In this, the last novel we shall have from Barbara Pym, it is Miss Grundy, a downtrodden elderly church-worker, who says that ‘a few green leaves can make such a difference.’ The phrase echoes a poem that the author loved, but found disturbing, George Herbert’s ‘Hope.’
I gave to Hope a watch of mine: but he
An anchor gave to me.
Then an old prayer-book I did present:
And he an optick sent.
With that I gave a viall full of tears:
But he a few green eares:
Ah Loyterer! I’le no more, no more I’le bring:
I did expect a ring.
The book, in her accustomed manner, is both elegiac and hopeful. It gives a sense of pity for lost opportunities, but at the same time a courageous opening to the future.
High comedy needs a settled world, ready to resent disturbance, and in her nine novels Barbara Pym stuck serenely to the one she knew best: quiet suburbs, obscure office departments, villages where the neighbours could be observed through the curtains, and, above all, Anglican parishes. (Even as a child at school she had written stories about curates.) This meant that the necessary confrontations must take place at cold Sunday suppers, little gatherings, visits, funerals, and so on, which Barbara Pym, supremely observant in her own territory, was able to convert into a battleground. Here, even without intending it, a given character is either advancing or retreating: you have, for instance, an unfair advantage if your mother is dead, ‘just a silver-framed photograph,’ over someone whose mother lives in Putney. And in the course of the struggle strange fragments of conversation float to the surface, lyrical moments dear to Barbara Pym.
‘An anthropophagist,’ declared Miss Doggett in an authoritative tone. ‘He does some kind of scientific work, I believe.’
‘I thought it meant a cannibal—someone who ate human flesh,’ said Jane in wonder.
‘Well, science has made such strides,’ said Miss Doggett doubtfully.
Or:
‘Well, he is a Roman Catholic priest, and it is not usual for them to marry, is it?’
‘No, of course they are forbidden to,’ Miss Foresight agreed.
‘Still, Miss Lydgate is much taller than he is,’ she added.
In such exchanges the victory is doubtful: indeed, Miss Doggett and Miss Foresight are, in their way, invincible.
As might be expected, however, of such a brilliant comic writer, the issues are not comic at all. Three kinds of conflict recur throughout Barbara Pym’s novels: growing old (on which she concentrated in the deeply touching Quartet in Autumn); hanging on to some kind of individuality, however crushed, however dim; and adjusting the vexatious distance between men and women. These, indeed, are novels without heroes. The best that can be put forward is the Vicar in Jane and Prudence, ‘beamy and beaky, kindly looks and spectacles,’ and, as his wife accepts, more than somewhat childish. If men are less than angels, Barbara Pym’s men are rather less than men, not wanting much more than constant attention and comfort. Their theses must be typed, surplices washed, endless dinners cooked, remarks listened to ‘with an expression of strained interest,’ and the forces of nature and society combine to ensure, even in the 1980s, that they get these things. Women see through them clearly enough, but are drawn towards them by their own need and by a compassion which is taken entirely for granted. Men are allowed, indeed conditioned, to deceive themselves to the end, and are loved as self-deceivers.
Women have their resource—the romantic imagination. This faculty, which Jane Austen (and James Joyce, for that matter) considered so destructive, is the secret ‘richness’ of Barbara Pym’s heroines. ‘Richness’ is a favourite word. It means plenty of human behaviour to observe, leading to a wildly sympathetic flight of fancy into the past and future. Of course, one must come down to earth, the tea must be made, reason takes over: but the happiness remains. Richness can defeat even loneliness. In The Sweet Dove Died pampered Leonora, on a visit to Keats House, looks in astonishment at a faded middle-aged woman with a bag full of library books, ‘on top of which lay the brightly-coloured packet of a frozen dinner for one…And now she caught a glimpse of her [the woman’s] face, plain but radiant, as she looked up from one of the glass cases that held the touching relics. There were tears on her cheeks.’
Barbara Pym nevertheless guards against sentimentality. She is the writer who points out ‘the desire to do good without much personal inconvenience that lurks in most of us,’ the regrettable things said between friends and ‘the satisfaction which is to be got from saying precisely things of that kind,’ the irritation we feel ‘when we have made up our minds to dislike people for no apparent reason and they perform a kind action.’ But towards her characters she shows a creator’s charity. She understands them so well that the least she can do is to forgive them.
For A Few Green Leaves she has moved back from the London of her last two novels to the country. Here, too, she has always taken a straight look. Why is it always assumed that English women must ‘love’ the country, and be partial to dead birds and rabbits, and to cruel village gossip? Why are those who dig the garden and keep goats called ‘splendid’? But, at the same time, this is Oxfordshire, the ‘softly undulating landscape, mysterious woods, and ancient stone buildings’ where Barbara Pym herself spent her last years.
The heroine, Emma Howick, who does not mean to settle there permanently, undertakes some quiet research into her fellow creatures (rather like Dulcie in No Fond Return of Love). The original inhabitants of the village have withdrawn to a council estate on the outskirts, leaving the stone cottages to elderly ladies and professional people. Here she begins her field notes. Changes in village life are a gift to the ironist, but Barbara Pym has placed such changes—seen partly through Emma’s eyes and partly through her own—in relation to an unexpected point, the human need for healing. The almost empty church confronts the well-attended surgery (Tuesdays and Thursdays). ‘There was nothing in churchgoing to equal that triumphant moment when you came out of the surgery clutching the ritual scrap of paper.’ The lazy old senior partner is ‘beloved,’ the junior partner’s wife schemes to move into the Rectory, far too large and chilly for the widowed Reverend Thomas Dagnall. Even a discarded tweed coat of the young doctor’s is handed separately to the Bring and Buy, ‘as if a touch could heal.’ But when, in the closing pages, he is obliged to tell a woman patient that her days are numbered—for it’s no good trying to hide the truth from an intelligent person—‘she had come back at him by asking if he believed in life after death. For a moment he had been stunned into silence, indignant at such a question.’ In this indignation we get a glimpse, no more than that, of a pattern that Barbara Pym chose to express only in terms of comedy.
The story proceeds from Low Sunday to New Year through delightful set pieces—a Hunger Lunch, a Flower Festival, blackberry picking (but the hedges turn out to have been ‘done’ already). Tom and Emma must draw together, that’s clear enough. Both of them feel the unwanted freedom of loneliness. Daphne, Tom’s tough-looking elder sister, is yet another romantic:
‘One goes on living in the hope of seeing another spring,’ Daphne said with a rush of emotion. ‘And isn’t that a patch of violets?’ She pointed to a twist of purple on the ground, no rare spring flower or even the humblest violet, but the discarded wrapping of a chocolate bar, as Tom was quick to point out.
‘Oh, but there’ll soon be bluebells in these woods—another reason for surviving the winter,’ she went on. Young Dr Shrubsole moved away from her, hoping she had not noticed his withdrawal.
Who can say which of them, in the satirist’s sense, is right? In the same way, the villagers intimidate the gentry, and the old are intimidated by the young, who preserve them and educate them in healthy living and make them carry saccharine ‘in a little decorated container given by one of the grandchildren’—but in both cases Barbara Pym gently divides her sympathy. We have to keep alert, because she will never say exactly what we expect. The ‘few green leaves’ of the title come from a remark of Miss Grundy’s, made to Tom, who reflects how often these elderly women give him quite unconsciously ideas for a sermon: ‘He made up his mind not to use them.’
Through all Barbara Pym’s work there is a consistency of texture as well as of background. She has described the texture herself as ‘pain, amusement, surprise, resignation.’ This makes it possible for characters to stray out of their own novel into another: in A Few Green Leaves, for example, we hear about the funeral of Miss Clovis from Less Than Angels. The valedictory note cannot be missed. But once again the ending is an encounter with hope as Emma determines to stay in the village ‘and even to embark on a love affair which need not necessarily be an unhappy one.’
London Review of Books, 1980
When Dame Muriel Spark began to write fiction—reluctantly, it seems—the novel was in an interesting condition, very conscious of itself and given to experiments with time and place and to asking the reader to question the whole business of truth and invention. In her first novel, The Comforters (1957), the heroine, who is writing her first novel, finds that she and her characters are being written into a first novel by someone else. This pretence (if that is what it is), that the book is a kind of game, suited her exactly, and still does. As she writes it, it is an enthralling game, and deadly serious.
She has pointed out that it wasn’t until she became a Roman Catholic, in 1954, that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do. Good and evil, and the state of play between them, can be made clear (though not simplified), she found, by looking at a small community. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie takes place in a select Edinburgh girls’ school. At the centre of Memento Mori is a ward (aged patients, female) in a London hospital. The Abbess of Crewe, written at the time of the Watergate scandal, takes place in a convent on up-to-date lines, where the bugging system is controlled from a statue of the Infant of Prague in the Abbess’s parlour. The Girls of Slender Means presents young women living in a respectable hostel as World War II comes to an end. They will not escape violence, however. An unexploded bomb is buried in the garden.
This is the kind of apparently gross injustice, in the form of brutal interruptions to the smooth-running narrative, that you expect from Evelyn Waugh and still more from E. M. Forster. In Dame Muriel’s stories these interruptions are a reminder of the vast unseen presences on which our lives are dependent or contingent. In Memento Mori, eighty-one-year-old Bettie, who has been a distinguished penal reformer, is battered to death by a casual thief. Dull, blameless Mavis, in The Ballad of Peckham Rye, gets stabbed to death with a corkscrew. It’s not for us to distinguish between the tragic and the ridiculous.
‘He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams.’ That is how Dame Muriel begins her latest novel, her twentieth, Reality and Dreams. We’re in yet another closed area, the movies. ‘He’ is Tom, a successful if somewhat old-fashioned film director—an auteur, really, who writes his own screenplays. It sounds as if he might be in search of spiritual truth, but the author soon disillusions us. He has just recovered consciousness in an expensive clinic after a nasty accident on the set. He has fallen off a giant crane, breaking twelve ribs and a hip. Cranes, as his assistant pointed out, are quite unnecessary these days, but Tom had wanted to feel godlike. From the marvellously written, half delirious opening sequence we get the impression of a man who has been hopelessly spoiled. Like both Miss Jean Brodie and the Abbess of Crewe, he is fond of poetry, and this may redeem him a little—not much, though.
Tom’s wife is Claire, easygoing and rich. (Dame Muriel has always faced unflinchingly the difference money makes.) He has two daughters, the beautiful Cora, from his first marriage, and, with Claire, the plain, hostile, alarming Marigold. Marigold is a mean-minded sociologist, without warmth, without ‘magnificence,’ in Aristotle’s sense. Such people are not tolerated by Dame Muriel, who has demolished them in earlier books.
Marigold appears early on in Reality and Dreams as Tom’s bedside visitor: ‘“Don’t wear yourself out,” she said, “with too much conversation. I bought you some grapes.” She said “bought” not “brought.” She dumped a plastic bag on the side table. “This is a wonderful clinic,” she said. “I suppose it costs a fortune. Of course nothing should be spared in a case like yours.”’
You must not imagine Marigold was particularly deprived. Her last remark should remind Tom, if he could hear it, that he is in the hands of an all-knowing narrator, sometimes gentle, sometimes cutting, sometimes even malicious, but always elegant. But Tom thinks that he himself is a creator. About his fellow human beings his question is always: What could I cast them as? How can I make them less real? The film he is making is about a nobody, a girl he had once seen on a trip through France as she was serving out hamburgers at a campsite. In the film she becomes a millionairess overnight. ‘Do you think,’ he asks Dave, his private cabdriver, ‘that she would know what to do with that sort of money? Would she ever learn?’ Dave replies that that would depend on what kind of person she was, but this means nothing to Tom. She will only exist as part of his work of art. Then she will be irreplaceable.
Will Tom’s egocentricity—his pride, to give his sin a name—lead him to another fall? It proves ruinous, not to him, but to others. As a result of the hostility he stirs up around him—‘“It’s so very difficult,” said Tom, “to realize that one makes enemies, especially in one’s family”’—Dave gets shot at and wounded, and there is another hideous accident with the giant crane. But Tom himself flourishes. The Hamburger Girl does quite well, and he has an idea for another film, about a Celt in Roman Britain who foresees the future. Admittedly it sounds terrible; however, he finds the money to make it. In the meantime, many of the other characters have lost their jobs—so many that they form a group, like the old or the sick. Tom’s brother has been laid off in a company downsizing campaign, so has his day nurse’s husband, so have both his daughters, both his sons-in-law, Marigold’s brother-in-law (from an international electronics firm), and Dave’s brother-in-law (let go from a pizza bar). We live in a world where millions find themselves unwanted overnight, expended, like casualties of the century’s wars.
This is the dispiriting fact. But the ironic quotation that accompanies Tom throughout the book is the first line of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: ‘Let us go then, you and I.’ In the Eliot poem Prufrock ends up in a sea dream, where if human voices wake him, he will drown. Tom knows that at best he inhabits a ‘tract of no man’s land between dreams and reality.’ About redundancy in the work force, all that he can say is ‘Nobody fires a man if he is exceptionally good.’ It is as if he couldn’t risk too much sympathy, or even too much good sense. His profession, as he admits, is not ordinary life. ‘But let me tell you that for people in the film business, yes, it is life.’
His comment on the second disaster with the crane—a death, this time—is ‘I’m glad the film is coming to an end. We’re just about ready to wrap it up.’ But we’re made to feel that he is considerably shaken. What’s more, he is left with a consoler. This Dame Muriel rarely does in her fiction. (Job’s unsatisfactory comforters are the metaphor of a whole novel, The Only Problem.) But Tom is left with his wife, Claire, who is calm and affectionate, quite unmoved by his infidelities and indeed by her own. He can feel her strength and courage sustaining him as the story closes, leaving nothing more to be said.
Dame Muriel is as enigmatic in this novel, as distinct, as relentlessly observant of human habits and unguarded moments as she has ever been. Reality and Dreams is very short but, as she pointed out twenty years ago in an interview with Frank Kermode, it’s no good putting a pint of beer in a small glass. ‘I think the best thing is to be conscious of everything that one writes,’ she told him, ‘and let the unconscious take care of itself, if it exists, which we don’t know…The best thing is to know what you are doing, I think.’
New York Times Book Review, 1997
Perhaps John McGahern’s classic short stories should be read as nearly as possible at one sitting. In that way you could watch the images and the characters recur and echo one another. In ‘Wheels,’ the first story in this collection, the speaker (who never gives his name) goes back home from Dublin on his yearly leave from the office to help on the farm. ‘I knew the wheel,’ he says—that is, the turning wheel of Time and Nature. ‘Fathers become children to their sons,’ and his own father, aggressively swallowing his food at the kitchen table, has turned into ‘a huge old child’ to his stepmother Rose. Meanwhile, he himself has drifted away from the shining upper reaches of childhood without ever reaching the destination he hoped for. He can evoke past summers only by putting on his old work clothes, kept ready for him, and helping to bring in the hay. His weak bully of a father nags at him to take over the land. But in ‘Gold Watch,’ when he comes back with the young woman he wants to marry, the old couple have rented out the meadows and there is no haymaking to be done. And in ‘Sierra Leone,’ Rose dies and we are faced with yet another possible ending.
In ‘Wheels,’ the battle within the family (fought almost in silence), the balance of power between men and women, the nostalgia for a cheerless country childhood, all put us straight into McGahern’s Ireland. Life on the land (oats and potatoes) or in the sawmill or the creamery is tedious enough. At the day’s end there is scarcely anything to relate, except ‘the shape of a story that had as much reason to go on as to stop.’ No one conceals his excitement when a cow falls on its back or a neighbour tries (unsuccessfully) to hang himself from a branch. But ‘all of all of life turns away from its eventual hopelessness and finds refuge in the importance of small things,’ and of these McGahern is a connoisseur. Take his description of the barman who helps himself to a whiskey only when his wife, at the other end of the room, isn’t looking. The way he watches her is ‘beautiful in its concentration, reflecting each move or noise she made as clearly as water will drifting clouds.’ McGahern has every respect for these ‘small acts of ceremony.’ Repetition makes them almost sacred, memory gives them a second life. In ‘A Slip-up,’ an old farmer, left by his wife to wait outside a supermarket, remembers minute by minute the work he would have been doing if he’d been allowed to keep the land—clearing, draining, fencing. ‘The hard way is the only way.’
This is ‘the solid world.’ The Korean War and the Cuban missile crisis are seen as a background only. McGahern has recorded the changes, certainly, in Ireland of the 1950s. The old poorhouse has become the Rest Home for Senior Citizens, the teacher is no longer paid at the back door once a week by the priest’s housekeeper, the ‘strange living light of television’ has replaced, in most homes, the red lamp in front of the Sacred Heart. After the war, when Britain had to be rebuilt, ‘the countryside emptied towards London and Luton.’ Later, the site-workers mostly came back, and headed for overcrowded Dublin. But the problems of education, opportunity, ‘the narrow rule of church and custom’—how far have they been solved? They are all, as McGahern sees them, aspects of the idea of home, which has to be left behind, but can never be got away from.
This, of course, is one of Stephen Dedalus’s most intractable difficulties in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He escapes painfully from the nets of home, as his destiny requires, and McGahern pays a tribute to Joyce in ‘The Recruiting Officer,’ where the Christian Brothers going down to the beach might well be the same ones that Stephen sees, on the same strand at Dollymount. In this story, too, the narrator suffers, like Joyce’s Dubliners, from a paralysis of the will, and (all the more perhaps because he is a teacher) ‘a feeling that any one thing in this life is almost as worth while as any other.’
McGahern’s women, and, above all, his young women, are more enterprising by far than the men and have modernized much more readily. Love between the sexes, however, is more awkwardly treated than the long-standing, sometimes reluctant affection between friend and friend, brother and brother, fathers and sons and even old dogs and their masters. When we love, McGahern says, we know nothing about each other even if we are able to go through the ‘low door’ of submission to each other’s wishes. We assemble love and become absorbed in it, and then ‘wake in terror in the knowledge that all we have built is terminal, that, in our pain, we must undo it again.’
McGahern is a realist who counts every clean shirt and every pint of Guinness but who writes at times, without hesitation, as a poet. This is only possible because of his magnificently courteous attention to English as it is spoken in Ireland. There are no characters in these stories as sinister as the child-beating father in McGahern’s novel The Dark (1965), who sleeps in his son’s bed, or as tragic as the dying mother in The Leavetaking (1974). He has deliberately set himself the task of showing, in everyday incidents, the grief and tension they only just conceal.
Times Literary Supplement, 1992
This is the third and last of Roddy Doyle’s novels about the Rabbitte family of Barrymount, an unprepossessing council-estate suburb of North Dublin much like Kilbarrack, where Doyle was born himself. Barrymount, although by no means a foul rag-and-bone shop, is a place for dreams to start. In The Commitments young Jimmy Rabbitte decides that Ireland is ready for soul music and gets his group together. Just as there seems to be a chance with a recording company, they desert him one by one. In The Snapper Sharon Rabbitte, drunk in the car park at the Soccer Club Christmas do, gets pregnant by that fucking old eejit Mr Burgess—the father, what’s more, of a friend of hers. Still, the family will help to look after her snapper, and she can always pretend she’s had a night out with a sailor. In The Van Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. is helping to run a fish-and-chip van. It ends up a wreck. All these could be called success stories. What matters is the strength to believe in possibilities. There is hardly any of the bitterness here that the past generates. Barrymount, as Doyle shows it, is not much interested in the What Happened Shite.
The Van is Jimmy Sr.’s book, but since The Snapper he has become a much weaker figure. He is a skilled plasterer, but his firm has let him go. He no longer has a car, hangs about the public library (where they’ve run out of Action Packs for the Unemployed), and fixes things about the house—one at a time, though, to make them last. His relationship with Darren, the youngest son, the clever one, has deteriorated. When he tells the argumentative Darren not to forget who paid for the dinner that’s in front of him, Darren answers: ‘I know who paid for it. The State.’ But Darren wishes he had not said this.
Jimmy Sr.’s tools are not likely to be needed again.
Jimmy Sr. had a mug for work that he’d had for years; he still had it. It was a big plain white one, no cracks, no stupid slogans. He put two teabags in it; used to. My God he’d never forget the taste of the first cup of tea in the morning, usually in a bare room in a new house with muck and dirt everywhere, freezing; fuck me, it was great; it scalded him on the way down; he could feel it all the way. And the taste it left; brilliant; brilliant. He always used two bags, squeezed the bejesus out of them…After a few gulps he’d sip at it and turn around and look at his work…Then he’d gulp down the rest of the tea and get back to it. The mug was outside in the shed, in a bag with his other work stuff. He’d wrapped toilet paper around it.
Jimmy Sr. would normally say ‘jacks paper,’ but not in this passage, where we need to feel his respect for the mug. This surely is what Doyle means when he says he wants to show his characters thinking, rather than himself writing.
He prefers, however, to write largely in dialogue. As a teacher in a Dublin Community School he knows how people talk, but a teacher’s viewpoint is not what he wants. The dialogue is heard in concerted passages, and Doyle has a range of dashes, longer dashes, and exclamation marks that act as a kind of musical notation. The language itself, like James Kelman’s Glaswegian, has its repetitions and limitations, but is subtle when you get to know it. Jimmy Sr. notices at their dinner, when they’re talking about what’s happening these days, that ‘the twins called Thatcher Thatcher and Bush Bush but they called Gorbachev Mr Gorbachev: that said something.’ Tom Paulin has said that Doyle ‘pushes Irish English to wonderful imaginative extremes,’ but doesn’t mean by this quite what you might expect. Doyle is a wordmaster and you have to trust him, and do trust him, as to when the right word is ‘Jaysis’ and when ‘Jesus’ or ‘Good Jayesus,’ and the distinction between Hiyeh, Hiyis, and Howyeh. ‘Fucking’ (which is usually taken to have lost any meaning at all) is an indicator in this novel of character and situation. Veronica, the mother, never uses it, and there is a swearbox on the kitchen table in consideration of Gina, Sharon’s snapper. All agree with this on principle. ‘Bitches,’ says Sharon to her young sisters, ‘if Gina starts usin’ ditty language I’ll kill yiz.’ Jimmy’s great friend Bimbo, a bakery worker, ‘hardly ever said Fuck,’ and this establishes him as what he is, a mild nature, a sensitive. His doorbell plays the first bars of ‘Strangers in the Night,’ although there doesn’t seem much point to it when his house is the ‘exact same’ of all the others in the street and you could hear a knock on the door anywhere in the house.
Bimbo, then, dispenses with Barrymount’s metalanguage, and Jimmy Sr. himself knows there is a time and place for it. On Christmas morning, for instance, he is stuck making conversation with Bimbo’s old mother-in-law.
Maybe she hadn’t said anything. Maybe she couldn’t help it; she couldn’t control her muscles, the ones that held her mouth up.
He heard feet on the path.
—Thank fuck!
It was out before he knew it. And she nodded; she did; she’d heard him; oh Christ!
She couldn’t have. No, she just nodded at the same time, that was all. He hoped.
Doyle takes a risk with the structure of his new book, which is more complex than the other two. It starts in a low key, reflecting Jimmy Sr.’s empty days. About a quarter of the way through, Bimbo, too, is let go by his bakery firm and puts part of his redundancy money into a fish-and-chip van. With no wheels, no brakes, no engine, no water, no electricity, filthy, too, almost beyond purification, the van might stand for the valiant illusions of Barrymount. Neither Bimbo nor Jimmy Sr. knows even how to peel a potato. But they open up for business, and the book’s action gets into gear with demonic scenes of frying and spilling and beating the frozen cod, hard as chipboard, against the rusty freezer. The family lend a hand as the van becomes a kind of fortress under siege. The fellow from the Environmental Health is on their track. Kids try to disconnect the gas canisters. One of Gina’s nappies gets fried in batter (‘it’d look like a piece of cod, folded up,’ says Bimbo to the raving customer). All these splendours and miseries keep pace (the year is 1990) with Ireland’s successes in the World Cup.
The country had gone soccer mad. Oul’ ones were explaining offside to each other…There were no proper dinners being made at all. Half the mammies in Barrymount were watching the afternoon matches…The whole place was living on chips.
Parked outside the Hikers’ Nest for the quarterfinals, the reeking van reaches the height of its earthly glory and Jimmy Sr. takes home £160 on top of the dole. ‘And then they got beaten by the Italians and that was the end of that.’
After this dramatic check comes the third movement of the book. The publishers have accurately described The Van as ‘a tender tale of male friendship, swimming in grease and stained with ketchup’. With the decline of the chipper trade comes a falling-out that we wouldn’t have thought possible. Bimbo—or perhaps it was his wife Maggie, one of those destructive women with a grand head on her shoulders—comes to believe that he’d do better with the van on his own. Jimmy Sr., once again, is let go. Roddy Doyle, however, has an impeccable sense of endings. We last see the two of them by night on the strand at Dollymount, the place where Stephen Dedalus recognized his destiny. They’re knee-deep in the freezing water (‘Jeeesus!!’), shoving drunkenly at the poxy van that has come between them and that, Bimbo confusedly knows, must be committed as a sacrifice to the sea. Even so, ‘You’ll be able to get it when the tide goes out again,’ says Jimmy Sr.
The Commitments has been filmed and the film rights of The Snapper are sold. When they get round to The Van, let’s hope they can find a way of conveying the delicacy of human feeling in this book and, above all, in its last scene.
London Review of Books, 1991
What is the real world in which William Trevor is making excursions? Is it County Cork, ‘sunshine and weeds in a garden at Mitchelstown, Civic Guards in the barracks next door, a tarred gate…dark limestone steps in Youghal, and a backyard tap in Skibbereen’? Or (which is not the same thing) is it his memory of these places? And is his fiction more or less unreal than what he calls ‘the bits and pieces of experience’ that lie behind it? Never let it be thought that Mr Trevor, to all appearances the most crystal clear of writers, will make the answers to these questions easy. As he notes in his memoir, Excursions in the Real World, he became aware very early ‘that black and white are densities of more complicated greys.’
He was born William Trevor Cox, in Mitchelstown, in 1928. His family belonged to a minority: the small-town, not-well-off Protestants who were without much of a place in de Valera’s new Catholic Ireland. His father was a bank clerk, so too was his mother, the first ‘lady clerk’ to be employed by the Ulster Bank. The love and hatred between the two are described to their bitter end in the essay called ‘Field of Battle.’ She, perhaps, expected too much from life; he was too undemanding. The father’s job took the family from place to place. ‘Behind the lace curtains that had been altered to fit windows all over the south of Ireland life stumbled on, until it stumbled to a halt.’ The mixture of tenderness and detachment here is entirely characteristic of Mr Trevor.
Cork was the first city he knew and his first idea of an earthly paradise. He writes lyrically about ‘the waitresses with silver-plated teapots and buttered bread and cakes’ at Thompson’s and the Savoy, and above all of his twice-yearly visits to the cinema—‘Clark Gable and Myrna Loy in Too Hot to Handle. Mr Deeds Goes to Town.’ There is irony here, of course, even if it’s of an indulgent kind, but with it comes the recognition of the human need to escape through the imagination: ‘The Gentlemen’s lavatory in the Victoria Hotel had to be seen to be believed, the Munster Arcade left you gasping.’ In much the same way, the dispossessed in Mr Trevor’s fiction (for example, in his recent pair of novellas, Two Lives) console themselves with what they know must be always out of reach.
The essays are more or less in chronological order, though they are memoirs only, not a full-fledged autobiography. After the childhood in County Cork came boarding school in Dublin, a school of which young William and his brother had hoped great things, but which turned out to be ‘a part of hell in which everyone was someone else’s victim.’ In describing a stomach-turning school dinner, Mr Trevor keeps, as always, strictly to the date and period (1941): the greasy, yellowish soup has to be swallowed from tumblers made of Bakelite.
Unassumingly, almost apologetically, he is revisiting his past. His years at Trinity College, for which he makes no great claim, are followed by his first jobs as an assistant teacher in Armagh and as a copywriter in the seedier West End of London. On the whole, he laments change, although we can’t tell quite how seriously, and searches, as most of us do, for evidence that what was once part of him has not perished entirely from the earth. We last see him taking a walk up Ireland’s Nire valley, between the Monavullagh Mountains and the Comeraghs. There he finds, ‘in the chilly air and sheep scratching for nourishment,’ a defiant Nature. ‘You would swear that this Ireland all around you has never been different.’
Mr Trevor also, of course, remembers people. In these marvellous sketches from the life, he feels it necessary to suppress, or at least to keep in order, his genius as a writer of short stories. But, as in the stories, there is a magical sense of time passing, and his own life passing with it, as his perspective alters. His first teachers are preserved as they seemed to him as a little boy. Miss Willoughby, pedalling against the wind on her huge black bicycle, was severe, Evangelical, and unapproachable. Young William was not one of her chosen few. Miss Quirke, a pink-cheeked farm girl from Oola, had a seemingly endless store of knowledge, perhaps from an encyclopedia, and a calm voice. ‘Mathematical subjects were less distasteful than they had been. Even geography had its moments, though admittedly not many.’ But even though he once took the valves out of Miss Willoughby’s bicycle, and tried (quite unsuccessfully) a practical joke on Miss Quirke, he recognized them as beings not quite of this earth. During his time at St Columba’s (the last of his schools) he observed, as a puzzled adolescent, the headmaster’s wife: shy, awkward, and academic, ‘fingers tightly interlocked behind her back when she crept, crablike, into Dining Hall or Chapel.’ Some secret was guessed at, but not discovered until many years later.
In the essay called ‘A Public-House Man’ he is a bewildered trainee copywriter, still somewhat in awe of Marchant Smith, his formidably heavy-drinking boss. ‘Sarzy’ (an essay about Frances Sarzano, a middle-aged, half-Italian waif) takes us on to London’s Soho and Fitzrovia in the late 1950s.
In all these re-creations, Mr Trevor shows an exceptional power of forgiveness. Henry O’Reilly, the farmer who once taught him to snare a rabbit, was known as the laziest man in Ireland, but seemed to him the nicest. Marchant Smith was a ruinous bully, but at least he employed the otherwise unemployable. Sarzy soon became impossible, but she was an innocent, and innocence is a quality Mr Trevor highly prizes.
He tells us in his introduction that from the very beginning he has used anything in his writing that was useful. What has been especially useful to him has been his empathy with the defiantly eccentric, the non-communicators, the old—sometimes left alone while their houses fall to pieces about them—and with all who despair but do not care to admit it. There are moments, too—his greatest to my mind—when (in the novel The Old Boys, for instance, and the story ‘In at the Birth’) he lets himself leave the earth altogether, but these are not the concern of Excursions in the Real World.
This delightful book, which seems so relaxed as to be almost casual, is in fact a serious confrontation between Mr Trevor and his memory. A writer, he says, must be able to separate himself from his identity as a human being. He must stand back, and that means exile. This is the most important lesson that Stephen Dedalus has to learn in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but Mr Trevor goes even further than Joyce. Stories derive from memories, but they can equally well be memories of anywhere and anyone. ‘Real people and real places,’ he writes of Samuel Beckett, ‘got him going.’ ‘The likeness of Thomas Farrell, stationmaster of that time, is not forgotten…But there is hardly any doubt that in some other place, with different recollections, Beckett would have succeeded as well.’ Here, in his well-mannered, entirely persuasive way, William Trevor is claiming sovereignty for the writer over his source.
New York Times Book Review, 1994
The Stone Diaries (though there are in fact no diaries, they are said to have been lost) because everyone raised in the Orphans’ Home in Stonewall Township, Manitoba, is given the name of Stone; because Mercy Stone’s husband, Cuyler Goodwill, works in the limestone quarries; because her neighbour, the dour Magnus Flett, comes from the stony Orkneys; because Mrs Flett is killed when she falls against the sharp stone corner of the Bank; because for all of us the living cells will be replaced in death by ‘the insentience of mineral deposition.’ A train of imagery, then, which recalls the mermaid metaphors ‘giving off the fishy perfume of ambiguity’ in Shields’s last novel, The Republic of Love. The present book is just as readable, but more disconcerting.
The section headings—Birth, 1905; Childhood, 1916; Marriage, 1927; Love, 1936; Motherhood, 1947; Work, 1955—64; Sorrow, 1965; Ease, 1977; Illness and Decline, 1985; Death—cover all the grand old topics of McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and the Canadian Home Companion (which for so many decades gave social and moral counsel and explained how to turn out a jellied veal loaf). The protagonist is Daisy Goodwill. Her mother, Mercy Stone, dies in childbirth. Clarentine Flett, the next-door neighbour’s fed-up wife, takes the baby and flees to Winnipeg ‘with a dollar bill taken the night before from her husband’s collar-box.’ Reclaimed by her father, Daisy goes to Bloomington, Indiana, where in the Twenties stone-carvers are still needed. She marries a rich young gold-hatted lover who throws himself out of a window; in 1936 she becomes the wife of Barker Flett, twenty-two years older than herself, an expert on hybrid grains. When her three children are grown she launches for the first time on a career—‘working outside the home,’ as people said in those days; she becomes Mrs Green Thumb, the gardening consultant on the Ottawa Recorder. But the editor—who has taken fright at the idea that he might be expected to marry Daisy—gives her column back to a staffer. She takes a while to get over the resultant depression, but emerges in old age as a ‘wearer of turquoise pants suits’ in a condo in Sarasota, Florida. During her terminal illness she is moved to the Canary Palms Care Facility. Her last words (unspoken) are ‘I am not at peace.’
I have summarized this plot to show how faultlessly Carol Shields has devised Daisy’s story. It would in fact have been readily accepted, with a trivial change of ending, by the dear old Canadian Home Companion. Daisy is precisely what her son Warren calls her, ‘a middle-class woman, a woman of moderate intelligence and medium-sized ego and average good luck,’ and Shields herself has said: ‘I am interested in reality, in the texture of ordinary life, and the way people appear and relate.’ The Stone Diaries could only have been written by an expert in sensuous detail, from the blood-drenched kitchen sofa where poor Mercy dies to Daisy’s longing, as she recovers her nerve, for ‘the feel of a new toothbrush against her gums, for instance. Such a little thing.’ Shields also likes, she says, to write about survivors. Daisy Goodwill Flett surely survives for eighty years thanks to the overwhelming force of her ordinariness.
This, however, brings us to the most interesting though perhaps not the most successful element in the book. Daisy, member of the Mother’s Union, the Arrowroots, Ottawa Horticultural Society, Bay Ladies’ Craft Group (she even has a diploma in Liberal Arts somewhere, but can’t remember which drawer she put it in), is also a closet Post-Modernist. Aware that her life is drifting harmlessly past her, she is determined to acquire power over it by standing apart and reporting on it as an independent witness. She begins with her birth. ‘Why am I unable to look at it calmly? Because I long to bring symmetry to the various discordant elements, though I know before I begin that my efforts will seem a form of pleading.’ She is aware, too, that ‘the recording of life is a cheat’ and that she will never be able to recount the whole truth. ‘She understood that if she was going to hold onto her life at all, she would have to rescue it by a primary act of imagination, supplementing, modifying, summoning up the necessary connections, conjuring the pastoral or heroic or whatever…getting the details wrong occasionally, exaggerating or lying outright, inventing letters or conversations of impossible generality, or casting conjecture in a pretty light.’ Very well, then, Daisy knows that she will have to do this, but now a narrator appears, in corrective mode, to tell us that she is often wider of the mark than she thinks. She has translated (for instance) her uncle’s ‘long brooding sexual state’ into an attack of indigestion. Later, this same narrator tells us that Daisy’s is the only account there is, ‘written on air, written with imagination’s invisible ink.’ But we cannot trust her, since she insists on showing herself in a sunny light, ‘hardly ever giving us a glimpse of those dark premonitions we all experience.’ Indeed, after th e loss of her gardening column Daisy’s consciousness seems to disintegrate altogether, for a time leaving her friends and family to interpret the situation as best they can. (This is reminiscent of the method of Shields’s brilliant literary mystery story, Mary Swann.)
The Stone Diaries, it seems, is a novel, among other things, about the limitations of autobiography. As far as Daisy is concerned, it never gets away from them, even when the narration changes from the first person in 1905 (‘My mother’s name was Mercy Stone Goodman. She was only thirty years old when she took sick’) to the third person in 1916 (‘the infant—a little girl of placid disposition—was clothed in a white tucked nainsook day slip’). All the change really does is to mark the last point when she can truly establish her identity, before her mother dies and she herself, new-hatched, begins to live. This failure to find a language—as she realizes at the very end—frustrates heaven knows how many. Her eyes ‘stare icy as marbles, wide open but seeing nothing, nothing, that is, but the deep, shared, common distress of men and women, and how little, finally, they are allowed to say.’ Carol Shields, however, believes that women have been much harder done by, in this matter of silence, than men. It is of their limitations that she is thinking.
Daisy has something important in common with Mrs Morel in Sons and Lovers. ‘Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.’ Mrs Morel sets herself to live through her sons, but Daisy does not even contemplate doing this. She makes her own sortie into the world of earning money and respect, is unkindly rejected, recovers, and maintains a certain dignity without asking help from anybody, ‘and yet a kind of rancor underlies her existence still: the recognition that she belongs to no one.’ Her children are moderately fond of her, her great-niece Victoria very fond. Victoria, in fact, bids fair to bring the whole book to a happy resolution. She is the daughter of a gone-astray niece whom Daisy has taken in, with her baby, out of pure good nature, and this baby has grown up to become a paleobotanist, classifying traces of fossil plants in the rock. In other words, Victoria combines Shields’s stone and her plant imagery, just as Daisy Stone does when she becomes the well-liked gardening correspondent, Mrs Green Thumb. But here Daisy does not deceive herself. She is certain that none of her descendants will do more than look back on her with forbearance. This gives her a frightening feeling of inauthenticity.
In the process of growing up, of becoming a middle-aged woman and an old woman, Daisy has failed either to understand or to explain herself. If you were to ask her the story of her life, says the narrator, and one can hear the exasperated sigh, ‘she would stutter out an edited hybrid version, handing it to you somewhat shyly, but without apology, without equivocation that is: this is what happened, she would say from the unreachable recesses of her seventy-two years, and this is what happened next.’ She is accustomed to her own version, and so, sadly enough, are we, all of us, accustomed to ours.
An exception, of course, is the witty, cautious, sometimes lyrical narrator, who knows all the words, all the versions, and all the weak places. For fear we might doubt the reality of her characters, convincing though they are, Shields supplies a section of attractive-looking, faded photographs of five generations. Daisy herself, as might be expected, doesn’t appear, but by comparing the family snaps with the portrait on the back dust jacket we can make out that Carol Shields must be the mother of Alice, the most difficult of Daisy’s children. (Alice becomes an academic, whose first novel is everywhere unfavourably reviewed. But she is able to rise above this, because she knows she is making up her own life as she goes along.)
Talking recently at Edinburgh about her books and her motivation for writing them, Carol Shields spoke of her care to establish the narrator’s credentials and said that Daisy’s inability to express herself was the true subject of The Stone Diaries. This would make it the tragedy of someone incapable of being tragic. But the novel as it stands suggests something more complex. The publishers tell us that Daisy’s signal achievement is to write herself out of her own story. ‘Somewhere along the line she made the decision to live outside of events’—that is, to accept her own insignificance. But the reader is also asked to decide whether this is ‘a triumphant act of resistance or a surrendering to circumstances.’ In novelist’s terms, did she do right or wrong? Daisy is described as summoning up her ‘stone self’ so that even her brain becomes transparent—‘you can hold it up to the window and the light shines through. Empty, though, there’s the catch.’ She is shown as breathing her own death and contriving it, taking charge of it, in fact, as though in exasperation with what has so far been suppressed in her. If she is capable of this, there was no need, perhaps, for the narrator to pity her quite so much.
Carol Shields is asking us to play a game—a game for adults—but she is also playing it against herself. The epigraph, attributed to Alice’s daughter, says that nothing Grandma Daisy did was quite what she meant to do,
and that, in the end, is what the novel makes her.
London Review of Books, 1993
I was asked to name the book I thought should have received more attention than it did during the last 12 months, or, in this case, did not seem to have had quite the right sort of attention. Reviewers complained because Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled was much longer than his three previous books and apparently not at all like them.
Certainly it is a very long novel, and its atmosphere takes getting used to—you have to sink into it and go with it, rather like swimming through clouds. Ryder is a world-famous pianist who arrives in an unnamed city in Central Europe to give a grand, long-awaited concert. His visit is considered a great honour. The community seem to think of him as a kind of saviour. But, in a way which will be familiar to anyone who has bad dreams, he meets with a long series of interruptions, diversions and frustrations. It is not that the people he meets are trying to make things difficult. All of them treat him with respect, but all of them press absurd demands and requests on him which Ryder, although he is too courteous to say so, has no idea how to carry out.
Gustav, the hotel porter, begs him to protest on behalf of all the town’s porters. Brodsky, the drunken conductor of the municipal orchestra, wants him to provide the music for his dog’s funeral. Gustav’s daughter, Sophie, has a little boy, Boris, who may or may not be Ryder’s son. When they meet, Sophie expects Ryder to move in with her, and his conversations with the child (exactly right, as always in Ishiguro) are the best and tenderest thing in the novel. Meantime, it seems impossible for Ryder to find anywhere to practise, or even the right way to the concert hall itself. In the course of his errands and changes of plan he patrols the town, its parks, its cafes and its suburbs and yet oddly enough always finds himself back where he started. Time and place have become fluid. And the hotel room, with its worn carpet, is no longer a safe refuge. From time to time it turns into the room he once slept in as a boy, listening to the quarrels of his parents below. The book’s structure, then, is one of the simplest of all—the anxiety plot: will Ryder arrive at the concert hall in time? But Ishiguro has explained something else about this book. Ryder is trying to piece together his own past, and perhaps his future, and to do this he is ‘appropriating’—‘that is, he is recognising echoes or variations of himself in everyone he meets. We do something like this ourselves whenever we come across anyone new.’
But has Ryder any real feeling for these ‘others’? Does he care when Gustav dies, after taking part in the bizarre Dance of the Hotel Porters? Or when Brodsky’s leg is amputated and he appears on the platform with an ironing board instead of a crutch, later falling heavily into the audience below? Self-deception and failure of compassion are a living death to Ishiguro. There is a moment in The Remains of the Day when the butler, Stevens, allows himself to realize, for the first and last time, what he has become. And Ryder, towards the end of this book, when the small boy Boris leaves him without saying goodbye, finds himself sobbing out loud. That does not last, but it is enough to make us realise that Ryder too is one of the unconsoled. I have said why I found this book interesting and moving, but perhaps have not explained why I liked it so much. I think it was perhaps because I was able to lose myself in it, which is what I always hope for.
On presentation of the 1995 Cheltenham Prize,
Daily Telegraph
Midnight’s Child was born, once upon a time, in the city of Bombay. His faithful record was dedicated to Zafar, Salman Rushdie’s son. So too is this new children’s book. To write it, Rushdie has gone back beyond the Thousand Nights and One Night to the Katha Sarit Sagara, the Hindu Sea of the Streams of Story. This Great Sea has been polluted, he relates, by evil-wishers to prevent truthful inspiration welling up. They fear it because it will be forever beyond their control.
Like Midnight’s Child, little Haroun was born in a city where smoke-belching factories manufacture sadness. His father, Rashid Khalifa, is a professional storyteller, in demand at parties and political rallies, and often away from home. In consequence, his mother Soraya runs off with a weaselly clerk from the upstairs flat. ‘What to do, son?’ Rashid asks piteously. ‘Storytelling is the only work I know.’ Haroun, in his distress, asks his father in return of what use it is to tell stories which are not even true.
The question is a blow against the imagination. ‘Haroun wanted to get those words back, to pull them out of his father’s ears and shove them back in his own mouth.’ But it is too late, and when Rashid next appears in public he opens his mouth and finds he has nothing to say.
Haroun must atone. He sets out on a long journey to restore his father’s lost gift. His friends are Iff the blue-haired water genie, Butt the bus driver, and a Kashmiri floating gardener whose mouth is a purple flower. His enemies are darkness and silence, and the tyrant Khattam Shud who ‘eats light, eats it raw with his bare hands’ as well as destroying words. The light fails as he approaches the Twilight Strip, where speech is forbidden and a shadow falls over the heart.
Like many other good children’s books—At the Back of the North Wind, for example, and The Jungle Book—Haroun and the Sea of Stories is an allegory. At times it brings to mind Swift’s The Battle of the Books, particularly when Haroun leads a gallant army of chapters and volumes protected by something that Swift didn’t have, laminated covers. And when the Colossus of Bezaban, the great ice-cold idol of repression and censorship, falls and shatters, it flattens Khattam Shud, who turns out to be none other than the weaselly clerk who went off with Haroun’s mother. For the allegory of words and silence is also an allegory of love.
Granta Books has published Haroun as a novel, but I thought it right to try out Rushdie’s brilliant wheezes, rich narrative and wild jokes on a seven-year-old, whose only criticism was that it wasn’t possible for Haroun to forget his own birthday. He does, however, and wakes surprised to find new clothes laid out, his father a story-teller again and his mother singing in the kitchen. Let’s hope that this delightful tale turns out to be a Just-So story.
Evening Standard, 1990
Old age, on the whole, is not a time to be recommended, but very old novelists are allowed to write about what they like and at the age of eighty-five Saul Bellow is interested in illnesses and their recent treatment and patients who are ‘blindly recovery-bent, who have the deep and special greed of the sick when they have decided not to die.’ If they have things left to do, that will be a way of keeping themselves alive.
His Midwestern narrator is Chick, Old Cluck, an unassuming scribbler with Bellow’s own familiar, puzzled, confiding, deeply beguiling voice, talking half to us, half to himself. He has undertaken to write a memoir of his younger friend, Professor Abe Ravelstein, a scholarly but grossly successful teacher and writer. Unlike Chick, Ravelstein is a human being on a giant scale. Even his hands tremble, ‘not with weakness but with a tremendous eager energy that shook him when it was discharged.’ All his life he had wanted—in fact, needed—the best of everything: Vuitton luggage, Cuban cigars, solid-gold Mont Blanc pens, Lalique wine glasses. Naturally this had got him into financial trouble. Chick had suggested that he might try a book based on his lecture notes. ‘Abe did so, and became tremendously rich.’ It is rather difficult to envisage this book, which is said to have sold millions in both hemispheres, but Ravelstein belongs, like Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, to a mythical world which seems to await discovery behind the real one, or is perhaps the more real of the two.
Bellow once wrote that
It’s obvious to everyone that the stature of characters in modern novels is smaller than it once was and this diminution powerfully concerns those who value existence…I do not believe that the human capacity to feel or do can really have dwindled or the quality of humanity degenerated. I rather think that people appear smaller because society has become so immense.
One of his responses has been to create figures of legend. Abe is only truly himself in Paris, and in Paris at the Crillon and in the Crillon in the penthouse suite. He is bald, he spills his food on the floor, one of his feet is three sizes larger than the other. In a sense, he is treated as a figure of fun, although his success ensures respect for him, and access to high places. Three generations of his students have done well in life, having taken his advice to forget about their families and listen to what he has to tell them about Plato, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Rousseau and Nietzsche. It sounds a strangely old-fashioned course, but we’re told it wasn’t an academic programme. It was more freewheeling than that.
Chick wanders in and out of time, but finally makes it clear that the book about writing a book is dated five years after Ravelstein’s death. ‘When I said Kaddish for my parents I had him in mind too.’ During Abe’s lifetime he has often appealed to their common Russian Jewish background—‘we had nothing of greater value than this legacy, which was the vastest and most terrible of legacies’—but Abe has been adamant in believing in this world only. He has studied Jewish history seriously, but what more can he do?
This does not mean that he is a materialist. ‘You know that he goes for people who have basic passions—who make the tears come into his eyes.’ This interpretation is from Nikki, Ravelstein’s handsome youngish lover from Singapore. Whereas Chick has had two marriages, one wretched, one ideally happy, Abe is homosexual, maintaining that ‘a human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.’
Eventually his friends are reduced to sitting with him or guiding his wheelchair as they watch him die of AIDS.
You would have thought that [he] would want a solemn ‘last days of Socrates’ atmosphere. He had taught the Apology and the Crito so many times. But this was not the time to be somebody else—not even Socrates.
Chick is left with a kind of waking vision of his friend in his university apartment, listening to music, putting on his wondrous custom-made boots, then going outside and laughing with pleasure and astonishment because the birds are making too much noise for him to be heard. I started by saying that this book was about illness, but I see that in fact it is about friendship.
Spectator, 2000