Writing novels is more like writing history than we often choose to think. The relationships between events, the selection of incident, even, in sophisticated fictions, the built-in skepticism as to the validity of procedures and assumptions, all these raise questions familiar to philosophers of history as problems relating to historical explanation. One such problem is explanation by types. They are obviously important in novels, for without them there would be no ‘structure.’ How do they work in history? How do we recognise a revolution? The events of a selected series cease to look random when we assimilate them to other selected series which have been identified and classified under some such term as ‘revolution.’ Similarly for series which can be filed under ‘crisis,’ or under ‘transitional epoch.’ There is the complication that personalities involved in the events under consideration may very well have done the typing themselves, as revolutionaries generally do, and this means that historical, like fictive events, can in some measure be caused to occur in conformity with the types. Furthermore, since everybody’s behaviour is indeterminately modified by the conviction that he is living through a crisis, it might be argued that history can, though with unpredictable variations, be prepared for such a conformity, even without the intervention of conscious theory. But the element of indeterminacy is so gross that we can perhaps forget this.
There are, very broadly speaking, two quite distinct and mutually hostile ways of considering ‘typical’ explanations. One is to assume that, with varying and acceptable degrees of ‘displacement,’ histories and fictions cannot avoid conforming with types, so that the most useful thing that can be done is to demonstrate this conformity. However sophisticated and cautious the exponent of this doctrine may be, his thinking is likely, in the last analysis, to be sentimentally ritualistic and circular. He is nowadays much more likely to be a critic of fiction than an historian. Historians and modern theologians nowadays employ typology in a much more empirical way, a way consistent with a more linear notion of history. The historian will agree that the discovery of a motive in some action or series of actions involves classifying it as belonging to a certain type. Unless that is done it will not appear that a motive has been discovered. Of course he will also, as a rule, agree that the material available is not always so classifiable; and so will the novelist. The distinction between these kinds of event is roughly that defined by Bultmann in respect of biblical history as a contrast between what is historisch and what is geschichtlich.1 The novelist, as a rule, has rather more interest than the historian in the latter, that is, he more completely ignores the multitude of events that might be supposed to have occurred along with the ones he chooses to treat as specially significant. His position is neatly put by Conrad: ‘Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it starts on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms.’ Forms are systematised typological insights; they are, or should be, always under very critical scrutiny, because they can tempt us into unjustified archaism.
The modern theologian is forced to understand the difference between sentimental or archaistic typology and the kind which is appropriate to a belief which has had to emigrate, like the Jews, from myth into history. He professes to use the old scriptural types only as indices of the contemporaneity of the New Testament, and not as elements in a miraculous plot, devised by the Holy Ghost, to keep Old and New Testaments, and the whole of history, in a condition of miraculous concord. Of course there are atavistic theologians as well as atavistic historians, literary critics, and novelists, though it is to me an interesting reflection that modern theology got really deeply into de-mythologising at about the time when literary critics began to go overboard for mythology.
I will not pursue that, but ask why literary people should be so liable to this atavism. One reasonably simple explanation is that our immense skepticism, our deep concern with the nature of the tools we are using, is only one of the traditions to which we are heirs. Another is a tradition of mythological primitivism which has branches of many kinds: occultism, Frazerian Cambridge anthropology, and of course Freud and Jung. In the period which was formative for us there was also a fashionably circular historiography, provided by Spengler; a revival of primitive art; and, a large and seminal literature which was in various ways primitivistic and favourable to archaic typologising. Thus, when novels are closest to history we may still ask whether their fidelity to certain types is wholly consistent with a just representation of human history.
I begin with this dogmatic introduction in order to make it clear in what relations I am considering D. H. Lawrence. Among the reasons why he continues to be thought of as a particularly important novelist is this: he believed himself to be living in a time of cosmic crisis, and partly justified this conviction by archaic typologising. History was for him a plot devised by the Holy Ghost, and ‘scientific’ explanations (which would first examine and then reject this as a fiction) he found hateful. Unlike George Eliot, a predecessor in The Great Tradition, he could not separate the intuition that he lived in the great age of transition from explanations devoid of empirical interest but interesting enough to all primitivists, and indeed to historians of ideas. He knew a great deal (anti-intellectualists need to) and was exceptionally aware of the nature and history of his typologies; for example, he was a great student not only of mystery rituals but also of Apocalypse, and commentary on Apocalypse. This essay is about what he knew, and how it is expressed in various books, notably Women in Love.
In the ‘Study of Thomas Hardy,’ which belongs in time to much the same period as The Rainbow and Women in Love, Lawrence observed that a man can only view the universe in the light of a theory, and since the novel is a microcosm it has to reflect a micro-theory, ‘some theory of being, some metaphysic.’ Of course this metaphysic mustn’t obtrude and turn the novel into a tract, nor must the novelist make himself a metaphysic of self-justification, and then ‘apply the world to this, instead of applying this to the world,’ a practice of which he found a striking instance in the ascetic Tolstoi, whom he describes as ‘a child of the Law.’ The fact is that Lawrence was at the moment when he wrote that passage troubled about the ‘metaphysic’ of the work he had in hand. That he should use so curious an expression of Tolstoi—‘a child of the Law’—gives one a strong hint as to the character of that metaphysic.1
Lawrence was obsessed with apocalypse from early youth, and he remembered the chiliastic chapel hymns of his childhood. During the war the apocalyptic coloration of his language is especially striking; sometimes it strongly recalls 17th-century puritanism. He considered the world to be undergoing a rapid decline which should issue in a renovation, and expected the English to have some part in this, much as Milton put the burden on God’s Englishmen; Lawrence, however, dwelt more on the decadence, and seemed to think the English were rotting with especial rapidity in order to be ready first. He spoke of the coming resurrection—‘Except a seed die, it bringeth not forth,’ he advises Bertrand Russell in May, 1915. ‘Our death must be accomplished first, then we will rise up.’ ‘Wait only a little while’; these were the last days, the ‘last wave of time,’ he told Ottoline Morell. There would be a new age, and a new ethical law.
The nature of Lawrence’s pronouncements on the new age and the new ethic is such that he can very well be described as a ‘moral terrorist’; Kant’s term for historians who think that the evident corruption of the world presages an immediate appearance, in one form or another, of anti-Christ. But he was also what Kant, in the same work (The Disputation of the Faculties) calls an ‘abderitist,’ namely one who explains history in terms of culture-cycles. More specifically, and perhaps more recognisably, he was a Joachite.
Where Lawrence, who was to call himself Joachim in The Plumed Serpent, got his Joachitism from one can only guess. A possible source is Huysmans’ Là-Bas (‘Two of the Persons of the Trinity have shown themselves. As a matter of logic, the Third must appear’). But Joachitism is a hardy plant, and as Frank E. Manuel says in Shapes of Philosophical History, it was particularly abundant in the literature of the French decadence and so could have formed part of that current of occultist thinking to which Lawrence was so sensitive. The doctrine varies a bit, but broadly it postulates three historical epochs, one for each person of the Trinity, with a transitional age between each. The details are argued out of texts in Revelation.
It is hardly too much to claim that the vague and powerful assumptions we all make about historical transition have their roots in Joachism; in Lawrence, however, the relation is much more specific. The wartime Hardy study speaks of our having reached an end, or a ‘pause of finality’ which is not an end. It is the moment of Transition. There has been an epoch of Law, and an epoch of ‘Knowledge or Love,’ and out of the synthesis of the two will develop the new age, which will be the age of the Holy Spirit. As in some early Joachite sects, the sexual implications of this are especially important. Lawrence holds that the principle of Law is strongest in woman, and that of Love in men (which is worth remembering when one considers Ursula and Birkin). Out of their true union in ‘Consummate Marriage’ will grow that ethic which is the product of Law and Love but is a third distinct thing, like the Holy Ghost. Although there is every sign that we have reached the point of transition, the art which should reflect it has not yet been invented. Obviously the big double novel he was working on was to be the first attempt at this appropriate art.
Now I daresay that some admirers of Lawrence will go a long way towards allowing one to speak of his thought, on sex and other matters, as having a strong apocalyptic colouring, yet draw the line at this very schematic and detailed application of the idea. Yet it is, I think, incontrovertible. When Lawrence spoke of ‘signs’ he did not mean only that everything was getting very bad, he meant that there were apocalyptic images and signs in the sky. The Zeppelin was one: ‘there was war in heaven.… It seemed as if the cosmic order were gone, as if there had come a new order. … It seems our cosmos has burst, burst at last … it is the end, our world has gone. … But there must be a new heaven and a new earth.’ This is from a letter to Lady Ottoline Morell, in September, 1915. A few days later he again calls the Zeppelin ‘a new great sign in the heavens.’ When he came to write the famous chapter ‘Nightmare’ in Kangaroo he again remembered the Zeppelin, ‘high, high, high, tiny, pale, as one might imagine the Holy Ghost.’
In Kangaroo the Holy Ghost is patron of a new age which will dispense with democracy and bosses and be dominated by ‘vertebrate telepathy’ from a leader. As always in apocalyptic historiography, this renovation is preceded by a decadence; the ‘new show’ cannot happen until there has been some smashing. Lawrence’s image of the transitional smasher was the terrible ‘non-metal’ mob, often symbolised by the troglodyte miner, one of his recurrent figures and an object of hate and love, fear and admiration. Continually reflecting on the apocalyptic types, Lawrence produced his own brand of Joachitism, as distinctive as that of Blake in The Everlasting Gospel, but easily identifiable, just as one can readily see the conformity between his more general apocalyptic thinking and the whole tradition. For convenience one can identify three aspects of this, in addition to the specifically Joachite notion of transition and crisis. They are: the Terrors (the appalling events of dies ilia, the last day); decadence and renovation, twin concepts that explain one’s own discontent and one’s own hopes for another Kingdom, somewhere; and finally what I call clerkly skepticism, the reluctance of the literate to credit popular apocalyptism in its crude forms, with consequent historiographical sophistications.
In Lawrence there is a very personal ambiguity in these matters; he was a clerkly writer, but the popular apocalypse fascinated him just the same. He had a doctrine of symbolism which helped him to bridge this gap, and sometimes his allusions are so inexplicit that only if you are a naïve fundamentalist (in which case you probably wouldn’t be reading Lawrence) or are on the lookout (in which case you are reading abnormally) will you pick them up. A good example of this is the passage in St. Mawr, which is in general an apocalyptic story, where Mrs Witt discusses with Lewis ‘a very big, soft star’ that falls down the sky. Lewis is led on to talk about the superstitions of his countryside, and finally to explain what the star means to him: ‘There’s movement in the sky. The world is going to change again.’ When Mrs Witt reminds him of the physical explanation of shooting stars, mentioning that there are always many in August, he just insists that ‘stones don’t come at us out of the sky for nothing.’ Whatever Lewis has in mind, Lawrence is certainly thinking of Rev. vi.13, ‘And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth,’ which happens at the opening of the sixth seal, when ‘the great day of his wrath is come.’ Lawrence is explicit enough about the general apocalyptic bearing of the horse itself, and perhaps too explicit about the decadence and the possibility of a new show and Lewis’s superior understanding of the situation, but in this little episode there is a set of variations on a hidden apocalyptic symbol which is in some ways even more characteristic.
What we have to see, I think, is that, explicit or inexplicit, this, the apocalyptic, is the chief mould of Lawrence’s imaginative activity. In the work of the 1920s it grows increasingly explicit, for example in the Whitman essay, or in the study of Melville, where the sinking of the Pequod is called ‘the doom of our white day.’ There had always been a racial aspect to his apocalyptic thinking, as we shall see; even in his essays on Dahlberg and Huxley’s Point Counter Point he affirms the exhaustion of the white racial psyche, the disintegration that will lead to a new show. From 1923, mostly in letters to Frederick Carter, he was offering elaborate interpretations of Revelation, based on a study of conventional exegesis (which he despised) and on less orthodox treatments, such as those of James Pryse, Madame Blavatsky, and Carter himself. In 1924 he wrote some articles on the subject, and in his last years worked hard on Apocalypse, his own commentary.
In Apocalypse Lawrence acknowledges that the book of Revelation, and other parts of the Bible, with which he was saturated in childhood, remained in his mind and ‘affected all the processes of emotion and thought.’ But in the meantime he had come to loathe it, and his long essay is an attempt to explain why, consciously and unconsciously, this ‘detested’ book could play so large a part in his most serious work. It has to be separated from mere vulgar credulity and subjected to a clerkly skepticism that is still not mere rationalism. Years of labour went into Lawrence’s theory that the version we read in the Bible, the hateful book, ‘Jewy’ and ‘chapel,’ meat for underdogs, was a horribly corrupt version of an earlier work which must have related the ritual of an authentic mystery religion. What he tries to do is to remove the ‘Judeo-Roman screen’ and penetrate to the fundamental rite, as it was represented in the imagery of the original pre-Christian text. This rite would be a guide to ‘emotional-passional knowledge’; the editorial sophistications stood for the non-vital Christian universe. The original was quick, though the corrupt version was dead. And of course Lawrence found in Revelation his mystery ritual. There was the Great Mother, whom the Jewish and Christian editors had dissociated into one good and one bad, the Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Scarlet Woman. There was the ritual descent into hell, and the rebirth. And this katabasis was the type of the one the world was at present undergoing. As in the mystery rite, the contemporary harrowing of hell is to be accomplished by a sexual act. In the epoch of the Holy Ghost we shall revert ‘towards our elementals,’ as Lawrence put it in that curious homage to the Paraclete, Fantasia of the Unconscious; to Adam reborn, love will be a new thing; the man-woman relationship will be remade. But first there has to be death and rebirth.
Although his commentators pay very little and then only embarrassed attention to it, Apocalypse is ideologically a climax of Lawrence’s work. But because he never ceased to feel that it was not enough merely to describe the crisis, the terrors, the death and rebirth, he wrote over the same years a novel, a novel which should be impregnated with this sexual eschatology. That novel was Lady Chatterley’s Lover. As I tried to show in an essay published four or five years ago, that book enacts the sevenfold descent into hell and the climactic rebirth by sex. I shan’t dwell on it now, because I want to talk about better books, and especially about one in which the apocalyptic types have a peculiar historical force, namely Women in Love.
Ritual descent into hell, followed by rebirth—that is the character of Lawrence’s transitional period. The reason why the world misunderstands what is happening is that it knows only a corrupt Apocalypse—it sees, with Mellors, that ‘there’s a bad time coming, boys,’ but thinks that the smashing-up will be a way of dislodging the proud, and setting the underdogs up instead. Actually the beneficiaries constitute an elect, isolate in a new consciousness, synthesising Law and Love. A mark of this elect will naturally be the new man–woman relationship; for the woman was law and the man love, and just as these two epochal ethics will be transformed in the third, so will the two Persons, Man and Woman, be, under the new dispensation, merged in a new relationship, and yet remain distinct. The obvious image for this sexual situation is the Trinity, of which the Persons are distinct but not divided. And this epoch of the Holy Ghost has no time for underdogs.
As we have seen, this programme, already implicit in the Hardy study, requires not only a new ethics and new philosophies of culture, but also its own art; so it is not surprising that the novels Lawrence wrote during the war have much apocalyptic figuration. The Rainbow came to represent the Old Testament (Law) and Women in Love the New Testament (Love). The rainbow at the end of the first novel is the symbol of the old Covenant; the apocalyptic climax of the second reflects the structure of the New Testament. Women in Love is an end, where The Rainbow was a beginning; it represents the destruction of the old, and enacts the pause before the new world. It projects a kind of Utopia; but it is subjected, like the rest of the apocalyptic material, to Lawrence’s own brand of skepticism.
The Rainbow is deliberately rendered as a kind of Genesis. The opening passages have a sort of Blakean gravity, like the illustrations to Job—the gravity is patriarchal. Allusions to Genesis punctuate the book. The death of old Brangwen, drunk, after a flood, makes him a sort of distorted antitype of Noah. George Ford’s extremely interesting book on Lawrence (Double Measure) makes these and other connections with Genesis, including the references to the coming together of the sons of God and the daughters of man, which establish a typical basis for Ursula. The Rainbow also contains some faint but characteristic premonitions of the apocalypse to come: as when Anna sneers at the lamb-and-flag window of the church, calling it ‘the biggest joke of the parish.’ The lamb and flag constitute a traditional icon of apocalypse, but Anna is sneering at her husband’s interest in such symbolism, as her daughter will later deride Birkin’s more sophisticated apocalypse. Women are skeptics, they cling, like Anna, ‘to the worship of human knowledge,’ they hanker after the Law. In fact Brangwen is a sort of decadent typologist, with an underdog chapel apocalypse; we are not surprised when we meet him briefly in Women in Love and find him grown insensitive, proletarian, obsolete.
The lamb-and-flag window is one of those glancing allusions, like the falling star in St. Mawr, which show how these figures possessed Lawrence. The great chapter of the horses is more explicitly apocalyptic; Lawrence’s discussion of the horse in Apocalypse establishes a direct connexion with Revelation; and in the same section he once again quotes that text from Genesis, earlier used in The Rainbow, about the sons of God visiting the daughters of men, adding that according to Enoch these angels had ‘the members of horses.’ The passage is extremely complicated, as always when Lawrence’s imagination is fully extended on this theme. These horses stand for the lost potency of white civilisation; (and specifically of England: this is the gloomy patriotic element in Lawrence’s eschatology); they also stand for sexual terrors of the kind he associated with them in Fantasia of the Unconscious. Of course sexual terror and the racial decadence were closely related subjects, as one sees most vividly in Women in Love.
In fact Women in Love exhibits all the apocalyptic types in their Lawrentian versions—decadence and renovation in a painful transition or crisis, elitism, patriotic fervour, sex and mystery. Its subject, like that of Lady Chatterley, is, basically, England, and by extension the decline of ‘white’ racial culture to be unimaginably redeemed in a sexual mystery. The characteristic pattern occurs with peculiar clarity in a letter of 1926: ‘they’ve pushed a spear through the side of my England,’ means, superficially, that the country round Nottingham had been ruined and disfigured by ‘miners—and pickets—and policemen’ during the great strike; but underneath there is the imagery of death and a new love: dancing, disciples, a new ‘England to come.’ There is a sort of Blakean patriotism, even in The Rainbow; but Ursula in Women in Love, is England, for her, as for Connie, that other sleeping beauty, there is a programme of renovation by sexual shock. We find her, after the water-party, ‘at the end of her line of life,’ her ‘next step was into death.’ This death, she finds, is preferable to mechanical life. But the death-flow of her mood is interrupted by the arrival of Birkin. At once she hates him. ‘He was the enemy, fine as a diamond, and as hard and jewel-like, the quintessence of all that was inimical. … She saw him as a clear stroke of uttermost contradiction.’ The life-flow of love and the death-flow of law here clash. Birkin contradicts death, personal, national and cosmic. He himself often meditates on the necessary death of England; ‘of race and national death’ at the wedding party near the beginning; of the death of England when he and Ursula buy the old chair; of the necessary disappearance of England in the chapter ‘Continental,’ when Gudrun sneers at him and calls him a patriot. But death is for him a preparation for the new life; so he must contain and overthrow Ursula’s skepticism; and because she is England he must work the renovation on her body.
This intermittent equation of Ursula and England gives some indication of the means by which Lawrence matched his apocalyptic types with history. For Women in Love is an historical novel. Like Middlemarch, to which it owes so much, Women in Love is a novel about a modern crisis; and it deals with it, partly, by concentrating on the condition of, women question, the answer to which, as George Eliot once remarked, had been from the time of Herodotus one of the most important symptoms of the state of a society. Unlike Middlemarch, however, Lawrence’s novel contains no positive allusion to actual history. ‘I should wish the time to remain unfixed,’ he wrote, ‘so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters.’ I shall postpone discussion of this radical difference of method, because the immediate need is simply to assert that Women in Love is nonetheless an historical novel, a book about a particular historical crisis. When Dr Leavis observes of Lawrence that ‘as a recorder of essential English history he is a great successor of George Eliot,’ he is thinking primarily of The Rainbow, but he adds that ‘ Women in Love has … astonishing comprehensiveness in the presentment of contemporary England (the England of 1914).’ The Rainbow has ‘historical depth,’ and studies the past in which the crisis germinated. Women in Love concerns itself less with evocations of a lost world than with a moment of history understood in terms of a crisis archetype. The random events of history assume the patterns of eschatological feeling and speculation.
‘The book frightens me : it’s so end of the world,’ said Lawrence in 1916. George Ford points out that among the early titles proposed for Women in Love were The Latter Days and Dies Irae. And this eschatological preoccupation touches everything in the book. Consider, for example, the social aspect. Lawrence’s apocalypse, as I have said, is elitist, and like the elite of the medieval Joachite sects, for instance The Brethren of the Free Spirit, his chosen ones exclude the profane from their mysteries. Birkin often remarks that people don’t matter; or they matter only in so far as they may produce the terrors, the great mindless shove into the last days. The mood is reflected also in Lawrence’s own letters and in Kangaroo. The mechanical mob has nothing to do with the true sexual mystery-religion of apocalypse; it was in their name that the Jewish and Greek bottom-dogs corrupted the text of the original Revelation. They have a false, lesser mystery, no true katabasis, but merely a parody of it. These profani, destructive, even chthonic, were associated in Lawrence’s mind with colliers, the ‘blackened, slightly distorted human beings with red mouths’ who work for Gerald. To Gudrun, who has an instinctive sympathy with them their debased power—Lawrence writes several passages to make this point including the very fine one where the workmen lust after her in her fancy stockings—to Gudrun they are ‘powerful, underworld men’ in whose voices she hears ‘the voluptuous resonance of darkness’; she desires them, related as they are to the kind of evil found in the waterplants of ‘Sketchbook,’ and the decadence of Halliday’s statue. If Ursula is the Magna Dea in her creative aspect, Gudrun is Hecate, a Queen of the Night. But in the renovated world there is to be no place for her, or for her underworld men.
The real descent into hell and rebirth Lawrence can signify only by sex. The purest expression of it is in The Man Who Died, but in some ways the love-death undergone by Ursula and Connie is a fuller image because it amalgamates heaven and hell, life-flow and death-flow, in one act. The act is anal. Lawrence is never explicit about it, whether in the novels or in the essays where one might have expected some explanation of the Holy Ghost’s electing so curious an epiphany. But he has in mind what he takes to be the basic figure of the mystery behind revelation—this is the point, for Connie and Ursula and for England also, where life and death meet; when the shame induced by Law is defied and burnt out. ‘How good it was to be really shameful. … She was free.’ This participation in ‘dreadful mysteries beyond the phallic cult,’ enacts death and rebirth at once, is decadent and renovatory at once.
As the literature shows, this is not easy to discuss. One cannot even distinguish, discursively, between the sex Gudrun desires from Loerke, which is obscene and decadent, and that which Ursula experiences with Birkin, which is on balance renovatory. The first comes straight out of Nordau, the second is darkly millennialist, again like that of some medieval sects in their Latter Days; yet in practice they presumably amount to almost the same thing. It is an ambivalence which may have characterised earlier apocalyptic postures, as Fraenger argues in his book on Hieronymus Bosch. Decadence and renovation, death and rebirth, in the last days, are hard to tell apart, being caught up in the terrors.
Does a new world—created in the burning out of sexual shame, in the birth from such an icy womb as in that of the last chapters of Lawrence’s novel—does such a world await the elect when the terrors of the transition are over? Do the elect rightly look forward to the epoch of the Holy Spirit? The myth in the book says yes. It says so throughout—in image after image and in a long series of antitheses: in ‘Rabbit’ and in ‘Water-Party,’ in the water-weeds and butterflies, in Gerald’s death journey to Gudrun’s bed and in Birkin rolling naked in the pine-needles; in the flow of death and the flow of life, the imagery of fleurs du mal and the rose of happiness. But the book also obscures the myth. Between the flow of life and that of death there is ‘no difference—and all the difference. Dissolution rolls on, just as production does … it ends in universal nothing—the end of the world. … It means a new cycle of creation after. …’ Birkin is glossing his earlier remark that Aphrodite ‘is the flowering mystery of the death-process.’ He cannot tell Ursula quite how their Aphrodite is dissociated from that process. And here he invites her skepticism.
As Magna Dea committed to continuance, as woman the voice of Law, and as modern clerk, Ursula is repeatedly the voice of that skepticism which always, in history, attends apocalyptic prophecy. When Birkin rants about the disappearance of England, she knows it cannot ‘disappear so cleanly and conveniently.’ It is part of the historical tension between myth and history (the long record of disappointed apocalypse) or between what Birkin thinks of as life and death. The novel fights back at myth, and where the myth says yes, the novel and Ursula often say no. The novel, as a kind, belongs to humanism, not to mystery religion; or in terms of Worringer’s contemporary distinction, it cannot, because of the society that produced it, abandon empathy entirely in favour of abstraction. Thus our white decadence can never take the obscenely abstract form of Halliday’s statue. And Lawrence knew this. Whereas The Rainbow, which looks back to a pastoral Genesis, can end with the archetypal sign of the covenant, Women in Love must have a modern conclusion in which nothing is concluded, a matter of disappointed love, a pattern incomplete. It allows history some ground unconquered by the types.
‘Has everything that happens universal significance?’ It is Birkin’s question, and the novelist’s question always. For Birkin it arises out of the repeated assertion that Gerald’s type is Cain. Gerald’s shooting of his brother is to Gudrun ‘the purest form of accident.’ But Birkin decides that he ‘does not believe there was any such thing as accident. It all hung together, in the deepest sense.’ Hence the subsequent death of Gerald’s sister, his own visit to the depths of the lake, the region of death, and finally his death in the ice, may be seen as pre-determined. At any rate Lawrence wants us to ask questions about the truth of the types in a novel. The New Testament shows them all fulfilled, in the ‘fullness of time.’ Can there be such a novelistic pleroma, in which no event is random? If so, all the apparent randomness of the book must have significance: cats, rabbits, jewels, floods. This kind of realism finds its figura in random event. So the mythic type returns powerfully to its ancient struggle with history. But Lawrence never in fact allowed history to lose altogether, even in The Plumed Serpent, even in the narrowly schematic Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He headed dangerously towards a typological predominance, and paid the price; the more he asserted the fulfilment of preordained types, the less he could depend on that randomness which leaves room for quickness and special grace. Mrs Morel locked out of her house, experiencing fear but burying her face in the lily—that is the kind of thing that is lost. We still have it in Women in Love—in a relevance altogether strange, in unique configurations. There are the naked white men round the African statue, an image not subordinated to the element of doctrine involved; or the eurhythmics and the cows in ‘Water-Party.’ One of Lawrence’s powers was a capacity for stunning verisimilitude, a thing precious in itself—one thinks of the passage in The Rainbow in which Will Brangwen picks up the factory-girl at the music-hall. There are always untyped graces of this sort in Lawrence; they belong to history, and they are what all good novels ought to have. Lawrence never lost the power, but it must have seemed that its relevance to what he was doing progressively diminished.
Women in Love is the last novel in which he kept the balance. Its radical type is apocalypse, used as an explanation of the great contemporary crisis; for ‘it was in 1915 the old world ended’ and the great transition began. The great feat is to confront what Auerbach calls ‘the disintegration of the continuity of random events’—reflected in the technique of Lawrence’s novel—with the unchangingness of the types, and to do it without sinking into a verisimilar discreteness on the one hand, or into a rigid, flux-denying schema on the other. Women in Love studies crisis without unforgiveably insulting reality. Its types do some of the work which historians also do with types.
Perhaps we can get a clearer notion of the kind of balance Lawrence had to struggle for if we look at that earlier historical novel to which he was so much indebted, Middlemarch. Lawrence grew discontented with George Eliot, but Women in Love is nevertheless his Middlemarch. The opening pages of the Victorian novel were in his mind when he made Ursula throw the jewels at Birkin, and again at the end when Gudrun gives the stockings to her sister—a curious dissociation of the Eliot scene, which stuck in his mind partly because of Dorothea’s priggish allusion to the use of jewels by St John in Revelation. There is an important typological recall of the great passage in Middlemarch when Dorothea returns, desolate, from Rome: near the climax of Lawrence’s book Gudrun passes a terrible night, alone with the ticking clock, in bondage to time, to the horrible mechanical Gerald, and half thinks her hair may have turned white. ‘Yet there it remained, brown as ever, and there she was herself, looking a picture of health.’ The slightly perfunctory nature of the prose here may be a consequence of Lawrence’s feeling behind what he was doing the extraordinary strength of George Eliot’s moment—Dorothea also desolate, also against a background of ice and snow, ‘incongruously alive,’ ‘glowing … as only youthful health can glow.’ It is in the same scene that Lawrence allows Gudrun to think of herself as a modern Hetty Sorrel, and of Gerald as a modern Arthur Donnithorne. It is a thought full of irony and the recognition of a change in the patterns of sexual tragedy. The very concept of the big double novel, earlier called The Sisters, is owed to Eliot: not only the contrasting sisters, but the deep study of two marriages at the end of a world. Ursula is his modern Dorothea, Gudrun his modern Rosamond. Ursula’s mistake over Skrebensky, as George Ford says, is founded on Dorothea’s mistake over Casaubon. From the start her crucial relationship was to be with Birkin, as if Lawrence had decided to shift the focus to the second union; but he knew, as he remarks in a letter, that Ursula needed this earlier barren experience also, and, with some difficulty, got Skrebensky into the story-line. Finally, he remembered that George Eliot had researched Middlemarch, as if to write history, and he researched Women in Love similarly, doing a lot of intensive reading for it in the early months of 1916.
Middlemarch is the novel of another crisis. It was begun in 1867. The ‘Sixties were thought then, and are thought now, to have been critical, a transition between two worlds. They opened with the American Civil War and ended with the Franco–Prussian War. Essays and Reviews come at the beginning, Culture and Anarchy, the First Vatican Council and the dogma of Papal Infallibility, at the end. The Education Act, which did as much as any single statute could to alter the whole character of society, became law in 1870. The source of the Nile was discovered in 1860, the Suez Canal opened in 1869. Various post-Gutenbergian techniques were taking hold: the telephone was invented, and ironclad warships, and the dynamo, and dynamite. For the first time you could telegraph to India and travel by tube. In the very year of dynamite and the telephone, Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital, a genuinely revolutionary event to which hardly anybody in England paid the slightest attention, and Disraeli got through his Reform Bill, an event thought by a great many people to be as fraught with revolutionary possibilities as the passage of its predecessor thirty-five years earlier. It seems not only that a world we know well was struggling to be born, but that people felt strongly, as they often do, that there was a crisis in their vicinity, even if they did not always agree with us as to where, exactly, it was.
In the year of the Reform Act, the telephone and Das Kapital, George Eliot began to plan Middlemarch. Writing began in 1869, ‘simmered’ for a long time, and got properly under way in 1871. Then the story formed a union with an independently conceived story called Miss Brooke, and was published in eight parts between December, 1871 and December, 1872. Throughout these vicissitudes two factors remained constant. One was that this novel was to deal with ‘contemporary moral history’ (to steal a phrase used by the Goncourts of their own Germinie Lacerteux, published in 1864). The other, which seems to indicate a programme different from that of the French realists, was that from the earliest stages George Eliot set her story very firmly not in the decade that was ending but at the beginning of the ’Thirties. Her notebook lists political and private events, which were to be cross-referenced in the narrative, and modern scholarship has illuminated this oblique historical accuracy. The author not only copied out lists of events from the Annual Register but also got up medicine, hospital management, scientific research. Bible scholarship, which is equally important to her design, she did not have to get up. She was particularly careful about medicine, as the notebook shows; and we must guess that this was not only because her principal male character was a doctor, but because 1832 is the date not only of the first Reform Bill, but of a catastrophic event, the arrival in England for the first time of the Indian cholera. It is a reasonable guess that, in the early stages of planning, she meant to have a cholera epidemic as well as an election in Middlemarch. It would be a great test not only for her doctor, but for the well-disposed gentry with their interest in sanitary dwellings.
Cholera was a disease unknown in England before this time, though there were of course later Victorian epidemics. This first onslaught of the disease must have seemed a new plague for a new age, much as syphilis had been for the period of her previous novel Romola, and it coincided exactly with the ominous political upheavals of the months preceding the passage of the Bill. She made a note to the effect that the preamble to a bill in Parliament spoke of the disease as an infliction of Providence, and that six members of the Commons voted for the exclusion of this phrase. The coincidence of these events is a sufficient explanation of her fixing upon the years preceding the Reform Bill’s passing, and her choosing an advanced young doctor as her principal character in the ‘Middlemarch’ part of the book. Other details fell into place; in the ’Thirties but not in the ’Sixties she could have a serious biblical scholar who yet remained ignorant of the advances of the New Criticism. After all she herself had translated Strauss in the ’Forties.
So she turned to earlier crisis-years, the years when the civilisation she knew, and which seemed in its turn to be on the brink of radical change, was being born out of great political and scientific events. Of all English novelists she came closest to accepting the Goncourt programme for using novels as means of prosecuting les études et les devoirs de la science, though in making one crisis the model or type of another for the purposes of the study, she was, though with a new scientific seriousness, adopting a device not uncommon in English fiction she knew, and which is of course a characteristic of all narrative explanation. George Eliot was in any case not interested in radical formal innovation; her attempt is rather to explore and modify the existing novel schemata. Thus she maintained, despite a conviction early on in the writing that the novel had ‘too many momenti,’ the several continuous, elaborate and interrelated plots to which readers had become accustomed.
Middlemarch has nothing in it quite like the famous intrusive chapter in Adam Bede (‘in which the story pauses a little’) but it is not without authorial interpolation, and there is one passage, uneasily facetious as George Eliot sometimes was when she felt she was being self-indulgent, which must cause pain to post-Jamesian purists. Yet it tells us something useful about the book. Mr Standish has just been reading old Featherstone’s will, and we have heard how vexed the family is at Joshua Rigg’s inheriting. The conclusion is that no one in the neighbourhood could be happy at this turn of events; nobody could prophesy the long-term effects of Rigg’s arrival. Whereupon the novelist adds:
And here I am naturally led to reflect on the means of elevating a low subject. Historical parallels are remarkably efficient in this way. The chief objection to them is, that the diligent narrator may lack space, or (what is often the same thing) may not be able to think of them with any degree of particularity, though he may have a philosophical confidence that if known they would be illustrative. It seems an easier and a shorter way to dignity to observe that—since there never was a true story which could not be told in parables where you might put a monkey for a margrave, and vice versa,—whatever has been or is to be narrated by me about low people, may be ennobled by being considered a parable.… Thus while I tell the truth about my loobies, my reader’s imagination need not be entirely excluded from an occupation with lords. … As to any provincial history in which the agents are all of high moral rank, that must be of a date long posterior to the first Reform Bill, and Peter Featherstone, you perceive, was dead and buried some months before Lord Grey came into office.
That this is facetious, muddled and evasive does not entirely destroy its value. It is one of the few places in which the novelist openly adverts to a matter which, on other evidence, she had incessantly in mind as she planned and wrote Middlemarch. She is merely pretending to be sarcastic on a well-worn issue, the right of novelists to concern themselves with low characters—the sort of thing she did in Adam Bede when she remarked correctly, though with an evil emphasis, that ‘things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome, I hope.’ It is the attitude controverted by Ruskin in his observations on The Mill on the Floss (‘the sweepings of the Pentonville omnibus’). Perhaps the question had not entirely lost importance—certainly George Eliot herself had not entirely solved it, as we shall see; but it is very unlikely that she here states it with any real seriousness. For in Middlemarch the problem is not so much to justify one’s rendering of a provincial society for its own sake as to make that society serve to illustrate a great historical crisis. The point is not that you can read lord for looby, or George IV for Featherstone, as she ironically proposes, but that if the novelist has got the detail right you can find in the book a ‘parable’ concerning these events in the mind and the conscience of society which, at a particular historical crisis, signal the birth of a modern age, that great theme of the modern novel.
And that is what the paragraph is trying to say. It tells us to relate the events of the novel to Lord Grey’s Act and the other great changes of that time. The period of the novel is precisely the years and months before the Act. The notebook contains not only lists from the Annual Register, but precisely dated events for the unwritten novel. Thus the marriage of Lydgate is timed to coincide with the dissolution of July, 1830, and the height of the cholera in Paris; Mr Casaubon’s death coincides with the last days of the Parliament whose dissolution in 1831 led to the General Election in May of that year, the election at which Mr Brooke failed to win his seat in what was to be the Reform Parliament. Not all these dates eventually coincided, but the book retains, as Mr Jerome Beaty has shown, a good many delicate cross-references to political events, to the vicissitudes of Peel and Wellington, the death of Huskisson, and so on. The final illness of George IV, mentioned in relation to that of Featherstone, was enough, if you coupled it with the dissolution of Parliament on the Reformism, and a general election, to make Mr Vincy ask whether all these were not signs that the world was coming to an end. But this overt though facetious allusion to the apocalyptic archetype of crisis is not repeated; the author is content with unspoken allusions and parallels. Lydgate’s efforts at medical reform are specifically related to the political struggle after the dissolution of 1831; Chapter 84, of which the main business is the family’s opposition to Dorothea’s re-marriage, begins with an allusion to the rejection of the Bill by the Lords. And many other events are sketched in thus. The book ends a few weeks before the final enactment of the Bill. In the narrative there are a few major crises—those of the two marriages, and the attendant crises in the reformist activities of Lydgate and Dorothea; there are also minor ones, relating to religion and business, Fred Vincy’s attitude to Holy Orders and Bulstrode’s disgrace. But these personal crises are shadows of the historical crises, of the ‘new life’ struggling to be born in 1832; they are parables, to use George Eliot’s word, of that crisis which is in its turn a model for the modern crisis of 1867, the leap in the dark, the end of another world. For in some ways we are all, even learned historians, Vincys. A crisis date gives history structure, and provides ways of talking about it.
This is the larger issue—crisis as a mode of historical explanation. The present point is that Middlemarch is a novel concerned with the end of a world. But it was expressly intended to inculcate ‘a religious and moral sympathy with the historical life of man,’ and it issued from the hands of an author who was done with all manner of explanations requiring a mythology of transcendence. Such divinity as may occur in Middlemarch must be humanised in the manner of Feuerbach; the history must be human also, Comtian not Christian. Thus the types of Dorothea are Antigone, Theresa, even the Virgin Mary (an extravagant observation of Lydgate which the author partly endorses), but they are systematically Feuerbachised, qualified as human. Rosamund’s ‘confession’ is another instance; it is sacramental only as to efficacy, not as to mystery. The Joachite elements in George Eliot’s history belong, like those of Comte, to an age in which apocalypse has been positivised. This humanised apocalypse is what we are all familiar with, for we habitually allude to it when we consider our own historical crisis.
The type of apocalypse, however transformed, is still operative in Middlemarch. The word may seem very strong; it only means apocalypse of the kind Feuerbach might have contemplated had he given his attention to eschatology—a ‘Copernican’ apocalypse, brought down to its true level, the human crisis. It is a good many years since Mark Schorer discovered in the novel what he calls ‘metaphors of … “muted” apocalypse,’ mentioning the figures of light, fire, transfiguration, epiphany, fulfilment, and the deliberate antithesis between Middlemarch and the New Jerusalem. He found prophecy and pseudo-prophecy, vision and growth. This is a muted apocalypse, certainly: the jewels of St John’s Revelation are mentioned early, but the context seems to make them serve only as a way of noting Dorothea’s priggish attitude to Celia. Schorer quotes a passage from Chapter X in which Dorothea’s hopes of revelation from Casaubon’s learning are given a strong though of course ironical apocalyptic tone. Above all, the historical events mentioned in the novel—again in a muted way—serve to emphasise the fulfilment of a time, and a renewal; though that, since the novel is set in the past, can be left to retrospective prophecy, the kind we, as historians, are best at. These are the last days; humanly speaking, the last days of an epoch, which is a Feuerbachian equivalent of the mythical apocalypse. The myth abandoned, this is still part of the structure of our historical thinking. And one reason why we relish Middlemarch still is that we understand the muted eschatology of its design.
For example, the crisis in bible criticism seemed at the time catastrophic in its implications. Casaubon, firmly planted on the wrong, mythological side of it, is typed in the same way as other characters—his name relates him ironically to the great Casaubon; he is a Milton, he is a Locke—all great men associated with major crises in the history of thought; but Casaubon’s relation to them is ironically qualified, as Dorothea’s is to hers, or as Lydgate’s to Vesalius and the other great medical men whose names and dates George Eliot copies out so carefully into her notebook. They stand for virtues or certainties thought to be in decadence at this turn of time; though they also, by implying the meliorist scientific achievements of the succeeding age, suggest also renovation, always in apocalyptic thought the obverse side of decadence. Middlemarch itself, as Schorer says, silently proposes its antitype, The New Jerusalem.
If Casaubon’s biblical methodology illuminated the historical crisis, so did Lydgate’s medicine. The opposition between Lydgate and the older provincial doctors is not the whole story: the parable is incomplete if it does not include allusions to modern differentiations between typhus and typhoid, the new treatment for delirium tremens (which becomes the material of an important narrative crisis), the general theory of fever, and indeed modern developments in ‘cell-theory.’ Of course part of the point is that to know about all these things is not enough; that in the new dispensation as well as in any older one the virtues, under whatever demythologised form one knows them, must be preserved. A spot of commonness, a failure to apply the proper kind of attention to another person, a neglect of duty, a cheapening of love, will bring disaster. Lydgate’s ‘commonness,’ as it happens, is associated with his caste—it proceeds from an inability to treat as true persons his sexual, social and intellectual inferiors—and so derives from a system that was beginning, with the Reform Acts (and perhaps more with the Education Act of 1870) slowly to collapse. In much the same way the dryness and sexual impotence of Casaubon reflect the sterility of a world-view that lingers on in survivors of the older ruined order.
The historical antitheses of Middlemarch go beyond scholarship and medicine, and are far from simple. It is not only, we see, a matter of one age, characterised by myth and ignorance, yielding to a new, of history and science, or of a supernatural giving way to a natural religion. Religious beliefs of many kinds—Fairbrother’s, Fred Vincy’s, Tyke’s, and especially Bulstrode’s—are ironically exposed at this historical crisis, but their forms survive that crisis, as fiction survives religious belief. Bulstrode’s error is to suppose too exact a relationship between plot (providence) and the random actuality on which it is imposed. He takes his prosperity as a figure of his justification, as arising from divine but mechanical plotting; his God knows nothing of contingency; the logic of his plots is the logic of myth, not of everyday life. The tide of plausible human events is not in accordance with his Calvinist prediction, and his discomfiture is proof of the obsolescence of another mythology, one that was still in favour among some of the novelist’s contemporaries. George Eliot has her own Feuerbachian version of predestination, worked out many times and most explicitly in Tito Melema; this and the erroneous old version play against each other in the Bulstrode crisis. That which works through Raffles is not, any longer, God; but neither is it mocked.
Many incidents are invented to strengthen the sense of an historical transition. There is the talk of new building and improvement, the tone of political dispute, Brooke’s inability to command the respect of the labourer Dagley, even—great Victorian symbol of the division of time—the railway; and Garth, that wondrous necessary instrument of capital, suppressing resentment at its progress through midland meadows. This critical balance is characteristic even the minor crises of the book. Casaubon’s scholarship hangs posthumously over Dorothea in her decision to marry Ladislaw. Lydgate voting for Tyke is voting, he thinks, in the interests of progress, but they turn out to be the interests of Bulstrode; he accepts Bulstrode’s saving loan, and Raffles is given medical treatment acceptable in current obsolete medical opinion, but to Lydgate’s new knowledge dangerous. A good deal of the corruption, impotence and ineffectiveness of characters in Middlemarch is imposed upon them by a dying but stubborn past, and they are part of the price one pays for living in ‘an age of transition.’ This is what Dorothea means, really, when she says she will ‘find out what everything costs.’ She takes on the new world. Lydgate finds himself cursed by the old; he must take Bulstrode on his arm; he is not one of the elite in any new world, even in a new world of which the millennialist ideal is so severely chastened by contact with a powerful sense of reality. The scientific figures which, as has often been observed, penetrate the texture of this novel are not arbitrary reflections of the author’s own interests: they establish the modernity of the problem, and they also, by indicating the tone of the future, judge the moral effectiveness of the characters who faced it then as we must now, and suggest the consequences of a failure such as Lydgate’s. The eschatology is humanised, but the old judgment remains, as to type, applicable: ‘I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot … so then because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.’
Thus Middlemarch arranges itself as an image of crisis, and a study of the moral obligations of men in transition. Its typology relates it to the archetypes of crisis, and this is one of the ways in which we understand human history. As I said at the outset, such terms as crisis and revolution describe to our satisfaction what it is in the utter particularity, the randomness and disparateness of events, that, we can recognise and understand; indeed people concerned in the making of history have often shaped it in conformity with such types, just as novelists do. Real events comply with archetypes of this kind; why should not fictional events? At the centre of this novel is a great and typical historical event. But it is only the nucleus. Round it accrete all these other images of crisis. The manner in which the basic apocalyptic figure permeates the texture is strikingly demonstrated in one of the greatest passages of the novel: the frustrated Dorothea contemplates Rome, the eternal city a wreck, a marble confusion, St Peter’s and its statues disfigured by red drapery, as if seen by a diseased eye: the vision of the urbs aeterna blighted. ‘Images are the brood of desire,’ says the novelist at the opening of the fourth chapter (in which Lydgate is on the point of marrying a woman he has presented with a whip). The image of Rome is the brood of desire that fails. To balance the scene, there is the wonderful moment of Dorothea’s return to Lowick and the blanched winter landscape, when the fire glows incongruously and she, seeking confirmation in the glass for her sense of deathly defeat, finds an image of health and vitality, the human and perhaps specifically female strength that comes through these crises. Lawrence—who saw so clearly that the novel must make this kind of sense and not fob us off with papers stuck into brandy-flasks, meticulously rendered lawsuits—Lawrence not only learned from the good and the bad in Eliot’s figures, but, as we have seen, remembered and reproduced this one at the climax of Women in Love. He meant that Crich, like Casaubon, belonged to death, to an old order.
However the relation between story and apocalyptic type is visualised, it presupposes an imaginative feat and a large degree of intellectual control. Occasionally this fails. There are lapses: for instance in the climactic interview between Dorothea and Rosamond, by which George Eliot set so much store. This was to be a flow of Feuerbachian feeling, confession and all, and so warm and spontaneous that she claimed to have refrained from thinking about it till it happened, and then to have written it entire, without revision, a claim which the manuscripts show to be untrue. However, it has virtual truth: it suggests a deliberate letting go, a kind of moral failure (nothing in Dorothea gives her the right to be even a Feuerbachian confessor to Rosamond) and redeemed only at its end, when Lydgate, dismissed from the elect, takes up his meaner burden. This is a failure of spiritual pride, like Bulstrode’s.
There are more serious faults proper to be mentioned here. One is, if one may so put it, that George Eliot runs out of love; or we could say, she too has her elite. I mean that she cannot sustain that special love by which a novelist knows and preserves the identity of characters. The indications of this are her slipping away into caricature or humour-characterisation when she moves out of the sociological middle area. At the extreme edge is Mrs Dollop, in the pub, but Trumbull the auctioneer is only good for a laugh and as a handy pneumonia patient. The Garths, even, are honourable pastoral prigs about whom one wants to know no more. As one moves out from the central figures, the two married couples, towards the periphery, the figures are increasingly distorted. In a certain sense, she is interested most in the good bourgeoisie and a little above it, the Vincys to the Brookes. The others she more or less deprives of moral reality much as Lydgate deprives Rosamond, and with similar results. What happens is that an authentic relation of type to history is distorted by adherence to novel conventions which are meaningless except as reflections of a caste system. Possibly the degree of distortion is as little as could be managed in the England of the time. But one sees why Arnold Kettle can attribute the failures of Middlemarch—a novel about change—to a view of society and morality ‘somewhat static,’ not incorporating ‘a dialectical sense of contradiction and motion.’ This is overstated, but it does locate, in this novel of crisis, a spot of commonness. Lawrence, we saw, had his own problem arising from a conscious elitism, but he contrived, partly by formal innovation, to keep it out of his novel.
Another fault of Middlemarch is in the plotting: or so it must seem to us. We are not, for various reasons too complicated to enter into now, so interested nowadays in what Beckett, praising Proust, called ‘the vulgarities of a plausible concatenation’ as our great-grandfathers, or even our grandfathers, but we cannot excuse George Eliot so simply, because in this respect she was obviously on our side, and admired narrative with a strong thematic aspect. Yet she wrote a good deal of unnecessary plot, not so much in Middlemarch as in Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, but still too much. The Bulstrode affair is an instance. In its elements this is impeccable ‘thinking with the story’—Lydgate’s association with the banker contaminates him with an odious pre-scientific religion, and the climax turns upon an issue between old and new medical practice. The conduct of Mrs Bulstrode is a grace, one of those favours that drop upon a writer because he has worked hard for something else, and not been a slave of the types. Yet in order to get to the point of Bulstrode she invented all the perfunctory business of Rigg and Raffles, the note stuffed in the brandy-flask, the unnecessary relationship with Ladislaw. In the notebook she laboured over the elaboration of all this in such unusual detail that, as Mr Beaty very credibly suggests, it looks as if she was not interested enough to carry such essentially extraneous material in her head. And this plotting damages the modernity of the novel. It is regressive, it takes us back to a more naïve kind of novel, in which it is assumed that the mere delights of concatenation are enough, in which serious thematic or typical interest is largely a matter of luck. Such plots are anti-historical, destructive of the crisis-‘set.’ Of course we have many later books to be wise by; yet there is no reason why we should not say that this kind of thing diminishes the critical force of the book, given its historical theme. Once again, Lawrence knew better, but it must also be said that the comparisons are not all in his favour.
I have been re-arranging familiar elements of Middlemarch because I want to make it possible to think of the novel as having various aspects in common with other kinds of narrative. Middlemarch is, to admiring eyes, a novel explanatory of crisis, and it achieves its explanations by means which may be called historical and typological. On the whole it does this without undue violence to persons or to probabilities, remaining true not only to the aims of historical narrative, and to the typological bent of our minds, but also to our sense of fact. Looby Event serves Lord Crisis. Middlemarch achieves all manner of consonances between past and present, the before and after of the crisis; but its Transition, its Terrors, its decadence and renovation are thoroughly secularised; apocalypse here has emigrated out of myth into history.
I hope one can say that it is now clear how much Middlemarch and Women in Love have in common, though even when one considers the similarities the differences insist on their presence. Each deals with a topic, absolutely central to the modern novel, namely what Lawrence described as ‘woman becoming individual, self-responsible, taking her own initiative’; and each associates certain bad kinds of sex with an older order, an order of death—though Lawrence did not need Casaubon’s impotence, for it was clear that this had become too limiting a symbol for sexual disconnexion, and Skrebensky and Crich are more than ordinarily virile. But both use marital crises as figures for vast and impersonal historical crises and revolutions; at the heart of the books there are the two couples, Casaubon and Dorothea, straddling their historical crisis, Lydgate and Rosamond not even worthy of the ordeal of initiation; Ursula and Birkin representing the mysterious struggle for a new epoch, Crich and Gudrun increasingly excluded, left to set up their own universe of death, with Loerke as its satanic priest. From this basic resemblance many others follow, which it is unnecessary to spell out.
On the major differences in the manner of representing historical crisis there is more to say. We noticed that George Eliot assumed a need for historical particularity, and therefore chose as a model of her own crisis another which she could investigate as thoroughly as she liked. Lawrence chose to write about the one that was going on all around him, and deliberately stripped it of contemporary reference. An historical novel, meaning an exploitation for the purposes of the moment of a set of events long past, is something that it is very hard to imagine Lawrence ever writing. So he ‘detemporalised’ his book, avoided mentioning that its events belong to the war years. The war was to be any war. Gerald had a commission, but has resigned it, as he could not do in wartime; the Pompadour is the pre-war Café Royal; and so forth.
One reason for this is simply that George Eliot was powerfully under the influence of demythologising Germans, notably Feuerbach, whom she persistently regarded as the leaders of modern thought. Lawrence was, though uneasily, a re-mythologiser. ‘The myths begin to hypnotise us once again, our impulse towards our own scientific way of understanding being almost spent,’ as he observed in the Fantasia. He lived after that great literary and academic and clinical revival of mythology with which we associate such names as Frazer and Harrison, Freud and Jung; with which we associate a whole movement of modern thought which is far from exhausted now. Consequently he associated the old demythologisation with an outmoded rationalism, and so far as it was consistent with his revised version of realism he gave his age of crisis the minimum of historical particularity and the maximum of mythical, or typological, or symbolic, reference. The very character of his narrative involves a recoil from mere history and from ‘the vulgarities of a plausible concatenation.’ He will have none of that plotting which in George Eliot soaks up so much authentic, thematic interest—no Raffles (compare Raffles as a plot agent with Loerke!) no papers wadded in brandy flasks. He will not make up stories which explain how one thing leads to another. There are concessions to contingency, for without them we should hardly recognise the book as a novel, but we move with the minimum of formal continuity from one crux to the next. It is true that the book starts in the traditional mode common to George Eliot and, say, Bennett in The Old Wives’ Tale or even Tolstoi in Anna Karenina, but we soon see that the scene at Halliday’s, for instance, exists for the image of the African statue and the naked men, and that ‘Rabbit’ is an entirely new re-focussing of the novel on to a symbol of large and ultimately indeterminable significance, related by many thematic ties to the general order of the book. When the older Crich, ordinarily right outside the narrative, is needed to make a point, he is worked in, made to symbolise the dying Age of Love; actually his business is only to die, for Gerald must run from his deathbed to make love to Gudrun. Loerke is introduced and given elaborate development much too late for a major character in a more orthodox narrative. There is a good deal which receives no formal ‘explanation’ at all—the relations between Birkin and Crich (especially after the cancellation of the Preface), the relevance of the long discussion between Loerke and Ursula on the autonomy of forms in art. The death of Gerald’s brother, and later of his sister, are related only thematically to the general design; they are certainly not tributes to contingency, but neither are they given narrative ‘followability’. Lawrence does not force discontinuities on one’s attention, but everybody observes them, and notes that they are much sharper here than in The Rainbow. The change reflects the break with the past which happens between the first and second novels of the sequence; the new manner is what Lawrence described in a famous letter to Garnett as ‘futuristic,’ not only in narrative but in the conception of character liberated from an established set of expectations which include not only a ‘certain moral scheme’ but also satisfactory explanations. A new deeper concept of personality required a narrative manner more dependent, as he says, on intuition, on illogic; and it also rendered very undesirable any sharpness of historical definition, allusions to specific event of the sort found in Middlemarch.
If we now consider these similarities and differences in the light of what we think novels ought to be, it will, I suppose, be clear that each writer, and all writers of the same degree of seriousness, had to contend with the special pressures of their particular moments upon an essentially atavistic form; the novel tells a story. The pressure on George Eliot was of an age of scientific morality, an age too which made the first onslaught on what used to be called the concord of the canonical scriptures, and discredited the old version of the plot of the Bible, and the plot of comparative religion; she boldly chose that as an important part of her theme. Lawrence, on the other hand, lived in a time when the scientific criticism of her German heroes had not only spread out into politics, history and literature, but had bred a formidable counter-movement, that anti-positivism of which we still hear so much. Because it seemed important to break with pseudo-scientific categories that had lost their relevance—the traditional ideas of character, indeed of order—Lawrence abandoned plot and radically altered traditional characterisation; because the truth lay in the blood and the darkness of the mind, and not in positivistic inferences from detail, he went more directly to the basic mythologies. Whereas she could assert fixed points in the historical flux without direct recourse to apocalyptic figures, which she would have thought, in their naked form, uninverted by the Feuerbachian dialectic, obsolete and irrelevant, he short-circuited conventional representations of the historical course of events and drew much more nakedly on the complex imagery of apocalypse that was maturing in his own mind.
Either way there is a good deal of waste and loss, and neither book can I suppose quite match our own typologies of crisis and change. But they do touch us, and on reason why they do so is surely that under our impressions of change the explanatory types persist. These books reflect our terrors, our contrary yet complementary types of decadence and renovation, even if they lack the peculiar quality of our own fears, and of our own ironies and reserves. We recognise that these books have tensions and problems essentially modern, in the sense that they grew out of an appalled sense of what it means to be modern; and this is true even though our modernism is on the surface so different from theirs, because they rest their whole weight on crisis and modernity, on modernity and history, and they seek our kinds of explanation for the pain of being where they are.
(1967)
We Anglo-Saxons, as the General indiscriminately calls us, have special problems with Colette, and I think the way to sort them out is to argue from the premise that she is a great writer (not, that is, a merely interesting or charming or odd one) and see what happens. Getting close enough to her to do this well is a further difficulty, obviously because she is not an easy writer to translate, obviously again because there is so large a body of work, and less obviously because the alien eye is especially likely to confound what is really impressive with what is more or less strictly for the members of the Colette cult.
By and large the translators have served her well, especially Antonia White and Roger Senhouse. And there seems to be a very fair amount of Colette at present available in this country. Farrar Straus have a programme to publish translations of the whole Fleuron edition, which has fifteen solid volumes, and there are many books in print, of which six have been collected in a Modern Library edition. The indispensable Break of Day (La Naissance du jour) is now available. Finally, no Anglo-Saxon should nowadays take on Colette without the help of Margaret Davies’ excellent short introduction (Oliver & Boyd, 5/−, Evergreen Pilot Books, $.95). Thus equipped, he can pursue the inquiry suggested above, and face the third difficulty, that of sorting out the really valuable from the merely chic or adorable.
At this point I might as well say which books I myself think the ones to be reckoned with if you believe (as I do) that Colette ought to be considered with the same kind of attention given to her most distinguished contemporaries: both of the Chéri stories, The Ripening Seed, Break of Day, The Cat (at present, it seems, hard to find), Julie de Carneilhan, and some short stories. About one or two more I cannot make up my mind, and there are moments when I have doubts about some of these. But it is a working list.
The newly translated pensées called The Blue Lantern1 don’t change the picture substantially. This is a brave and gay performance by an old woman in pain, a kind of unaffected tribute to herself, a book by a brilliantly intelligent member of the Colette cult, rather as if Jane Austen should have survived to take part in those learned and adoring games played by devoted Janeites. But this sounds much too harsh. Years before, Colette in her strangest book had celebrated, as a woman of fifty, her liberation from the sharper lusts, partly for the reasons which caused Sophocles to rejoice similarly (but at eighty) in The Republic, partly because that masculine directness and hardness—which she thought women really had more of than men—could now be allowed a larger share in the arrangements of life. Now she faces another change, death; she writes about the progressive fading of the senses, accepts it, and values what remains behind: sights, sounds, smells, animals, and old friends. She speaks with love of Jean Marais, of Cocteau and Moreno and the dying Fargue; she is charitable to the most egocentric of the young, remembering her own youthful ‘shudder of repugnance at the touch of old people.’ She watches children at play in the garden beneath her window, and writes of them with the unillusioned toughness she showed in the music-hall stories of long before. She writes of animals with an unsentimental anthropomorphism we Anglo-Saxons may have trouble understanding, because our culture precludes the unsentimentally anthropomorphic.
Colette combines a strong sense of the total otherness of plants and animals with an equally strong assumption that they have their real meaning in terms of a human world; thus the final cause of flowers is the art of the gardener and the florist, of rustic foods, Parisian haute cuisine. Her intensely civilised attitude to the wild reports of sense distinguishes her clearly from Anglo-Saxon nature-mystics, Wordsworth or Thoreau, as we can see in this book from her accounts of painful visits to the vendange at Beaujolais, or to Provence for the scents of the hills behind Grasse. She is the inheritor of that great French 19th-century enterprise which was devoted to the confusion of nature with art. Out of it springs a delicate veneration for the cosmetic but also a grossness, the grossness of the belle époque. Colette has them both, is as much at home in the reeking scent factories of Grasse as in the hills; a parody of her manner would have to concentrate on her cult of odours, which is alike responsible for much that seems tedious and affected and for such marvels as the conclusion of The Ripening Seed.
On the whole, then, one sees The Blue Lantern as an agreeable act of self-indulgence, a cultist tribute to a writer whose notoriety has merged into her fame, whose grossness time and the worshippers have sublimated into a unique delicacy. The books have been part of an experiment in living conducted as if there were no evidence to work with except what living provides; thus the conclusions—that the passionate senses beget their own temperance, the mind its own heaven—are what we extract at our own risk from books which never offer a moral formulation and are variously and unpredictably gross and delicate.
Anglo-Saxon attitudes to Colette may be further contorted by our lack of ease with the French concept of the woman writer as homme de lettres. We think, maybe, of some burly suffragette, made more formidable by a native French arrogance, as of Colette’s own grandes cocottes in their contempt for alien whores. And to have got rid of this feeling is not to have abolished altogether that obscure discontinuity of understanding which intervenes between French and English, and in which, notoriously, flourish such reputations as that of Charles Morgan. The very career of Colette is likely to promote fruitless wonder in us. Her first books were no more than tricks done at the bidding of an unscrupulous husband; she wrote herself out of mere naughtiness into the relatively serious Lesbian plot of Claudine Married, and out of mere whimsical compliance into a vocation. Leaving him, she became a music-hall dancer, and some of her best stories come out of this episode. Still dancing and writing, she was next the hostess wife of an amorous diplomat. Her third marriage was marked by a new combination of interests: actress, dramatic critic, owner of a beauty shop, novelist. She moved about in worlds to be realised and made concentric only in Paris. Not very like Virginia Woolf, or the modern lady campus-novelist.
And throughout there is this unfamiliar sensual empiricism, expressed most often as a completely open mind on love. She herself was involved in a scandal about a music-hall kiss with another woman; one of her heroes, a lover of young girls, comments on the natural sensual depravity of a rustic fifteen-year-old and describes the smell of her sweat (like ‘rest-harrow’ in this story; in Le Blé en herbe Vinca’s is ‘pink cammock or crushed green wheat’). The most cultivated life of the senses (food, scent, clothes, the country) is easily associated with venal sexuality, the remote language of botany with a physical innocence that only full experience can restore. Colette would have understood up to a point the New England hedonism of Wallace Stevens, his Florida with ‘mornings meet for the eye of the young alligator,’ but not the usurping metaphysics, not the poetry which says ‘It is not in the premise that reality is a solid.’ In Le Blé en herbe the boy, newly promoted to manhood by an older woman, sees his girl and thinks, not ‘how innocent!’ ‘how beautiful!’ but ‘Comme elle est solider Hardness, truth to natural instinct, are the qualities for which she values people and animals. To be so confidently rooted in the senses is egocentric; yet one sees why André Billy told her, ‘Beside you we are all little boys.’ Men have less solidity, a less certain grasp of things; this homme de lettres is entirely female, and in her total freedom from grand male notions and theories is perhaps the first great woman writer, as distinct, of course, from woman writer.
We return, then, to the problem of how to be seized of this greatness without joining the cult. The best thing is to avoid Gigi, merely a throwback to naughty Claudine, and tackle the Chéri books. Chéri begins in the belle époque manner, a piquant study of a boy educated by grandes cocottes; but with a great technical and moral leap Colette invents a mode, the mode of hedonist tragedy. Chéri’s beauty and taste, his meanness about wine and gasoline, the eternal awareness that luxury and beauty have to be hoarded against extravagance and time in a fashion more bourgeois than a banker’s, are all part of a severely rendered social milieu. The detail is characteristic: ‘Have you noticed,’ asks one ageing lady of another, ‘that as the skin gets less firm, the scent sinks in better and lasts much longer?’ Chéri’s leaving his older mistress Léa to make a proper marriage is a normal event of this world; but it projects the story into a dimension where the will confronts unknown and terrible possibilities, and the passions assert themselves as imperious enemies of ease and content, the allies of time the destroyer. In each book Chéri has, by means of a faint, to flee the world of sense. The postwar Last of Chéri is a great book, surely; Colette is here in the position of Piranesi cutting deeper into the plates of the prison etchings made years before. It is still Chéri and Léa; but the man, symbolically wounded, carries a paralysed will into a life of pure misery. These are two episodes of exceptional power: the scene in the opium flat where Chéri, under great photographs of Léa, suffers dreams which are ambiguously of her and of the world before the war; and the properly famous peripeteia when he comes to her in despair, as if to regain lost time, and finds an old woman, masculine and derisive, wearing age like a natural costume; obese, pure, life-accepting, whereas he carries death with him; she is a Falstaff who rejects the prince.
The Chéri books are a triumph of time. Chéri progresses from beauty and vitality, from the world of death-denying artifice and irresponsibility to an intolerable world of corruption and ennui, and so to suicide. Between the two parts there appeared the more limited yet more perfect Ripening Seed. The adolescent lovers long for the end of innocence, inhabit an artificial paradise closed to their lifeless, shadowy parents. The boy escapes, and is seduced by an older woman, so exchanging an anguish rich in revery for a known and limited pleasure. But Phil is the soft male, wincing at the girl’s easy cruelty when fishing; and now even more vulnerable, he has discovered a sense that life is shared throughout nature, and this gives him the right and duty to tremble ‘devant la vie délicate des bêtes et le sang échappé à ses sources.’ Returning from his woman he sees in the glass not the face of a new man but of a murdered girl. Vinca soon forces him to take her out of innocence also; but she is solid, and the morning after she loses her virginity Phil is astonished to see her happy on her balcony, singing and watering a fuchsia. The end reminds us of the hostages given to time and nature: in a few weeks the singing girl may be terrified and condemned, the boy may need to revise his new estimate of himself as the giver of only small pleasures, small pains. The fact is that in this book, with its delicate Breton beaches, its extraordinarily strong and accurate love-scenes, Colette invented not, as somebody said, ‘a new way of being sad,’ but a way of telling the truth as a woman of civilised eye and sex and pen can feel it; and the truth is again tragic. It is in such works that what she herself began by treating as a trivial stock-in-trade is worked into great literature; and they are the best guide to the reader facing the problems I mentioned earlier.
‘Death does not interest me,’ Colette once said: and in spite of evidence to the contrary in such stories as ‘The Sick Child,’ it seems generally true that it interested her mostly as an aspect of love. Perhaps the most remarkable instance of this is the climactic scene in the first Chéri, where love is represented as an almost intolerable loss of personality, a closing of the other senses at the command of one grown gluttonous. Break of Day, of which Miss Davies rightly says that it is the one work without which Colette’s work cannot possibly be seen in perspective, enacts a psychic rebirth by the renunciation of sexual life; the return of the fully adult to the garden where children name the beasts and flowers. The long conversation which is the heart of this book has its longueurs, but they are justified by the conclusion. And Colette isn’t, hereafter, going to sell love short. Julie de Carneilhan is a sombre record of the shabby middle-age of a twice-married and fastidious woman who, like Chéri, abandons the world of the rotten; in another splendid conclusion she polishes her riding boots and sets off through the autumn woods with her taciturn horsy brother, back to where she belongs.
The major Colette is tragic, and The Blue Lantern is strictly not so; it is brave, amused, charming. Yet the aged hedonist, almost happy in her pain, experiences the last stirrings of that spirit of rebirth which is the other side of tragedy. ‘If I am lying here motionless tonight, there is good reason for it, for I can feel stirring within me—apart from the twisting pain, as if under the heavy screw of a winepress—a far less constant turnscrew than pain, an insurrection of the spirit which in the course of my long life I have often rejected, later outwitted, only to accept it in the end.’ When the aged homme de lettres passed in her wheelchair through a hotel lobby, everybody stood up. We shall not understand her quite so deeply as her countrymen, perhaps, but we can try to sort out the unique hedonist tragedies from the mere fluff; and we shall then know at least enough to see that to stand up was the proper and inevitable thing to do.
(1963)
I can’t imagine that anyone will ever write better than Orwell on Tropic of Cancer.1 Miller, he said, was ‘the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.’ He believed that Miller was important in the only way a writer could be in such times, ‘a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil,’ who demonstrated the ‘impossibility of any major literature until the world has shaken itself into its new shape.’ He saw that Cancer really belonged to the ’Twenties, was in some ways already old hat by 1934; but he urged everybody to read it because of Miller’s often rich and muscular prose, and because he used a selection of language of real men.
‘Inside the Whale’ is itself a period piece, belonging to Orwell’s 1940: the world about to succumb to totalitarian dictatorships, writers, with the iceberg of liberalism melting under them, had nowhere to go but into the whale. Re-reading the essay, I think the judgments which are still absolutely valid are the limiting ones, and that much of the commendation derives from Orwell’s obsessive interest in extreme poverty and such relaxations of language and conduct as might be thought to attend it. Who now, for example, could honestly endorse the view that the language of Miller’s characters is that of ‘an actual majority’ of ordinary people? It is certainly not an unfamiliar dialect, but it is spoken not by ordinary people but only by men without women: sailors, for example, or possibly men in heavy industry. Miller’s Americans in Paris have a different girl every night, but they are still men without women. There is no real objection to the use of the four-letter word for the female organ in a proper context (bearing in mind all the connotations of fantasy and insult) but men with women—sharing a society with them—don’t use it metonymously for ‘woman.’ As ‘skirt’ is deliberately cheap, ‘cunt’ is deliberately solitary, and reduces sex to an activity which, as one of the characters discovers, might as well be performed with a cored apple. It makes no difference that the girls in the book are all whores, since Miller regards them as persons, and even seems to prefer them to other women. Similarly, for someone who thinks sex has potentially a paradisal function, it’s odd that he should—like many people who don’t—explain his low valuation of something by saying he doesn’t give a fuck about it.
Certainly Miller’s language is closer to one that is actually spoken than the ridiculous upper-class chatter about ‘going off’ and so on in Lady Chatterley’s Lover; but it is the language of grossly limited groups, and is not, as Orwell thought, a language of acceptance but of rejection. It rejects half of the population. The stated purpose of the author is to put down ‘all that is omitted from books’ and we know this is a great deal; but much of what Miller puts in is simply what every sailor knows. The book is often like a very long night in port, late, when the money’s spent—a topic of reasonable but limited interest.
The Tropic of Cancer rejects as venal not some but all kinds of living that have any pretence of mesure, the quality he hates most also in art. Thus the book is a messy account of mess, as Miller intended it to be, believing that this is the way to produce sudden and fragmentary greatness, the wisdom of ‘splinters, toenails.’ The rejection of mesure, of art in a pejorative sense, had been an avant-garde convention for quite a time, and this is the only reason I can find to explain why some of the early sponsors of Joyce and Lawrence came out in favour of Cancer. The ‘modernist’ family resemblance between Miller and these writers is entirely superficial; Joyce was a life-long student of mesure in one way and another, and Lawrence would surely have loathed Miller’s book. History (‘obscene love of the past’) is rejected along with art, because it is simply a record of man’s self-betrayal, the long trek from Eden.
Miller is, then, primarily a rejector; in this book there flowers that germ of nihilism present from the beginning in the Romantic culture. What, it may be asked, are those positive, moral, vitalising suggestions that so many persons of authority have found in his book? They seem to amount to repeated assertions that the ecstasy of artists can bring health to the cancerous mass he describes; that out of the modern jungle in which he says he walks, ‘a lean and hungry hyena,’ may come a new Jerusalem. His Paris is a Babylon big with this apocalyptic city; in fact, since it serves as a symbol of these two antithetical establishments, Paris has in the book an ambiguity which Miller, so far as I can see, does nothing to resolve. Often it sounds like Baudelaire in a bad translation:
Night after night I had been coming back to this quarter, attracted by certain leprous streets which only revealed their sinister splendour when the light of day had oozed away and the whores commenced to take up their posts.
Under its Jerusalem aspect the tone suggests a talentless amateur copy-writer: ‘God knows, when spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in Paradise.’ The trouble with this is not that Paris won’t stand up to such symbolical usage but that Miller simply hasn’t made the effort.
What other good things grow out of the ‘muck and filth’? There are the surrealist celebrations of Romantic joy which even Orwell throws out; and there is the private ecstasy, which was to recur in later books and with genuine splendour in The Colossus of Maroussi. Miller observes that The Tropic of Cancer is not concerned with ‘sex, nor with religion, but with the problem of self-liberation,’ and he speaks of the need to be picked clean by life before one can know reality. The man who achieves this rebirth will be ‘a pre-Socratic being, a creature part goat, part Titan.’ There is nothing intellectually disreputable about this familiar atavism—‘deep in the blood the pull of paradise’—nor about Miller’s war on time, his search for its ‘meridian,’ where ‘there is no injustice.’ But all such quotations have to be drawn from the many passages in which Miller is outlining his programme, talking about the book he is writing rather than writing it. The book doesn’t seem to have much to do with this programme. Curiously enough, it ends with the story of how a friend of the narrator’s was able to escape from a tricky Parisian situation by fleeing to America, not exactly one of Miller’s paradises. Admittedly the narrator, who momentarily has the cash to do likewise, prefers to stay with the mess; we leave him enjoying a moment of calme and volupté beside the Seine. This last section is, I think, much the best in the book, but I say so because I see in it obvious formal virtues, and I doubt if people find their guru in Miller on the strength of these.
Miller, obviously, can write, as Orwell claimed; but he rarely bothers to. Whether or not you think it worth rummaging through Cancer in search of those golden pages (‘splinters,’ ‘toenails’) really depends upon how you like your wisdom served. To my mind, the scattered logia which the Millerite view prefers to more formal communication amount anyway to a group of second-hand attitudes only occasionally galvanised by some happy audacity of phrase. I don’t feel life in this book which is so famous for having it; and I sympathise with those friends of the narrator who made him feel ‘a sort of atavistic remnant, a romantic shred, a soulful Pithecanthropus erectus.’ Orwell admiringly calls Miller ‘Whitman among the corpses’ (Whitman accepted life in a world which still permitted him to do so; Miller accepts death, which is all our world has to offer). I don’t think this is quite right. Whitman, after all, spent some time among real corpses, and seems to have known the difference between them and the living.
(1963)
This1 is about how Paris was in the early days when Mr Hemingway was very poor and very happy and handling himself very carefully because he knew there were going to be some rough contests, not only with Mr Turgenev and Mr Stendhal but also with life, ‘the greatest left-hooker so far, although many say it was Charley White of Chicago.’ The sadness of the book comes at the end because it explains that something got lost and the author was no longer making love with whom he loved, an activity to which he attached much importance. But it also speaks very happily about Paris, which is the best place in the world to write in. It explains writing carefully: the great thing is not to describe but to make, not to invent but omit. And to be a good writer, as Hemingway has formerly explained, you need a built-in shit-detector. With one of those, working well, you can purge not only your prose but your acquaintance; so this book tells how Hemingway detected Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis and even Gertrude Stein, though it also tells how and why he put up with Scott Fitzgerald. It also tells about skiing, horse-racing, and fire-swallowing; about fishing in the Seine and the troubles of waiters, and how the Kansas City whores drank semen as a specific against tuberculosis. If I make it sound a little as if the figure of Lillian Ross’s Papa must be casting a shadow over the book I do it no wrong.2 But I do it wrong beyond question if I seem to suggest that it could have been written by any but a great writer. This is, in some ways, Hemingway’s best book since the 1920s and that makes it altogether exceptional.
At the beginning we have him sitting in a café on the Place St Michel writing ‘Up in Michigan’; he names the streets he walked by to keep out of the wind, as elsewhere his route is determined by the need to avoid food-shops. A girl waiting in the café provides a kind of emblem of what he is feeling, and gets into the act; he sees her when he breaks off to sharpen a pencil, and she belongs to him as he to his craft. Finishing the story he feels ‘empty and happy, as though I had made love.’ This passage, which is about writing, is written not only with the skills but in the manner acquired during the period in which it is set, and so is the book as a whole. Some of the older attitudinising Hemingway has got into it, certainly—a sort of sentimental understanding of his own gifts and problems. But the book has that sharpness and suggestiveness which Hemingway means to achieve when he pursues his famous policy of omitting the known, the familiar links with other experience. And the power of it comes from its being a return—though by a man still sentimentally engaged in the struggle for style—to the time when he first made that hero’s effort. The old writes about the young Hemingway, but in the prose of the latter.
The coexistence in this writer of technical and personal ambitions which seem at odds with each other has attracted much comment. Technically he intends to purge his prose in the interest of accurately representing the structure of experience and the texture of the world. It is the getting rid of littérature. The young Hemingway was dedicated to this effort. He had been a fluent journalist, and had had to learn that the good thing is the thing done with difficulty. So he went hungry when he need not have done, and ‘learned how to make a landscape from Mr Paul Cézanne’—the hardest kind, demanding strict technical application, like boxing and shooting. And he listened to Stein and Pound. ‘Isn’t writing a hard job, though? It used to be easy before I met you,’ he wrote to Stein. ‘I certainly was bad, gosh, I’m awfully bad now but it’s a different kind of bad.’ He learned how to leave things out and get right the things he did not. To all this he returns at length in the new book, telling how he took up Cézanne in Paris where he had left him in Chicago, ‘learning something from the paintings … that made writing simple true declarative sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put into them.’ And when the light went in the Luxembourg he called on Gertrude Stein and watched her ‘alive, immigrant hair’ as she told him ‘many truths about rhythms and the use of words in repetition.’ It was taking him a morning to write a paragraph, but he was in training, like a fighter.
This book is in the manner then acquired. But it is far from bloodlessly insistent on purely technical feats. It is explicit that a living man, a natural heavyweight, was involved in these cerebral experiments, and they are accompanied by beer, whisky and oysters. The technique involved a technician, human material which felt itself involved in the demands of harsh difficult skills. And the behaviour of this material under stress came to interest him more and more. Perhaps we remember best of all the stories in his first book Big Two-Hearted River, with its concentration on a sporting technique and a sportsman’s life. But Hemingway moved on, as he had to, from paragraph to story, story to novel; and he moved also into larger attitudes—the hero and not his skill became the focus. This is probably why Gertrude Stein could say that in her view he wrote nothing so good after 1925, the date at which this book ends. It is certainly why he began to lay the foundations of the heroic Hemingway myth.
This myth has often been characterised as self-indulgence, as something very different from the genuine dedication with which he went about making a style. In life it produced the insecure toughness ridiculed by Stein and rendered more sympathetically, a quarter-century later, by Lillian Ross. In prose it produced a writer who, in Lionel Trilling’s words, ‘put away the significant reticences of the artist’ and ‘opened his heart like “a man”.’ The ethics of Jordan, the aesthetics of Cantwell, the cult of honour in defeat, too rigidly expressed, loosen and trivialise the writing, which invites harsh comparisons with the rigorous truth-telling and uncompromised structures of the earlier work.
This is a not unfamiliar line of argument. And yet this book strongly indicates something that was always there to be seen; only this hero, for all his self-indulgence, could have developed the manner of In Our Time. It is the same man throughout. The difference between the pre- and post-Stein Hemingways, as he himself represents it, was the difference between a man who could do a lot easily and a man who could do a little only fairly well, and with great irritation and pain. He was learning a difficult craft and learning to do it with one hand. He thought it heroic, and perhaps it was; anyway the man who did it became the suffering hero of the novels. It is worth noticing that Barnes’s wound in The Sun Also Rises is a very literary wound, and is obliquely compared with the mysterious accident of Henry James. After that the wounded writer is replaced by all those other sportsmen-technicians who have to hold the line of maximum purity in the utmost exposure: the bullfighter who, incapacitated by an accident, has to kill his bull with one good hand; Morgan’s last fight, one-handed against an evil world; Cantwell’s wounded hand, which the perfect contessa loves; and finally the Old Man and his bad hand. Once he had beaten a powerful Negro in an all-night hand-game at Casablanca; but now his hand betrays him. ‘If he cramps again, let the line cut him off.’ When he sleeps after returning with his skeleton fish, the boy sees his hands and weeps.
So the years in Paris were not only a time in which Hemingway was learning how to do it, but how to be heroic in doing it, one-handed. And there is an intelligible relation between the self-denial of the writing and the self-indulgence of the attitudes, between finding out how to do it ‘so it will make it without you knowing it,’ and being the big game man, the aficionado, the marksman, the fisherman, the DiMaggio of the novel. The style is a painful stripping away of all that is not declarative. What goes in must have the same kind of authority as a manual of instruction in some manly technique. Now the man who makes such prose is affected by it, and develops an increasingly simplistic theory of manliness. Hence the attention paid to the life of honour (‘this honour thing is not some fantasy I am trying to inflict on you. I swear it is true’) or the life of pure timeless and mindless love, even the life of the mystic. But above all, as we see when the lines of the literary diagram grow sharper, it is the life of the heroic and gifted peasant.
Hence the cultivated fellow-feeling for proletarian heroes—bakers, bullfighters, fishermen, all possessing techniques to be maintained in purity by imperfect human equipment. The theme is most diagrammatically proposed in The Old Man and the Sea. There the hero speaks as Hemingway’s Spaniards spoke, an invented language, common and pure, evading the transience of refinement or of slang. It is not spoken English any more than the language of the characters in the Civil War book is Spanish. It is the language of Wordsworth’s Michael, resettled, after all, in the tropics. It is very understandable that The Old Man was at first taken to be an allegory of some personal disappointment, perhaps over the reception of Across the River and Into the Trees. It is simply the fullest representation of a pastoral myth, the myth of the author reduced to the simplicity of a one-handed struggle against the world, saying everything by saying a little accurately.
In the meantime, what happens to the reticent, heroic prose? The truth, it seems, can be known only by simple men who cannot speak English. One consequence is a sort of bombast, for Great Ideas can be mooted and discounted at the same time, as when the Old Man argues that you are entitled to kill a fish if you love it, but at once reproaches himself with thinking too much. This is certainly a difficult line to hold without falling into self-indulgence, and the later Hemingway is marred by a great deal of this disingenuous simplesse. Only one sees how it is related to his virtues, and developed from them.
So, if we consider this posthumous book ad hominem, it will strike us as very moving. It was written by a man who thought he had, over the years, disciplined his technique to the point where he could deal with what he called the fourth and fifth dimensions; who had, year in and out, fought his handgame with language till blood came from under his nails; who knew that he could do it any length, yet published nothing in the last decade of his life except a novella of the crystalline variety, very different from the arduous prose of the first heroic period. And a few years later he began to write this book about the heroic apprenticeship. It opens with a passage which equals in subtlety and power anything in the great stories. ‘Then there was the bad weather’ is the first sentence—what was omitted before he arrived at this declaration?—and before the end of the first page we are in the midst of a painter’s description of sewer wagons in the moonlight on the rue Cardinal Lemoine. Then he tells about the girl who got into ‘Up in Michigan,’ and goes right on to a description of one of Stem’s lessons. He wants it to be clear that this book is about writing, about the heroic apprenticeship.
Much of what he says of Paris is generally familiar from other books. But no other book is of this authority and distinction, and no other so strongly conveys (largely by omission, of course) the sense of time regained. This, however, is to be understood as a side-effect of the principal effort, which is to celebrate the hero and his struggles. What happened in Paris was important in so far as it helped or hindered him. Being in love, knowing Pound and Sylvia Beach, going hungry, watching the fishermen, helped. Racing, though absorbing, didn’t, so it had to be given up. Many things were positive hindrances: people who interrupted him as he wrote in cafés, and were foully insulted; people who upset him by being homosexual; people who in one way or another were out to con you. Some of these were well-known people, and the most obviously interesting thing about the book is that it says disagreeable things about such people.
There is a malice here, recollected in tranquillity; as in the pages on Stein, and those on members of what she called the lost generation. (Incidentally Hemingway’s explanation of the expression ‘la génération perdue’ is that Miss Stein got it from a garage proprietor who was reproving the help for slowness or ineptitude in repairing her Model T. This is far less convincing than John Brinnin’s version, which is that she borrowed it from a hotel-keeper who argued that men got to be civilised between eighteen and twenty-five, or never, and that a generation had missed its chance of civility because of the war.) It was obviously fun to get back at Stein for the nastiness of the Toklas book, and Hemingway invents some beautiful dialogue—which he could always do, and which she, he claimed, could not—to say wicked things about her. The two chapters on Stein are written like very good stories, especially the second, called ‘A Strange Enough Ending,’ which has in it why he could never make friends with her again; the reason given is not, most of us would think, a good one, but it sounds good. Wyndham Lewis is disposed of in a hideous little vignette; Hemingway goes home afterwards and tells his wife, ‘I met the nastiest man I’ve ever seen today.’ ‘Tatie, don’t tell me about him,’ she said. ‘Please don’t tell me about him. We’re just going to have dinner.’
Ernest Walsh, who was dying of Consumption, flaunted a ‘marked-for-death look’: ‘and I thought, you con man, conning me with your con.’ Of Ford Madox Ford: ‘I took a drink to see if his coming had fouled it.’ Scott Fitzgerald is a kind of critical case, absurd and offensive but a writer. So to him is devoted the most elaborately written section of the book, a carefully devised tragic farce about a trip to Lyon, with a scene in which Hemingway takes Fitzgerald’s perfectly normal temperature with an immense bath thermometer. The food and the conversation are remembered or invented with total authenticity. From start to finish this is the work of a great writer.
This, as Hemingway himself suggests, is a work of fiction, and ought to be considered among his novels. It is an ingenious and deliberate way of revisiting the sources of a great writer’s strength; and it displays that strength as very little else of his had done in thirty years.
(1964)
The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with an obligation to express. …
Feeling that this is what art should be, Mr Beckett—who else?—opts, he says, for writing which deserts the plane of the feasible, ‘weary of its puny exploits.’ Mr Kenner1 quotes this with some indications of agreement. More specifically, he suggests, Beckett rids himself of the problem of how to go on from Joyce by abandoning the narrative tradition with its ‘idiot consistency’ and fining fiction down to the point where it is clearly absurd to go on with it, except that writing is being alive and we’ve all been tricked into the cowardice—as Beckett called it in the Proust book—of thinking we’re better suited that way.
Beckett is worth a lot of trouble, if only because of Waiting for Godot, and if Mr Kenner, in taking trouble, seems to absorb rather than describe the oeuvre, that may be said to be true of very good critics. Mr Kenner, indeed, has sent most of the great moderns spinning with the velocity of his passage, and it was not without relish that one saw he was going to give Beckett a whirl. However, the question is not whether Kenner is good at absorbing Beckett, but whether he is informative or otherwise helpful. The answer is, slowly, yes; but the cost to the reader is high enough to be worth counting.
Speaking of the trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable), a work with ‘a fastidious stench,’ Kenner says, among other things, that it is ‘a compendious abstract of all the novels that have ever been written,’ ‘a sardonic counterpoint to the epic tradition of the West,’ a progress from sum to cogito, and a happy dissolution of fiction to the point where it describes nothing but itself being written (‘pure act by pure inaction,’ or, if you like, ‘pure activity, the Ape of pure Act’). Similarly with the plays: they reduce themselves to actors acting acting before a time-bound audience being an audience—unless it walks out, it has to be. Allowing that there are historical reasons for all this, why is it good? Why is idiot randomness any better than idiot consistency? Please explain, we ask, how the trilogy sums up all the other novels, and counterpoints the epic. Well, declares Kenner, I can tell you that if Homer had been a 20th-century Irishman living in Paris, he ‘might well have written the first half of Molloy.’
The truth is that this critic does much more absorbing and converting than explaining. His prose is atwitch with the exertion of wit and intellect and it has a narcissistic glow. ‘All Beckett’s writings bring some sustained formal element to the service of some irreducible situation round which the lucid sentences defile in baffled aplomb.’ This is useless. Sometimes there is a disastrous self-admiring joke: Beckett’s bicycle is maestro di color che vanno.
However, the book does provide some information about published and unpublished work of Beckett. And Mr Beckett himself contributes a highly significant piece of information about his interest in a racing cyclist called M. Godeau, whom Kenner accordingly hails as Beckett’s ‘Cartesian Man in excelsis.’ The book is strongest, in fact, on bicycles, the frequent occurrence of which in Beckett testifies to his interest in them as emblems of l’homme machine. Indeed, Beckett is obsessed with the description of movement, and the reduction of human activity to mechanical stereotypes. It is the decay of a bicycle that reduces Molloy, and the lack of one condemns the Unnamable to inert cogitation. In this Cartesian connection, Mr Kenner has usefully looked up the obscure Belgian Occasionalist Geulincx, whom Murphy quotes. This author believed that the division between mind and body was complete, rejecting the pineal gland theory, and that a separate act of God was required for every physical movement. The textbooks, if I remember rightly, claim that Occasionalism was knocked out by Leibniz, but according to Kenner Mr Beckett has shown it to be ‘aesthetically relevant’ to our time. The book is also good on the counting mania suffered by so many Beckett characters, and Mr Kenner ingeniously works out a comparison between irrational numbers and the clown or clochard figures—shadows behind the neat rationalist rows of bourgeois numerals.
Beckett, in the trilogy especially,
takes stock of the Enlightenment, and reduces to essential terms the three centuries during which those ambitious processes of which Descartes is the symbol and progenitor accomplished the dehumanization of man.
This book is a rhapsody on that theme, with illustrations from Beckett. It is Kenner’s own theme, though of course it isn’t a novel one, and Beckett grew up with it; but I suspect that Kenner’s view of it, which is the fashionable thing about our being trapped at the end of a technological epoch, is not really Beckett’s. He is much more old-fashioned, having a more biological approach, and also more theological interest than this book indicates. He was also, as the Proust book shows, affected by Bergson : the bicycle is a Bergsonian laughter-maker, and the famous ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on’ is the beastly plight of a thinker acknowledging his instinctive adaptation to life, his involuntary survival kit. Anyway, if the forthcoming Comment C’est merely illustrates the Kennerian Beckett as accurately as this book predicts, I shan’t be reading it. Possibly it won’t; Mr Kenner can be extremely reductive, as in his handling of All that Fall.
(1962)
How, if this novel1 were by an unknown author, would one set about the reviewer’s task of giving some notion of its contents, and throwing in an appraisal? First, perhaps, by dealing in certainties: for instance, this book was written in French under the title Comment C’est. The translation is by the author. It is on the whole about as literal as a comparison of the titles will suggest, though one notes a lost pun (commencez). And since Comment C’est are the last words in the book, they impart to the design a circularity which is, perhaps not too unhappily, lost in English. Where the English is obscure the French in general helps little: ‘the history I knew my God the natural’ comes from l’histoire que j’avais la naturelle. Where the English looks wrong the French looks just as wrong: ‘of the four three quarters of our total life only three lend themselves to communication’ sounds as if the first ‘three’ has got in by mistake, but the French says quatre trois quarts and adds to the muddle by saying deux seuls for ‘only three.’ It seems unlikely that the reader loses much in clarity by using the English version. The syntax is neither English nor French, but that of some intermediate tongue in which ‘ordinary language’ cannot be spoken. This language goes indifferently into French or English. It eschews marks of punctuation, although the novel is divided into paragraphs of unequal length, signifying, why not, the fluttering of some moribund intellectual pulse, rather than successive stages of meaning. At its climax the story virtually disclaims its own authenticity, and this uncertain commitment to ordinary criteria of meaningfulness is also characteristic of the language in which it is told.
The meanings present in this language are not valid outside the book, being mostly the products of intensive internal references and repetitions. Phrases of small apparent significance occur again and again with some kind of cumulative effect: ‘something wrong there,’ ‘bits and scraps,’ ‘quaqua,’ ‘when the panting stops,’ etc. The speaker of these phrases looks forward keenly to the end of his task, frequently promising that we are near the end of the first, second, or third part, and rejoicing especially in the final paragraph, only to be thwarted by the Finnegan-begin-again trick mentioned above. In short, the whole book refuses to employ the ordinary referential qualities of language, and frustrates ordinary expectations as to the relation between a fiction and ‘real life.’ It is as if the old stream of consciousness were used in a situation where there is nothing but the stream to be conscious of.
Not very helpful, says the reader. What is the story? Well, it is spoken by a nameless man face down in mud, and apart from him its principal character is called Pim. Three sections describe how it was before, with and after this Pim, who is therefore a measure of time and history. Pim was long awaited, then he arrived and lay down in the mud beside the speaker and his sack full of cans; but things didn’t go well, and he passed on. Where, or to whom? Before Pim, the speaker had been alone; perhaps, he thought, the ‘sole elect,’ moving at intervals with his sack and his can opener ten or fifteen yards through the mud. His only contact with the world ‘above’ is the memory of a past idyllic scene with a girl and a dog; and another of a marriage that failed with the waning of desire. After Pim he sees that he is really one of a great number, all on the same impossible muddy journey. Somehow it has been arranged that its progress is circular and endless.
With Pim, the situation was at least not solitary. Pim brought a watch and one could listen to the delicious ticking away of the seconds. Furthermore, the speaker devised an elaborate signal code by which he induced Pim to speak: as by jabbing the can opener into his rectum, beating him on the kidneys, or, to make him stop, on the head. Pim, being a man, is a kind of machine, l’homme machine in fact, responsive to external stimuli. Nevertheless he clenches his fists in pain, and his nails grow through his palm. The close relationship of the couple is that of tormentor and victim. When Pim abandons the speaker he leaves very little, but still something, behind him, ‘with Pim all lost almost all nothing left almost nothing but it’s done great blessing.’ This example of dream parataxis, translated into English, means, I suppose, that the residual benefits of Pim’s sojourn are small but important, perhaps only because they prove that we have lived through one more stage and are nearer the last. Later we gather that as far as the speaker is concerned we can do what we like with time—reverse it, for example—so long as we always give Pim and the Primal Scene a central place in it: ‘on condition that by an effort of the imagination the still central episode of the couple be duly adjusted.’
After Pim, the world is full of tormentors and their victims, an endless chain in which each man repeatedly changes his role from one to the other. Over vast stretches of time, one torments and is tormented. The speaker moves on through this suffering inflicted and received, towards reunion with Pim. But in the end the voice we are listening to rebels, denies that all he has said is quoted from some external authority, claims that it is all a fiction (‘all balls’); that there was something, yes, but no ‘quaqua,’ no logos or revelation from without, only himself, face in mud, making it up and mumbling. Then the last sentence, with its ambiguous denial of this disclaimer.
What kind of a story is this? Certainly there is a fiction; and there is a chain not only of torment but of rhythmical incantation. But the reader who wants more than a form commenting upon itself, an autistic stir of language, will be tempted to look aslant at the book, to seek allegory. I myself have already slipped into allegory in describing Pirn’s watch, and in hinting that the tormented relationship between the speaker and Pim stands for the incarnation, which, we are told, gives history such meaning as it may be said to have, and could be regarded as affording the type of human love-relations ever since (the love of the Word unable to speak a word speaks, under painful stimulus, when it is embodied in l’homme machine. Pim has nails through his palms, and is pierced by a kind of spear).
Perhaps, as the speaker felt when he denied the authenticity of ‘quaqua,’ the intervention of that word was all a fiction anyway. Even so, his dreams are penetrated by it. Thus there are in the book echoes of Christian figurations of experience: hints of millennialism, of the logos as distorted by mud. In the first part a vague ‘epiphany’ suggests an involuntary memory of Eden. The sack is a figure for the body, support and burden of the soul, which the Christian centuries would have had no difficulty in recognising; in the third part we have a picture of the history of the elect parallel to Milton’s in the last two books of Paradise Lost, except that we lack the assurance of Pim’s second coming in majesty. The book offers an open invitation to such allegories, even though everybody who accepts it will soon feel lost and uncertain.
In view of all this it is, I suppose, just as well that we do after all know something, if only a little, about Beckett. The Speaker in this book is the latest in a long line bred from his obsession with Dante’s Belacqua, who could not enter purgatory until he had relived his slothful life. Beckett’s dream of life is purgatorial. or would be if salvation waited at its end; as it is, his characters are, as Mr Rooney says in All that Fall, ‘like Dante’s damned, with their faces arsy-versy.’ There is a Beckett country in which we feel half at home; and we know the Beckettian homo patiens, sinking progressively into immobility. His role as victim and tormentor we recall from Godot. His relation to the past we learned from Krapp’s Last Tape. And so on. In addition there is, to provide a physics for the Beckett world, his early book on Proust, as well as such sophisticated experiments as Mr Kenner’s book. So we have some knowledge, not much, of the physical laws governing this new book; we have keys to its meanings. ‘No symbol where none intended,’ noted Beckett in the addenda to Watt; but by establishing a world of uncontrollably interrelated objects and meanings he makes this injunction impossible of fulfilment.
A few instances will serve to illustrate this. There must be a connection between Pirn’s watch, Pozzo’s watch in Godot, and the passage in Proust on Time’s ‘ingenuity … in the science of affliction.’ Time is the means by which we are punished for having been born. For Beckett as for Proust our only means of triumphing over it is the involuntary memory; in Beckett this operates infrequently and unsatisfactorily, as with Krapp’s tape or the Speaker’s recollection of the girl and of his marriage. We are enslaved by time; when eternity, the nunc stans, the durée, came down to save us, it apparently failed. So much for the ‘succour’ which, as Molloy observed, you ought to consider as a possibility before, inevitably, you reject it. Pim is one name for it. Trapped in time and space as the fallen categorise them (and what other way is there?) Beckett’s figures are all, as Mr Kenner demonstrates, more or less conscious Cartesians. They are all, perhaps, Descartes himself, contemplating the world from a position prone or supine (Yeats remarked that the world changed when Descartes discovered that he could think better in bed than up).
Contemplating a world so changed, Beckett is moved to ‘jettison the very matrices of fiction—narrator, setting, characters, theme, plot,’ and ‘devote his scrutiny (under the sign of Belacqua) to the very heart of novel writing: a man in his room writing things out of his head while every breath he draws brings death nearer.’ So Mr Kenner. He is also much interested by human inventions which reflect the factitious order and inter-relatedness of the objective world to which he cannot belong; his relation to this common-sense reality is exactly that of a circus clown, who can do apparently impossible things but finds easy ones incredibly complicated. The fundamental absurdity of the subject–object situation is for him figured in clowns and clochards; and so is our imperfect control over space, time, and death. Beckett’s humour derives entirely from this. It is a stateliness of speech, a clownishness of philosophical language (dealing with the complicated things and finding the easy ones too hard); in action it is the Bergsonian pratfall. This is the humour of man as machine, whether rhetorical or locomotive.
Beckett can thus be read as a philosophical fantasist: His bicycles are Cartesian symbols, his submen Prousts who have really contracted out, and so forth. Sunk in a sub-social, sub-psychological dream, they all merge in one’s mind—Watt, Molloy, Malone, the Unnamable, the unnamed of the new book. They may sink deeper into a state of pure rejection, pure negativity—indistinguishable, as Molloy noticed, from God’s. But because they are all aspects of the same figure, inhabiting similar worlds, we have relevant knowledge to bring to this new book; we can live with it, perceive something of its rhythms and stresses—in short, receive it.
That, at any rate, is a way of putting it. Yet it may tell little more than a small part of the truth about how Beckett has to be read. To emphasise the formal interest can be a fashionable way of concealing the true nature of our curiosity. Beckett is a puzzle-maker, quaint and learned. We look for clues, guess at meanings. His formal sophistication may be the meat the modern burglar brings along to quiet the avant-garde housedog. Under it all, he is a rather old-fashioned writer, a metaphysical allegorist. Take, for example, Watt. There he made his hero’s name the first word of a metaphysical conundrum; and Knott, whom Watt serves, is the god defined by negatives, perhaps also time itself, inexplicably regular. Watt has only oblique religious experiences. He meets a porter whose lameness causes him ‘to move rapidly, in a series of aborted genuflections,’ and a Mr Spiro, Catholic propagandist, who gives prizes for anagrams on the names of the Holy Family. (Out of Mr Spiro’s motto, dum spiro spero, we get the interesting anagram dum: mud. Since dum is ‘while,’ here meaning one’s time on earth, it isn’t hard to see why the latest hero spends his time in the mud.)
Watt, however, is not good at symbols: he had ‘lived, miserably it is true, among face values all his adult life … whatever it was Watt saw, with the first look, that was enough for Watt… he had experienced literally nothing, since the age of fourteen, or fifteen, of which in retrospect he was not content to say, “That is what happened then.” ’
To enjoy Beckett, one mustn’t be a Watt. When we meet, for example, the Lynch family, we must take their heroic efforts, ruined by disease, to reach a combined age of a thousand years not as merely grotesque humour, but as a hopelessly human millennialist aspiration, an absurd plot to overcome history, bring time to an end. If we know that Beckett’s names and titles often contain puns, sometimes obscene, let us also look for allegorical meanings in such names as Malone and MacMann, Godot, and even Pim.
This suggests that the delights offered by Beckett are of an old and tried variety. He has re-invented philosophical and theological allegory, and as surely as Spenser he needs the right to sound sub-rational, to conceal intention under an appearance of dreamlike fortuity, to obscure the literal sense. The only difference is that his predecessors were sure there was such a sense, and on this bitch of a planet he can no longer have such certainties. This difference does not affect the proposition that Beckett’s flirtations with reality are carried on in a dialect which derives from the traditional language of learning and poetry. It is nevertheless true that the more accustomed we become to his formal ambiguity, the more outrageously he can test us with inexplicitness, with apparently closed systems of meaning. How it is differs from the earlier work not in its mode of operation but principally in that it can assume greater knowledge of the Beckett world. Such assumptions have often and legitimately been made by major artists, though we should not forget that this is not a certain indication of greatness. Prolonged attention given (from whatever motives) to a minor but complex author may allow him to make them. But who can be sure which is which? It is a perennial problem for critics of avant-garde art, and Beckett raises it in a very acute form.
(1964)
The age is grown so picked that the toe of the critic comes so near the heel of the artist, he galls his kibe; Mary McCarthy’s authoritative exegesis of Pale Fire has been available for awed inspection since September, whereas the novel itself is only now offered to the public.1 Although it is still ‘unlike any novel you have ever read,’ as the publishers say, it does remind one occasionally of Miss McCarthy’s article, and one especially remembers, as one obediently reads back and forth through the book, her final assertion that it is ‘one of the very great works of art of this century.’ This thesis has been severely blown upon by Dwight Macdonald, who thinks Miss McCarthy has been caught in a tiresome critic-trap. One doesn’t read novels primarily in order to find out whose side one’s on, but I am clear that Miss McCarthy, who boldly neglects all her own forcibly expressed opinions on fiction when she writes on Pale Fire, is largely right about detailed interpretation and largely wrong about the value of the whole work.
Pale Fire is got up as an edition of an autobiographical poem by a distinguished old sub-Frostian called Shade—on the evidence provided, a somewhat uneven performer. The man who is editing the poem, in the teeth of Shade’s widow and his friends, is a refugee from Zembla called Kinbote, or, by other people, Botkin. This crazed homosexual believes that Shade had really wanted to include in his poem a full account of Zembla, and especially of the revolution which resulted in the flight of the King, who is none other than Kinbote himself. The commentary explains how this Ruritanian romance got submerged in Shade’s poem, and how the assassin dispatched from Zembla to liquidate Kinbote accidentally killed Shade instead, just as he was entrusting his poem to the hands of his Zemblan friend. Hints are dropped to give us the true story: the murderer is really an escaped criminal lunatic who seeks revenge on the judge who committed him, and whose house Kinbote has rented; he shoots Shade in mistake for the judge.
This, as Miss McCarthy observes, is only the start of it. Pale Fire is certainly one of the most complex novels ever written. Kinbote builds up his fantasy out of stray bits of associative material. He projects the events of the campus on to Zembla, the fictive land, the country of semblance. He suffers, you are allowed to think, from the sort of verbal disorientation which is symptomatic of some forms of insanity (an idea used by Musil for his Clarisse). Thus he deals in all manner of occult associations, private meanings which shape his fantasy-world; and these are not merely verbal but also enter into astrology and colour symbolism. The merest hint in Shade’s poem sets off a train of Zemblanisms, and what may be inverted is inverted, like a mirror-image and like Kinbote’s name and sexuality. The private and mad character of his activity is suggested by his failure to perceive obvious allusions in Shade’s poem—he cannot even understand the title, because his copy of Timon of Athens is a Zemblan translation.
There is here a fleeting resemblance to Golding’s method in Pincher Martin; but the tone and purpose are very different. Nabokov, having researched all these occult interrelations, hands them over to poor old crazy Botkin to make a world of, but leaves enough Nabokovian traces on the text to assure us that he’s there, sane and interested. And the big question isn’t whether you can spot all these weird multiple associations, but why Nabokov should have wanted to make them up—he says he loathes ‘symbolic’ novels—and present them to his madman.
To answer it, one would need to look at Nabokov’s whole output, which includes a large element of what Dwight Macdonald calls ‘high-class doodling.’ This, abating the pejorative implication, would indeed do to describe his whole method. His attention all goes to the formal aspects of the work; he is fascinated by the medium. To describe the relation of his fictions to reality would be an impossible assignment; and this is one of the points of Pale Fire. In a novel, the facts need not be true, but their interrelations must be; and the novelist’s world stands in relation to common reality as Kinbote’s commentary stands to Shade’s poem. Both are out of focus, both deliver versions of reality different from the brute facts. Hence Kinbote’s homosexuality, which is a metaphor for the artist’s minority view of a bad world, of ‘our cynical age of frantic heterosexualism.’ If one dared risk a guess at correlative idiosyncrasies in Nabokov himself, one would have to point to his intellectual disgust with Freudianism or, recalling that he is a member of the Russian émigré minority, his loathing of Marxism.
But the main reason why Kinbote serves Nabokov’s purpose is that he is obsessed, intoxicated by his text, exactly, and with the same disinterest, as Humbert Humbert was obsessed by his girl. Nabokov’s novels are usually concerned with elevated, amoral states of mind comparable no doubt to that of the author in creating them. One consequence is that they have the kind of contempt for realism demonstrated, in the degree of mania, by Kinbote. On one occasion Kinbote describes some royal Zemblan portraits in which the painter, master of trompe-l’oeil, has emphasised his skill by sometimes inserting pieces of wool, gold or velvet, instead of painting them. This, says Kinbote, has ‘something ignoble about it,’ and discloses
the basic fact that ‘reality’ is neither the subject nor the object of true art, which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average ‘reality’ perceived by the communal eye.
Incidentally, this trick deceives the Russian experts who tear the palace apart looking for the crown jewels. No Soviet realism for Nabokov; he is a formalist. And he repeatedly draws attention to the artifice which constitutes his reality higher than the communal ‘reality.’ He has always done so, and Kinbote’s whole fantasy is merely a bold development of this prejudice. His Zemblan fantasies are a metaphor for the world of fiction.
Pale Fire, however, includes not only Kinbote’s fantasy but a version of the communal reality as well: Shade’s wife and tragic daughter, Botkin’s campus enemies, the poem which is a rival, saner version of the real. Thus the author has to show us not only that Kinbote’s activity is the model of his own, but that Kinbote is justly to be called mad. There ensue many delicate acts of dissociation, little authorial plots against Kinbote. For example, he is given certain mannerisms of style which reflect his sexual interests in a dismally coy light:
When stripped and shiny in the mist of the bath house, his bold virilia contrasted harshly with his girlish grace. He was a regular faunlet.
When Nabokov makes Kinbote speak like this, or otherwise betrays him, we remember Humbert slipping unwillingly into compassion when Lolita comes, defeated, to his motel bedroom.
Yet none of this affects the basic validity of the metaphor; Kinbote’s obsession represents what Nabokov calls ‘aesthetic bliss.’
For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.
This is the state of being enjoyed by Humbert and Kinbote; it sets them against the world which prefers men like machines, supports commonplace dictators like Paduk in Bend Sinister, or disgustingly sexless, unextravagant, mechanical men like Gradus, Kinbote’s imaginary assassin, who is studied throughout the work with fascinated revulsion. Yet Pale Fire is, as I’ve said, technically more ambitious than Lolita, because it renders not merely isolated bliss but the communal, blissless, ‘reality.’ And the occult relations explored by Miss McCarthy reflect the complicated ties between reality and ‘reality,’ the artist’s vision and the mere facts.
One instance of this is worth mentioning. Shade is a Pope scholar, and there are several allusions to The Essay on Man; this is not a wanton choice of Nabokov’s—though he might be held to have used it wantonly—because he saw in it a relevant approach to aesthetic bliss. Shade, meditating an absurd mistake which had seemed to bring together two dreams of after-life but depended entirely on a fountain/mountain misprint in a written report, observes that such near-coincidence is in a way stronger evidence of ‘correlated pattern in the game’ than perfect similarity. ‘All Chance, Direction which thou canst not see’ is the line at the back of his mind. The game metaphor is continued; he thinks of the players,
aloof and mute,
Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns
To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns;
Kindling a long life here, extinguishing
A short one there; killing a Balkan king …
Co-ordinating these
Events and objects with remote events
And vanished objects. Making ornaments
Of accidents and possibilities.
Here Shade is remembering part of Pope’s Second Epistle, and perhaps more extreme statements of an 18th-century position we know best from Johnson’s assault on Jenyns: disease, madness, sorrow, may be part of some game played by higher creatures than men. And Nabokov is remembering that the novelist can, after all, amuse himself by making a man tumble over in an epilepsy, run mad, or be confounded by fantastic coincidence. His is the bliss of co-ordinating events and objects with remote events and vanished objects; he can sit, if he wants to, like the saints enjoying the torments of the damned.
Pale Fire reproduces this divine game and offers us the pleasures of process as well as of product. But it is only a kibitzer’s pleasure. Nabokov’s relationship with his world is very exclusive; his is the creative logos, we are, at best, angels privileged to stand by and applaud. As to those readers who are enslaved to the communal ‘reality,’ they can expect nothing at all. As a class, they may be identified as those who thought Lolita was about, not aesthetic bliss, but nymphetolepsy. For all such readers the author, engrossed in the sublime images he has made of his own delight, feels nothing; or, if anything, contempt.
(1962)
Sartre is a very big writer, an obscure and copious writer; he has powerful and variable opinions about almost everything, and it is quite certain that so long as he is in production nobody will ever be able to grasp him firmly. Even if one tries merely to find out what he means in relation to a special and limited interest, it is by no means easy. The new work pours out, altering the picture as a whole, and, by implication at least, changing even those details which are not directly under consideration.
Thus it can be said with some assurance that Sartre is a figure of importance in the theory and practice of the modern novel; but this does not mean that we can have a clear view of his opinions, as we have, for example, of Robbe-Grillet’s. In an early essay he said one ought to look behind every novel for a hidden metaphysic, and it might seem useful to have, behind Nausea, the immensely visible Being and Nothingness; indeed it has often been argued that these works are very intimately related. This is about half true, perhaps, but even if it were wholly true it would be of limited interest to most readers of the new paperback Nausea,1 who might reasonably want to get to know this central work without being obliged to break into so vast and harsh a freedom-fortress as the ‘essay on phenomenological ontology.’ Some might choose to do so with the aid of the keys, admirably simple and well-cut, provided by MrsWarnock in what is far the most practical and humane introduction to Sartre I know.2
Translation lags behind, but there is a new volume of essays containing pieces from Situations IV and Sartre’s preface to Sarraute’s Portrait of a Man Unknown.3 Apart from the Sarraute essay, it contains little comment on literature, but there is a good deal that ought to be taken into account whatever the angle from which one views the author. The translation (except in the Sarraute piece, which was done years ago by Maria Jolas) is slapdash, and at times worse than that, but even so the huge and alien personality blazes through. The opening piece on Tintoretto, too long, inappropriately rhapsodic, reminds us that Sartre sometimes writes ‘at top speed, with rage in my heart, gaily, tactlessly.’ The point is that this painter, under the shadow of Titian, exposed or reflected the corruption of his city: ‘anxious and cursed, Venice produced a man riddled with angst,’ a man whose art ‘rent the age with slashes of fire’ and proved him ‘a Darwinist before the fact.’ It is by most standards a very bad performance; but such judgments have to be suspended with an author like Sartre, for excess and disorder acquire significance in the total context.
The long essay on Merleau-Ponty is in some ways a similar problem. Although their friendship was evidently shot through with philosophical accords and disputes, Sartre is allusive rather than expository when he discusses their intellectual associations. What comes through very powerfully is the strange set of profiles their friendship and half-quarrels present: it is like something from one of the novels, or a fictional illustration in Being and Nothingness. The account of how they dealt with one another on Les Temps Modernes has its farcical side; and yet what comes of this essay in the end is not amazement at the improbable conversations of co-editors but a fine sense of the quality of Merleau-Ponty, of a man who could think desperately and live as one who could reasonably argue that every life and every moment are incarnations, singularities which deform yet illustrate the universal.
What is constantly surprising about Sartre is this charity, this insight into others which, the early philosophical work suggested, could not be had, but which novelists need, if only as an ‘as if.’ The new book reprints his vehement attack on Camus. At first the tone is almost comically mean.
Your combination of dreary conceit and vulnerability always discouraged people from telling you unvarnished truths. The result is that you have become the victim of a dismal self-importance. … Sooner or later, someone would have told you this. It might just as well be me.
Twenty or so pages of this, then Sartre says he has reached the end; but he thinks of more he wants to say. He obligingly outlines his thought for Camus, who seems to have misunderstood it, and quite gratuitously embarks upon a penetrating estimate of Camus himself in the days when he was ‘alive and authentic’ There follows his obituary of Camus, this ‘Cartesian of the absurd’; it is rough with sorrow and love.
Friendship and its corollary, the posturing row, are simpler in the occasional writings than they were shown to be in the third section of Being and Nothingness. So with the long memoir of Paul Nizan, who taught the young to be angry and refused to accept the old explanations of conditions as ‘natural’; between him and Sartre, as between Camus and Sartre, the old myth of friendship, as something ultimately indestructible, intervened. Yet one would look to these essays, rapid and generous as they are, for evidence that much of the original thinking of Sartre survives the obscure Marxist ‘conversion’ Mrs Warnock labours to define. They are prodigiously thoughtful, and the thought has its roots in the old Existentialism.
This is also true of the essay on Giacometti, which is as impressive as the Tintoretto is tawdry; it also reads like an exemplum from Being and Nothingness. So, too, with the introduction to Sarraute, which calls—he may have been the first to do so— certain ‘penetrating and entirely negative works’ anti-novels. He admires her because her subject is inauthenticity, and because she understands, as he has understood, what he called the ‘viscous.’ In allowing us to face what we normally flee, she presents human reality ‘in its very existence’ and so herself, presumably, achieves a condition, or anyway a model, of authenticity. Subsequently he has attacked the formalist obsessions of the nouveau roman; but here he obviously admires Sarraute’s tentative, exploratory rejections of all the paradigms, of what in another connection he calls ‘the eidetic imagery of bad faith.’
This brilliantly concise expression, thrown away in a footnote to the piece on Merleau-Ponty, may have more value to the literary critic than anything else in the new book. Long before, Sartre had adopted the term ‘eidetic reduction’ from Husserl; it is part of the method of the phenomenologists. But here I take him to mean that mauvaise foi (a comfortable denial of the undeniable—freedom—by myths of necessity, nature, or things as they are) derives its paradigms from illusions left over from the past—as some abnormal children can ‘see’ the page or the object that is no longer before them. Sartre uses the phrase in a political context, as it happens, but it serves to describe in part the critical position not only of the exponents of the nouveau roman but also of the younger Sartre himself. He thought of some great 19th-century novelists as collaborators in Bad Faith, and held that it was as bad to diminish the liberty of a character by conventional devices of ‘form’ as to betray one’s own ‘project’ by mauvaise foi. In this new Situations we find him asking whether music, because it has ‘wrenched itself from its alienation and set about creating its essence while freely providing its own laws,’ cannot be a model for the working class as it tries to do the same. To do so it must ignore ‘a priori limitations,’ falsely said to be inherent in nature. The artist must ‘break the already crystallised habits which make us see in the present tense those institutions and customs which are already out of date.’ Passéisme is a manifestation of bad faith.
Thus, in his own peculiar dialect, Sartre, a very inclusive thinker, makes the species ‘anti-novel’ a component of his system. On the proper relation of the self-created forms of the modern novel to the ‘eidetic’ paradigms surviving from the past—or, to put the same thing in another way, on the relations between form and freedom—there is a growing literature. Miss Murdoch calls form ‘an aspect of our desire for consolation’; it interferes with the profoundest task of the novelist, which is to create irreducible and opaque persons. Every concession to form is a reduction in that ‘respect for contingency’ which is essential to imagination, as opposed to fantasy. In short, the eidetic imagery of novelistic forms helps to protect us from the real, is the agent of bad faith. Miss McCarthy says something like this, perhaps more superficially, when she attacks ‘myth’ and calls ‘factuality’ the one distinguishing feature of the novel. Mrs Spark has not written discursively about the problems, but her latest book1 is, among other things, a defence of eidetic form, and a rejection of the anti-novel. Robbe-Grillet is against the retention of any paradigm which may suggest that the world means something, or even that it doesn’t. ‘Quite simply, it is.’ This anti-essentialist position, logically developed, calls for a gap of the kind Camus would have called ‘absurd’ between the autonomous structure which is the novel, and the world. The time of the novel is its own affair (as in Marienbad, there is no reference to any past or future, and the time of the film, however you look at it, is one and a half hours); and the only ‘character’ is the reader. The ambition of the new novel, he says, is to make something ex nihilo which will stand on its own without reference to anything outside it.
Sartre undoubtedly has his place in the development of this new radical formalism; that he rejects it seems to me not an indication that he is old-fashioned but a proof that his existentialism is a humanism. The most extraordinary claim Robbe-Grillet makes is that the new novel will appeal to ordinary people because it is truer than the old one to their own lives. This ignores the large element of the merely fictive we all use to get by—to console ourselves, as Miss Murdoch says. It’s not really surprising that Robbe-Grillet should find fault with Nausea. He acquits Sartre of the charge of essentialism, but accuses him of escalating the characters of Roquentin and the Autodidact into a state of ‘necessity,’ so bringing back into the novel what he should have kicked out—nature and tragedy. This is saying that Sartre uses the eidetic imagery of bad faith; that he has failed to make a novel signifying nothing, and so slipped, like any other salaud, into prefabricated formal attitudes. And it is true. When Sartre shows us a man in anguish, ‘choosing what he will be,’ completely and profoundly responsible, he tries to show also that this man is ‘a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind.’ This man is very like the eidetic image of a tragic hero. And he is explicit that to be rather than to exist is to resemble the hero of a novel; the comparison recurs in Nausea. Whether Robbe-Grillet likes it or not, the Sartrean hero is, must be, the demythologised modern equivalent of the tragic hero; the old imagery lingers.
In the earlier volumes of Situations Sartre himself looked into some of the problems arising from this survival. The characters must not be predetermined by plot; they must be what a truly Christian novel would make them, ‘centres of indeterminacy.’ He attacks Mauriac for playing God to his characters, and also for failing to reproduce the action of time; for Sartre the temporality of a novel is satisfactory when it is closest to ‘real’ time. When he writes of Camus, he admires L’Etranger for creating its own order and expunging ‘necessity’ from fiction; yet he denies him the title of novelist, largely because his book lacks ‘continuous duration, development, and the manifest irreversibility of time.’ Curiously enough, Sartre read this book, even in some ways misread it, as if it were an anti-novel avant la lettre; but he is quite sure for all his admiration that L’Etranger is not a novel; whereas Nausea, for all its emphasis on absurdity and viscosity, did by implication deserve to be called one.
And so it is. It is certainly an illustration of absurdity and contingency, but also illustrates the power of fiction to free us from them. Since that is a traditional task of fiction, it is not surprising that the ghosts of old novels would not be entirely exorcised. Sartre began the book as a discontinuous and episodic work; but to write ‘comme les petites filles,’ as Roquentin says, is no way to achieve a cure, which this book has to be. So it develops design and structure. Quelque chose commence pour finir. The novelist has to avoid the errors of Roquentin, the historian who imposes an order, and of the Autodidact, who reduces the world to an alphabet; without falsifying contingency, he has to make ‘adventures’ and rhythms, establish the place of the ‘privileged moment’ in the ‘irreversible flow of time.’ This is to do what has been done before. ‘Beware of literature,’ says Roquentin; Sartre is cautious, but remembers and echoes Proust. Roquentin comes at the end to believe that he can see the shape of his life, and that he knows how to implement the lesson he learned from the song ‘Some of these days’—il faut souffrir en mesure. What is needed is a novel, ‘beautiful and hard as steel.’ Nausea contains the viscous and the absurd, but aspires also to this condition. Consequently it yields a little, as a fiction must, to tyrannies and consolations of inherited forms. It fakes, as good novelists fake, honestly. It is the only way for the hero-novelist to ‘wash himself of the sin of existing.’
Like the nouveau roman, Nausea is a fiction that explores the forms and status of fiction; but it has a deeper tone than the new works, and this is in part because of Sartre’s sense that even when nothing is beyond question ‘given,’ everything cannot be new. Form is, under one aspect, necessarily eidetic; it persists, like friendship. A critical devotion to both will not preclude rant or betrayal; but Sartre in his way shows this devotion, and it places him not among the passéistes but among the heroes.
(1965)
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies has sold over a million copies in the American paperback edition alone. It has, by all accounts, succeeded The Catcher in the Rye as the livre de chevet of educated American youth. I doubt if anybody is really qualified to say why this should be so: books make their way inexplicably. This one was published in 1954, and certainly it was noticed; E. M. Forster commended it and ‘everybody’ talked about it, but with a sense that it was caviar rather than chowder—a book to tempt an intellectual into believing he had discovered a classic at its birth, but hardly a best seller. In the years that followed Golding did much to confirm this belief, but very little towards making himself a popular novelist. The Inheritors is a technically uncompromising, fiercely odd, even old-fashioned book about the overthrow of Neanderthal man, very distinguished but inconceivable as a big seller; Pincher Martin is as difficult as it is masterly; and Free Fall is complex, original, and in many ways reader-repellent. Golding’s fifth and latest novel,1 coming five years after Free Fall, is unsurprising in one way at least: it is fire-new, written in what, despite its novelty, we can identify as a style bearing the impress of Golding’s peculiar presence; but difficult, inviting only slow and submissive readers.
And yet Lord of the Flies has the vast readership. One can’t help guessing at the reasons. For one thing, it is a comforting book; it assures us that evil is natural to men, and not something that we have recently invented. It is absolutely free of desperately ‘forward’ thinking—no Zen, no diagnosis of modern civilisation, only of civilisation. Yet it is spare and diagrammatic, and lends itself to techniques of sophisticated reading now widely taught in American colleges. Ultimately it derives from, or, as the word is, displaces, a familiar myth, that of the Earthly Paradise, which it handles ironically. And as it develops the myth with intricate passion, it alludes implicitly (as Golding, I think, could never do explicitly) to Freud and to all other conceivable systematic explanations of the phenomena. One might say cautiously that the book has a kind of innocence, thinking of two things: the later novels, which are more occult; and Golding’s own view, since abandoned, that there is only one true way of reading a novel, and that the author knows it best, and takes upon him the responsibility of ensuring that a good reader can read it in that way.
This is a bad doctrine, and it does not distinguish between a novel and a riddle. It cannot be maintained in respect of Lord of the Flies, but Golding thought it could; and oddly enough the error had beneficial results. The novel has an extreme sharpness of outline, an exactness of invention, which come from its closeness to diagram. Lord of the Flies (aided, no doubt by the snowball law of popular acclaim) made its way by not being like Kafka, or like Death in Venice, by not being psychologically occult; the plot explains its own profundities. Furthermore, it has closed form, whereas the more brilliant contemporary American novelists have reverted to open form. You live along the lines of the book and feel, in its pattern, a total explanation. It belongs, to use a distinction of Iris Murdoch’s, to the crystalline rather than to the journalistic pole of fiction. The virtuosity of (say) Philip Roth, belongs near the journalistic pole; the needs of Golding involve him in experimentation of a virtuoso order, but this is a matter of structure and hardly at all of drawing— the quick accuracy of a Roth conversation or interior. His complexities are not ways of rendering nature or society, but new shapes produced by the pressure of a theme. And there perhaps lies the principal explanation of the success of Lord of the Flies: it is a sharply imagined account, a new clear outline, of what one vaguely knew, and many readers are sufficiently skilled to see this outline and to be shocked by it.
And yet not everybody sees the same outlines; and Golding saw that however closed the form and limited the intention, people could not be prevented from walking round the books and validly seeing not the shape he thought he made, but others, which were there and which were good. His change of opinion was later than Free Fall; but even before that book there were signs that he was aware of the power of his fictions to support interpretations he himself had not foreseen. Perhaps the very contrivances of his stories persuaded him better than the remonstrances of critics; thus the best scene in The Inheritors—where the Neanderthal man watches his new enemies as they act out their strangeness in the clearing below him—required an imaginative feat of such intensity that its result is, self-evidently, a properly mysterious poetry and not simply a diagram of corruption as it might be observed by the different senses of such an animal.
In Pincher Martin there is, as it happens, something like an allegory of the situation Golding was in; for Pincher is all egotistic assertion, making plausible and familiar structures out of memories and his knowledge of his own body, indisputably, he thinks, master of his rock, defying, with growing terror, all other interpretations of his plight. But he is wrong, merely a dead man whose interpretations are fairly, for all his resistance, destroyed. In Free Fall there is a slightly less proprietary attitude to the theme, which consequently grows more intensely obscure. The book opens, as Golding’s books always do, with an absolutely crucial thematic passage, about free will, the state preceding the free fall; but the course of Sammy Mountjoy’s life is not diagrammatic, like that of the boys on the island, and the assertions of the last page (always equally crucial) are more ambiguous, less prescriptive than before. Golding has changed his attitude to his fictions. And there is also a change of manner; more than before, the force of the book is generated by the pressure of casual figures as they gain power in the turbulence of language. The later books have a linguistic density absent from Lord of the Flies, a quality of vision smokier, less accessible.
Although Free Fall disappointed me, I must say that I could not imagine a literary event more interesting to me than the publication of the next Golding novel; and here it is, a most remarkable book, as unforeseeable as one foresaw, an entire original, yet marked throughout by that peculiar presence. Golding shares with Conrad the habit of writing each new novel as if he had written no other, and certainly no book that had sold a million copies. With the other novels in our head we can of course see how it fits in the sequence: it is ‘late,’ it is less assertive as to its possible meaning than Lord of the Flies; it has the later density, indeed fierceness, of language, and the power to generate meanings internally—meanings that grow out of the fiction and are not imposed from without. Consequently its themes are occult, as in Free Fall.
The Spire tells the story of Jocelin, Dean of some cathedral, and his efforts to realise a vision and a vow by building on to his church a 400-foot spire. That is all. And we see the entire action not so much through the eyes as over the shoulder of Jocelin; such facts as where the money came from, and what other interested parties think about the crazy dean, we gather by using the corners of our eyes. It is sometimes, for Golding’s other books, both easy and useful to know his point of departure; nobody is the worse for understanding how Lord of the Flies is related to Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, or for taking note of the epigraph of The Inheritors, which is from H. G. Wells’s Outline of History and congratulates homo sapiens on his successful campaign against the Neanderthals. Here we are not told of any similar starting point; but Mr Golding must have got up the subject of how to build a spire, and the one he has in mind is Salisbury. He makes the spire 400 feet high—Salisbury is a little over that—and the highest in England, as Jocelin wants it to be. It is surmounted by a capstone and a cross, as Salisbury spire is. It is octagonal, with a skin of diminishing thickness, and has no orthodox foundation, like Salisbury, of which it has been said that the dangers and difficulties of adding the spire were enough to frighten any man in his senses from trying it. Iron bands strengthen the structure. The four columns over which the spire was raised settled or bent in Salisbury, as in the book, and the spire at once slipped out of its true perpendicular, as here. In short, this is basically the spire at Salisbury. There was even a 12th-century bishop called Jocelin. Despite some topographical mystification, the scene is consistent with this, and especially the Hanging Stones, which must be Stonehenge. And although it is no business of ours, Mr Golding lives near Salisbury. I don’t know exactly where he got the facts about the mason’s craft, however1.
In outline the story tells how the making good of the vision entails endlessly disagreeable and unforeseeable discoveries. It seemed simple enough; yet it has sordid material causes, unsuspected sexual motives; and it can be realised only in the teeth of technical obstacles which a sane man would regard as prohibitive. The cathedral being a bible in stone, the spire will be the Apocalypse; but it is also a human body and the spire its erect phallus. It all depends upon how your attention is focused. As Dean Jocelin himself observes, ‘the mind touches all things with law, yet deceives itself as easily as a child.’ The opening paragraph shows us Jocelin laughing, shaking his head so that a glory consumes and exalts Abraham, Isaac, and God; his ways of looking, the moods of his mind, make and unmake vision and sacrifice. At this point Jocelin controls a manageable glory. But there is the question of the foundations, the palpitating human substratum that must maintain this glorious erection. And to its splendour the church is sacrificed, defiled by pagan workmen. Obscenely superstitious, they work as if taking part in some pagan rite. When they pry up the slabs at the crossways, it is clear that there are no foundations.
Against the will of the other principal Persons, against the skilled advice of the master builder, Jocelin forces the business on; whatever the foundations of the spire—whether you take them to be mud, or the corrupt money of his aunt—he will have his four hundred feet and his cross with its Holy Nail, a diagram of prayer. Rain water in the excavations finds the corpses and makes the church foul; the master builder seduces the wife of a church servant; the spire seems founded on human filth, the earth ‘a huddle of noseless men grinning upward.’ The workmen fool about with the model spire obscenely between their legs; but the vision persists, even in the crossways, above the pit itself: ‘Here, where the pit stinks, I received what I received.’ The four slender pillars are not divine but human lovers, founded precariously on filth; they sing in agony under the growing weight. The church servant disappears, and Jocelin finds pagan mistletoe in the crossways—a typical Golding narrative device, to issue in a revelation as horrible as the recognition of Beatrice in the madhouse of Free Fall. Jocelin fares forward: ‘the folly isn’t mine. It’s God’s Folly. … Out of some deep place comes the command to do what makes no sense at all—to build a ship on dry land; to sit among the dunghills; to marry a whore.’
Whereas Jocelin thinks of each new foot of the building as a godsent challenge to his strength personally to uphold the structure, the master builder has material problems; he devises a steel band to hold the outward thrust of the spire. Each is clear about the cost, in life and lust and increase of foulness, of this ‘unruly member.’ The mason’s mistress dies for it—a violent death in childbirth, Golding’s recurrent figure for violence and creation. ‘This have I done for my true love,’ thinks Jocelin with only apparent inconsequence. The workmen desert for pagan midsummer fire festivals, and Jocelin’s own unruly member is tormented by the memory of the dead woman. Reporting to the Visitor from Rome, he presents himself—filthy, crazy—as ‘Dean of the cathedral church of Our Lady,’ the church he has desecrated, deprived of services, made the scene of deadly lust. His spire is finished, the Nail driven in; it is at once half-destroyed in a storm. And yet, though built imperfectly, in folly and anguish, it is (he thinks in hubris) a spire of prayer. Then the angel strikes him.1 He has brought ruin and loathing on himself and on the master builder and the church; he can see only the hopeless conflict between the kind of love he thought he had, and the kind that really made the vision, so that the red hair of the dead woman hangs between him and heaven, preventing prayer. On his deathbed he finds a formula for this: ‘a tangle of hair, blazing among the stars; and the great club of his spire lifted towards it … that’s the explanation if I had time … Berenice.’ The antinomies of love are reconciled there; Jocelin’s final gesture of assent is not to the priests around his deathbed, but to the beautiful maimed spire.
So much of the story one can tell without giving anything important away; such is the nature of Golding’s power. It derives from patterns assumed by the language of the book from certain figures I haven’t even mentioned: a tent, a net, a tree, as well as the mistletoe berry. Like Lord of the Flies it could be called a fable; but it is not a diagram. We are not to think of a prayer-spire and a phallus-spire, of Christian and pagan, devotion and lust, vision and graft. All these antinomies swirl together in the tormented mind of Jocelin, and in ours. We are even allowed to see how a deaf-mute carver understands Jocelin, and how the sacrist, a jealous, embittered, even venal man, is properly shocked by the pagan outrages on the holy vessels in his care; but Golding eschews the deliberate double vision which constitutes the plot of his first three books. Scholarly enquirers will have to look hard for a scenario here. Or, indeed, for a simple issue. Jocelin’s dying thought is this: ‘There is no innocent work. God only knows where God may be.’ But that is not quite the point; nor is the suicide failure of the master builder (who, having gained weight by drinking, miscalculates at last the breaking strain of a rafter). Whether the vision was innocent or not, the technique sound or not, the spire is still there at the end, damaged but beautiful.
Briefly then, this is a book about vision and its cost. It has to do with the motives of art and prayer, the phallus turned spire; with the deceit, as painful to man as to God, involved in structures which are human but have to be divine, such as churches and spires. But because the whole work is a dance of figurative language such an account of it can only be misleading. It requires to be read with unremitting attention, and, first time perhaps, very little pleasure. It is second-period Golding; the voice is authoritative but under strain. The style might have been devised by some severe recluse for translating the Old Testament; it is entirely modern, without the slightest trace of god-wottery, yet it is almost unnaturally free of any hint of slang—a modern colloquial English but spoken only by one man.
Trying to characterise the dry hot urgency of this prose, I found myself unexpectedly thinking of a musician: of Vaughan Williams in the mood of Job. The parallel has some use, I feel. The ballet for which this music was written was based on the Blake engravings—the Old Testament in an extremely heterodox interpretation. The music is in the full voice of Vaughan Williams’s already slightly archaic but fully idiomatic, mere English, pentatonic manner; it goes directly to the large statement about good and evil: Satan falling. Elihu beautiful, the sons of the morning at their sarabande. Vaughan Williams had some of the sensitive bluffness, much of the true privacy, of Golding; and he was another late starter who continually experimented but stayed out of touch with the contemporary avant-garde There is a squareness, a clumsiness; but in some works—in Job especially, and in the later music which remembers Job—we hear the clear strange tones of the visionary whose idiom we can learn (a saxophone for the comforters), and who speaks as directly as may be of good and evil.
Golding writes rather like that. Look at this passage, chosen quite at random:
The evening turned green over the rim of the cup. Then the rim went black and shadows filled it silently so that before he was well aware of it, night had fallen and the faint stars come out. He saw a fire on the rim and guessed it was a haystack burning; but as he moved round the rim of the cone, he saw more and more fires round the rim of the world. Then a terrible dread fell on him, for he knew these were the fires of Midsummer Night, lighted by the devil-worshippers out on the hills. Over there, in the valley of the Hanging Stones, a vast fire shuddered brightly. All at once he cried out, not in terror but in grief. For he remembered his crew of good men, and he knew why they had knocked off work and where they were gone.
The ‘cone’ is the unfinished spire; we note how unashamedly the sentence passes from its rim to the easy grandeur of ‘the rim of the world.’ We might regret ‘terrible dread,’ and yet it is somehow purged by the absolute plainness of reference elsewhere, by ‘knocked off work,’ for instance. The last sentence might seem altogether too artless were it not that on this very page the whole strange plot is undergoing a subtle change of movement, modulating into violence.
It is a prose for violence. All Golding’s books are violent; as I say, his basic figure for terror, violence, and bloody creation is childbirth. As such it is used in this book, and it breaks out of the language into the plot. This is part of a private vision; and one might hazardously conjecture that this novel, like some of its predecessors, is as much about Golding writing a novel as about anything else. But one need not believe that to agree that it is deeply personal. It gives one some idea of the nature of this writer’s gift that he has written a book about an expressly phallic symbol to which Freudian glosses seem entirely irrelevant. It is remote from the mainstream, potent, severe, even forbidding. And in its way it is a marvel.
(1964)
It seems impossible to review Salinger without reviewing his audience at the same time. There are other accomplished rhetoricians in the field, but no ‘serious’ modern novelist has quite this rapport with a large public. The two stories Franny and Zooey are seven and five years old; they appeared accessibly in the New Yorker, and have been widely discussed. But when they appear as Franny and Zooey1 in hard covers there is a marked excitement on both sides of the Atlantic. It doesn’t seem to matter that these stories are merely samples, or—to quote the author—‘early, critical entries in a narrative series I’m doing about a family of settlers in 20th-century New York, the Glasses.’ It doesn’t matter that other fragments of the big unrealised novel are already in print, nor that if the Glass saga ever gets written it may not contain these bits in their present form. Does it matter that Zooey, the longer and more ambitious of the stories, is an almost total disaster? It should, for the audience is deeply involved in it.
Salinger, if we may for a moment peer through the novelist to the guru underneath, is against all forms of wanting and hankering; he condemns the sort of religion that is eternity-acquisitive, and the sort of humanity that is culture-acquisitive, desiring to know, for the prestige of knowing, about Homer and Blake and Zen. And Salinger. For the really queer thing about this writer is that he very carefully writes for an audience he deplores, an audience that disposes of a certain amount of smart cultural information and reacts correctly to fairly complex literary stimuli: an audience that is familiar with Creative Writing, and has a strong stiffening of people who have turned in pretty good papers on Flaubert or Faulkner. Or Salinger. Now this audience is, under one aspect, precisely what makes the world so dreadful for Salinger’s Wise Children, so they have nervous breakdowns from contact with it. But under another, it is what you have to have if you play the piano or write books or act. It doesn’t know, as the Wise Children do, the difference between wisdom and knowledge; you may be acting perfectly, as a saint prays, but there will still be ‘unskilled laughter coming from the fifth row.’ And yet even if you’re ‘God’s actress’ you can’t get along without an audience. So what you do is to work through a whimsical sorites and come out calling the audience Christ, even the lout in the fifth row. Salinger can thus exercise his art with reverence, while still despising the ‘culture’ which makes it possible.
I do not mean to make this sound repulsive, but the truth is that the position could not be maintained if the audience were either stupid or holy: it has to be smart, and the novelist counts heavily on that. The art which has so much to say against culture-acquisitiveness really depends on it, and a lot of Salingerian legerdemain is devoted to concealing this fact. The epigraph of For Esme with Love and Squalor is a Zen koan: ‘We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?’ A brutal, occidental answer might be: Salinger without a culture-acquisitive audience. The mythical Fat Lady—the Glasses invent her as an excuse for giving good performances to stupid audiences, but really despise her (‘very thick legs, very veiny. … She had cancer, too’)—has to provide the other hand.
The Irish-Jewish Glass family consists of nice ex-vaudeville parents and seven fantastic children, two of whom, as in ‘We Are Seven,’ are dead. These children all appeared at one time or another on a radio-show called ‘It’s a Wise Child’—based on the Quiz Kids of history. They all know a lot, especially about the importance of unknowing, and when they grow up they are still in this respect entitled to be called Wise Children (another reason, sympathetically suggested by Leslie Fiedler in his superb Partisan Review notice of this book, is that Salinger really thinks they’re a lot of little bastards. This is a good example of the way Salinger attracts benevolent interpretations). Wisdom, Yeats remarked, is a property of the dead, a something incompatible with life; and the Glasses find it so. Seymour, the venerated eldest brother, committed suicide in the ravishingly written story. ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish.’ Another brother is dead, another a Jesuit; a sister is married, and Buddy, the next best counsellor to Seymour, inaccessible. That leaves Franny and Zooey, with Franny in a religious crisis.
Franny has her breaking down at lunch with an oafishly cultured Ivy League date, and it is irreproachably written. Zooey shows her back home in the big New York apartment, an amusingly furnished womb, a cosy place for a breakdown. Mother Bessie is in attendance, and there are ‘hot and cold running ghosts,’ especially Seymour, whose private telephone is still listed, and whose room is unchanged. But housepainters stand outside the door waiting for Franny to move out; and Zooey, in his anxiety, can only talk the author’s customary desperate whimsy.
Franny’s crisis is big and worrying, but pretty typical, one feels, of the Glass children; it has to do with the phoneyness of the world they grow up into, full of boyfriends discussing football, Flaubert, life. She has become obsessed with ‘the Jesus prayer’—a formula by which you pray incessantly. This seems wise, but it drives her to the edge of breakdown. She wants to talk to Seymour, but Seymour is dead (Holden Caulfield had similar trouble). Buddy is away. Bessie, her mother, offers homely advice and chicken soup. It is up to Zooey to save her from the psychiatrists who might make her want to live in the world she now rejects; sweating with love, he does so, Franny accepts his advice. It is sort of religious, and also involves acting in the world as it is. The religion Salinger has to sell to his culture-acquisitive audience; the need for action he has to sell to himself. This explains the method of the book.
Signs that there is a method are characteristically minimised; there is a lot of carefully planned improvisation. Essential information about the book is wrapped round it in a blurb or given with an air of inevitable clumsiness in a footnote (footnotes are called an ‘aesthetic evil’). Buddy Glass, the narrator, takes a deal of space to explain why the book is so randomly shaped. Zooey, we hear, dislikes his brother’s handling of the narrative, and, according to Buddy, further complains
that the plot hinges on mysticism … which … can only expedite, move up, the day and hour of my professional undoing. People are already shaking their heads over me, and any immediate further professional use of the word ‘God,’ except as a familiar, healthy American expletive, will be taken … as the worst kind of name-dropping and a sure sign that I’m going straight to the dogs.
In case we don’t find this sufficiently disarming, we are encouraged to believe that Zooey, in voicing these forbidden thoughts, is merely providing another example of the off-beat loving which goes on in the Glass family. The fact that it is Zooey who is voicing them is meant to prevent us from doing so. The same sort of endearing duplicity is involved in Buddy’s apology for the endless talking that goes on in the book: that’s the way it was, you can’t change the Glasses. Buddy also has tricks that allow him to speak frankly of Zooey’s incredible beauty, or rather the ‘authentic esprit’ of his face: a bit embarrassing, but that’s the way it is. He is even capable of a parenthesis stating that ‘all this data is, I think, to some degree relevant.’
The author knows the public knows he isn’t clumsy; but just in case anybody thinks he’s really slipped into awkward simplicity there is the television script Zooey is reading, a piece that ‘stinks of courage and integrity.’ ‘It’s down-to-earth, it’s simple, it’s untrue.’ This is to prevent anybody using such words of Zooey; yet, all this legerdemain apart, they apply. So let us use such words; when the fog of technique and comparative religion clears away. Zooey is simple (it says, with Carlyle, ‘Do the work that lies nearest to thee’) and untrue.
It should in justice be said that he succeeds in all sorts of ways: with Bessie Glass, in the protracted, funny, yet economical bathroom scene that takes up half the book; with Zooey’s droll, teasing ways. But not with Bessie as the priestess of the Fat Lady’s altar, not with Zooey as the book of the dead. Buddy’s enormous, apparently amorphous letter, which Zooey reads through as a preparation, saved Zooey years before, and provides the pattern for the saving of Franny: neat, and in some Salingerian sense true. But the treasured wisdom of Seymour about ‘unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night’ had to be mediated to Buddy by a little girl in a supermarket who says her boyfriends are called Bobby and Dorothy; a similar angel passes before Zooey’s eyes as he works on Franny. The missions of these girls (and of the one in ‘Bananafish’) may be to play tiny Iphigenia to adolescent Orestes—as Fiedler observes; but their message is death or nirvana, and for Buddy and Zooey to interpret it as a call to action in ‘this goddam phenomenal world’ seems false both to Salinger and the audience.
This is really the crux. Franny has got this Jesus prayer wrong: Zooey has to straighten her out. First he tries to show her she’s wrong about Jesus, who was extremely tough and intelligent, a cobra not a bunny, as she seems to think. This fails; when he succeeds (under terrific emotional pressure) he does it by using Seymour’s telephone; first pretending to be Buddy then not quite pretending (even Salinger couldn’t quite try that) to be Seymour. What he says on the phone will keep the explicators happy for ages, since it turns on a pun: Zooey is an actor; Franny could be. Von Hügel called prayer an ‘ever-increasing predominance of Action over activity,’ and Zooey has a similar notion in mind, perhaps (not that I understand Von Hügel’s remark). Franny is well-informed on religion, and he doesn’t have to spell it out. She must act. It seems that acting is Franny’s karma; she must be God’s actress, and that will be her Jesus prayer. If it seems strange to be saying a Jesus prayer to a lot of louts in a theatre, she is to remember that they’re all Christ. Franny, restored, happy and self-controlled, drops into a calm sleep.
It is to make us accept this conclusion that Salinger has worked so deviously. And, as one of his admiring audience, I find it hard to believe he could be selling anything so simple and untrue. The wise child would certainly have discounted this effort of Zooey’s as a last desperate attempt to save her from the professional headshrinker. Salinger has at last overestimated his rhetorical control over us. When Bessie’s chicken soup turns out to be eucharistic, like the colonel’s hash in Mary McCarthy’s diatribe against Creative Writing courses, we feel let down. When Zooey’s exhausting effort to save Franny’s life and wisdom comes down to a trouper’s advice to go out there and wow them, we know that Salinger’s exhausting effort to satisfy us and himself has failed. He cannot, for all his skill, make it appear that a good performance as Pegeen Mike in The Playboy is an adequate substitute for being dead.
The author of Zooey, a work designed with extraordinary care and even a kind of passion, is certainly a master of sorts. Perhaps he’s grown too fond of Seymour, perhaps he’s been over-subtle about his audience. For whatever reason, he has slipped badly, and Zooey doesn’t work. The Fat Lady, obstinately unholy, doesn’t move a muscle; the artist’s single hand silently beats the air.
(1962)
In this book1 a couple of koans, first exhibited in the New Yorker in 1955 and 1959, are trapped between hard covers. The first takes the form of an anecdote about Seymour’s wedding day, the second is a discursive study of Seymour’s sanctity—a summary which will serve only if you underline the word ‘discursive’ with almost hysterical profuseness. The whole thing is dedicated to the amateur reader, to show that the author is sick of being read by people who may seem clever but are so ignorant of Zen that if they took up archery they would assume their job was to aim at the target. The second story contains several careful allusions to the peculiar and terrible relationship obtaining between this author and his readers. It is admitted that Seymour personally laid it down that the amenities of exposition ought to be respected, but argued that in this case they can’t be, because of immediate needs of Buddy, the narrator. These cause certain essential modifications which unskilled readers may treat as marks of authorial self-indulgence, or as signs that Buddy is cleverly pushing St. Seymour out of the limelight. Buddy suggests early on that awkward customers should cut their losses and leave right away.
‘I’m told,’ says Buddy, ‘that I have many surface charms as a writer.’ We may have been over that before, but certainly a gesture of compliment is in order for ‘Raise High,’ a funny-sad piece with something of the period atmosphere of ‘For Esmé.’ Seymour fails to turn up for his wedding, abandoning Muriel, chosen for her dullness or because she was like old Charlotte, a childhood sweetheart whom Seymour once hit with a brick because he loved her. Buddy has to entertain hot and angry friends of the bride. There are cunning dips into the vast lake of Glassiana which lies beneath the Salinger surface. If I dare to say what I dislike about the story I shall give myself away at once as fatally un-hip to Seymour. For I am not moved by his soothing the 10-month-old Franny by reading her a Taoist tale, and in fact am no longer surprised that she turned out badly and fell for Zooey’s bogus Zen trickery in the last book. When Seymour’s journal erupts onto the page I expect and get something more than tiresome, such as the bit about his being so holy and sensitive that if he touches a thing he loves for too long—Zooey’s hair or Charlotte’s dress—he develops stigmata on his hands. When Buddy tells the truth about Charlotte’s scars he chooses as sole audience a sympathetic funny old deaf-mute—pure Seymour this, like Zooey’s bogus telephone call, and characteristic of that chic Western Zen which, Buddy assures us, the real thing will survive.
All the same, you could put this story in a book with good Salinger-Glass, such as ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish,’ without doing much harm. ‘Seymour’ is, on the other hand, close enough to mere rubbish for someone who enjoys exaggeration to call it that. Here art destroys art, or rather disorder goes through an elaborate and skilful process and comes out as disorder. Seymour is the key to Glass, and it is presumably important for us to see him plain. He is presented as a sort of American Prince Myshkin, a saintly fool whom Buddy will, in an interminable monologue, describe and expound. Because of Buddy’s ‘extremely pressing personal needs‘ the monologue eschews orderly narrative, using anecdote for purely panegyric purposes and dwelling, with a calculated air of fortuity, on the situation of Buddy himself as he writes.
Still, we do add to our knowledge of Seymour; and if you already have a fairly deep impression of his beauty, his intellect and his charity, this new onslaught of his identity may make you want, like Keats in a similar situation, to leave the room. Seymour is, frankly, ‘the artist and Sick Man.’ Starting life as a Wise Child on the radio, he grows up into a Seer, ‘the heavenly fool … dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colours of his own sacred human conscience.’ He is a top American poet; Salinger gets round the obvious creative-writing problem this creates (for poets must be harder to do than saints) by merely paraphrasing a couple of poems and describing their form: double haiku, 34 syllables, basically iambic. The poems aren’t autobiographical, or don’t, at any rate, refer to Seymour’s most recent incarnation, but they are related to his vaudeville ancestry—‘highly literate vaudeville,’ a kind of Zennish balancing act. When Seymour’s athletic skills are discussed it is once more the oriental aspect that is stressed, as when he wins at marbles by not aiming. His face, and his love for Buddy, are very fully described. It is part of Salinger’s own technique of indirection to blur the line that divides the personality of Seymour from that of Buddy (and, incidentally, the line between Buddy and Salinger). Buddy is also something of a happy fool, as well as being very clever and inclined to treat the reader as the Fat Lady. He dwells on his resemblance to his brother and then blames himself for doing so, attributing the error to his egotism, the one thing he has that Seymour lacked.
Having found ‘Seymour’ very tedious at first reading I ought to add that I had a second try and found it somewhat less insufferable. If you read the book as primarily about a crisis of Buddy’s, parallel to that of Franny in the last book, and resolved in much the same way (Buddy goes off with joy to face his audience of college girls), you might be able to stand the rich flavour of Seymour, or even convince yourself that Seymour isn’t a straight character at all because Salinger is working with irony. But in the end I don’t think this will hold up. The ironies do nothing to dispel the incense cloud round Seymour. There is a genuine sense of the sheer difficulty Buddy has in getting what he has to say past large psychological blocks, but the disorder that results tells us nothing about Seymour and nothing interesting about Buddy. In short, ‘Seymour’ is a bigger frost than ‘Zooey.’ The question as to why Salinger should devote his skill to tying himself up into knots is still intriguing, but such topics have small staying power, and it may shortly be superseded by the question as to what possessed so many people to take him so seriously.
(1963)
Muriel Spark—as Derek Stanford rather quaintly observes in his new book about her1—is in her prime; like her own Miss Brodie she has a set, and to it should belong anybody who takes an interest in the ways fiction can body forth the shape of things unknown. This remarkable virtuoso being in her prime, new books are happily frequent, and the latest, called The Girls of Slender Means,2 is, like nearly all the others, in some ways the best. They are all pretty alarming, and the reasons why they are also funny are very complicated. Some literate people dislike them, though not, so far as I know, for decent reasons. It’s true that there is an unfashionable element of pure game in these books—they are about novels as well as being novels—but this is simply part of their perfectly serious way of life. It won’t do to call them bagatelles. And there is another rather moral objection, quietly voiced by Mr Stanford in a footnote, to the effect that Mrs Spark lacks charity. This also misses the point, since the concept, cleared of cant, may be entertained in precisely the gratingly unsentimental way in which this pure-languaged writer understands it.
There is certainly a remoteness, a lack of ordinary compassion, in her dealings with characters, but this is part of the premise of her fiction; if we feel sorry in the wrong way, it’s because our emotions are as messy and imprecise as life, part of the muddle she is sorting out. In her story ‘The Portobello Road’ one of the characters says of a murdered girl: ‘She was at Confession only the day before she died—wasn’t she lucky?’ And she is described as ‘speaking from that Catholic point of view which takes some getting used to.’ The Spark point of view is like that, not only because she is an unremittingly Catholic novelist committed to immutable truths, but because she is uncommonly interested in the shapes assumed by these truths as perceived in the tumult of random events and felt upon insensitive fallen flesh. The question for the reader is not at all whether he accepts the truths, but whether the patterns are made good and recognised. Reading them, like writing them, is a work of the imagination, fallen or not. What establishes their validity is not the ‘sharp reminders of eternity’ mentioned in the blurb, but imaginative cohesion, a Tightness of the shapes, a truth sensed in the fictions.
The easiest way into this kind of fiction, which shows the world as bearing obscure figurations of meaning like a novel, is by way of The Comforters,1 the first of the series. Here is a novel which looks into the question of what kind of truth can be told in a novel. It creates a quite powerful sense—still not absent from later and less openly experimental stories—that to make fictions is in a way a presumptuous thing to do, because the novelist is, unlike God, free at the expense of his creatures. Of course the characters fight back : Caroline, the heroine—who as a Catholic convert knows about absolute truth and is also expert in theory of the novel—does her best to resist manipulation by the mind of the unseen novelist who is putting her into a story and trying to shape her life. So she tries to spoil the plot by an exercise of free will: ‘I intend to stand aside and see if the novel has any real form apart from this artificial plot. I happen to be a Christian.’ And later, when the writer tries to make her lie low in hospital and let her get on with other parts of her pretty complicated plot, Caroline forces her way back into the book by saying that she’s being left out only because the writer can’t cope with a description of the hospital ward. There follows a deliberately perfunctory description of the ward. The voices Caroline hears recounting or prophesying her actions are novelistic: they are one voice differentiated into many, always speaking in the past tense. (Later Mrs Spark is often, as a novelist, devious about tenses.) The novelist arbitrarily arranges fantastic and pointless coincidences. Mrs Hogg, standing for a singularly odious piety, vanishes when not in the story, having no other life.
The tone of The Comforters is civilised and often frivolous, but it is naggingly about something serious, and about the difficulties of saying such things in terms of a convention so absurd and arbitrary as a novel. The plot is deliberately complicated, since the question asked is, how can such an organised muddle of improbabilities, further disordered by the presumptuous claims of the writer on space and time, say anything true or interesting? One of the answers, if one may abstract it, is that even among the falsities of a novel, as among the shapelessnesses of ordinary life, truth figures; and it does so because the imagination, in so far as it is good, is bound by categories which stand in a relation to absolute truth. This shows up in a certain repeated atavism in Spark plots—the assumption must be that the ancient patterns have a more certain relation with the truth. Thus Caroline deals with her demon while crossing water; but this is only an early instance of a device very important to Mrs Spark. And it doesn’t detract from the frivolous pleasures of flux.
None of the other books is so obviously an inquiry into the way fictions work, but by now it’s plain that Mrs Spark will not relinquish the investigation. In this, as in other ways, she remains a poet, for poets have always bothered more than novelists about the exact nature of their chosen mode. A Sparkian aphorism, ‘There is more of everything than poetry,’ is quoted with some show of disagreement by Mr Stanford, but it seems very pregnant, and an accurate if queer account of her novels. Of these Memento Mori (there is more of everything than holy dying) seems the best known. Certainly it has a superb morbid accuracy, a poetic concentration on a narrow society of people and ideas. The ancient characters are all different, united only by the common summons of death, as in the danses macabres; and the most notable of them is not the evil Mrs Pettigrew but the revitalised Charmian, a novelist within the novel, still giving ‘to those disjointed happenings a shape,’ and well aware that this shape is a deception, like all fiction. ‘In life,’ she says, ‘everything is different. Everything is in the providence of God.’ This is the simple point; the scientist’s notes perish in a fire, like the dross they are (Mrs Spark often burns a building for parabolic purposes). He knows how death comes, but it is Jean Taylor who knows what to do about it, its right place among the four last things. Memento Mori may be slightly overloaded with incident; at this stage Mrs Spark wants swirling activity as well as subtle dialogue and occult figuration.
The Ballad of Peckham Rye is nearer to fable and shorter. It has so many heavy hints about the diabolic nature of Dougal Douglas that it could be made to look like a more fictional Screwtape Letters, but it is really a subtle book. The typing ghost of The Comforters now roams arbitrarily about interfering in everybody’s life. The devil as father of lies is the patron of novelists; Dougal is writing a highly fictional biography of an old woman, and he records in his notebook lists of useful if low novelist’s commonplaces, useful blunters of truth and sharp perception. Like a novelist, he seduces people into wanton or even self-destructive acts: the bridegroom who says ‘I won’t,’ the head of the typing pool who is murdered. Again there is an intense concentration on a small society, again there are tell-tale atavisms (Dougal’s dread of water, the cysts on his head). There are also chill Edinburgh high spirits; the novelist herself wantons with the story of the tunnel and the dead nuns.
The last of the heavily plotted books (so far) was The Bachelors; but the world has the same arbitrary limitation, a world of bachelors, their friends and mistresses. Just as, in The Comforters, we are asked to consider the analogy between the writing of a novel and a temporary loss of sanity, we are here made to see an affinity between novel-writing and mediumship (fraudulent and authentic in indeterminable degrees, but fundamentally alien to the truth) and between mediumship and the disease of epilepsy. Mediums, like novelists, speak in a variety of voices, depend on stock responses in their audiences; yet they are no more their own masters than epileptics, who suffer (as all stories do) from atavism in the central nervous system. Yet, like writers, they are sometimes thought very wise. The Bachelors is a comic performance, although it is, as the hero notices, ‘all demonology and to do with creatures of the air.’ Its comedy arises from the corruptions it deals with; and these imply a primal innocence, which later became Mrs Spark’s central topic.
Thus The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie treats of the loss of innocence. It may well be the best written of these cunningly written books; there is a fusion of tone and material. There is a characteristic Spark voice, slightly pedantic, produced in Scotland’s good schools. In The Comforters she can write that Father Jerome ‘had used to send the lay brother to her’—a usage probably not to be found in other living novelists. This faint pedantry suits Miss Brodie, and the book should ideally be read aloud by a lady who has preserved the Edinburgh accent in all its soft severity. The tone is now more important than the plot: ordinary expectations are flouted by skipping to and fro in time from the ’Thirties and the schoolgirls to the present time of their maturity.
The unpredictable and often absurd acts and assertions of Miss Brodie are precisely what amuses us; but they also have unpredictable consequences (one girl burnt in the fire, being Miss Brodie’s notion of dross; another, taught to transfigure the commonplace, herself uncomfortably transfigured). Miss Brodie fancies herself one of the secular elect, a modern justified sinner; and she assumes a novelist’s, or God’s, power over character. But her life assumes penitential patterns familiar to the instructed, and repeated with pain by the treacherous Sandy. Hindsight is liberally provided from the outset; but the dominant image is of the justified Miss Brodie presiding calmly over a lost innocence.
The new book is rather on the pattern of Miss Brodie; it is about a group of young ladies living in a genteel hostel near the Albert Memorial, during the months between the end of the war in Europe and the end of the whole thing. As in Brodie, the history of the time is touched in, neatly and with full relevance. The girls are poor though not in want, like the English generally at the time; they are beautiful in poverty, slender (some of them) in means and figure alike. They have a Schiaparelli dress, held virtually in common, and have dealings with an anarchist poet, Nicholas Farringdon, who sleeps with the most beautiful of them, Selina. We know all along about Nicholas’s later martyrdom, but the focus is on the days just before the hostel is destroyed by an old bomb and a fire.
The arrangements are such that slender means and bodies become figures of beautiful poverty; but it is Selina’s slenderness that enables her to destroy the image of paradise by a breach, as it were, of the rule of the order, so providing Nicholas with the vision of evil which leads him to the Church, and in the end to martyrdom. While they exist, ‘the graceful attributes of poverty’ are enhanced by Nicholas’s anarchism, and by the poems intoned by the elocutionist Joanna. These are relevant because paradisal, or sometimes quite fortuitously, as with Drinkwater’s ‘Moonlit Apples’ or Shelley’s ‘West Wind’; most relevant to the crisis is ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland,’ and the Anglican liturgy proper to the day of the disaster.
It may seem that the parable element bulks rather large, that the novel is itself trying to get through the eye of a needle. But Mrs Spark uses all her power ‘to love and animate the letter.’ The commonplace may show the operation of these figures, and others, but it is still represented with an arbitrary novelistic richness; and if ‘charity’ is a word to be reserved for the future of Nicholas, it might still be said that the society of girls is handled with cool tenderness.
Such novels assume the reader’s sympathetic participation in muddle, they assume a reality unaware that it conceals patterns of truth. But when an imagination (naturaliter christiana) makes fictions it imposes patterns, and the patterns are figures of the truth. The relations of time and eternity are asserted by juxtaposing poetry and mess, by solemn puns about poverty. None of it would matter to the pagan were it not for the admirable power with which all the elements are fused into shapes of self-evident truth—the power one looks for in poems. Mrs Spark, in her prime, is a poet-novelist of formidable power.
(1963)
People—novelists even—have been heard to say of Muriel Spark that she is gifted and elegant, but a fantasist, a trifler. This at any rate allows one to see why the old topic of the death of the novel is still dusted off from time to time. Mrs Spark is a novelist; she is not an antinovelist or a philosophical novelist, a realist or a neorealist, but a pure novelist. She is evidently not of the opinion that the possibilities of the form are exhausted, since she is continually finding new ones. Her novels quite deliberately raise difficult questions about the status of fiction, but she has not been driven to violence in her attempts to answer them; she does not cut her books up or fold them in or try to make them random. If there is to be randomness, she wants to be in charge of it. If the characters have to be free, then their freedom will have to be consistent with contexts not of their own devising, as in life. If the reader thinks that the shapes and patterns, the delicate internal relationships, of a well-written novel give the lie to life and suggest impossible consolations then he must content himself with some other thing, with whatever unconsoling fiction he can find. Mrs Spark is even somewhat arrogant about the extent of the novelist’s power: knowing the end of the story, she deliberately gives it away, and in a narrative which could have regular climactic moments she fudges them, simply because the design of her world, like God’s, has more interesting aspects than mere chronological progress and the satisfaction of naïve expectations in the reader. Yet all the elements of this world come from the traditional novel.
The suggestion is, in Mrs Spark’s novels, that a genuine relation exists between the forms of fiction and the forms of the world, between the novelist’s creation and God’s. At the outset of her career she wrote a novel called The Comforters, which is quite deliberately an experiment designed to discover whether this relation does obtain, whether the novelist, pushing people and things around and giving ‘disjointed happenings a shape,’ is in any way like Providence. This quotation is actually from Memento Mori; Mrs Spark’s later novels are all very different from The Comforters, but all are in a sense novels about the novel, inquiries into the relation between fictions and truth. You may treat her last two books, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means, both very brief and exquisitely formed, as beautiful jokes; they have a constantly varying formal wit, an arbitrariness of incident under the control of the writer’s presumptuous providence, that warrant the description. But like the wit of the 17th-century preacher, they are jokes for God’s sake, fictions which have to do with the truth.
‘I don’t claim that my novels are truth,’ she once said in an interview.1 ‘I claim that they are fiction, out of which a kind of truth emerges. And I keep in mind that what I am writing is fiction, because I am interested in truth—absolute truth. … There is a metaphorical truth and moral truth, and what they call anagogical … and there is absolute truth, in which I believe things which are difficult to believe, but I believe them because they are absolute.’ This absolute truth is, of course, the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. The lies of fiction can partake of this truth, perhaps give it a useful, though imperfect human application. It is, perhaps, inconceivable that the creator of fiction can—insofar as he looks at what he has done and sees that it is good—make shapes and depths utterly dissimilar from those of God. In a sense, this makes his work a daring kind of game. He lies like truth. He simulates the plots of God, even when he plays at being arbitrary and contingent. The tragic aspect of this is the subject of another Catholic novelist, Graham Greene, in The End of the Affair; Mrs Spark is more concerned with the comedy of the situation. The novelist, presumptuous, arbitrary, scheming, and faking, lying like the fiend, makes things like worlds, plots absurdly like God’s.
The interest of this for nonbelievers is that even they must make worlds like plots. Even if they reject the Absolute as itself a fiction, they are by nature structure-makers and impose this human need on history, on nature, on poems and novels. They seek and accept images of order. They need not be alienated from a novel because it represents a world designed to possess formal relationships, rhythms, and certainties under the wild muddle we see at first glance. In other words, they are as well equipped as a Catholic to understand the power and beauty of Mrs Spark’s most ambitious creation game, her new novel, The Mandelbaum Gate.
Mrs Spark here tells a story, and a good one; she is a novelist all through, extremely inventive, at ease with complex plots. But she presents the story in discontinuous bits, blurring the climaxes, giving away the surprises. Why? Because in reality this occurs, and it occurs without making any difference to the certainties of the world and its design. She sets the story in Jerusalem because Jerusalem, as the medieval map-makers knew, is the centre of this world, the core and paradigm of God’s plot. Jerusalem brings the two plot-makers together. The book is a confrontation, or rather a concord of plots. God’s plot is Jerusalem itself, the ancient données divided by the Mandelbaum Gate. To recognise them is to know something of the ways of God to men; they lie timeless and unchanged under the extraordinary contingencies of modern Jerusalem. This is the plot the novelist confronts, with which she seeks concord. How does she set about such a task? By taking as a central figure Miss Barbara Vaughan, who is half Jewish, an English Catholic convert, and setting her down in Jerusalem on a pilgrimage to the holy places, which are divided by the Mandelbaum Gate. She is on the Jewish side of the gate; the Arabs will let her pass if convinced that she is a bona fide Christian, but they do not recognise half-Jews any more than they recognise Israel. The story is of the adventures of Barbara on her pilgrimage, and also about her love affair and how it prospered when her lover succeeded in having his first marriage annulled at Rome. It is also about smuggling and spying and smart Arab operators and British consular officials. It is a complicated story. To explain how it is made to match Jerusalem, I shall have to speak in some detail at least about the two opening chapters.
First we meet Freddy Hamilton from the British Consulate, upper-class, talented, agreeable in his fifties, and a bit wet. He is given to composing vers de société in archaic verse forms, and is walking back through the Mandelbaum Gate making up a bread-and-butter letter to his weekend hostess on the Jordan side. It is to be a rondeau. He bumps into a Jewish child, then into a Jewish-looking Arab in European dress. He meets Miss Vaughan and hears her chidden by an old Jew for a dress which, though it seems modest enough in the heat of the day, offends the sensibility of two thousand years. Proceeding, he carries on with his thank-you verses as he passes a school where the children are chanting in Hebrew. He reflects on the Greek meters, ‘pitting culture against culture.’ At his hotel he calls for a drink, and the Israeli waiter reminds him of a line from Horace. He remembers Miss Vaughan, and the small embarrassment when she told him she was half a Jew; but in spite of that they had contrived to be comfortably English together. Miss Vaughan had complained, as the English will, of un-English activities among the natives. Her guide was interested in modern cement factories and had been reluctant to take her to the top of Mount Tabor, ‘probable scene of the Transfiguration.’ Then Miss Vaughan turns up, speaking of her dangerous trip to Jordan to see the other holy places, and of her archaeologist fiancé, who is seeking the annulment in Rome which she, not he, regards as indispensable to their union. Freddy does not know much about Miss Vaughan; she looks spinsterish to him. Later he learns of her sensual nature. Now he learns that her life has a different basis from his own, for he allows himself to say that he doesn’t understand this fuss about an annulment. (Barbara’s fiancé, being a scholar, understands it very well. Archaeologists also know that layers of irrelevance cover the original true deposits.) She quotes Apocalypse at him: ‘I find thee neither cold nor hot; cold or hot, I would thou wert one or the other. Being what thou art, lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, thou wilt make me vomit thee out of my mouth.’ Surely one ought not to quote Scripture in this way? Freddy departs, thinking about Greek meters.
Under the quiet of this opening, which would, I think, delight Mr Forster, chords are beginning faintly to sound. The second chapter is more decisive. Barbara is on top of Mount Tabor. In her, it seems, everything meets: Jew and Christian, the two testaments, an ability to live in the present without forgetting the historical deposit of holiness, Jewish intellect, and ‘the beautiful and dangerous gift of faith.’ Can all these be made one? Intelligently she studies the parts; in faith she recognises totalities beyond criticism, whether in a person or a poem or a world. On Mount Tabor, where an earthly body was transfigured as a poem is by its totality, she thinks of the Beersheba of Genesis. It is now dominated by a Scotch-tape factory, but it is still the Beersheba of Genesis, where Jacob tricked Isaac into blessing him instead of Esau, and so earned his inheritance and his place among the fathers of Israel. God went along with this; he had not been to Eton. ‘The mighty blessing, once bestowed, was irrevocable.’ So, though she doesn’t know it, will the College of the Rota in Rome be tricked into annulling her fiancé’s marriage. Meanwhile, the Holy Land is Beersheba and Scotch-tape factories, Tabor and cement.
She remembers Jaffa, and the house of Simon the Tanner. If you recall that it was in Simon’s house that St Peter had his vision of the unclean meats, the reminiscences of Barbara’s childhood which follow will not need the excuse that the Jewish guide asks her why she is not of her mother’s religion. Barbara remembers the double background of her childhood—the hunting Anglicans, the intellectual Jews of Golders Green, ‘Passover gatherings and bell-summoned Evensongs.’ She decides that she is not fragments, but a totality; she is what she is, though her parts, like the parts of Christianity after the vision of St Peter in Simon’s house, are Jew and Gentile, as the Old and New Testaments are a concord, the types of one fulfilled in the other. ‘She then remarked, without relevance, that the Scriptures were specially important to the half-Jew turned Catholic. The Old Testament and the New, she said, were to her—as near as she could apply to her own experience the phrase of Dante’s vision—“bound by love into one volume.” ’ Pending the true Transfiguration, which is of eternity, she decides that something of the sort is known in time, since memory, and history, bring health, and this recollection of the données of God’s plot enables us to do as we must: ‘what is to be borne is to be praised.’
The insight into a totality made up of such different parts is conveyed, in the city of Jerusalem or in a good novel, by an image. Barbara remembers an Easter vacation afternoon, spent with her English family on a tennis lawn, and as she leaves to celebrate Passover in Golders Green, ‘the drawing-in of an English afternoon … with its fugitive sorrow. “See here, Barbara,” said her grandfather at Golders Green a few hours later, “these are the bitter herbs which signify our affliction in Egypt.” ’ The intellectual Aaronsons enacted their Passover ritual as the English rolled their pace eggs in the mild woods. Barbara, shaky on detail, is excluded from the Jewish kitchen. She is neither full Jew nor full Gentile, and so all the better for the purposes of this novel, since her double estrangement mirrors the accidental deviations of the Gentile religion from its Jewish base, the New from the Old Testament. Sitting, like Deborah, on the top of Mount Tabor, she reflects on her own transfiguration in faith and sensuality, in acts of love and recognition. She will go to Jordan and finish the pilgrimage. Whatever Barbara may think of the matter, she has been transfigured, for the purposes of the novel, by Mrs Spark. We recall that Miss Brodie, that comic alter ego of the novelist, had something to say about the transfiguration of the commonplace, and so, in Sandy’s case, had God.
It will be seen that these opening pages achieve certain traditional ends. They establish character, tone, background, the last very strongly since the book has to be a sort of map of Jerusalem. They found a plot: the trip to Jordan, the annulment case. if that were all, they might possibly be thought somewhat extravagant; but they have also, to use Mrs Spark’s word, anagogical work on hand. This is sometimes a matter of hints in the texture (the people Freddy bumps into, his clashing Greek against Hebrew) which may be for the moment obscure, as when Miss Vaughan quotes the Book of Revelation. Such hints imitate similar hints in the texture of reality. The structural imitation begins in the second chapter, with Barbara on Mount Tabor. The fraud that serves a divine purpose is associated with Beersheba. The health-giving memory of Easter-Passover happens at Simon’s house. The old that has to be remembered underlies the meaningless variety and division of the new: Old Jerusalem, with its shrines calling for recognition, however perfunctory, as focuses of truth, subsisting under the hurrying Jews, the unrecognising Arabs, and fortuitously assembled foreigners of the new city. It is all one and capable of transfiguration when rightly seen. Mount Tabor knew the warlike Deborah and the shining Christ, and now sees Miss Vaughan in love, sitting on the mountain nobody wanted to take her to. Down in the streets wildly diverse people bump each other in divided streets; but on some view they are one, and the city is their happy home.
When Barbara remarks ‘irrelevantly’ that this reminds her of Dante, who at the climax of his vision of Paradise saw the scattered leaves of the world bound into one volume, legato con amore in un volume, we may ask on what kind of view she is irrelevant. Only on the impossible view that talk in novels obeys the standards set for relevance in common talk. We may believe, as Barbara and Mrs Spark do not, that only in a book can the world be shown to be bound together as a book. Mallarmé said something of the kind, that the world exists to end in a book. But whether the shrines, the images, the données exist only inside or inside and outside the book, it remains true that in such a book people must say things that transcend simple relevance, and so may appear irrelevant. The use of the adverb is Mrs Spark’s way of making peace with those who think novels ought to be simple, small towns rather than Jerusalems. Or it can be called ‘faking,’ so that the simple story gets told while at the same time ‘a kind of truth emerges.’ The run of talk must point back to the données, just as the fugitive sorrow of an English evening and the bitter herbs of Passover have to be juxtaposed, the time between annihilated. They are together as closely as Jewish mother and Gentile father, in the union that produced Barbara. If the novel is to be bound together in one volume by love, it may be necessary to use the word ‘irrelevantly’ at the point of maximum relevance. Out of the lie ‘a kind of truth emerges.’ Mrs Spark’s comfortable expatriate English are fond of saying that the Arabs think in symbols, by which they mean ‘tell lies.’ This is a good description of what novelists of Mrs Spark’s stamp know they are doing.
Virtuoso composition of Mrs Spark’s kind tends to make short novels. But The Mandelbaum Gate is twice as long as Jean Brodie and much more heavily plotted; one can’t offer a clumsy commentary on the whole thing. Having established the set of her world, or her Jerusalem, in the opening chapters—the process is quite arbitrary, like God’s piling layers of history and holiness onto one small region—she can make or allow the events of her story to fall within it, or even, to show her arbitrary power, outside it. What is required, as a critic once said of Milton, is that the reader should be continually on duty. It is up to him to see that the annulment plot, which turns, like a lawsuit in some vast Victorian novel, on the dubious circumstances of the fiancé’s birth and the absurd intervention of a jealous woman, has to do with Beersheba and Isaac, and with human applications of absolute truth. When Scripture is quoted, it is quoted with the same ‘irrelevance’ I’ve discussed in connection with Barbara’s reference to Dante. The cultivation of English wild flowers on the Israel–Jordan border, the obsessive collocation of their popular with their botanical names, and with the holy places where Freddy’s friend Joanna finds them, may seem a minor and rather poetic figuration in the book, but it is firmly related to the central theme of Jerusalem, and also to the adventure story which somehow gets told. And when trefoil, lady’s-finger, viper’s bugloss come from Gethsemane, the Mount of Olives, Siloam, these last names are touched, as they ought to be, by the commonplace; the English names rest on the holy places, as history and the world rest on Jerusalem. In the garden where these flowers grow, Freddy writes insincere letters to his terrible mother in Harrogate, and she too will be bound, under the pressure of apocalypse, into this one volume.
In this Jerusalem, as in the real one, there must be variety, confusion, conflict, not only between Semites but between everybody. Indigenous characters soon begin to pour into the story—Orthodox Jews, Orthodox Catholics from Lebanon, Arab operators. The muezzin wakes you on the Israeli side; to touch the Wailing Wall you have to go by the gate to the Arab side. People in England, only remotely concerned, are drawn to Jerusalem, encountered in the polyglot confusion of the holy places. Barbara, Jew turned Catholic, visits the shrines disguised as an Arab. She buys from a Lebanese Christian merchant a chain with the Christian fish symbol but also with Turkish charms to counteract it.
The adventures of Barbara in Jordan, and Freddy’s liberated behaviour as, in flight from his mother, he accompanies her, are narrated in discontinuous but amusing fits. The Ramdez family, all charming, all making a good living out of refugees, spying, smuggling, the peccadilloes of English and American government officials, move into the centre, as much a part of Jerusalem as the Zionists, the Scots Presbyterians, the priests and nuns. Farce works for Mrs Spark as heavier irony for other writers; and underneath the story, with its farcical, anarchic, naturalistic incidents and encounters, are the holy places. To recognise them, even in this fugue, is what makes Barbara ‘all of a piece,’ though a ‘gentile Jewess, a private-judging Catholic’ The heart of it all is the memory, the anamnesis, of these places: Nazareth, ‘where it really began’; Cana and the first miracle, for ‘everything begins with that’; Capharnaum, where ‘the spiritual liberation of the human race had begun’; the birthplace of Mary Magdalen. In Jerusalem, observing the ‘actual Gethsemane passively laid out on the Mount of Olives,’ she feels the relation of this Jerusalem to that other of poetry and hymm, ‘my sweete home, Hierusalem.’ The pilgrimage may well be without emotion; it is essentially a simple act of recognition.
The quality of the book’s imagination is suggested by the inclusion of the Eichmann trial among these objects of Christian recognition; if one had to cite a single example to show Mrs Spark’s deepening power, this would serve. All Barbara hears of the trial is a dull day when Eichmann is being interrogated by his own counsel. She sees it, however, as ‘the desperate heart’ of the whole process: the dead mechanical tick of the discourse, words and statements divorced from all reality and all pity; and she thinks of the French anti-novel, the discourse dead, the subject living. Barbara here decides, as it were, in passing, that she has to see the holy places on the Jordan side. They are basic to her kind of meaning, as to Mrs Spark’s. It is a meaning you may find in a novel, not in an anti-novel. The Eichmann passage is characteristic of Mrs Spark’s sensibility, and of her desperate confidence in the novel. So that we may see how this confidence is based, she includes (as Camus and Iris Murdoch have included) a sermon, about the point of the holy places and their involvement with fraud and false emotion. She is telling us that her novel too gets its meaning from truths which can be misunderstood, and that it is an analogue of Jerusalem; but she is also saying that we need to see it as Jerusalem-shaped without forgetting that it contains, like the city, a good deal that may seem hard to relate to that model.
To emphasise this, the quality of observed life, she brings into play the sharp ear and the key-cold charity known from her earlier books. The dialogue is exemplary, Forsterian in its command of dialect. If she describes a cellar in Acre where the Crusader wall is still a foundation, she makes it a real cellar, not a symbol. People act credibly, are funny, make love, or fight like people in the real Jerusalem. To write such a book, one needs to be very inward with the novel as a metaphor for the world. Mrs Spark is precisely that; the book is, in an age of rather clumsy argument about fiction, a demonstration that great things can be done when a strong imagination determines to take up many aspects of the ‘kind of truth’ that fictions provide and bind them up into one volume.
(1965)
Bernard Malamud, having like many American writers to buy time in academies, has written only three books since the appearance in 1950 of his volume of stories, The Magic Barrel.1 They are The Natural, his first novel, which came out in 1952, The Assistant, published five years later, and A New Life, which now reaches England.1 The early stories were well received here, but the novels, which many Americans rate very highly, are not well known, and the new one provides an opportunity for English reviewers to consider them all.
These books have been slow to take because Malamud is in some ways a writer of alien sensibility. The pressure behind his work, in fact, is a powerful Jewish–American fantasy, a ghetto-dream coloured by a New World environment and qualified by an ironical self-criticism which controls, without quite drying up, the wetness of its self-indulgence. Diligently his characters make their own prisons in hopeless shops and mean rooms, and then inhabit them with ancient resignation. The reader has to decide how far the irony moderates his easy stock response. This is indeed a central difficulty of Malamud’s work, and clearly it is more testing for the foreigner. You have to know whether the occasional corruptness of style and invention is there because a dream is out of control or as a justifiable complexity of tone.
In the broadest terms Malamud’s method is to conduct his characters through a more or less plausible series of events to a climax by which they are frozen into ritual attitudes, and to allow this tableau to close the work. In a story called ‘The Mourners,’ a landlord tries to evict an agonised tenant but only reduces him to an hysterical act of mourning; the story ends with the landlord tearing a sheet off the bed, wrapping it around him, and joining in. In ‘The Lady of the Lake,’ Henry Levin has a dreamlike affair with a girl he believes to be the daughter of a rich and ancient Italian family; in its course he casually denies he is a Jew, and in the end loses her because of this, since she is really the caretaker’s daughter, has a Buchenwald brand on her breast, and will marry no one but a Jew. The real point of the story is that ‘Freeman’—as Levin calls himself, supposing it to be possible to be un-Jewish—represents not a special but a universal self-deception, though his being a Jew gives him access to a language of ritual gesture:
He groped for her breasts, to clutch, kiss or suckle them; but she had stepped among the statues, and when he vainly sought her in the veiled mist that had risen from the lake, still calling her name, Freeman embraced only moonlit stone.
In the title-story ‘The Magic Barrel,’ what seems to be a folk-tale about a marriage-broker—the kind of thing you might read in, say, Isaac Singer—takes a very odd turn, and has a ritual ending which seems to me comic; but an American Jewish friend finds it macabre.
Such is the ambiguity inherent in this use of ritual poses; again and again there is a contrast between some climactic tableau and the struggling day-to-day life of the characters, between deep emotions and English distorted by Yiddish idiom. The difference is comic or pathetic or both, and sometimes one wonders if Malamud ever means to be funny at all. But this doubt is dispelled by examples of sheer intelligent farce, like the theological debate between Negro Jews in ‘Angel Levine.’
These highly accomplished early works make available the theme of the imprisoned Jew; subsequently it can be shown that he is only a classic case of what everybody suffers from. Time and again Malamud returns to the small shop, the family whose tiny stake in the city is steadily reduced by supermarkets and slick competitors. Enterprise or education seem to offer a way of escape from one’s hole-in-the-wall; but the physical prison is only an external symbol of the real thing, which is the Jewish capacity to suffer, to achieve a sort of dignity in suffering, as a substitute for success and freedom. And this leads on to more general statements of the same theme. You may think that bricks and mortar are depriving you of Nature and so of Life. You rush at Nature and seize her breasts; but she soon has you back in prison. It is, in the end, the fact of being alive that shuts you off from Life.
Malamud repeatedly has his people make love for the first time in a field or a forest, often by a lake: good natural sex, but a dubious boon, and Nature soon has you back in a guilty bed, staring worriedly at the ceiling. The alfresco sex is the dream of an adolescent in his hole-in-the-wall; when he wakes up he’s still there behind the counter. This device is paralleled by a very personal stylistic habit, a blend of urban sex-slang with very careful and respectful natural description; deliberately and indeed ludicrously the two are fused in, for example, the description of a girl undressing in a mean bathroom: ‘her ass was like a flower.’
The pressure of this urban myth of natural freedom, and its ironic qualification, are easily spotted in Malamud’s strange first novel, The Natural, which is all baseball. It’s hard to imagine any English analogue to this one. Imagine a serious novel ending with a gripping match to decide the county cricket championship. Literary cricket is entirely a matter of Georgian pastoral. This book takes baseball without whimsy and whole; not only the players but the financiers and gamblers, the crackpot fans, the heroic myths, the insane statistics. (Last summer people were asking was it right for a ballplayer to break Babe Ruth’s venerable home-run record.) Here the game does the work of Jewishness in the stories; its mythology is set down uncritically, inflated indeed, to stand for the urban dream. The great player is a power like one of nature’s.
In one season the hero, a veteran of 34, rises to the top. As a boy genius, a natural, he had been maimed by a maniacal girl who picked up top athletes and shot them with silver bullets. Years later, recovered, he has his one season, breaks hundreds of records, makes the dream true. ‘Knock the cover off it,’ orders the manager. He does so, his bat (carved by his own hand out of virgin wood) gleaming in the sun, its impact producing a sudden thunderstorm. For this kind of thing Malamud uses a grotesque, bombastic prose, a deliberate impurity of style: ‘The third ball slithered at the batter like a meteor, the flame swallowing itself. He lifted the club to crush it into a universe of sparks. …’ Roy, the hero, falls under the spell of a bad girl, Memo (morality names), and dreams of silver bullets. After a losing spell he meets a lifesaving natural woman, makes love to her in a field after a swim, and regains his form. But she turns out to be a young grandmother, as you might expect of Dame Nature, and at a game he lays her low with a foul ball. After a bout of heroic overeating he falls ill, takes a bribe so as to get Memo, and is finished as a player.
The baseball fantasy serves a sophisticated allegory1; so does the prose. Even when Roy dreams of his disaster the language is ironical: ‘cut down in the very flower of his youth, lying in a red pool of his own blood.’ This is not the bad fine writing Malamud produces when he is self-indulgent, but an example of that occurs on the same page, when Roy finds himself in bed with Memo, thinking he is having a fine dreamy rural love affair, but actually sleeping with the old evil. The point of The Natural is precisely that Nature does betray the heart that loves her—the fact of life Malamud hates most.
The Assistant, most achieved of the novels takes us back to the ailing Jew in his collapsing business trapped in his shop and a lightning conductor for the trouble of a whole neighbourhood. Trade was never worse but the holdupniks rob his till and break his head rather than those of the prosperous liquor dealer across the street. The life of the shop, the Yiddish English, the ghetto patience, are perfectly done. But there is much more to it; Malamud is a big, ambitious writer. The Assistant is, for the most part, the story of how the Bobers, against their will, acquired an assistant, a down-and-out Italian who insinuates himself into their lives though disliking Jews; he cannot resist the quality of their misery and patience. The first ritual climax of the book comes when the assistant has wormed his way not only into the shop but, very slowly, into the favour of Bober’s daughter. She is about ready to sleep with him when a criminal associate of his tries to rape her in a park; the assistant saves her, but, caught up in the sexual excitement, rapes her himself. ‘Afterwards, she cried, “Dog—uncircumcised dog!” ’ A great deal depends on the success of this strange sentence, for the rest of the book deals with the man’s attempt to recover his position (Malamud seems to like the situation of a man courting a girl he has already had) and so prepare his complete surrender to the Jewish thing, marked by his circumcision on the last page. I think the trick works. Malamud does it by rhetoric, and by a sort of impurity of tone in the build-up to Helen’s cry; for a moment this makes you lose touch with the existential situation, and you take the cry abstractly, as part of some ritual pattern, which it is.
Malamud depends heavily on this power to modulate from personalities into abstractions, from life to ritual. What he is doing has a clear sociological basis in the etiolated survival of one culture within another, of old-world Jewishness in America; the literary problem is whether the sentimentality this situation generates escapes from the story and infects the teller. The answer is probably that it does so far less often than might be feared.
A New Life is much bigger and looser. A New Yorker called Levin gets a job in a fifth-rate college in the Far West. He has had a rough life; at 30 he wants to leave it behind, enjoy teaching, come to terms with Nature. The college is terrible, and we hear a lot about it, its courses and its politics; an election, for the chairmanship of the department, is one of the points to which the whole story moves, through ambushes of intrigue, concealed and stolen documents, tale-telling etc. But there the resemblance to Snow ends. Levin is prone to absurd behaviour—a farcical attempt on a waitress, lecturing with his fly open—but there the resemblance to Amis ends. There is so much of this, such careful recording of professorial idiosyncrasy and faculty parties, and in particular so detailed a record of one married couple, the Gilleys, that it looks for a while as if Malamud had rid himself of his obsessive plot and decided to give personalities their simple value. There is even, at first, no emphasis whatever on Levin’s Jewishness.
But this is a trick, like the careful non-committal record of trees, flowers, rainfall. Levin is the urban Jew who has made it out into Nature, ‘that marvellous invention.’ But the traps are set; first the waitress, in a barn, among cows, until a rival comes and steals their clothes. Then, as a further warning, a colleague who like Memo, has a fibroma in a breast; and finally Pauline Gilley, a real Nature figure, married to a hopeless, seedless husband whose main interests are various rapes on nature with gun, rod and club. She is clumsy and untidy in her house; when Levin meets her in a forest (which turns out later to be college property) they make love at once. But soon she is visiting him secretly in his lodgings amid increasing difficulties; he is not on Gilley’s side in the election campaign, he is jealous of his predecessor, another liberal from the East, with whom Pauline had also slept. He suffers a presumably psychosomatic affliction, a ‘fiery pain in the ass at emission.’ Malamud puts an enormous amount into the chronicle of these grandeurs and miseries, and skilfully conducts the politics and the lovemaking to a simultaneous crisis.
Yet it is at the very end that his real power shows. He has spent a lot of trouble on Gilley, so that character is ripe for a superb scene with Levin when he knows his wife is leaving him. Gilley is now the bachelor, Levin the married man, his Jewishness leaking through into the text as his burden increases. Gilley tells him what he is taking on, information not to be had simply by sleeping with Pauline. What he is really explaining is the Nature that drives men back to their holes-in-the-wall, into a necessary Jewish patience. She is congenitally discontented, given to nervous depression, domestically inefficient, irregular in her menstrual cycle. Then there are the adopted children—delightful, but there is the eczema, the bronchitis … Gilley, from his strong position, gives Pauline custody of the children on condition that Levin gives up college teaching. As he prepares for a life of patience, Levin discovers that Pauline had selected his application from the pile because his photograph reminded her of a Jewish boy she had once known. ‘So I was chosen,’ he says; they drive off, snapped by Gilley’s Leica, with the pregnant Pauline carrying her ointment-smeared baby. Levin gets the Nature he went West for.
A New Life carries its irony hidden in the title, and—mature, craftsmanlike book as it is—carries its myth deep, gives way less easily than the others to the big ritual gesture. But its power comes from the same source, and its failures too. Levin himself is the most serious of them; his necessary past is not fully authenticated, his farcical aspect does not belong. Yet the conception works; unlike his namesake in the early story, he reaches the breasts of his beloved, but they are still signed with the mark of prison. All in all, the book has, under its carefully presented plot and character, the old obsessive, ritual theme.
(1962)
There is one famous compliment to a novelist that nobody is ever going to offer Saul Bellow, and that is to say that his books are the product of a sensibility so fine that no idea could violate it. It seems doubtful whether any interesting writer, even James, really fits that formula; in any case, if you think that is the condition the art should aspire to, Bellow is not your man. Yet for many people he is the man. In America, where more and more the hypotheses of literary historians jostle works of literature, Bellow has already been snugly fitted into neat intelligible patterns. He is the big novelist who emerged at the precise conjunction of race, milieu and moment—when, as Leslie Fiedler puts it, ‘the Jews for the first time move into the centre of American culture’ as the group best-equipped to act as an urban, Europe-centred élite. Augie March is Huck Finn Chicago-Jewish-style, still, in Mr Fiedler’s dialect, in search of a primal innocence, but above all an urban Jew, with the appropriate worries, failures and aspirations. Or, according to Norman Podhoretz, Bellow in 1953 came through with Augie March at just the right moment to encapsulate and typify the new revisionist liberalism, moving away from the Left at the same conscientious pace as Partisan Review.
Aside even from these professionally large and resonant explanations, much has been written about Bellow, and this is not surprising. When all the reservations have been made he is so good that anybody can see it with half an eye; only severe doctrinal adhesion prevents the recognition that he is a far more interesting writer than Mailer.1 One remarkable thing about him is that along the way he has conjured out of the air new talents, powers he apparently did not have, even in posse, when he started in the ’Forties. With this bonus he is more gifted than the gifted young, including the handsomely endowed Philip Roth. Furthermore, he is, for all the glitter of ideas, accessible, easier to get to than John Hawkes, further out in the open, less constricted, than Malamud. Thus he made everybody flock to read him without sacrificing intellectual seriousness, and without growing plump enough to be caught in the meshes of the critic’s hypotheses.
Bellow’s career has some curious aspects. He has never lacked support. Dangling Man brought him respect, nearly 20 years ago, not only in America but here. Rereading it now, one finds it a little rigid, worthy but off-putting, a book one does not wish longer. I suppose that at the time, in a different and on the whole duller literary epoch, the intelligence with which the wretched but hard-thinking hero was placed, his eloquent and intellectually respectable introspection, were what won perceptive praise. Now the diagrams of alienation seem too square, the prose somewhat inelastic; it is hard to find in it the vivacity and inventive power one associates with Bellow. Perhaps it might be said that the austerity of the book gives it a kind of fidelity to its moment. Anyway, The Victim, though it had some of this rigour, and some of this period quality, was more various and flexible. But the big change, the détente, came only in the early ’Fifties, with The Adventures of Augie March.
It would be easy to run through the roll-call of this book’s deficiencies, but the point is that Bellow had found his new form. Perhaps it struck him that the tragic stance of classic alienation, and even the existence of intellectuals, looked funny in this new world. They became a source of gags, and the hero turned picaro. Simultaneously with this new circumstance, Bellow became profusely inventive, exhibited a sense of the true comedy of intellect, which is painful as well as funny. There was some lamenting about what he gave up—the effects which arise from a firm management of structure, for example; it seemed that he thought these appropriate only to the short novel, and this guess was apparently confirmed when he next wrote a very good novella, Seize the Day, and went on to another inventive sprawl in Henderson the Rain King.
At least one ingredient is common to all the novels: the hero is, in Alfred Kazin’s phrase, ‘burdened by a speculative quest.’ They all have the same humble need (however little this humility comes through in their conduct) to sort out human destiny by sorting out their own. In a world of chaotic particulars, where the only speculations which draw any support are bogus, vulgarised or corrupt, the speculative quest turns into a sequence of extravagantly funny or pathetic gestures, and the happiest ending that can be hoped for is that of Seize the Day, when Tommy Wilhelm, a middle-aged flop, winds up weeping at the funeral of somebody he doesn’t know.
The great merit, and at the same time the great difficulty, of such writing is that it does try to get into fiction the farcical excitements of thinking as distinct from behaving. To do this straight seems almost impossible, or, if you think it works in La Nausée, unrepeatable. Bellow gets round the problem in the same way every time. The speculative interest is never put straight in. In Seize the Day the wise sayings come from the fraudulent Tamkin; in Henderson fantasy bears the freight of speculation. The new book1 is full of furious thinking, and Herzog, the hero, does most of it, but not ‘straight.’ The first sentence of the book says: ‘If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me.’
Herzog is in the line of the fat novels, but has more structure than the others. The hero is a very well-read Chicago Jew on the point of a breakdown. Most of his thinking is done in letters, the kind of letter you might frenetically compose, if you had enough in your head, in the early stages of a sleepless night. ‘Dear Herr Nietzsche, May I ask you a question from the floor?’ ‘Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression “the fall into the quotidian.” When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?’ ‘Dear General Eisenhower …’ The letters, in a sense, do the work of Tamkin. As a way out of the difficulty, which was to show an intellectual operating in the world, they seem to me to have the exceptional merit of turning the technical trick and then, because sparingly used and full of wit, to become delightful in themselves.
Herzog is an authority on everything from Romantic theology to fish-scales, but all this equipment is of interest only as useful in the speculative quest. After all his adventures he may wind up where we find him at the start of the book, in his weird derelict Vermont country house in a state of peaceful choicelessness. But the main business of the novel is Herzog, under stress, trying to sort out Herzog. He can in various ways tell us all about himself: a genuine old Jewish type that digs emotion, but grown at this moment—his second marriage ludicrously broken—narcissistic, masochistic, anachronistic. His friends a sort of traitors, a bunch of real grotesques (one of them gives the kiss of life to a monkey dying of tuberculosis), seem to be engaged in ‘a collective project’ to destroy his vanity and push him ‘down in the mire of post-Renaissance, post-humanistic, post-Cartesian dissolution, next door to the Void.’
Out of the goings-on that ensue there begins to emerge an interesting design. Herzog, forced into sacrifice anyway, sees that what he has to sacrifice himself to is the truth, and we watch him both consciously trying to do this and unconsciously doing it. Under the pressure of his ‘reality instructors’ he moves hastily about, colliding with the world from which he is dissociated; in the subway he writes letters about negative entropy, and emerges to observe ‘an escaped balloon fleeing like a sperm, black and quick into the orange dust of the west. …’ (This is not only powerful and versatile, it concretely presents the dissociation between things as they are and Herzog’s speculations.) He is on the way to see a splendidly undemanding sexpot, whom he enjoys with the same comic metaphysical detachment from sense. The truth about sacrifice can’t be got to by that route, nor by fast useless journeys, made by Herzog with ‘all the dead and mad’ in his company or custody, nor by surveying ‘the story of my life—how I rose from humble origins to complete disaster.’ When the answers eventually come, they come both from without and within.
The long climactic passage of this novel, which is about Herzog’s trip to Chicago to see his daughter, is the first piece in which Bellow has improved on Seize the Day, a book it somewhat resembles. It has many layers, and a diagram would be misleading, especially if it sounded conventional or banal; but Herzog pays an important visit to an old, still Yiddish aunt, and carries off a gun he had once seen ineffectively flourished by his father. By this agency he gets his chance to come, though imperfectly, to terms with indignity and suffering, and that is a step in the necessary direction. As he had informed General Eisenhower in a particularly abstruse letter, the forces that make us human are history, memory, and a knowledge of death. A day in a New York courtroom had taught him more—for example about how high he stood in the scale of affluent misery; and he feels this more keenly when in a prison cell himself, knowing that this is not the place for him to do time; he belongs to the privileged classes who do it on the street. Finally, as in Seize the Day, the decisive message comes from the wisdom of a crank: you can’t live until you know death; practise lying in a coffin, know it while you still live; then live. So, as far as it can be done in a self-hating civilisation, in an emotional language corrupted by all the fraudulent modern talk of crisis, apocalypse, desperation, Herzog touches bottom and finds health.
Bellow must be sick of hearing about his deficiencies, especially about his failure to invent women. There isn’t a conventionally well-written woman in Herzog, though the hero’s second wife is convincing as the inhabitant of a bad dream, a figure of fun who then bursts nightmarishly into the police station to press Herzog down to the bottom. The other girls, Herzog’s mistresses, are about as real as Smollett’s, but little more is needed. This is a slightly caricatured world, male, Jewish, comic and pathetic, temporarily crazy too, so that the men friends are no less grotesque than the wife, and the remnants of Herzog’s childhood are endearing emblems rather than original experiences profoundly evoked. This is the world refracted through the ageing Bellow hero : bricks and mortar, cab-drivers, what might be seen from the corner of an abstracted eye, are idiomatic, accurate; dialogue also can have accuracy as well as comic energy. But the nearer the foreground, the nearer the main interest, they come, the more distorted the characters tend to look.
Still, it is plausibly the view from Herzog’s disciplinary coffin. So although the book has clear limitations, they are a long way off. And why should we be surprised that Americans make much of such powers of invention and intellect, such comic energy, so genuine a speculative quest? Wouldn’t we?
(1965)
‘Rammel’ is a word that recurs frequently in Mr Sillitoe’s books. It isn’t in the Concise Oxford, nor yet in the Shorter, but it makes a decent showing in the OED itself, which says that the primary meaning is branches, twigs, bits of old wood, but gives examples of its use in the Midlands and specifically Nottingham as a word for old rubbish of all sorts. One way of understanding why it is so often on the tip of Mr Sillitoe’s pen is to carry out upon it the operation which Kenneth Burke calls ‘joycing’: ram and mel, strength and sweetness, violence with a sexual note that the taste of honey reinforces, and the whole thing against a background of urban and industrial waste. Rommel, in short, means Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
A deep and studious interest in the constituents of rammel is one of the determinants of this author’s talent. True, his first book was the thing itself; but even in The Key of the Door it is lovingly catalogued, and the violence it promotes channelled into the peculiar tough sweetness of the sexual descriptions. Even the Forces, for all their bull, present an orderly paradigm of the industrial arrangements that excrete rammel. ‘If it moves, screw it; if you can’t screw it steal it; if you can’t steal it set fire to it’, is a rammelly ethos. Mr Sillitoe’s heroes are moving out of Nottingham, but this is the mark set upon them—tough talking, drinking, screwing, stealing, insubordination. What they acquire in the world is a respect for books and thought; in this way they learn to despise rammel, to estimate the degree to which the poor who live in it are cheated and deprived. So they move out of the world that cheated them into jungle or desert, not so much in order to help the Malayan Communists or the FLN as to find themselves in a world purged of rammel.
These preoccupations impose a pattern on Mr Sillitoe’s novels. Their base is Saturday Night and Sunday Morning with its back-to-backs, factories and pubs. Their climaxes are fights with rivals and husbands, and they end in action on behalf of the militant proletariat as a means to personal salvation. This is, at any rate, the goal towards which he has been moving, and the paradigm appears in almost ideal clarity in The Death of William Posters.1 The language in which it is presented has an appropriate blend of rammel and bookishness. The hero, ageing a little from book to book, is potent, belligerent, a drinker (double rums with pints), victimised but independent. The difference is that he is, on the first page, on his way out of Nottingham.
Frank Dawley has sold his car, parted with his wife, and set forth. Only the flashbacks are set in Nottingham. The first section is about an affair with a district nurse in Lincolnshire—urban man in an icy pastoral environment, labouring, reading, meeting a primitive artist. The second part is set in London—an affair with an LSE girl, wife of a surveyor. Each part ends with a violent encounter: Frank beats up the first husband, is knocked down by the other’s car. The third and final section shows Frank on the move again, taking his girl with him, all the way to Tangier, where he leaves her, pregnant, and goes off to run guns to the FLN in the desert. In The Key of the Door we are always being brought back to Nottingham; we have to feel it and the jungle all at the same time. Here the burden of rammel is borne by the characterisation and more especially by the prose.
Sillitoe’s style is one of habitual violence, a deliberate reflection of the hated, cheated prole, crossed by a certain awkward artifice, which is correlative with the hero’s self-education. It is clear that the maintenance of this stylistic attitude presents him with enormous problems. There is evidence of slackness, fatigue; there is the practical difficulty of making fights violent when everything else is violent. So the language becomes loosely ecstatic, as in talk of
a hand cracking on flesh, and the purple spark-fanged floor on the sway and loose burst at Keith like a piece of ice over the eye-face, an engulfing polar cap.
Or a fist is described as ‘bursting, a whale-head driving across the light, packed with flintheads and darkness.’ A violent hyperbole afflicts the homely prose of the working-man hero: ‘The sky eats into my brain here,’ he notes. It is a thought one doubts ever got thought. Mere description blossoms with a rash of irrelevant conceits: ‘The island lay like a death-mask, the tip of its black chin flashing a lighted pimple in dubious welcome to the ship.’ When a man has a hangover he leaves his body and travels ‘among star-sparks of half life on his way back into his eyes and brain, toes and stone-cold bollocks.’ For a conceited orgasm, try: ‘Flames from all her limbs leapt to the middle of her as if to greet the guest that slid so ceremoniously in.’
This is the prose of a writer dangerously stretched; and for that reason and others it occasionally reminds one of the Lawrence of Lady Chatterley. In one passage Sillitoe achieves the unnecessary feat of parodying a chat between Mellors and Connie. The LSE graduate is in bed with Frank, and he lectures her on love and work:
In my ideal society all advertisements would be ripped off the streets, and instead there’d be well-placed neon signs in red saying: ‘Work! Work! Work!’ Maybe now and again there’d be a little one going on and off saying: ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’
With Frank’s ‘broad-shouldered nakedness looming in the half-light,’ Myra is healed by darkness: ‘In spite of the black passion of his desires, her body seemed to belong to her again.…’ With these blunt lectures and coitional therapy we’re not far from the gamekeeper’s hut and the old magic carrying out its ‘desperate healing of the interrupted bloodflow.’
It seems that lust and rage, dancing attendance on a novelist’s rhetoric, can have the effect of parching it. And in his concern for rhetorical effect, he can be negligent of structure. Key of the Door was messy, the new book is obvious and untidy. In the first part, the Lincolnshire affair, paragraphs about Frank’s early life are dropped into the narrative, and especially into the dialogue, and they do a lot of harm. Sartre, who is exceptionally uneasy about fictional temporality, used to argue that novels are at their strongest in dialogue, because the time of dialogue is so closely analogous to that of the reader, so that he is in less danger of ‘jumping out of the book.’ There is something in this; Sillitoe’s reminiscences are a great drag on the dialogue in this novel, and the reader may have some sympathy with Sartre, who would be in and out of it like the lady in bed at old fairgrounds.
It’s impossible to guess how much damage all this does to a writer like Sillitoe, a writer ambitious enough to write not what Frank calls ‘shit-novels’ but the sort that ‘prises open previously unknown regions within yourself.’ He mentions Conrad, Melville, Stendhal; but Conrad stands not only for an occasional hysterical inflation but for intense concentration on form. It seems characteristic that the best writing in Sillitoe’s last two novels comes at the time of his heroes’ self-expression in action, and in a context of guerrilla warfare. Give him a small society of men, their ankles tied together with string, lying in ambush for the imperialist French, and he will release his hero and his style at one stroke. Even so, these advantages can be thrown away by a rhetorical over-explicitness, as in this book. ‘Something in him was going to be reconstituted. … His life had to be filled from the fountains of his own desert.…’
This book is certainly, by any standards the author would accept, a failure. The first—the Country—section has excellent passages registering the cold, the hero’s adaptation to country ways, the fantasy of life in the cottage of the primitive painter (his masterpiece is ‘Christ the Lincolnshire Poacher’). The second section—London—has a not unsubtle contrast between Frank’s integrity and the endangered gift of the painter when taken up by smooth metropolitan artmen; there is also some point in making the second girl’s husband nice (he loves the country and goes on three-day drunks) so that Frank doesn’t have to beat him up, as he did the adman husband of the nurse. But the final—Desert—section is the best-written; the style is released with the man.
The mythical figure of Bill Posters is certainly an agreeable invention. He is the figure who at all times and everywhere ‘will be prosecuted.’ He represents the indestructible cunning and evasiveness by which a man survives among the rammel; admirable in some ways, his is a way of life that has to be destroyed on the way to self-fulfilment. The myth is well, if predictably, handled, and it will cause little surprise that Frank in a revery associates him with his friend’s picture of Christ. Breaking free from Bill Posters, Frank attunes himself first to a Mellors-like independence (sturdily antinomian, indifferent to work as the bosses understand it, educated) and then to the sort of anguish Bill Posters, preoccupied with his incessant tricks and escapes, has no time to feel. The conversation between him and the wild and wily painter on the subject of art and pessimism, and the rejection of art in favour of action, is beneficial to the novel; but mostly Frank preaches without resistance. His hatred of the telly, the ads, the London crowd scurrying for comfort into the tube at rush hour, have imaginative vivacity; but both he and Albert the painter sink into lay figures, flatly and feebly rendered from the outside. Albert is 42 but could be seen as ‘little more than a man of 30 who had already suffered the fires of life’s iniquity.’ Frank is labelled ‘a strong character’ with ‘a rich mineral coal lump’ of a brain. Nothing much about him really matters except the fantasy that he chucked up everything and, at the end of some nut-strewn road, killed Bill Posters.
Curious that this English dream should appear at the same moment as Mailer’s American Dream. Mailer’s is metropolitan and by comparison distinctly upper-class, but it is certainly violent, and has to do with changing the patterns of social and individual life. But that it is a dream is a donnée of Mailer’s book; and for all its absurdity, its intellectual irresponsibility, its dangerously ambiguous presentation of pathological data, it shows what a difference it makes to have a richer and more relaxed rhetoric, a more natural control of the emblematic situation (in Mailer’s book, the high balcony) and of the imagery necessary to writing of this kind. Avoiding the indiscriminate sensationalism of Sillitoe, Mailer, at the risk of absurdity, makes smell the king of the senses. I’d rather be found to share Sillitoe’s view of the world than Mailer’s magical nonsense about cancer, orgasm and the moon; but in the unjust world of the novel it is Mailer who sounds right. They both send their violent fornicators into the violent world; what makes Mailer’s much more pretentious hero work is a kind of cheating: an irony, as in the characterisation of the police, which is totally absent from the English writer.
It does seem unfair. Reviewers have quoted pages of rammel from Mailer. Sillitoe feels strongly that newspapers are termites devouring civilisation, and this kind of observation is made in Mailer’s book only by square professors of psychology. It’s just that he can write novels—look at the dialogue, proceeding as it does from situations preposterous in the last degree, but racing forward, creating its own reality. Look at the saving salute to sanity from dementia in the last paragraph. It seems the first truth about novels is still that they have to be made, and as novels, not as curtains of violent-coloured words draped over plot-props. It may be something wrong in the nature of things that allows Mailer’s novel to be so much better than Sillitoe’s, but it seems to be so, and there’s a moral in that.
(1965)
1 I have borrowed some notions and terms from A. C. Charity’s Events and Their After Life (C.U.P., 1966). For a fuller discussion see Novel, Summer 1968.
1 It is worth remembering Lawrence’s capacity for having things both ways. He balances his more extreme metaphysical and occult fantasies with a sophisticated pragmatism; the effect in his fiction is to have passages that jeer at Birkin’s doctrines. This hedging of bets I occasionally refer to, but it gets in the way of exposition, and the reader might like to re-introduce it into his reflections if he finds something that seems unexpectedly and positively absurd in my account of Lawrence’s crisis-philosophy.
1 Translated by Roger Senbouse. Farrar Strauss.
1 Calder.
1 A Moveable Feast. Scribner.
2 This, needless to say, was written years before Mr Hotchner’s further revelations.
1 Samuel Beckett. Calder.
1 How It Is. Grove.
1 Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
1 Nausea. Translated by Robert Baldick. Penguin.
2 The Philosophy of Sartre. By Mary Warnock. Hutchinson.
3 Situations. Translated by Benita Eisler. Hamish Hamilton.
1 The Mandelbaum Gate. MacMillan.
1 The Spire. Harcourt, Brace and World.
1 In fact Mr Golding worked it all out himself, simply walking round the Cathedral and asking himself how he would have done it.
1 Tuberculosis of the spine, it appears.
1 Heinemann.
1 Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction. Heinemann.
1 Muriel Spark. Centaur Press. It wouldn’t be true charity to call this a good book, since it is sometimes sloppily handled and, in the biographical part, a shade embarrassing. But Mr Stanford makes many profitable observations, and is interesting on the verse, which her publisher ought to reprint. [He has now done so, 1967.]
2 Macmillan.
1 Penguin. Several of Mrs Spark’s novels are available in Penguin.
1 Broadcast by the B.B.C. and condensed in my article ‘The House of Fiction,’ Partisan Review, Spring, 1963.
1 Recently published in paperback. Ace.
1 Eyre & Spottiswoode. A fourth novel, The Fixes, appeared in 1966, and there has been a further collection of stories called Idiots First.
1 Exegetes have shown that The Natural closely follows Arthurian legend.
1 I should now say that An American Dream has caused me to modify this view.
1 Herzog. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
1 The Death of William Posters. W. H. Allen.