Introduction

by Jonathan Coe

MacDonald Harris was the pseudonym of Donald Heiney, an American academic who, besides holding a distinguished series of university posts for more than thirty years, published fifteen extremely diverse and well-received novels. Born in 1921, by the time of his death in 1993 he was not exactly a household name, but his books were much admired, with one of them – The Balloonist, published in 1976 – being nominated for the National Book Award. The fact that his fiction is now mostly forgotten is a sobering reminder to all working writers that time can be unkind even to the brightest talents, and no one can rely on a glittering afterlife.

Fortunately, in Harris’s case a modest revival seems to be getting under way, and the reissue of this, his second novel, is a significant part of it. Mortal Leap was published in 1964, and in Britain at least did well enough to merit a mass-market paperback edition three years later. But it didn’t linger in the public memory. Who knows why not? The literary marketplace was just as arbitrary and unforgiving in the 1960s as it is in the 2020s. It should surprise no one that it allowed this novel to slip through its net, even though Mortal Leap is, in its way, pretty much a masterpiece of existential fiction.

The novel sets out its stall in the first few pages and makes no bones about its intent or ambition. An unnamed man, the first-person narrator, is looking at his reflection in the mirror. “And with a familiar chill, like the air that sinks down at evening from the hills behind the coast, came the question: who am I?” A few paragraphs later, the narrator’s speculations have already broadened out from the personal to the universal. “We are all innocent, in the end,” he writes, “and all guilty. We move blindly toward our sins, and the things we do and the things we suffer for don’t have much to do with each other. In the end there’s no justice: the universe is not an auditing firm.” And this is just page three!

Lofty though the explicit concerns of the novel may be, its tone is anything but. The reader immediately notices on those opening pages the terse precision and economy with which Harris uses words. Mortal Leap is a visually rich novel, full of vividly-imagined scenes, but there is nothing indulgent or flowery about its prose. Even when Harris is dealing with metaphysical concerns, his use of language is sharp, ironical, plain, and the easy yet emphatic rhythm of his sentences is matched by the beguiling rhythm of the novel itself, its succession of telling, pointed dramatic episodes.

These episodes combine into a story full of mystery, full of suspense, which is difficult to resist. It is a story of two distinct halves. The first tells of the narrator’s early years, starting with his escape from a strict Mormon family as a teenager, fleeing by bus in the middle of the night. Very soon he has run away to sea, finding work on a tramp freighter, where he falls under the influence of a cynical, hardened, anti-Semitic Russian called Victor. The milieu of this first half is unremittingly grimy and affectless. The world of these merchant seamen is portrayed as a joyless battle for survival, where all human relationships are transactional, where women are seen as merely “receptacles or machines.” An entirely masculine world, too, in which emotions can be processed only through reading: because our narrator turns out to be bookish – much to the derision of his shipmates – although he soon discards his early hero Conrad on the grounds that he is a “sentimentalist,” has no truck with “books by tea-party fairies like Proust” and tosses a copy of The Forsyte Saga overboard because “I very quickly saw what was wrong with it; Galsworthy was a gentleman, and no gentleman would ever write a good book.”

To avoid spoilers I will not discuss how the narrator becomes transported, after much incident and trauma, into an entirely different social universe. He finds himself moving in with what he calls “the leisure class” and builds an alternative life for himself with the help of a new accomplice. She is a woman, this time, one whom he finally understands as neither receptacle nor machine but as a human being with needs and agency, and who decides to save him and throw in her lot with him for reasons which are, at first, every bit as covert and unknowable as his own.

In its second half, then, Mortal Leap gradually reveals itself as a novel not just about masculinity, war and identity, but also about class. The self-annihilation and erasure of personality which the narrator embraces at the story’s midpoint is pivotal in more ways than one: it buys him passage into an altogether more privileged and materially comfortable world, in a way which perhaps parallels Heiney’s own journey. During the Second World War he joined the merchant marine as a cadet, was awarded a Third Mate’s license and saw action in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean campaigns. The sweaty, deadpan account of life aboard ship which makes up the first half of the novel was written from lived experience. But love of literature determined the course of his post-war life, which was spent mainly on university campuses and involved writing book-length studies of “tea-party fairies” like Proust. It’s inevitable that we end up reading Mortal Leap as a metaphorical account of his own experience: a post-traumatic attempt to make sense of his irreconcilable wartime and peacetime lives. Projecting this autobiographical dimension onto the narrative does not, however, diminish its power in any way: quite the reverse, in fact. It adds even more personal and emotional heft to a book which addresses itself, without preamble or apology, to the very fundamentals of the human condition. It’s a novel which aims high and hits its target.