know him only a little: trickles of his despair seep in through the reader’s fingertips, and stick uncomfortably, like the “sensation that [Monsieur Monde] recalled with obsessive accuracy: the mesh of the lace between his forehead and the cold pane,” as he gazes out a window wishing to leave his first wife several years ago. “The day before, that morning, just an hour previously, he had adored his wife and children.”
Then a woman passed by. He could see only her black silhouette, with an umbrella. She was walking fast, holding up her skirt with one hand, over the wet gleaming sidewalk, she was about to turn the corner of the street, she had turned it, and he felt a longing to run, to get out of the house; it seemed to him that he could still do it, that one great effort would be enough, that once outside he would be saved.
He would rush forward, would plunge head foremost into that stream of life that was flowing all around the petrified house.
So Monsieur Monde has done this before, married again, built up a good business, and now wants to throw it all away once more. We do not know precisely why, except that
He had often dreamed, in vain, of being ill so that someone might bend over him with a gentle smile and relieve him, for a brief while, of the burden of his existence.
This existential angst might put us in mind of Camus’ L’Etranger, published three years earlier, but Simenon is still a storyteller at heart. Monsieur Monde vanishes, takes the train from Paris to the south of France, until “nothing lay behind him any more: nothing lay before him as yet. He was in space.” His desire to keep moving, his inability to remain, reminded me of Patrick Suskind’s Mr Sommer. When he does escape, does he get what he wants? In a lodging house in Nice, “he was not unhappy. This squalid drabness was all part of what he had been seeking.” The separateness which he feels is a symptom, and cause, of what Simenon in a 1955 Paris Review interview called (and said he was “haunted” by): “the problem of communication.”
I mean communication between two people. The fact that we are I don’t know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world. When I was a young boy I was afraid of it. I would almost scream because of it. It gave me such a sensation of solitude, of loneliness. That is a theme I have taken I don’t know how many times. But I know it will come again. Certainly it will come again.
He might have been talking about Monsieur Monde Vanishes, as with another recurring theme Simenon identified in the same interview: “the theme of escape. Between two days changing your life completely: without caring at all what has happened before, just go.”
In just going, in leaving his old life, Monsieur Monde (his name suggesting everyman; anyone in the world) discovers that wherever he goes, he brings himself with him, and his past begins to return in unexpected ways. There is a completeness to the story which I found less satisfying than the enigma of Monsieur Monde’s actions. And I couldn’t help wondering if I was overrating the book because of its new-minted ‘modern classic’ status, just as unreasonably as I would previously have dismissed it because of its churning-them-out crime author genesis. That, combined with the fact that I nonetheless want to read more of these romans durs, is the greatest mystery of all.
07.26.08
Stefan Zweig: The Post-Office Girl
A new Stefan Zweig book is always a welcome prospect: so how about a new Zweig which is literally new – the first English translation of a book unpublished at the time of his death in 1942 (though it was released in Germany in 1982) – and as a bonus, comes in the lovely NYRB Classics format? Furthermore, at 250 pages, it’s a full novel rather than his usual story form. Say no more.
The Post-Office Girl (‘1930s’ is the best date we have for it) must be two or three times longer than anything else I’ve read by Zweig, and it shows that he can sustain his usual strengths of psychological truth and moreishness at novel length.
What’s particularly interesting is that, where Zweig’s usual form is to overwhelm the reader with immersion into the obsessive or passionate mindset of the protagonist, here, initially at least, he takes a more omniscient approach, scattering his gift widely around many characters, encapsulating them efficiently in a paragraph or two. An affair and marital break-up is despatched in a page and a half, and even passing characters are depicted in loving detail, such as the schoolmaster Franz Fuchsthaler, “a scrawny little man, anxious blue eyes hidden behind spectacles”:
For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidized flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows; he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener’s delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands.
But quickly it becomes apparent that the central character is Christine Hoflehner, postmistress in the Austrian village of Klein-Reifling, who is thoroughly bored with her existence. It is 1926 and for years Christine has been in the same job, where “the hundreds of thousands of letters will always be different letters, but always letters. The stamps different stamps, but always stamps. The days different, but each one lasting from eight o’clock until noon, from two o’clock until six o’clock, and the work of the office, as the years come and go, always the same, the same, the same.”
Christine jumps – eventually – at the opportunity to visit her aunt Claire van Boolen in Switzerland, where she finds her life transformed by the social whirl and the new opportunities – and people – available to her.
And continually she asks herself in bewilderment, “Who am I? For years people on the street walked past without a glance, for years I’ve been sitting there in the village and no one gave me anything or bothered about me. …Is there suddenly something in me that was always there and yet not there, something that just couldn’t get out? Can it be that I was actually prettier than I dared to be, and smarter and more attractive, but didn’t have the courage to believe it? Who am I, who am I really?”
But even here the seeds of a turnaround are sown, as Zweig points out that although “she’s discovered herself for the first time in twenty-eight years … the discovery is so intoxicating that she’s forgetting everyone else.” Further than this it would be unfair to go (so don’t read the back cover: see below), but the story proceeds with Zweig’s usual combination of cruel logic and contorted emotion.
If the book’s moreish readability makes it seem at times less substantial – despite its greater length – than some of Zweig’s other works, then there is enough to make up for this in his skewering of class awareness, social shame and the desperation of reduced circumstances. The ending to me at first seemed rashly abrupt, but on rereading the closing pages I came to the view that it made a perfect marriage of ambiguity and inevitability.
Now a few quibbles with the edition from NYRB Classics (I know; I never thought I’d see the day). The back cover blurb is perhaps unique in that it reveals the entire plot right to the end of the book – a grave error, given that there are developments and switchbacks along the way which are a good part of the pleasure, as ever, in reading Zweig. On the other hand I would have welcomed a bit more background to the book, if not a full introduction then at least a translator’s note – where did the book come from, why didn’t Zweig publish it during his lifetime, and so on? (In fact NYRB Classics Editor Edwin Frank has written a little about it on their website, though this is not much more helpful, with its wild description of the book as “hardboiled, as if Zweig … had fortified himself with some stiff shots of Dashiell Hammett.”)
Finally I’m unsure about the title. The original is Rausch der Verwandlung. The last word I know from Kafka, but a rough Google Translate gives the whole as Noise of the Transformation. Edwin Frank prefers The Intoxication of Metamorphosis, which makes more sense. Both are more enigmatic and striking than The Post-Office Girl to be sure. Then again, the chosen title has a blank simplicity which appeals too, and an irony in finally reducing Christine to her social role however hard she wishes to escape it. Plus if we translated everything literally, then this post would be about a book by Stephen Branch. Sometimes publisher knows best then.
07.20.08
Patrick Hamilton: Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
Hard to believe that it’s taken me over a year to return to Patrick Hamilton after The Slaves of Solitude reminded me how great he is. Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935) is widely considered to be his first major work, but its 500-page extent kept putting me off until I went on holiday and had the ideal opportunity not to be tempted by anything shorter. It’s available in the UK in Vintage Classics and in the US as an NYRB Classic. For what it’s worth, Michael Holroyd’s introduction to the former is superb.
A word about the titles. This book is an omnibus edition of three novels, connected but independent, which were first published separately. I’m not mad on the collective title, particularly in comparison to the individual titles of the novels within. The Midnight Bell (which inspired an excellent and elegant BritLitBlog), The Siege of Pleasure and The Plains of Cement seem to me to have that golden ear for a good title which Martin Amis (I seem to be quoting him a lot lately) called “almost a guarantor of minor work”. That word ‘minor’ is noteworthy. Today the language of superlative has become so devalued that ‘favourite’ has practically been supplanted by ‘most favourite’, which used to be a gag to show up an ignoramus on Only Fools and Horses, but is now used with sincere intent. In these times, ‘minor’ seems positively insulting. But it fits for Hamilton, who clearly has his limitations – the little bit (two inches wide) of beer-slopped bartop on which he works – but does what he does brilliantly, scintillatingly even.
The Midnight Bell (1929) tells the story of Bob, barman in the eponymous Euston Road pub (the book is subtitled A London Trilogy) which is full of “bottly glitter” and regulars such as Mr Sounder (“he had been to Oxford University, and was a man of letters – mostly to the papers”) and Mr Wall:
‘Ah Ha!’ said Mr Sounder. ‘The worthy Mr Wall!’
‘Oh ho!’ said Mr Wall. ‘The good Mr Sounder!’
But the two men looked at each other with a kind of glassy gleam which belied this broad and amicable opening. Indeed, these two were notoriously incapable of hitting it off, and the thwarted condescension of the one, together with the invulnerable impudence of the other, were features of ‘The Midnight Bell’ in the evening.
Bob’s mind is elsewhere, however, on a young prostitute called Jenny Maple who visits the Bell. His obsessive love for her (“completely captivating, and accessible by ‘phone”), and purchasing of her affection, is apparently based on Hamilton’s own infatuation with a prostitute, Lily Connolly. (“He informed himself that he was not insanely anxious to get her on this walk because he was in any way in love with her. It was simply because he had to find out whether he was or not – to see where he was.”) So too, we presume, are the authentic scenes of mornings after:
He went to bed with a rich and glorious evening, and he awoke at seven to find that it had gone bad overnight, as it were (like milk), and was in his mouth – bitter and sickly. He had been fooled. He had not, after all, had a great time: he had merely been drinking again.
(Hamilton, it’s worth remembering, was on three bottles of vodka whisky [thanks Tom R.] a day by the 1940s, and died in his 50s of cirrhosis of the liver.)
In The Siege of Pleasure (1932), we learn how Jenny, with her unfortunate combination of exceptional beauty and a “gift of pleasing,” came to turn her hand (so to speak) to the oldest profession. In The Midnight Bell, there had been some touching on its social origins (“Jever hear of Bernard Shaw? … Well, he wrote a book called Mrs Warren’s Profession – an’ showed it was all economics…”), but here Hamilton focuses forensically on one evening in the life of Jenny which leads her to lose her job in service to two old maids. The story is built within an artificial framing device, as Jenny goes through the motions with another fine gent.
She saw how badly he needed a drink, and marvelled, as she always did, at these little men, to whom an evening of delight, apart from the money they paid for it, entailed such strenuous mental suffering. You would have thought he hated the sight of her – instead of loving the look of her – which his four pounds definitely demonstrated that he did in some sort of way.
This is the shortest of the three books, and is devoted almost entirely to that fateful evening, where Jenny’s anxiety “not to appear unfamiliar with the manner and ways of her present company” leads to her downfall. What is so impressive is how Hamilton has the courage to go into every detail, never pausing or leaving the reader to imagine how awful the night gets. He shows us absolutely every step on the way. This unity and direction give it – and indeed the other books in the trilogy – the force of a (very long) short story, and it’s easy to succumb to reading each one almost in a sitting.
The final volume, The Plains of Cement (1934), takes this technique of gazing unblinkingly at things we would rather not see, and applies it to Ella, the barmaid at the Midnight Bell, who adores Bob as much as he in turn adores Jenny. As a distraction from her love for Bob, Ella allows herself to be seduced – sort of – by Ernest Eccles, whose ridiculous vanity is perfectly captured in his first appearance in the book.
You could see at a glance that for the time being the man lived in and through his hat. You could see that it cost him sharp torture even to put it on his head, where he could not see it, and it had to take its chance. You could see him searching incessantly for furtive little glimpses of his hat in mirrors, you could see him pathetically reading the fate of his hat in the eyes of strangers, you could see him adjusting his tie as a sort of salute to his hat, as an attempt to live up to his hat. You could see him striving to do none of these things.
For the scenes that follow, where Ella tries not to become engaged to Mr Eccles (I was reminded of the similar fate for Major Archer in J.G. Farrell’s Troubles, who ended up betrothed when he and his lady friend “had kissed behind a screen of leaves and, reaching out to steady himself, he had put his hand down firmly on a cactus, which had rendered many of his parting words insincere”), the reader is well advised to pre-curl their toes in preparation. However it’s in this volume that the story also soars into truly affecting scenes, not least when Ella finds how “painful it would be to go on discussing the man to whom she was engaged with the man she loved,” and the muted emotion of the closing pages brings the trilogy as a whole close to something like greatness.
Even when being cynical about the passing caricatures, Hamilton makes his central characters sympathetic – and, as someone who normally isn’t bothered whether he likes the characters or not, I can report that it was a very nice experience for a change. The book too has a passionate depiction of Hamilton’s city, more in foul weather than fair:
‘Oo, look!’ she said. ‘It’s snowing!’
And it was. Quite hard. Tiny flakes, whirling and scampering down, as though in terror or ecstasy, from the hidden night above. A myriad host of minute invaders, coming to fill, with their delicate but excited concerns, the gloomy plains of electric-lit London.
By the end, through Bob’s obsessive trudging of the prostitutes’ favourite venues in doomed pursuit of Jenny, I felt that I really had walked the streets myself. If only Hamilton hadn’t been so keen on his research, we might have had a few more novels from him yet. Speaking of that, suspicions about Bob’s nature as representation of the author are supported too by the revelation that he writes short stories in his spare time.
And then he gave up doing that, and took to dreaming again – dreaming about a great novel that he would one day write. This would take the form mostly employed by young novelists who have never written any novels. That is to say, it would hardly be a novel at all, but all novels in one, life itself – its mystery, its beauty, its grotesquerie, its humour, its sadness, its terror. And it would take, possibly, years and years to write, and it would put you in a class with Hugo, Tolstoy, and Dreiser.
Pah! Who wants the company of those major writers when you can get all the mystery, beauty, grotesquerie, humour, sadness and terror you could wish for, all in a perfect minor key, right here?
05.19.08
Richard Hughes: A High Wind in Jamaica
When a trusted source recently named Richard Hughes’ novel A High Wind in Jamaica as a book that “just flat out blind-sided me with [its] perfection,” I knew I had to have it. It was one of those synchronicity things: I remember, a decade back or more, seeing it forever languishing on the tables in my local Waterstone’s in a handsome Harvill edition, which was to me the only thing notable about it (even then I was a publishing-house geek). It stuck in my head but I never bought it. Then I remember reading in Martin Amis’s memoir Experience about his involvement in the film adaptation – Little Mart, the child star! The third encounter recently was all I needed.
A High Wind in Jamaica – pictured above in the US edition by NYRB Classics, below in the UK edition by Vintage Classics (no prizes for guessing which one I bought) – was published in 1929, the first of only three novels that Hughes published in his lifetime. It engages with the contrasts and connections between childhood and adulthood in a way I’ve never quite seen before, and does so in an elliptical, almost evasive manner. This is my way of admitting that although I got a lot from this book, I didn’t feel I quite grasped it completely.
It opens in a dreamy style, in late 19th century Jamaica, where an English family, the Bas-Thorntons, live. “It was a kind of paradise for English children to come to, whatever it might be for their parents: especially at that time, when no one lived in at all a wild way at home. Here one had to be a little ahead of the times: or decadent, whichever you like to call it.” In these scenes Hughes evokes the novelty of the flora and fauna through the Bas-Thornton children’s viewpoint, and displays both a vivid eye and a sense of playfulness:
John had to take a sporting gun, which he bulleted with spoonfuls of water to shoot humming-birds on the wing, too tiny frail quarry for any solider projectile. For, only a few yards up, there was a Frangipani tree: a mass of brilliant blossom and no leaves, which was almost hidden in a cloud of humming-birds so vivid as much to outshine the flowers. Writers have often lost their way trying to explain how brilliant a jewel the humming-bird is: it cannot be done.
That wonderful phrase about the gun being “bulleted with spoonfuls of water” feels like one that will stick in my head for a long time.
When the “high wind” of a hurricane hits the island (though their daughter Emily mistakes it for an earthquake), the Bas-Thorntons decide to send the children back to England ahead of their own return. Hughes reminds us that this was an era when parenthood, at least for the well-off, was not as child-immersive an experience as it is now. Because of this, “it would have surprised Mrs Thornton very much to be told that she meant practically nothing to her children.” The parents, fearful for the children’s physical and mental wellbeing – though during the hurricane “they were so brave, so English” – persuade them to return alone:
“Think what an adventure it will be!”said Mrs Thornton bravely.
“But I don’t want any more adventures!” sobbed Emily: “I’ve got an Earthquake!”
Just how much of an adventure is to be revealed, when the ship on which the children are travelling, the Clorinda, is hijacked by pirates. “Piracy had long since ceased to pay, and should have been scrapped years ago: but a vocational tradition will last on a long time after it has ceased to be economic, in a decadent form.” This is the point at which the sensible blogger must draw a veil over any further discussion of the plot, as there are some surprising and disturbing revelations to be had.
What A High Wind in Jamaica gives us is a highly original approach to the relationship of power between adults and children, and some of the most disquieting scenes of the book are where the children discover and explore their new awareness of power, whether violent or sexual. Also unusual is Hughes’ involvement in the text, appearing from time to time as an “I” in an otherwise omniscient narrative. This is a tool I immediately warm to – James Salter used the same technique in Light Years – but it can interfere with the book’s strength in presenting everything from the point of view of the children, so the reader is left to interpret reality for himself. In one passage Hughes offers, with some irony, the following:
Being nearly four years old, [Laura] was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term “human” a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies of course are not human – they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates.
[...] It is true they look human – but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.
Subconsciously, too, everyone recognises they are animals – why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the human, as they would at a praying mantis? If the baby was only a less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely.
The flurry of commas, dashes and colons that punctuate the first paragraph above are an indication of the eccentric nature of the book generally. Hughes’ characters at times seem little more than toys at his beckoning – which of course, as fictional constructs, they are, and his invasions of the narrative anyway remind us that we’re reading an invention. A High Wind in Jamaica is a book which I can imagine frustrating as many people as it delights. In the end I came down in favour, through presuming that any weaknesses were in my own reading and not in the writing – which is so assured, so often – and anyway, even when we don’t absolutely love a new book, it’s impossible to regret reading something so strange and intriguing, as foreign to me as faraway England was to the children and the pirates.
12.08.07
J.R. Ackerley: We Think the World of You
Having just done the online equivalent of a trolley dash through the NYRB Classics on Amazon, I warn you to expect more of these handsome volumes cropping up here in the coming weeks. Here we have We Think the World of You (1960), the only novel from literary editor J.R. Ackerley, which is described on the back cover as “hugely funny” (by the Glasgow Herald) and “a fairy tale for adults” (by Ackerley himself). I don’t really agree with either of those, but it’s still a delightful discovery which charmed and disarmed me.
Apparently the novel is a reworking of Ackerley’s memoir My Dog Tulip (that’s one NYRB title I don’t need to get then) and in fact the German Shepherd pictured on the striking cover is his own. Our narrator, Frank, is a well-to-do middle-aged man who is in love with a younger married man called Johnny. We never have explicit details of how intimately they know one another, though Frank’s brief but adoring descriptions of Johnny’s body (“the whole of his smooth, unblemished torso glowed … as though bathed in perpetual sunlight”) reveal enough.
Johnny, a working class boy not made good, is in prison for housebreaking, and Frank (“unwilling to assist him, unable to give him up”) visits; Johnny wants Frank to look after his dog Evie while he’s ‘away’ but is met by rebuff (“Couldn’t you feed ‘er when you come ‘ome of an evening?” “But I don’t always come home of an evening”). Meanwhile Frank, in an attempt to stay close to his beloved, begins to visit Johnny’s family, which is the source of some comic misunderstandings and a fair amount of snobbery:
I noticed at once that, in my short absence, the window had been closed. The working classes, I reflected with a shrug, have an ineradicable belief that the colds from which they constantly suffer are due to fresh air rather than to the lack of it.
As usual, here the first person narrative tells us more about the speaker than his ostensible subject. So it is throughout the book: although it is a story about a dog, and how Evie acts as both a surrogate for Johnny – Frank ends up deeply in love all over again – and a link to him, really the book is all about Frank. Naturally he hates Johnny’s wife Megan, but gets on with his mother Millie (“an exceptionally strong bond united us, we were both bewitched by her son”) but not father Tom. He is jealous of anyone who is close to Johnny, as he rolls in agonies over Johnny’s repeated failure to write to him, or to grant him one of his precious permitted visits. In time his adoration of Evie becomes total and the whole of Frank’s feelings are played out in vigorous exchanges with Millie:
“She had Tom’s slippers last week! You remember, the red ones I gave him for Christmas? And you should have seen Tom’s face when he come home and found what she done. Laugh! You couldn’t ‘elp but laugh! Oh, but he did pay her for that! He took off his belt to her. ‘You didn’t ought to ‘it ‘er like that, Tom,’ I said, but he only told me to mind me business. Oh he did give it ‘er!”
For a moment I could not speak. I was trembling with rage and indignation. Then I said violently:
“How disgusting!”
Millie glanced at me in a startled way.
“Of course he was sorry afterwards,” she said in her slow voice. “I could see that. He made an extra fuss of her that evening.”
“Does he beat her often?” I asked, with a sick feeling looking at the brilliant and extraordinary face by the door.
“I wouldn’t say often,” replied Millie mildly. “He gets a bit ratty with her at times when he’s in a bad mood or his back’s been playing him up. But you mustn’t go thinking that Tom’s a cruel man, for he’s not. He’s a kind man at heart, and he’s fond of her. Oh yes, he thinks the world of her, he do.”
“Just like your Johnny does of me!” I said, getting up.
This phrase, as the superb title suggests, is the key to the book. Everyone in Johnny’s family “thinks the world of” everyone else, when to Frank this is nothing but the cruellest insult as his own feelings seem increasingly unrequited, except by Evie the family dog. And the ‘world’ in question brings to mind the insurmountable class differences in operation too.
Yes, [Evie] knew [Johnny] thought the world of her; but possibly, I reflected, she guessed, as I now did, what the world amounted to, and that what he had just done for us was, of all things she wanted, the most she would ever get, and that she could not count even on that.
We Think the World of You has a formal perfection too, with not only a central character – a non-human one at that – who acts as symbol and representation for so much, and whose purpose changes as the story matures, but also a impeccable ending of solemn resignation and and a warning to be careful what we wish for. My only criticism is that the coda to the main story which leads to this tragic conclusion (“that leads me into deep waters, too deep for fathoming; it leads me into the darkness of my own mind”), introduces an almost new character and seems rushed through. It was nothing I couldn’t live with though, given the unique and brilliant nature of everything before.
