Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, the Marquis de Sade and William Burroughs …
Few writers have so identified themselves with their own work as Scott Fitzgerald. With some – Ernest Hemingway or Evelyn Waugh – it is difficult enough to separate the man from the legend, but in Fitzgerald’s case one often feels that there was only the legend in the first place. Jazz-age darling, spoiled genius and alcoholic writer romantically dying the slow Hollywood death, Fitzgerald played these parts as if they were roles in the movies whose scripts he later found himself forced to write.
Matthew Bruccoli’s elaborately researched biography goes some way to disinterring the real Fitzgerald, though perhaps his warts-and-all portrait is yet another romantic fiction, and one that happens to be closer to our own taste. All the same, Fitzgerald’s extraordinary charm, and that touching determination to be a success, to run faster than the dream and to enfold it, come through as strongly as ever.
The son of a failed furniture manufacturer in St Paul, Fitzgerald felt an outsider from the start. Desperate for admiration, he struggled to reach the school football team, but was labelled a show-off. At Princeton, which he regarded as a rich young man’s country club, he found his first social success. However, his academic record was a disaster, and already he was rationalizing this into a potent myth of romantic failure. His poems and stories in the college magazine sound many of the themes in his later fiction – the gifted man ruined by a selfish woman, the hero half-consciously seeking destruction, and the strong strain of masochism.
He soon set about satisfying his own obsessions. Fitzgerald’s service in the army was another partial failure. He was considered an unreliable officer and was not sent overseas. The captain in charge of his training platoon was Dwight D. Eisenhower, and though, sadly, Ike’s opinion of Fitzgerald is unrecorded his fellow officers disliked Fitzgerald and played elaborate practical jokes on him. But while he was stationed at Montgomery, Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, his future wife and a destructive force beyond all his dreams.
The last of the southern belles, Zelda was beautiful, daredevil and exhibitionist, a brilliant and racy talker. She smoked in the street, flirted outrageously and had scandalized entire states. To win her, and the money he needed to satisfy her own demands for success, Fitzgerald wrote his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Its publication in 1920 was a critical and commercial triumph, launched the Jazz Age and locked Scott and Zelda into a legend that only ended with her death thirty years later in an asylum fire.
Fitzgerald was always puritanical about sex, and his views on marriage were surprisingly conventional. ‘Just being in love is work enough for a woman. If she … makes herself look pretty when her husband comes home in the evening, and loves him and helps him with his work and encourages him – oh, I think that’s the sort of work that will save her.’
Given her entirely opposite nature, Zelda must have been a powerful spur to Fitzgerald, touching his deepest dreams of romantic rejection. It is hard to imagine him writing his masterpiece of nostalgia and regret, The Great Gatsby, without the aid of this tragic but extraordinary woman. Her first mental breakdown in 1929, like the Crash itself, marked the end for Fitzgerald, and his imagination never recovered. Between 1920 and 1929, according to Bruccoli, Fitzgerald earned $244,967, at least six times its present value, but from then on his income sharply declined. If the twenties had spoiled and encouraged Fitzgerald, the thirties ignored him.
Fitzgerald’s best work is about the failure to recapture past emotions, and one feels that the series of calamities that form his later life was almost consciously set up to provoke that poignant regret. During the endless champagne party of the twenties this seemed touching and romantic, but far less so in the thirties against a background of real failure and despair.
His last three years in Hollywood, contrary to popular myth, were modestly successful. But he died, in the words of John O’Hara, ‘a prematurely old little man haunting bookshops unrecognized’. His last royalty statement in 1940 from Scribners reported sales of forty copies for all his books, including seven copies of The Great Gatsby, for a total royalty of $13.
Henry Miller bursts into the twentieth-century novel like a reprobate uncle gate-crashing an over-sedate party, scandalizing the company with a string of off-colour stories before slipping away with the two prettiest wives, but leaving behind him the strong sense that for a few minutes everything has become a great deal more fun. Reading this lively and entertaining biography, I was struck by Miller’s charm, amiability and irrepressible good nature, qualities (none too prevalent among writers) which most people who met him instantly recognized. I can still remember reading Tropic of Cancer when I first went to Paris after the war, and being stunned by the no-nonsense frankness of Miller’s language and by the novel’s sheer zest and attack. The ozone of sex rushed through Miller’s pages, and his prose had a life-hungry energy that made Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the close of Ulysses seem contrived and mannered.
Miller was never a commercial pornographer (well, hardly ever), but the new puritanism of our day has helped to devalue his reputation in recent years. The sexual imagination needs every encouragement to remain in the daylight where we can see it, rather than plunge again into the subterranean world of repression and taboo from which Miller helped to free us. Feminist critics like Kate Millet have castigated Miller, in effect for seeing sex from the viewpoint of an eighteen-year-old stoker on his first shore-leave, rushing down the gangway towards a welcoming party of good-time girls, but that, alas, is how most eighteen-year-old males see sex, certainly those from Henry Miller’s background. Miller, it seems to me, was the first proletarian writer to create a pornographic literature based on the language and sexual behaviour of the working class, and this was the source of his appeal to the American servicemen whose elbows jostled mine in the Paris bookshops of the forties.
Another problem Miller poses for the reader is that of knowing who exactly he is. Henry Miller is the hero of his fiction and his own greatest creation, so much so that, as Robert Ferguson remarks, he became a hybrid of man and book. This conflation of author and text is anathema at present, given our desperate need to demystify the writer and shoulder aside any claims he may make to the ownership of his own text. Irritatingly for the deconstructionists, Miller’s novels, like his life, only make sense in terms of the mythic illusions he managed to weave around them.
Since Miller was his only real subject matter, it is not surprising that he waited until his forties before becoming a writer. Only then had he amassed enough material to make himself the hero of his own imagination. He was born in 1891 into the immigrant German community in Brooklyn, the son of a hard-drinking tailor and a doting mother who must have given him his lifelong self-confidence, so much so that the young Henry developed what Robert Ferguson terms a reverse paranoia, in which he suspected others of plotting secretly to find ways of increasing his happiness. His mother urged him to read aloud to his playmates, and Henry made the interesting discovery that while this tended to put the boys to sleep, the girls very much enjoyed it, a phenomenon visible at poetry readings today.
After leaving school Miller worked briefly at his father’s tailor’s shop, where one of the customers was Frank Harris, who scandalized everyone at his fittings by revealing that he wore no underwear. At the age of nineteen Henry began a long-standing affair with a sympathetic widow in her mid-thirties. He spent his spare time roaming around Brooklyn, his head full of Walt Whitman, probably the greatest influence on Miller with his plain man’s stance, emotional humanitarianism and notoriety. Miller dreamed of becoming a writer, but already suffered from intense writer’s block long before penning a word.
He married Beatrice, the first of his five wives, in 1917 in order to avoid being conscripted, but the marriage soon faded and a few years later in a Manhattan dance-hall he met a taxi-dancer, June Smith, who talked to him about Strindberg and Pirandello. She became his second wife and the great inspiration of his fiction for the next forty years. This erotic but remote woman, who shared his passion for Dostoevsky and was probably the only woman whom Miller really loved, later prompted Anaїs Nin to comment: ‘The more I read Dostoevsky the more I wonder about June and Henry and whether they are imitations … are they literary ghosts? Do they have souls of their own?’ Together they opened a speak-easy, exploited gullible businessmen who became infatuated with June, and immersed themselves in Greenwich Village bohemia. Smarting from his wife’s lesbian friendships, Miller was still unable to write, until June gave him a volume of Proust and the idea struck him that he could become a working-class Proust, a notion that formed the basis of his entire career.
Needing to place some kind of distance between himself and his Brooklyn subject matter, he set off for Paris in 1930, where he soon established a reputation as a starving artist but astutely worked out a rota system by which he dined every evening at the home of a different friend, a traditional rite of passage for so many aspiring writers. He helped to found a group called the New Instinctivists (they were against admirals but for rear-admirals, against prostitutes but for whores, against the photographing of hands – particularly poets’ hands – and, of course, against the New Instinctivism) and began a heady, ten-year affair with Anaїs Nin. She saw him as the Mellors to her Lady Chatterley, but was surprised to find ‘a gentle German who could not bear to let the dishes go unwashed’. Inspired by Nin’s exotic and hyperventilating persona, every bit as self-created as his own, and excited by her moods and what he described as her singing in ‘a sort of monotonous, inharmonic Cuban wail’, Miller at last began to write what was to become his first and greatest novel, Tropic of Cancer. The title was his nickname for one of June’s breasts, Tropic of Capicorn for the other.
Celebrity followed its publication in France in 1934, though it was not until 1961, nearly thirty years after it was written, that it was at last published in the United States. By then Miller had long since moved to Big Sur on the California coast, where he became one of the gurus of the sixties, a venerated sage and cosmic tourist who dipped his feet into Scientology, Christian Science, white witchcraft and Ramakrishna.
He lived to an immense old age, his charm and optimism intact, delighted by his long-delayed success, enjoying his fame and his ping-pong and the succession of beautiful women like Brenda Venus, a Playboy gatefold model, who happily befriended him. Thinking of the morose and ungenerous glare which our own most famous ‘old devil’ turns upon the world, it is refreshing to be reminded of Miller’s warmth, love of women and rapscallion good humour.
Armchair travellers who happily sailed with Gavin Young aboard his Slow Boats to China should dust down their oilskins and sou’westers, settle themselves comfortably by the winter fireside and prepare to set off on another enchanted voyage. In Search of Conrad is the most pleasurable book I have read this year, and far more than a collection of traveller’s tales, though any travel book by Young exists in a class of its own.
Part mariner’s log and part detective story, it brilliantly evokes the Far-Eastern landscapes fixed for ever in our imaginations by Conrad’s novels. But above all Young makes us realize that the world Conrad described nearly a century ago is still there, far from our marinas and airports and international hotels, waiting for the determined traveller among the archipelagos of the South China and Java Seas, still haunting the secret rivers of Borneo and the Celebes.
Thanks in part to Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Conrad is chiefly identified with his short novel, Heart of Darkness, the story of a European trader deranged by the cruelties of the then Belgian Congo. But much of Conrad’s greatest fiction – in particular Lord Jim and Almayer’s Folly - is set on the other side of the world, among the islands of the East Indies through which he had sailed as a merchant marine officer during most of the 1880s and as master of the barque Otago, his first and last command.
A newspaper correspondent and war reporter for many years, Young had often visited Bangkok, Borneo and Singapore, places well known to Conrad and familiar settings for his novels and stories. Many of the characters and incidents in his fiction are a complex blend of the real and imaginary, so much so that Young decided to retrace Conrad’s journeys around the East Indies and try to discover the sources of the events that had inspired the great mariner-novelist. His quest begins, fittingly, in Singapore, now a high-rise enclave of late twentieth-century commerce, but a hundred years ago the home port of the character who dominates Young’s book, Capt. William Lingard. This daring privateer and owner-captain had found a secret route up the dangerous Berau River in east Borneo and was the original of Capt. Tom Lingard, played with such panache by Ralph Richardson in Carol Reed’s An Outcast of the Islands.
William Lingard had employed a Eurasian book-keeper named Charles Olmeijer to represent him in his Berau office, and he too appears, as Kaspar Almayer, in Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands. Young follows both the true and fictional trails from Singapore to the Berau River, by way of Jakarta, Makassar and Surabaya, outposts of the exotic that come alive under the author’s affectionate gaze, like so many tropical Samarkands. He takes ship in a series of small trading vessels of the kind he described in Slow Boats to China, manned by gregarious and charming crews who seem to have responded wholeheartedly to the romantic dream that impelled this obsessed and affable Englishman.
More vividly than most novelists could manage, Young lovingly describes these eccentric boats, rusty hulks dipping top-heavy through these magical seas, skippered by eccentric captains happy to enrol themselves for a few hours or days in the author’s quest. No one can evoke so subtly the pregnant mystery of a strange estuary or shoreline, or bring alive the scents and colours of a nondescript port that suddenly detaches itself from the background jungle and is to be one’s dubious home for the next ten days.
And overlaying this feast is the spirit of Conrad, and the ghosts of his characters who still haunt these remote trading stations. Olmeijer died in Surabaya, and Young tracks down his remarkable grave, and that in Singapore of A. P. Williams, the disgraced first officer of the Jeddah, who urged his captain to abandon 950 pilgrims to their deaths in a storm and was the original of Lord Jim – in fact, the pilgrims and the Jeddah survived, astounding Williams and Captain Clark when they were towed into Aden three days later.
William Lingard vanished mysteriously when Arab traders cracked the navigational riddle of the Berau and took away his trade, but his ghost still sails through the secret archipelagos of the Java Sea and into the pages of Young’s bewitching book.
Novelists are not the nicest people. Touchy, unloved and aware that the novel’s greatest days lie back in the age of steam, we occupy a rung on the ladder of likeability somewhere between tax inspectors and immigration officials, with whom all too many of us share an unworthy interest in money and social origins. The one great exception is Kurt Vonnegut, whose sheer amiability could light up all the cathedrals in America – where, in fact, many of the homilies and lay sermons that make up this collection were originally delivered. Vonnegut’s heart, by now a prized American totem, is at least as big as Mount Rushmore, and in his latest photographs he looks as if he is already up there, a huge man, craggy and serene, slightly eroded by the winds of fate, but admired for his rugged kindliness.
Reading these essays and speech-day addresses, one senses that Vonnegut, against all the odds, has forgiven us everything. Only plague, famine and Richard Nixon seem to lie beyond the reach of his vast compassion. He rambles away in his affable, cracker-barrel fashion, intoning his trade-mark ‘so it goes’, spinning a cocoon of the sweetest sugar around our failings and foibles. Yet all this sentimentality is surprisingly bracing – it’s a challenge in itself to find someone who has looked the world straight in the eye and never flinched.
Is it an act? Or, at least, a desperate stratagem that the young Vonnegut devised after witnessing the destruction of Dresden? ‘I didn’t give a damn about Dresden,’ he remarks here. ‘The fire-bombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about what I write and what I am.’ But this is scarcely borne out by his endless references to Dresden and his obvious qualms over his German ancestry, a sense of unease that I suspect is the main engine of his imagination. For a sometime science-fiction writer whose subject was the future, Vonnegut is unusually obsessed with his own past. He talks frankly about his Indianapolis childhood, marred by his unhappy father, who eventually killed himself, and by his mother, who loathed her husband and later became insane. A self-described depressive from a family of depressives, Vonnegut concludes that ‘you cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.’
Fortunately for his readers, he began his career on a cheerier note. He comments that American humorists tend to become unfunny pessimists if they live past a certain age, which he estimates to be sixty-three for men and twenty-nine for women, though the reverse seems true to me – Imelda Marcos and Vanessa Redgrave have yet to reach their hilarious prime, while Vonnegut, now sixty-eight, is droller than ever. His early s-f novels, Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan, are far less sentimental than his later work, and are filled with irony and black humour, though in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater a woozy bonhomie was already breaking through. Vonnegut’s alter ego, Kilgore Trout, addresses his fellow American s-f writers with the resonant words, ‘I love you sons of bitches’, a generous tribute to one of the most mentally shuttered groups in existence.
With Slaughterhouse Five, based in part on his wartime experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Vonnegut broke away from s-f into the mainstream novel and, his greatest test, international celebrity. Success often destroys American writers, or at least derails them – Hemingway, Kerouac and Truman Capote never lived up to the popular images of themselves – in a way difficult to grasp on this side of the Atlantic. Americans may not read but, like the French, they take books and writers seriously, whereas the British view their writers in a vaguely adversarial way and success usually comes with a live round still in the chamber.
One feels that for Americans fame is always unexpected, whereas British writers have thought of nothing else from the first rejection slip, like people I have known whose choice of Desert Island Discs has been fixed for twenty years before the producer’s telephone call. Anyone who has done the classic book-promotional tour of American cities, and stood in those vast shopping malls in the anonymous suburbs of Chicago or Seattle, has sensed the planetary loneliness of America and wondered how one would then cope with success, an even more demanding challenge than failure.
Vonnegut’s sensible and savvy response was to become his country’s itinerant preacher and pin-pricker, dispensing folksy wisdom along with a strong dose of purgative. As in these lectures, he mixes fortune-cookie philosophizing with acid satire. God, or at least our notions of God, he finds a constant provocation. ‘The more violent picture of Him you create, the better you’ll do … any God you create is going to be up against Miami Vice and Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone. And stay clear of the Ten Commandments – those things are booby-trapped.’
He scorns people who get divorced because they no longer love each other. ‘That is like trading in a car because the ash-trays are full.’ Or is it because the battery is flat, or the CD player has been stolen? Either way, Vonnegut insists that life is unserious. However, he himself has a long memory for a slight – after Salman Rushdie’s hostile review of Hocus Pocus, he writes: ‘I was so upset I considered putting a contract out on him’, an example of mafia humour at its most awesome.
Objecting to the line in the requiem mass, ‘let light perpetual shine upon you’, he visualizes his dead sister trying to fall asleep in her grave with the lights on, and devises a rival mass with the words, ‘Let not light disturb their sleep’, which a composer friend sets to music. Some time after its Buffalo premiere Vonnegut’s wife bumps into Andrew Lloyd Webber, and informs him that her husband has also written a requiem, to which Lloyd Webber, sensing that he has started a fad, retorts with the best line in this book: ‘I know. Everybody is writing requiems …’
The spell cast by the bear of little brain is as powerful and mysterious as ever. Ann Thwaite’s lavishly illustrated tribute to A. A. Milne and the affable Pooh describes the transformation of a charming children’s fantasy into a worldwide cultural phenomenon, a process that tells its own intriguing story about the rest of us. Winnie-the-Pooh may well be one of the three most successful characters that English fiction has created this century, taking his place beside Peter Pan and James Bond, juvenile heroes who also made the sensible decision never to grow up.
The real Christopher Robin became a West Country bookseller and endured an agonizing struggle to free himself from the fictional character who threatened to overwhelm him. One can easily imagine the strain on a shy middle-aged man of being approached by the thousandth child as its mother pipes: ‘Now, dear, meet the real Christopher Robin.’ But the rest of the world embraced Milne’s creation with a fondness that never wavered. Ann Thwaite traces Pooh’s origins to a black bear cub which Henry Colebourn, a Canadian army officer, bought in 1914 at White River, Ontario, from the hunter who had killed its mother. The bear, which Colebourn named Winnie after his home town of Winnipeg, was donated to London Zoo when his regiment embarked for France, and was a popular attraction until its death in 1934. Pooh, Thwaite claims, was the Milnes’ name for a swan they knew, and has migrated across the species gap with happy results.
The bear’s absent-minded nature and bumbling adventures were perfectly complemented by E. H. Shepard’s evocative drawings. Sales of the English editions still average half a million copies a year, and the Pooh books have been translated into twenty-five languages, among them Chinese, Serbo-Croat, Esperanto and Latin. Soft-toy versions of Pooh and his companions first appeared in the 1930s, and there were endless merchandizing spin-offs – Pooh bookends, garden ornaments, a Hollywood film and, the nearest thing to deification our century offers, giant effigies at Disneyland. In 1947 Christopher Milne’s original toys made a triumphant tour of America, and now reside in the New York Public Library, where they will one day occupy a climate-controlled case. Already one may confidently guess it will become a shrine.
Standing back from all this, if one can, how does one explain the appeal of what is, after all, a stuffed toy? Dorothy Parker may have detested the bear, ending a caustic review of The House at Pooh Corner with ‘Tonstant Weader fwowed up’, but I have never known anyone who remembered Pooh with less than total affection, something rare in children’s fiction. I still dread even thinking about those versions of the Grimms’ fairy tales with their eerie and threatening coloured plates.
But then childhood is not the happy idyll we choose to remember, and part of the appeal of the Pooh stories is that they describe the world of childhood as if it had been happy. Over the years there have been psychoanalytic interpretations of Pooh (repressed fears of puberty), Marxist readings (Pooh and company as members of a decadent rentier class), and even a Taoist version (Pooh as the all-accepting philosopher prince). Matching the vast scope of the Pooh phenomenon, I see the Pooh world in geo-political terms, as a parable of the British Empire in its last two declining decades, with Christopher Robin as the embattled young District Commissioner trying to control his wayward colonial charges. But whatever the interpretation, the magic endures, which Ann Thwaite’s fascinating history amply proves. As she reflects, echoing Milne, somewhere a boy and his bear will be playing for ever.
Few novelists today dream of emigrating to Hollywood, following the shadows of Scott Fitzgerald and Aldous Huxley to the writers’ building on the studio lot and scripting popular adaptations of The Magic Mountain or The Brothers Karamazov. Jet travel, the fax machine and the demise of the studio system mean that British novelists write their commissioned scripts at home in Maida Vale or Holland Park, which may say something about the sorry state of today’s cinema. Forty years ago, as I mused over my first rejection slips, working as a Hollywood scriptwriter seemed the sweetest way for a novelist to sell his soul, and a vast literature already existed about the moral agonies of being paid $3,000 a week to do so. I couldn’t wait to be summoned to that city of man-made sunsets, where the twentieth century created its greatest myths, even if I ended face down in a swimming pool in Beverly Hills, a small price to pay for true celebrity.
Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, first published in 1939, remains the best of the Hollywood novels, a nightmare vision of humanity destroyed by its obsession with film. West, the author of Miss Lonelyhearts and A Cool Million, had worked as a scriptwriter in Hollywood for five years, but wisely made the hero of his novel a painter rather than a writer, accepting that in film, if not everywhere else, the image mattered more than the word. His young hero, Tod Hackett, is a promising artist who has been brought to Hollywood to work in the design department of a major studio. The novel opens as he watches a rehearsal of the Battle of Waterloo, taking place on a studio lot crowded with stuffed dinosaurs, Egyptian temples and Mississippi steamboats. The costumes of the hussars and grenadiers, thanks to his scrupulously researched designs, are authentic replicas, but beyond the studio, in the streets of Los Angeles, absolutely nothing else is real.
His apartment building in the Hollywood Hills is surrounded by luxury homes that resemble Rhineland castles, Swiss chalets and Tudor mansions, built not of stone or brick, but of plaster, lath and paper. Yet crowds of sightseers are drawn to Los Angeles from all over America, and for them the spectacle provides the only reality in their stunted lives. Hackett watches them as they loiter on Hollywood Boulevard, waiting for even the briefest glimpse of their screen idols. He notices that their eyes are filled with envy and a sullen hate, as if they are aware that their dreams are as insubstantial as the painted glue around them. Having nothing else in their lives, they are desperate to seize the sources of their dreams and even, perhaps, destroy them.
In his spare time, Hackett is at work on a visionary painting, ‘The Burning of Los Angeles’, which will portray the destruction of the city by this alienated horde. Throughout the novel, West brilliantly counterpoints scenes from Hackett’s apocalyptic canvas with events that he observes in the Hollywood demi-monde and its cast of weird and shiftless characters. Among them are a drugstore cowboy who makes a modest living in westerns; a lonely accountant, Homer, who has abandoned his job in Iowa; a failed vaudeville performer reduced to selling polish door to door; and his beautiful daughter Faye, a part-time film extra. Faye bears a resemblance to the young Marilyn Monroe that is uncannily prophetic. With her platinum hair and affected little-girl wisdom, her nights spent as a call-girl and her determined dreams of becoming a serious actress, Faye is a remarkable portrait of the young Monroe during her first unhappy years in Hollywood.
Powerful set-pieces fill the pages, like the brutal but enthralling cockfight staged in Homer’s garage, which not even Hemingway could have bettered, and the filmed Waterloo that turns into a catastrophic rout of collapsing scenery and injured stuntmen. Most impressive of all is the final chapter when Hackett is trapped and nearly killed by a crowd outside a Hollywood premiere. This delirious and vengeful mob seems to have stepped straight from his painting of Los Angeles in flames. The fury of the crowd, unable to find an enemy and so turning on itself, is chillingly conveyed in West’s spare and unemotional prose. Much of the novel’s force stems from the reader’s sense that, fifty years later, Hollywood’s power over our imaginations is undiminished, and that his vacant and restless sightseers are proxies for all of us.
Sadly, West and his wife died in a car crash in 1940. One wonders what he would have made of Hollywood Boulevard today – tacky and faded, the haunt of hookers, drug dealers and edgy tourists, waiting for Tod Hackett’s great fire to surge up from the wastelands of central LA and at last destroy the city of dreadful night.
The whip whistles through almost every page of this bracing biography, against a background of the heaviest breathing since Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The Marquis de Sade is the spectre at the feast of European letters, the prodigal son invited in from the cold only to leave footprints of human blood on the welcome-mat. Coping with his wayward genius is like digesting the news that a distant relative ran the torture chambers in a death camp. Do his warped genes, these demented dreams of sodomy and the lash, also thread themselves through our lives?
‘Should we burn Sade?’ asked a worried Simone de Beauvoir during the post-war reassessment of Sade. I suspect that the jury will always be out, unable to weigh his deviant imagination against the countless massacres of our century. Sade’s novels have been the pillow-books of too many serial killers for comfort, but the ‘divine Marquis’ refuses to go away, and may well have an important message for us.
Almost forgotten during the nineteenth century, Sade was rediscovered in the 1930s after the publication of his lost masterpiece, The 120 Days of Sodom. The surrealists embraced him eagerly, hailing him as a precursor of Freud who revealed the infinite perversity of the human mind. Others saw him as a political revolutionary, the ultimate rebel against the bourgeois order, constructing a self-sufficient anti-society from his elaborate hierarchies of torturers and willing victims. But the horrors of the Third Reich shut the surrealists up for good and forced even Sade’s keenest admirers to wonder if his psychopathic imagination had paved the way for Hitler and helped to write the script of the Holocaust.
Both his writings and sexual behaviour led to Sade’s imprisonment for decades in the Bastille and the Charenton asylum. Yet, as Maurice Lever points out in his scrupulously neutral biography, Sade’s brutal treatment of prostitutes and peasant girls during his sexual games was commonplace among the aristocracy of his day. What condemned him was his refusal to disavow himself.
Lever comments that Sade’s early life contains all the ingredients of his novels. At the age of four he was taken from his mother, who immured herself in a convent, and was brought up by his uncle, a libertine priest, in a gloomy palace surrounded by debauched women. Sade developed what Lever terms a negative Oedipus complex, forming an alliance with his adulterous father and dreaming of the cruellest revenges on his absent mother. He took a long-suffering wife, Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, who helped him to stage his orgies, but his devotion to the whip led his strong-willed mother-in-law, known as la Présidente, to have him committed to prison, where he remained for thirteen years until the Revolution.
Prison only spurred Sade’s sexual imagination, and in the Bastille he produced his greatest work, The 120 Days of Sodom, penned in microscopic handwriting on a strip of paper forty feet long. Sade harangued the insurgent crowds from his cell window, using as a megaphone the funnel with which he emptied his chamber-pot into the moat – a perfect example of the medium fitting the message – and he was moved from the Bastille a few days before its fall. He was heartbroken over his lost manuscript, though it surfaced more than a century later and was first published by a German psychiatrist.
Freed by the Revolution, Sade became a judge on a popular tribunal, but the guillotine sickened him and he began a second career as a playwright. Condemned by Napoleon for immorality, he was interned in the Charenton asylum, where he staged plays with a cast of lunatics. Fashionable audiences flocked from Paris, a foretaste of the uneasy admirers his writings would attract in the twentieth century.
Meanwhile his sinister presence endures, subverting any wistful notions of literature as a moral repository and testing-ground. During his days as a journalist, Joseph Goebbels wrote a third-rate novel, Michael, which can be dismissed out of hand and never compels us to reconsider the career of the Nazi leader and the cruelties he helped to perpetrate. The problem posed by Sade is that The 120 Days of Sodom is a masterpiece, a black cathedral of a book forcing us to realize that the imagination transcends morality and that anything can serve as the raw material for a compelling work of art, even those whistling whips and flowering bruises.
In Finnegans Wake, a gigantic glutinous pun, James Joyce brought the novel up to date, circa 1940, with his vast cyclical dream-rebus of a Dublin publican who is simultaneously Adam, Napoleon and the heroes of a thousand mythologies. William Burroughs takes up from here, and his fiction constitutes the first portrait of the inner landscape of the post-war world, using its own language and manipulative techniques, its own fantasies and nightmares, those of
Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesised, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers of exquisite dreams…
The landscapes are those of the exurban man-made wilderness:
swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish.
Whatever his reservations about some aspects of the mid-twentieth century, Burroughs accepts that it can be fully described only in terms of its own language, idioms and verbal lore. Dozens of different argots are now in common currency; most people speak at least three or four separate languages, and a verbal relativity exists as important as any of time and space. To use the stylistic conventions of the traditional oral novel – the sequential narrative, characters ‘in the round’, consecutive events, balloons of dialogue attached to ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ – is to perpetuate a set of conventions ideally suited to a period of great tales of adventure in the Conradian mode, or to an over-formalized Jamesian society, but now valuable for little more than the bedtime story and the fable.
Burroughs begins by accepting the full implication of his subject matter:
Well these are the simple facts of the case – There were at least two parasites one sexual the other cerebral working together the way parasites will – And why has no one ever asked What is word?’ – Why do you talk to yourself all the time?
Operation Rewrite, Burroughs’s own function as a writer, defines the subject matter of The Ticket that Exploded:
The Venusian invasion was known as ‘Operation Other Half,’ that is a parasitic invasion of the sexual area taking advantage, as all invasion plans must, of an already existing mucked up situation – The human organism is literally consisting of two halves from the beginning, word and all human sex is this unsanitary arrangement whereby two entities attempt to occupy the same three-dimensional coordinate points giving rise to the sordid latrine brawls which have characterised a planet based on The Word’.
Far from being an arbitrary stunt, Burroughs’s cut-in method is thus seen as the most appropriate technique for this marriage of opposites, as well as underlining the role of recurrent images in all communication, fixed at the points of contact in the webs of language linking everything in our lives, from nostalgic reveries of ‘invisible passenger took my hands in dawn sleep of water music – Broken towers intersect cigarette smoke memory of each other’ to sinister bureaucratic memos and medicalese. Many of the portmanteau images in the book make no sense unless seen in terms of this merging of opposites, e.g. the composite character known as Mr Bradly Mr Martin, and a phrase such as ‘rectums merging’ which shocked the reviewer in The London Magazine to ask ‘how?’ – obviously the poor woman hadn’t the faintest idea what the book was about.
In turn, Burroughs’s three novels are a comprehensive vision of the individual imagination’s relationship to society at large (Naked Lunch), to sex (The Soft Machine), and to time and space (The Ticket that Exploded). In Naked Lunch (i.e., the addict’s fix), Burroughs compares organized society with its extreme opposite, the invisible society of drug addicts. His implicit conclusion is that the two are not very different, certainly at the points where they make the closest contact – in prisons and psychiatric institutions. His police are all criminals and perverts, while his doctors, like the egregious Dr Benway of Islam Inc., are sadistic psychopaths whose main intention is to maim and disfigure their patients. Most of them, of course, are not aware of this, and their stated intentions may be the very opposite. Benway, a manipulator and co-ordinator of symbol systems, whose assignment in Annexia is TD – Total Demoralization – makes it his first task to abolish concentration camps, mass arrest, and ‘except under certain limited and special circumstances’ the use of torture. When out of a job he keeps himself going by performing cut-rate abortions in subway toilets, ‘operating with one hand, beating the rats offa my patients with the other’. Likeable and insouciant, Benway is full of ingenious ideas for uncovering the spies who infest every nook and cranny:
‘An agent is trained to deny his agent identity by asserting his cover story. So why not use psychic jiu-jitsu and go along with him? Suggest that his cover story is his identity and that he has no other. His agent identity becomes unconscious, that is, out of control…’
However, questions of identity are highly relativistic. As one spy laments: ‘So I am a public agent and don’t know who I work for, get my instructions from street signs, newspapers and pieces of conversation…’
By contrast, the addicts form a fragmentary, hunted sect, only asking to be left alone and haunted by their visions of subway dawns, cheap hotels, empty amusement parks and friends who have committed suicide. The fact of addiction imposes contact,’ but in their relationships with one another they at least take no moral stand, and their illusions and ambitions are directed only at themselves. But for its continued comic richness – for much of the way it reads like the Lenny Bruce show rewritten by Dr Goebbels – Naked Lunch would be a profoundly pessimistic book, for Burroughs’s conclusion is that the war between society and individual freedom, a freedom that consists simply of being individual, can never end, and that ultimately the only choice is between living in one’s own nightmares or in other people’s, for those who gain control of the system, like Benway and the Nazi creators of the death camps, merely impose their own fantasies on everyone else.
What appear to be the science fictional elements in The Soft Machine, and to a greater extent in The Ticket that Exploded - there are Nova Police, and characters such as the Fluoroscopic Kid, the Subliminal Kid, the delightful Johnny Yen, errand boy from the death trauma, heavy metal addicts, Green boy-girls from the terminal sewers of Venus – in fact play a metaphorical role and are not intended to represent ‘three-dimensional’ figures. These self-satirizing figments are part of the casual vocabulary of the space age, shared by all people born after the year 1920, just as Mata Hari, the Mons Angel, and the dirty men’s urinal to the north of Waterloo form part of the semi-comical vocabulary of an older generation. The exploding ticket, i.e., the individual identity in extension through time and space, provides Burroughs with an endless source of brilliant images, of which ‘the photo flakes falling’ is the most moving in the book – moments of spent time, each bearing an image of some experience, drifting down like snow on all our memories and lost hopes. The sad poetry of the concluding chapter of The Ticket, as the whole apocalyptic landscape of Burroughs’s world closes in upon itself, now and then flaring briefly like a dying volcano, is on a par with Anna Livia Plurabelle’s requiem for her river-husband in Finnegans Wake.
And zero time to the sick tracks – A long time between suns I held the stale overcoat – Sliding between light and shadow – Cross the wounded galaxies we intersect, poison of dead sun in your brain slowly fading – Migrants of ape in gasoline crack of history, explosive bio-advance out of space to neon … Pass without doing our ticket – Mountain wind of Saturn in the morning sky – From the death trauma weary goodbye then.
For science fiction the lesson of Burroughs’s work is plain. It is now nearly forty years since the first Buck Rogers comic strip, and only two less than a century since the birth of science fiction’s greatest modern practitioner, H. G. Wells, yet the genre is still dominated by largely the same set of conventions, the same repertory of ideas, and, worst of all, by the assumption that it is still possible to write accounts of interplanetary voyages in which the appeal is to realism rather than to fantasy. Once it gets ‘off the ground’ into space all science fiction is fantasy, and the more serious it tries to be, the more naturalistic, the greater its failure, as it completely lacks the moral authority and conviction of a literature won from experience.
Burroughs also illustrates that the whole of science fiction’s imaginary universe has long since been absorbed into the general consciousness, and that most of its ideas are now valid only in a kind of marginal spoofing. Indeed, I seriously doubt whether science fiction is any longer the most important source of new ideas in the very medium it originally created.
However, Burroughs’s contribution to science fiction is only a minor aspect of his achievement. In his trilogy, William Burroughs has fashioned from our dreams and nightmares the authentic mythology of the age of Cape Canaveral, Hiroshima and Belsen. His novels are the terminal documents of the mid-twentieth century, scabrous and scarifying, a progress report from an inmate in the cosmic madhouse.
Hitman for the apocalypse in his trench coat and snap-brim fedora, William Burroughs steps out of his life and into his fiction like a secret agent charged with the demolition of all bourgeois values. More than in the case of almost any other writer, Burroughs’s life merges seamlessly into his work. Hemingway and Evelyn Waugh were never for a moment convincing as big-game hunter and country gentleman, two of the least likely roles that writers, bundles of nerves and indecision, can ever have asked themselves to play. Had they swapped roles, both might have been more comfortable. One can see Hemingway presiding over a finca near Pamplona, breeding bulls rather than skewering them, and Waugh contentedly blasting apart every wildebeest in the Serengeti.
Genet, living out his last days in the tiny hotel rooms that reminded him of his prison cells, consciously turned his back on the world and returned himself to the realm of his own pages, while Burroughs has never left them. Reading Ted Morgan’s rich and authoritative biography, one constantly feels that Burroughs’s fiction, however extreme, is a milder version of his life. In the late 1970s Burroughs rented a windowless apartment, soon nicknamed the Bunker, in a converted YMCA in the Bowery. The concrete space, with its white porcelain urinals, had once been a changing-room, and Burroughs was pleasantly at home there, surrounded, as he liked to say with a touch of his death-rattle humour, by the heavy psychic traces of naked boys.
This strange scene seems to spring straight from the pages of Naked Lunch, from that dank world of subway dawns, cheap hotels and empty amusement parks, and it is this unity of life and vision that gives Burroughs’s fiction its enormous charge. At a time when the bourgeois novel has triumphed, and career novelists jet around the world on Arts Council tours and pontificate like game-show celebrities at literary festivals, it is heartening to know that Burroughs at least is still working away quietly in Lawrence, Kansas, creating what I feel is the most original and important body of fiction to appear since the Second World War.
As the contemporary novel transforms itself into a regional or even provincial form, Burroughs’s fiction remains international in its scope and subject matter. Surprisingly, those novelists like Snow or Malraux who rose to senior posts in the political establishments of their day left only minor works of fiction about their privileged subject matter. By contrast Burroughs, the professional outsider, sometime petty criminal and drug addict, has produced an unmatched critique of the nature of modern society and the control and communication systems that shape our view of the world.
For all his heroic rebellion against the convention-bound middle class, Burroughs was born in 1914 on one of its most comfortable slopes. His paternal grandfather had invented what was to become the Burroughs adding machine, and the young Burroughs enjoyed a well-to-do childhood in St Louis – though already, at his private school, the father of a schoolmate remarked of him: ‘That boy looks like a sheep-killing dog.’
Sensing that he was a misfit, and aware of his homosexuality from an early age, Burroughs began to experiment with drugstore chloral hydrate when he was sixteen, his first steps in the exploration of states of altered consciousness that was to become a secondary career. He graduated from Harvard with a dose of syphilis and a low view of formal education, but unsure where to point his life. His parents gave him a monthly allowance of $200, which arrived regularly for the next twenty-five years.
Few research funds have been put to better use. The allowance gave him the chance to go down the hard way, not to make good but to make bad. He was able to move outside his own class and explore the vast proletarian sub-culture of blue-collar drifters, small-time gamblers and pennyante thieves. Pushing morphine and living on his wits in New York, though yet to write a word, Burroughs became the dominant figure in a circle that included Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg. Ted Morgan comments on their similarity to the Bloomsbury Group, and one can – just – see the resemblances: the same back-scratching and maverick sexuality, the same guest-appearances in each other’s novels, with the astringent Burroughs as Virginia Woolf, perhaps, Kerouac as E. M. Forster and Ginsberg as Vanessa Bell…
One member of the circle was a bright young Barnard girl called Joan Adams, a benzedrine addict who was to become Burroughs’s common- law wife and whom he tragically shot dead a few years later while playing William Tell at their house in Mexico. Ted Morgan convincingly suggests that her death, and Burroughs’s grief, unlocked his literary vocation, his self-disgust coinciding with his sense of alienation from American society. Driven by his addiction, he landed in Tangier, where ‘the days slid by, strung on a syringe with a long thread of blood …’ But Tangier, Burroughs realized, might serve as the model for a novel, an ‘Interzone’ or limbo where anyone could act out his most extreme fantasies. Even before the book was written, Jack Kerouac had provided the tide: Naked Lunch (the addict’s fix, or the rush of pure sensation). The sections were sent in random batches to the Paris printer, but the sequence seemed to have a logic of its own. Celebrity and controversy followed its publication, but Burroughs has for the most part spent the later years working quietly on the long series of novels that show his gift for humour and character undimmed, and constitute one of the most remarkable achievements of modern fiction, composed against the greatest conceivable odds.
Now living quietly in Lawrence, Kansas, at the very heart of the America he spent so many years escaping, William Burroughs has recovered from his recent heart surgery with his humour and intelligence intact, and at the age of nearly eighty is a walking advertisement for the misspent life – especially to any aspiring writer.
Burroughs has always been regarded as a maverick, roaming the wild lands of the novel beyond the walls of respectability. But this is a measure of our own conformity, and in the years to come, writers of real merit and originality may resemble Burroughs rather than the literary worthies sent jetting around the world by the British Council. Fiction today is dominated by career novelists, with the results one expects whenever careerists dominate an occupation, and the great writers of the future may need to lead lives as disordered and perverse as the one revealed in these fascinating letters. Only then are they likely to break free from the airless monoculture that threatens to entomb us.
For anyone with the courage to follow Burroughs his letters are the perfect guidebook to hell. Almost all were written to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac between 1945 and 1959. These were the darkest years of Burroughs’s life, and cover the depths of his drug addiction and the death of his wife, whom he accidentally killed while trying to shoot a glass from the top of her head. His wanderings take him from the United States to South America and Europe, across a terrain of seedy hotels, sinister pharmacies and last-chance clinics where he tried to cure his addiction. From this desperate world he was able to distil his masterpiece, Naked Lunch, one of the most original and important novels written since the Second World War.
The correspondence opens soon after his first meeting with Ginsberg, then a nineteen-year-old student at Columbia. More than ten years his senior, the Harvard-educated Burroughs at first takes a lordly line with Ginsberg, ticking him off for his misuse of language – ‘Human, Allen, is an adjective and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable’ – and suggesting books that might improve his mind. Their roles soon changed. Ginsberg seems to have been the great emotional and sexual passion of Burroughs’s adult years, and his letters to the poet were a vital lifeline, whether he was farming in East Texas, hunting for hallucinogens in the Peruvian jungles or coping with his heroin addiction in Tangier.
The first letters show Burroughs in Texas, setting himself up as a farmer, one of the least likely people ever to worry about a carrot crop. Although preoccupied by the endless search for drugs, Burroughs writes to Jack Kerouac about his lettuces and peas, and how much he hopes to make from them. Desperate to leave the United States and its crushing suburbanism, he moves with his wife to Mexico, ‘a fine, free country’ where ‘the cops recognise you as their superior and would never venture to stop or question an upper-class character like myself.’
But wherever Burroughs moves the cops soon get restive. His years in Mexico seem to have been his happiest, and it was there that he wrote his first novel, Junky. Already he is aware that the traditional novel is not for him, and in 1952 he writes to Ginsberg: ‘A medium suitable for me does not yet exist, unless I invent it.’ Forced to leave Mexico after his wife’s death, he moves to Tangier, where he is cold-shouldered by the foreign community and snubbed by Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin, both later to become close friends. ‘Maybe I will feel better when I get my shotgun and kill something,’ he broods, working off his resentment by rowing in the harbour.
For all its drawbacks, Tangier played a crucial role in Burroughs’s development as a writer. Interzone, the ultimate open city that is the setting for Naked Lunch, is a portrait of Tangier, a ‘counterfeit’ city, as Paul Bowles described it, with its international zone and rootless expats devoted to drugs and sex, a forerunner of the larger world emerging in the post-war years.
The letters to Ginsberg express his intense longing for the poet, whom he constantly urges to visit Tangier. It is thanks to Ginsberg that these letters have survived, and without him it is likely that Naked Lunch would not exist. Large sections of the novel were written in the form of extended skits – what Burroughs calls ‘routines’ – which were embedded in his letters to Ginsberg. These scatty monologues were Burroughs’s ironic commentary on the waking nightmare through which he had moved as a heroin addict, a realm filled with corrupt doctors, deranged fellow junkies, brutal narcotics cops and the teenage boys whose fleeting embraces provided the only solace in his life. Yet the letters are never depressing. Witty, scurrilous, paranoid and philosophical, they are held together by Burroughs’s comic genius and extraordinary ear for dialogue.
As Burroughs’s literary skills enlarge and his visionary eye begins to shape a unique imaginative world, the mature artist emerges from the riot of cabaret turns. By the last of the letters, Naked Lunch has been published in Paris to huge acclaim, and Burroughs is already at the centre of the immense notoriety that has surrounded him for the past thirty years. None the less, he is never satisfied, and at the end of this correspondence he writes to Ginsberg: ‘Unless I can reach a point where my writing has the danger and immediate urgency of bullfighting, it is nowhere.’ How many of today’s novelists would dare to agree with him?
Parochialism seems to me to be the besetting sin of contemporary English fiction, a fault of which Graham Greene has always been completely free. Writers, of course, can make any number of angels dance on the head of a pin and create a universe out of a nut-shell or a single room. The greatest and most influential French writers of the past fifty years – Sartre, Céline, Camus and Genet – seem, to me at least, to have taken their subject matter and inspiration from France and her territories alone, in the geographical sense, and from the most intense focus on a sometimes narrow aspect of French life, a small social class, a provincial city, a criminal milieu.
For English writers, however, a similar concentration on the life of their own country seems invariably to lead them into all the worst defects of provincialism – an obsession with obscure social nuances, with the minutiae of everyday language and behaviour, and a moralizing concern for the limited world of their own parish that would do credit to an elderly spinster peering down at her suburban side-street. The bourgeois novel flourishes in England now as nowhere else, its narrowing walls crushing its writers against their airless and over-stuffed furnishings. With few exceptions – Graham Greene pre-eminent among them – the English novel seems to me to be a branch of provincial fiction, relevant to nothing but itself.
It is no coincidence that the English novelists who triumphantly escape from this limited, entropic realm – Graham Greene, Lawrence Durrell, Anthony Burgess – are not only emigrants in the literal sense from England itself, but have taken a large part of their inspiration from the world at large. Faced with the suffocating character of English life, the writer has two stark choices – internal emigration, following the route laid down by Kafka, or a one-way ticket from the nearest airport. Now that Britain shows all too many signs of becoming an afterthought of Europe, it may be that the best British writers of the present day, like the best Irish writers of half a century ago, Joyce and Beckett, are forced by internal necessity to seek their imaginative fortunes elsewhere than in their own countries.
I first began to read Graham Greene in the mid-1950s, and will never forget the sense of liberation his novels gave me. This was the heyday of the so-called Angry Young Men – John Osborne, Kingsley Amis, John Braine, and a fraternal American colleague, J. P. Donleavy -morose recipients of a welfare state education from the wrong side of the social tracks who railed against the restrictions of English life (rich men all of them now, they sit in their grand houses, literally in some cases on top of the very hills they once sought to assault). I remember turning from Look Back in Anger and Lucky Jim to Graham Greene The Heart of the Matter, and then The Power and the Glory and The Quiet American.
These remarkable novels, whether serious or ‘entertainments’ as Greene likes to call them, had all the tonic effect of stepping from an aircraft on to the airport tarmac of a strange country. In the novels of Graham Greene one was no longer smothered within the red-brick and lace-curtain world of English life, with its endless moral proscriptions upon everything. Instead, one could see the sights and scent the smells of the whole world. For me, a reluctant immigrant from the Far East in 1946, Greene’s novels were an indefinite visa to reality. In his novels over the years one can see the shape of the post-war world as it emerged in Africa and the Far East, in Central America and the Caribbean, just as one saw the hard reality and moral ambiguities of post-war Europe in The Third Man.
As a writer myself, I have been enormously influenced by Greene’s style, by his method of setting out the psychological ground on which his narratives rest. Within the first paragraph of a Graham Greene novel one has an unmistakable feeling for the imaginative and psychological shape of what is to come. The opening picture of a narrator/hero standing on a jetty watching the sampans drift down river and waiting with mixed feelings for his sick wife to come ashore, or of a bored police chief slapping the fly on his neck, together stamp an indelible image on the reader’s mind.
And for all his most serious concern for the psychological and spiritual dilemmas of his characters, Greene never moralizes about his subject matter in that way so beloved by the English provincial writer. Their strengths and weaknesses, their dubious motives and social backgrounds are accepted without comment like the grease on the fan, the dirt under one’s fingernails.
With Lawrence Durrell and Anthony Burgess, Greene keeps alive the largest and most admirable traditions of the English novel. The robustness and strength of his vision are clearly demonstrated by the fact that after half a century, and now well into his seventies, he is still producing great works of fiction.
Hell is out of fashion – institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the twentieth century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one’s own skull. Sartre’s hell is other people – a lesbian, a coward and a neurotic trapped together in a hotel room and bored beyond death by their own identity. Cocteau’s is the netherworld of narcissism, Orpheus snared by the images of his own mirror. Burroughs’s hells are more public, their entrances are subway stations and amusement arcades, but built none the less from private phobias, like the Night-town of Leopold Bloom. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.
By comparison Wyndham Lewis’s hell in The Human Age is a more conventional affair. Layered like a department store, the presiding bureaucracy of demons and supernal gauleiters would satisfy the most narrow-minded fundamentalist. A magisterial Bailiff, like a sinister Punchinello, presides over the émigré rabble of the dead waiting for admission to purgatory. This, called Third City, looks like Barcelona, with tree-lined avenues crammed with cafés. Now and then supernatural booms knock everyone to the ground as archangels the size of skyscrapers move across the sky. An amiable Padishah rules this chaotic outpost of heaven like a sultanate (‘social life centres on the palace’). Hell itself is a cross between Birmingham and Dieppe, governed by the Lord Sammael, a droll Lucifer who sounds like a saturnine account executive cutting a swathe through a typing pool.
Summarized like this, Lewis’s Hell is hell. But on the page his annealed prose and painter’s eye are able to save this vision of the judgement and resurrection of mankind from becoming a bizarre pantomime. Put on by the Third Programme ten years ago with tremendous style and panache, and with a virtuoso performance by Donald Wolfit as the Bailiff, the trilogy came over superbly as black theological cabaret. The narrative, however, asks to be taken more seriously, and the black centre at Lewis’s heart casts a pall over his panorama of the afterlife.
‘Is this Heaven?’ Pullman at last blankly inquired of the air … Thousands of people overflowed the café terraces. As they began to pass the lines of tables nearest the road, faces came into view. They were the faces of nonentities; this humanity was alarmingly sub-normal, all pig-eye or owlish vacuity. Was this a population of idiots – astonishingly well-dressed?
Needless to say, this is not heaven. Unfortunately for the author, it is not hell or purgatory either. This malevolent vision of mankind is the fantasy of a solitary misanthrope out of touch with his times. A leader of the avant-garde before the First World War and founder of the review Blast, Lewis’s aggressiveness and talent for polemics served him well enough in the last round of the attack on the already routed bourgeoisie. Painter, writer and propagandist, after the war he launched Vorticism, a cerebral version of cubism, and then turned his withering eye on the prominent writers of the twenties, Hemingway (‘the dumb ox’), and Joyce, who comes up for special attention in The Childermass. Although his criticism is written with tremendous elan, a boiling irritability and impatience with fools, Lewis’s reputation began to slide, particularly as his right-wing views seemed to reveal a more than sneaking sympathy for Hider and the Nazis. The Childermass had been published in 1928, and a quarter of a century later he brought out the next two volumes of The Human Age – Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta. When he died in 1961, blind and ignored, he was working on the notes for its projected successor, The Divine Age, in which the principal characters would ascend to paradise and there conclude their journey through the afterlife.
The inner eye of the blind painter, warped by his own bile, illuminates a landscape beyond time, space and death. Already cut off by temperament from the mood of his age, he inhabits a private purgatory or, rather, sits with the other journeymen to the grave on the nominal ground outside the walls of limbo, waiting to begin his descent into hell.
The city lies in a plain, ornamented with mountains. These appear as a fringe of crystals to the heavenly north. One minute bronze cone has a black plume of smoke. Beyond the oasis plain is the desert. Two miles across … the emigrant mass is collected within sight of the walls of the magnetic city. To the accompaniment of innumerable lowing horns along the banks of the river, a chorus of mournful messages, the day breaks.
Sand-devils perform on the borders of the plain, the air murmurs and thunders by the outposts of Beelzebub, in this supernatural light flares burst from the sand. There is a whiff of plague. At the ferry-station by the river a seedy-looking man in a shabby suit looks out with a speculative eye at the magnetic city, wondering how he can gain admission. The powers of this world after death seem in no hurry to set him on his way.
This sense of the constant need for choice and decision dominates Lewis’s vision of hell. Unlike its obvious parallel, Dante’s Inferno, Lewis’s netherworld is a place of shifting identities and loyalties, where the characters’ progress towards their ultimate trying-ground is achieved by their capacities for self-assertion, intrigue and manoeuvre. Like a party of tourists stranded outside the gates of a chaotic and perhaps hostile desert city, they have to bluff and barter their way through its guards towards whatever dubious comforts lie beyond.
The Childermass opens with the arrival of Pullman and Sattersthwaite at the refugee camp. Both have died in middle age during the First World War, but are incarnated here in their most typical guise. Pullman, a former schoolmaster, a man of sharp but pedantic intelligence, is now a young man of about thirty. Satters, his onetime fag, appears as a babyish adolescent in rugby cap and Fair Isle jumper. The indulgent relationship between this pink-lipped juvenile and the aloof intellectual, whose mind is as barbed and impatient as his author’s, is carried forward through the entire trilogy, sustained by bonds that are by no means evident to the reader. How much of the high camp that mars The Childermass was originally satiric in intention is difficult to decide.
Taking stock of themselves, Pullman and his companion begin to explore the margins of this supernatural plain. At the refugee camp everything is uncertain. There is no formal administration, no system of processing by which the waiting émigré throng can gain entrance to the city. It is not even known whether the magnetic city, from which they are excluded by the high walls and river, is heaven or hell. Rival sects have formed themselves around the leaders of different philosophic schools, and spend their time vilifying each other and haranguing the mob. All that Pullman and Satters are sure of is that they themselves are dead, and that part of their fate, if no more, lies in the hands of the unpredictable minor demons who form the casual bureaucracy of the camp.
Principal among these is the Bailiff, to whom Pullman, with his sharp eye for self-preservation, is soon drawn. Loathed and abused by the disputing philosophical sects, the Bailiff is the presiding eminence of The Childermass and Monstre Gai, and, to give Lewis his due, one of the most droll characters in fiction. Grotesque in appearance, but with a mind of great learning and cultivation, he arrives at the camp at the head of a procession of demons and janissaries, and there holds court for the ostensible purpose of selecting entrants to the city. In fact, his authority here seems doubtful, and despite the powers of restraint and mutilation which he now and then exercises, is continually challenged by his opponents among the émigrés.
As Pullman soon realizes, behind his pose as a capricious buffoon, and the endless metaphysical and theological discourses to which he treats his audience, the bailiff’s real role is to remind his listeners exactly who they are and how pathetic and vulnerable their condition, both in this life and their previous one, how meaningless and precarious their tenancy of time and space. Wheedling, raucous, vicious and cajoling by turn, a fund of low vaudeville humour and academic witticisms, the Bailiff rouses his audience to a pitch of fury. Pullman alone, realizing that this sinister but powerful figure is his one hope of escaping from the feuding and sterile self-immersion of the camp, decides to accept the Bailiff on his own terms. At the first opportunity, outside the gates of the city, he attracts the Bailiff’s attention and by his ingratiating manner gains admission to the city for Satters and himself.
It is here, at the opening of Monstre Gai, that The Human Age loses its way. Pullman’s willingness to accept the logic of whatever situation in which he finds himself leads him to join the Bailiff’s faction. Whether or not this enigmatic pasha is the Devil he can only guess, but the question is of less interest to Pullman than the need for his own advancement. In due course, an unsuccessful putsch against the palace regime is scotched when the powers of heaven send in their forces to bolster the puppet regime of the Padishah. Pullman and the Bailiff flee from Third City. In Malign Fiesta they arrive in hell, where Pullman deserts the Bailiff, in disfavour and exiled to the suburbs like an unsuccessful foreign revolutionary forced to return to his homeland. He now attaches himself to the entourage of the Lord Sammael. This time a more ambitious plot against heaven is abruptly forestalled, and the agents of God carry Pullman away to whatever judgement awaits in paradise – exile, one would guess, to the supernal equivalent of Elba or Mauritius.
The strange amalgam of Rumanian intrigue, political thriller and Old Testament demonology is often entertaining, but fails to consider the most elementary questions of morality or character. Pullman’s failure is not a moral one but that of a minor political opportunist who has backed the wrong horse. Pullman feels no remorse, but merely a passing regret for his errors of judgement.
However, apart from his deficiencies of character, Pullman is a wholly passive creature of circumstance. Unlike a torture chamber, a hell is made by its inmates, not its jailers. Sartre’s Roquentin, in La Nausée, surrounded by festering furniture and cobblestones; Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, obsessed by his failure of compassion for his wife, God and fellow men; the legion of unknown subnormal mothers struggling with their overtoppling children – these people inhabit hells of their own devising, whose racks are despair, self-disgust and self-hate. The case histories of Freud and modern psychiatry give us a different insight into the origins of our infernos, nightmares as ghastly as the polymorphic horrors of Dali and Ernst, and very different methods for expiating our sense of sin. The hells that face us now are more abstract, the very dimensions of time and space, the phenomenology of the universe, the fact of our own consciousness.
James Joyce’s Ulysses had an immense influence on me – almost entirely for the bad. I read Joyce’s masterpiece as an eighteen-year-old medical student dissecting cadavers at Cambridge, then a bastion of academic provincialism and self-congratulation. Ulysses opened my eyes to an infinitely richer and more challenging world. Here, I knew, was the authentic voice of heroic modernism that rang through the European and American writers I had devoured at school while trying to recover from the shock of arriving in England – Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Kafka, Camus and Hemingway. Reading them at too early an age, long before I had the experience to understand them, was probably another mistake.
But Ulysses overwhelmed me. It might be set in a single day in a provincial European city, but in Joyce’s eye Dublin was the whole world, and that single day lasted longer than a century. Joyce’s text seemed to exhaust every conceivable possibility of narrative technique – in fact, technique became the real subject of the novel (a dead end, as the post-modernist writers demonstrate). Ulysses convinced me to give up medicine and become a writer, but it was the wrong example for me, an old-fashioned story-teller at heart, and it wasn’t until I discovered the surrealists that I found the right model.
I read Ulysses again last year and was even more impressed than I was forty years ago, though clearly it’s excessively interiorized, is curiously lacking in imagination and fails to engage the reader’s emotions, defects that of course recommend it to academia. But if not the greatest novel of the twentieth century it is certainly the greatest work of fiction.
Kafka may be the most important writer of the twentieth century, far more important than James Joyce. He describes the fate of the isolated man who is surrounded by a vast and impenetrable bureaucracy, and begins to accept himself on the terms the bureaucracy imposes. Human beings today are in a very similar position. We are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate: the City, the banking system, political and advertising conglomerates, vast entertainment empires. They’ve made themselves more user-friendly, but they define the tastes to which we conform. They’re rather subtle, subservient tyrannies, but no less sinister for that.