YOU ARE writing a novel. In this novel your hero and heroine are enjoying a drink or a quarrel or an amatory session, or any two or all three of these, and a man comes to the door with a telegram. What do you do about this man? Do you write: ‘Alfred went to the door and found a man waiting with a telegram. He took the telegram, closed the door and tore the missive open. “Good God,” he said. “What is it, dear?” she called from the bathroom.’ If you do, you may, re-reading the passage in print, become worried about that man – so faceless, so anonymous, what an undemocratic approach to a useful and hardworking human being. But then, unable to make amends, you may reflect that the telegram-bearer has no other function in your fiction than to bear one telegram, so why waste words on him, giving him a face, a set of physical gestures, a minimally revealed treasury of idiosyncrasies? Economy is the thing. ‘The maid brought in the tea’ is surely enough? Calverley, apostrophising tobacco, achieves the literary limit in impersonality when he says ‘Sweet when they’ve cleared away/Lunch’. Why confuse the issue – which is the sweetness of tobacco – by bringing in faces, skirts, limps, warts, even gender and number?
But some imaginative writers will not have this – Dickens, for instance, and J. B. Priestley. ‘At the door was a man with a telegram. His face, perhaps under the influence of his presumed specialisation, was pared to essentials – eyebrows, like commas, were not there; the mouth was a mere pencilled O; but the eyes seemed to reflect the perturbation of a thousand past telegram-receivers.’ Something like that, only, of course, better. You never meet the man again, and he has been presented as a mere grotesque conceit, but you feel that the author cares: if there were opportunity, he would tell you more about this man. Dickens, one knows, would be very ready to describe his last Tuesday’s breakfast.
Of modern novelists, I prize this caring quality in Mr Priestley more than anyone. I have been re-reading his two-volume The Image Men, which is full of toothsome thumbnail cameos (sorry: that, in this context, sounds like a Good Companions minor character picking his teeth in the cinema: the film is silent, so you can hear the noise) – like the kickshawses that strewed the table at the Elizabethan banquet. ‘Beryl was a girl in her early twenties with not much of a nose, a loose mouth, a receding chin, all suggesting, together with her conversation, a kind of young female village idiot; and yet, so strangely are we put together, she had large and really quite beautiful eyes, burnt sienna flecked with copper. Tuby always felt she must have borrowed them from somebody.’ Beryl is only, if that modifier be permissible, a receptionist-typist, with no part in the plot, but she has at least been noticed and she doesn’t have to be noticed again. The following fixes a transient character called Rolf Tenzie (though he may be said to be fixed already – very Dickensian – in his name): ‘his voice, rather high but resonant, seemed to Elfreda to come out of a sort of blur, rather as if a clever middle-aged actor were playing a charming young man in a colour film not quite in focus.’ A waiter ‘had black side-whiskers and might have been a Sicilian except that he spoke with a Scots accent.’ Brigadier Rampside of the Ministry of Defence ‘was a man about fifty, pink and spruce but with rather angry bloodshot eyes, as if he were furious with himself for drinking too much at lunchtime.’ And so, always entertainingly, on.
It is possible to imagine a novelist in the Dickensian tradition keeping a notebook to record little descriptive ideas, long before the novel is written: ‘straggly bear – face like a page with too little text and too much footnote?… nose like cuttlefish bone stuck in a budgerigar’s cage… five strips of hair like stave-lines, frown like a treble clef… might have been an acceptable face if it were upside down…’ I don’t think Mr Priestley does that, but if he did – well, Brahms kept a notebook full of suitable sonata-form second subjects. It’s not only a question of characters, of course, but of anything that can go into a récit (I don’t think any novelist makes preparatory notes for dialogue): ‘The aircraft left a long jet-line in the clear sky; the semibreve sun rose a semitone to meet it… a blackbird’s song stuck a pin in the great silence… he came towards them, sadly prescient of his social unacceptability, ringing the ice in his glass like a leper’s bell (Graham Greene?)… a sandy path stitched with grass.’ This business of descriptive passages beloved of that special half-page in the Reader’s Digest but primarily waiting for a novel to be put in is, I should think, not uncommon.
In this same The Image Men, Mr Priestley has a major female character who looks like the Duke of Wellington. This, I feel sure, is so that she may beget humorous images like ‘And she laid a hand on Tuby’s shoulder that made him feel he was about to be press-ganged into the Peninsular War.’ In other words, I don’t think that this female character swam into Mr Priestley’s ken already armed with a Wellington nose. If you impose on your faceless character certain historical lineaments then you have a limitless account to draw on, so long as the comic disbursements are small and infrequent. Thus, you give a landlady a very unremarkable face with (cf. Beryl supra) the eyes of Napoleon Bonaparte. She will then be able to look on your hero, her lodger, like a badly cooked helping of chicken Marengo, like Barras disclosed as a royalist, or with the patience appropriate to a long-winded report from stuttering Berthier, or as on a wet afternoon on St Helena. I think, on the whole, that creating a character, especially a minor picturesque one, is a matter of arbitrary manufacture: there’s rarely any question of the novelist painting what he sees before him and trying to get the details right.
And, to go further, I think that descriptions in works of fiction are, so to speak, parallel to the real substance: they’re a decorative way of saying: ‘these things and statements and events really exist; they take up positions in space-time, and to prove it I’ll hang draperies on them – see how the contours press through that piece of jazz-patterned calico.’ But if there are no descriptions, this rarely seems to invalidate the reality, so eager is the reader to believe. Pretty women merely need to be pretty (the colour of eyes and hair is an acceptable gratuity but no more). ‘He was a handsome greying man in a smart suit, about forty-five’ – that will do even for a major character. How many people can describe Emma Bovary? In Ulysses, does Stephen Dedalus wear spectacles? Food and drink are, since they touch nerves more sensitive than the optic ones, more important than the pattern of wallpaper or the hero’s best suit, and it is generally agreed that only second-rate novelists write passages like ‘He went into a pub and got stinking drunk’ or ‘After a hearty breakfast we resumed our journey.’ Paradoxically Dickens can get away with this kind of ellipsis occasionally, since we know exactly what he means by a hearty breakfast.
In my last published novel, aware that it was necessary to describe the lobby of a small hotel but having no real idea what that lobby looked like, I took a page of Wilkinson’s Malay-English dictionary (one of the great works of lexicography, incidentally) and filled the space with objects described on it. I began the descriptive passage with a girl on the telephone asking for a number which was the number of that page and, to provide a further key for anyone interested, specifying the subscriber – Mr R. J. Wilkinson. I have, on Creative Writing courses in America, stressed this aleatory value of the dictionary to the fagged student faced with a chunk of récit-making. Page 929 of the American Heritage Dictionary gives you, among other items, ortolan, Orvieto, Orwell, oscillogram, osculum and Osiris. You can surely draw the furnishings of a living-room out of these (cushions with the texture of an ortolan’s wings, one’s bottom making an osculatory smacking noise as it disengages from a plastic chair, a new pot of Osiris face cream) with, for good measure, Down and Out in Paris and London playing at the Osculatorium down the street.
It seems to be dialogue – exterior and interior, when it becomes monologue, the characterisation achieved through the temporal flow of speech while empty-stomached space has any kind of scrap thrown at it – an air-luggage tag with KIN on it (airport code for Kingston, Jamaica), the prospectus of a kindergarten, a liqueur called Kindlepoint, a stuffed kingbird, a sleeping King Charles spaniel, a torn kimono. ‘“Sein oder nicht sein,” spat out Hamlet to the damp corridor outside the palace library. He looked again, grinning wryly, at the volume of Schelling in his hand. No help there. “Ja, dass ist die Frage.” Nobler in the mind to suffer – A toad hopped into the shadows, uttering one bass note. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? Or to take arms against a sea of troubles. Not, of course, that you could take arms. The wind blew in keenly from the open window, a dank wind from the black sea. Troubles, what troubles? Oh, toothache, the sudden migraine in the night, the melting mouths and stern eyes of the place-seekers, the mess of endless lawsuits, the girl whose wagging bottom was both a taunt and a dismissal. You could, he thought, turn Hamlet into a seven-hundred-page novel, no sea of troubles in that task.’
Having made Mr Priestley’s The Image Men a starting-point, it would be only decent to return to it and say what pleasure it has given me on a couple of headachy days in rainy Rome, far from London pubs, steak and kidney pie, Cheddar cheese and wrapped bread (not to mention BBC Two and the sound of London English). When we talk of the novel’s being a solace, we rarely, if we are honest, think of the novels that the textbooks admire – Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy and Nathalie Sarraute’s Planetarium and Christine Brooke-Rose’s Out. It’s not experimentation we ask for (leave that to the novelist’s laboratory) but we don’t demand a clear-cut plot either. We want the easy flow of picaresque, meals in inns, people getting into bed with each other (not too explicitly described, since we all have a fair idea what it’s like), cabbage that seems to have been prepared by a deep-sea-diver, a woman coming to the door who looks as though she has spent the night in the dustbin, a man who turns his esses into sh (‘There’zh shome new shizhzhorzh on the shideboard,’ he said). My small son recently, seeing me all knotted up at the typewriter, asked me why I didn’t write for fun? He’s right, of course – a nice flow of dialogue carrying the weight of the story, and doing what the hell you like when the characters aren’t actually speaking. Like Mr Priestley, enjoying it.
Previously untitled, unpublished, and undated