Tag Archives: Everyman’s Library

Updike’s final two Henry Bech novels

Posted on by
2

John Updike, Bech Is Back (1982); Bech at Bay (1998). Books 2 and 3 of The Complete Henry Bech, Everyman’s Library 264, hb, Alfred A. Knopf 2001, pp. 153-509

I posted recently on the first book in this trilogy of linked short stories by John Updike featuring the grumpily priapic Jewish author Henry Bech – an alter ego very different from everyman Rabbit Angstrom.

In my second post I indicated that I wasn’t sure whether to carry on with books 2 and 3, but was attracted by the flashes of brilliance that just about made up for the unsavoury elements, especially in the depiction of women as ‘dolls’ (as Bech ruefully reveals is what one critic said was a feature of his fiction). Ok, so it’s satiric, but also looks very like a convenient way of displaying a misogynistic, salacious attitude.

I persevered, but found the going increasingly unattractive. In Bech Is Back the middle-aged author is still blocked, struggling to finish his next novel: he has ‘all but ceased to write’, but his books ‘cast shuddering shadows toward the center of his life, where that thing called his reputation cowered.’

That convoluted, super-smart style pervades these stories (each Book consists of loosely linked short stories, originally published separately in periodicals like The New Yorker). It grates as often as it gratifies.

He marries, but is clearly not cut out for the suburban life that goes with it. He’s libidinous, but far from monogamous. That’s where Updike’s rather off-colour portrayal of Bech’s rampant sex life strays into what looks like male fantasy.

The stories in Bech at Bay were written a decade later, and they become increasingly bizarre and surreal – and for me, tedious. He continues to accept lucrative lecturing gigs abroad, and produces very little new literary work (though the novel he finally managed to finish in the previous Book has become a best-seller – bringing with its success some snide critical comments about his selling out).

This leads to his becoming ever more vindictive and vengeful towards those critics who have upset him with their negative reviews. This is where I really started to dislike what I was reading – but refused to give up.

It didn’t get any better, I’m afraid. There’s a silly story about Bech in court, defending himself against a libel charge. Another is an unedifying account of his going to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize for literature (yes, his reputation had grown larger than his achievement). But his sexual promiscuity (usually accompanied by a refusal to commit emotionally) is tediously celebrated.

He redeems himself a little towards the end, but I’ll finish with the revealing final words of the novel, where Bech’s tortured self-doubt is tempered by hostility:

Those women who showed up at his readings did it, it seemed clear, to mock his books – clever, twisted, false books, empty of almost everything that mattered, these women he had slept with were saying. We, we are your masterpieces.

John Updike, Bech: A Book

Posted on by
6

John Updike, Bech: A Book. Pt 1 of The Complete Henry Bech: Twenty Stories. Everyman’s Library 264 hb, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001; pp. 1-152 of 509.

This novel is very different in subject and style from Updike’s (1932-2009) four Rabbit novels, which I devoured some years ago. As with that tetralogy, he added a new Bech novel (three of them) at roughly ten-year intervals.

Unlike Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, a WASP like Updike, a working-class everyman who would no doubt be a Trump/MAGA supporter today, Henry Bech is Jewish (but with anti-Semitic tendencies), cerebral and educated, and author of several novels that had been published to varying degrees of acclaim. He’s considered, in Bech: A Book, where he’s middle-aged, a celebrity.

But he’s blocked (though he jokes that he’s just a ‘slow typist’). He has ideas for a new novel, but can’t bring it to life. So he takes on various government-sponsored cultural/lecturing visits to Eastern Europe, Soviet Russia and S. America. There he talks on highbrow topics to do with modern American literature (though his favourite authors include Melville and Hawthorne):

His reputation had grown while his powers declined.

Like Rabbit, he’s angst-ridden and lost, ‘displaced’. Here’s a revealing passage, quoted satirically by Updike from an article by a fictitious British journalist (who’d claimed to be an ardent fan), where the writer comments on Bech’s ‘oeuvre’:

…Queried concerning the flowery, not to say fruity, style of The Chosen [Bech’s third and most recent novel, published in 1963, seven years earlier].

With self-referential wit, Updike writes this novel in a similarly baroque, ‘fruity’ style, with arresting turns of phrase, puns and epigrams. Take this extract, where Bech is about to deliver one of his lectures to students at a girls’ school in ‘rural Virginia’. His habitual existential angst kicks in as he contemplates the expectant young audience:

…those seriously sparkling eyes, those earnestly flushed cheeks, those demurely displayed calves and knees – appalled him with the abyss of their innocence…The essence of matter, he saw, is dread. Death hangs behind everything.

He goes on:

He saw himself, in this nest of delicate limbs, limbs still ripening toward the wicked seductiveness Nature intended, as a seed among too many eggs, a gross thrilling intruder, a genuine male intellectual Jew…[and so on for five more lines].

Women are often depicted in this novel, from Bech’s lubricious perspective, in this ‘male gaze’ kind of way: they tend to be seen in terms of how sexually attractive he finds them. If this is meant satirically, it still strikes an unsavoury note for me, and I struggled at times to carry on reading. Admittedly, Updike has chosen a flawed character whose attitudes and behaviour (especially towards women), like Rabbit’s, aren’t always admirable – but these factors, along with the tortuous, self-consciously literary style, make for a troubling, only intermittently satisfying read.

What kept me going was the appearance every now and then of an image, a sentence or passage of breathtaking elegance, wit and technical brilliance: these more than made up for the otherwise laboured Jamesian complexity and tone that came across to me as borderline smug. Here’s one passage I marked as pleasing – not his best, but fairly typical; Bech is an a lecturing trip to Bulgaria:

There was a mosque, and an assortment of trolley cars salvaged from the remotest corner of Bech’s childhood, and a tree that talked – that is, it was so full of birds that it swayed under their weight and emitted volumes of chirping sound like a great leafy loudspeaker.

Ten years ago I quoted from and analysed two passages from Rabbit Redux (1971) HERE and HERE.

John Ruskin, Praeterita

Posted on by
4

John Ruskin, Praeterita (and Dilecta). Everyman’s Library 279, hb, Alfred A. Knopf (2005). 564 pp.

John Harvey’s novel The Subject of a Portrait (2014) casts vivid fictional light on the complex psychological condition and problematic sexual proclivities of the eminent Victorian polymath, art critic and socio-political commentator and philanthropist John Ruskin (1819-1900). I posted about this novel when it was published, with guest posts relating to it by the author himself, and by Michael Flay (links at the end of this post).

The novel is about Ruskin’s courtship of and marriage to Effie Gray, who he’d met in Scotland when he was 21 and she was 12. They married in 1848, but the marriage was annulled six years later, on the grounds, more or less, that he was incapable of (or not interested in) consummating it. The Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais, who painted his portrait – hence the novel’s title – when the three of them travelled to Scotland together, fell in love with her on that trip, and they married in 1855.

I wanted to see if Praeterita sheds any further light on Ruskin’s strange, disturbing personality and behaviours, as well as for an insight into his otherwise brilliant and hugely influential cultural-critical sensibility and oeuvre.

The book’s Latin title means ‘past things’. As the introduction by his biographer Tim Hilton says, it was put together in his house by Lake Coniston using as source material his large collection of journals and letters. He rightly describes it as having no ‘narrative drive’, and is as bizarre as his life story: some chapters were carefully prepared, others dashed off impromptu. It isn’t a conventional autobiography; it has some affinity with the religious ‘confession’ literature that he was immersed in from childhood. His evangelical Christian mother ensured that he knew the Bible intimately, and he wrestled with his faith throughout his life, veering from deeply devout to what he described as his ‘unconversion’.

It doesn’t reveal much at all. He begins in vol. 1 with reminiscences of his childhood, then in vols. 2 and 3 proceeds chronologically through to adulthood. There’s a lot of stuff about his family, his father’s partnership in the Domecq wine business, frequent and extensive travels in England and Europe (especially the Alps, Italy, including of course what he calls ‘the enchanted world of Venice’, about which he was to write one of his best-known works; he also names Rouen, Geneva and Pisa as ‘the centres of my life’s thought’, the ‘tutresses of all I know, and…mistresses of all I did’), and his love of books.

His ‘first masters’ were Scott and Homer, and he started composing poetry and prose of his own very early on. His mother wanted him to enter the church, and his father later regretted that the famous author Ruskin became had failed to become a bishop!

From an early age he developed a passionate love of nature. Art and drawing also became important aspects of his life – which of course he went on to make one of his key adult preoccupations.

At the age of 17 his father’s partner’s four Paris-based daughters stayed at his family home in Herne Hill (S. London) for a while. Ruskin amusingly describes how within four days in this ‘fiery furnace’ of female pulchritude (what a great Victorian expression – mine, not Ruskin’s) he’d been ‘reduced…to a mere heap of ashes’ by the charms of 15-year-old Adèle Domecq – an infatuation that was to last several years, until she married someone else. There’s no sign here, then, of his later preference for very young girls. Is there also a hint of retrospective self-recrimination in this mocking attitude to his teenage/young adult crush? There are no further references in Praeterita to his being attracted to physically mature women.

Interestingly there’s not a single mention in Praeterita of Effie Gray. He does mention Rose la Touche. He met her in 1858 when she was just turning 10 and he was almost 39. She was to replace Effie (his marriage to her was annulled four years earlier) as his ideal female (ie pre-pubescent). At p. 269 he says he wrote a fairy story ‘to amuse a little girl’ (this was Rose), but doesn’t name her. Instead he makes a joke about his story’s being ‘totally valueless…I can no more write a story than compose a picture’. This evasion or elision is revealing.

It’s not until p. 467 that he describes being taken on as Rose’s art tutor. He describes her appearance in a restrained, factual way. But he does say she had ‘Lips perfectly lovely in profile – a little too wide’, etc. Although there’s nothing particularly salacious here, it’s interesting that he goes into such detail about her looks.

He goes on to say a good deal more about her prowess as an artist, but the only real hint at the growing intimacy between them is his revelation that she had a pet name for him: St Crumpet. This short section ends, however, with this revealing passage:

Some wise, and prettily mannered, people have told me I shouldn’t say anything about Rosie at all. But I am too old now to take advice…

And he goes on to include at great length the first of her many letters to him, in which she innocently describes her European travels. He says that there’s nothing particularly precocious in the letter, but he (over)states her ‘sympathy’: ‘She knows exactly what I am feeling, and thinks only of that’. He fails to mention that he asked her parents’ permission when she was 18 for her to marry him, and they refused. They cut off all connection between him and Rose. According to Wikipedia, Effie Gray intervened to warn them of his nature, and this helped them to make this decision. I haven’t been able to verify this.

So there’s a great deal of charming, discursive material in this book, and Ruskin’s writing is often witty, self-deprecating and interesting. There are some dull, repetitive sections, for example about the beauties of alpine scenery, and I skipped much of these, but it’s worth a look for anyone with an interest in Victorian art, literature and culture.

I can’t help feeling some disquiet, though, at these omissions about his personal life, and the breezy avoidance of anything untoward about his sexual inclinations. In this respect it’s not exactly a whitewash job, but it’s definitely a very partial portrait of an artist and his psyche.

[An apologetic footnote reflecting my preoccupation with hagiographical and iconographical matters: at p.444 Ruskin mourns the death of one of his favourite dogs, Wisie, ‘a white Spitz, exactly like Carpaccio’s dog in the picture of St Jerome.’ He tells a lovely anecdote of this dog getting lost when playing on the beach on the Venice Lido, spending three days there alone, ‘living by petty larceny’, evading all attempts to capture him, then he swam back across the lagoon to the city and was brought back to his sad owner, ‘the Madonna della Salute having been propitious to his repentant striving with the sea’.

But it’s usually a lion that’s depicted in the iconography of St Jerome; what’s going on? A quick online search (thank you Wikipedia) revealed that the painting by Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1460-c.1526) long known as ‘St Jerome in his study’ was correctly identified in 1959 as actually depicting ‘St Augustine’s vision’. The confraternity of the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni – one of many Venetian religious charitable guilds, founded in the 15C by Dalmatian immigrants when Dalmatia was part of the Venetian empire (schiavoni is the dialect word for ‘Slavs’) – was dedicated to Sts George, Tryphon and Jerome.

Around 1502 they commissioned Carpaccio to produce a cycle of nine paintings portraying scenes from the lives of these saints. Three illustrate scenes from the life of St Jerome (who was born in a province of Dalmatia). Augustine’s letters relate a story of a time when he was sitting in his study writing a letter to Jerome when he was interrupted by a vision. He was bathed in divine light, and the study was filled by a heavenly aroma. Jerome’s voice filled the room, chastising Augustine for his intellectual pride. It later turns out that this was the very moment Jerome died.

The painting (link to the Wikipedia article, with several lovely illustrations from it HERE) shows Augustine at this moment, pen poised in the air, peering at the miraculous light streaming through the window. His little white dog sits nearby, looking up at this scene, also seemingly transfixed. Augustine’s cabinet of curiosities displays a formidable array of fashionable and exotic Renaissance artifacts – maybe his pride extended beyond the intellect (but it’s probably more to do with the artist’s own preoccupations).

The Wikipedia article identifies the dog as a ‘Volpino Italiano’ (which translates as ‘Pomeranian’, although ‘volpo’ means ‘fox’ – hence Jonson’s eponymous character Volpone), ‘similar to a German Spitz’.

So I hope, if you’ve got this far, that you’re now gratified to have that detail cleared up.]

My post (from 2014) on Harvey’s novel Subject of a Portrait HERE

John Harvey’s guest post (later in 2014) on his novel, and thoughts about the (at that time not yet released) film ‘Effie Gray’, scripted by Emma Thompson, HERE.

Another guest post on the novel and its depiction of Ruskin’s ‘sexual thoughts and behaviours’ by Michael Flay HERE. He discusses the psychology and pathology of Ruskin’s preference for pre-adolescent girls: ‘the age where beauty dwells, we spoil as we grow big’.

In the cage: Elizabeth Bowen, First Stories

Posted on by
6

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), First Stories

My Everyman hardback copy of Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen’s Collected Stories (2019) runs to 860 pages of fairly small print. This post will therefore focus on the first section – a collection of 14 stories first published as Encounters in 1923, when she was only 24 years old.

The usual approach to consideration of a collection of stories like this is to identify common threads or themes. But each of these stories is a finely crafted entity in its own right. If there are such themes, they’re probably to do with people using plenty of fine-sounding language but failing to communicate – or to articulate what they really mean (if they even know themselves). There’s very little action or plot in the stories; instead we see people gossiping, assessing each other (often not very favourably), scoring points, deflecting, struggling with social expectations.

The first story, ‘Breakfast’, published when Bowen was only 21, is a good example. A man steels himself to join the breakfast group in the house where he’s a paying guest. ‘Behold, I die daily’, are his unspoken thoughts as he descends from his room to join the unsympathetic group already eating. His landlady, the owner of the house, passive-aggressively chides him for being late to the meal, then proceeds to accuse him of profligacy in losing collar-studs – his excuse for his lateness.

The story sets the tone for most of what follows. There’s wit and psychological perception in the portrayal of these sparring characters. Bowen’s modernist approach means there’s a lot of free indirect thought, disconnected or inconclusive musings and dreams, epiphanies and obliquely observed scenes which reveal depths and complexities in the characters that the reader has to work at figuring out. It’s worth the effort. Atmosphere prevails over exposition.

Bowen was born to a wealthy Protestant Irish family. Her mother’s ancestors included a Viscount Powerscourt (a fine estate in Co. Wicklow; I attended a wedding there with Mrs TD some years ago when a relative of hers had his reception in the big house – now an upmarket hotel. Her father as a lad had climbed the rockface behind the waterfall in the grounds).

The author spent her childhood summers at her father’s family home, Bowen Court in Co. Cork, but she lived mostly in England, moving there with her mother permanently in 1907 when her father had a mental breakdown. When her mother died in 1912, when Elizabeth was only 13, she went to live with great-aunts in England. This peripatetic early start to life, and the traumatic events she experienced, seem to have influenced her writing. Another aspect of these stories includes characters who are dislocated, disengaged, unfulfilled. Maybe as a person who was perceived by many in Ireland as not a true Irishwoman, and by the English as a colonial, she felt inclined to write about outsiders, people estranged from those around her.

She conveys the passion and anger felt by a small girl when her mother isn’t home to lavish praise on her for the essay her teacher had read out to her class at school. Her immature instinct is to lash out when the mother finally appears.

There are wives who feel they live in an ‘intolerable cage’, like the woman in ‘The Evil that Men Do -‘. She receives a florid love-letter from a man she’d met at a poetry reading, and with whom she’d shared a bus-ride afterwards. This leaves her in a romantic flutter; she feels she’s lived her life ‘on the defensive’. She doesn’t like her solicitor husband any more, she concludes. He doesn’t even glance at the poetry books she leaves lying around. When she sat gazing at the fire for hours, or out of the window, he never asked her what she was thinking about (T.S. Eliot used a similar trope about the same time). He often left her alone with the children and servants for days on end (the characters in these stories usually have servants and grand houses). She bemoans this solitude, but also embraces it: ‘of course solitude was her only escape and solace.’ She adds this self-consciously poetic thought to the postscript of the letter she’s writing to her effusive admirer.

The story’s conclusion provides an example of Bowen’s capacity for sly humour: the unsentimental, neglectful husband buys his wife a pretty gift, and she’s instantly won over. Her romantic fantasies vanish, and she’ll never know that for fateful reasons her correspondent will never read her letter.

This is not the only story in which a married woman (or one with a selfish, possessive brother) has a third, shadowy man in the background. In ‘The Shadowy Third’ this third person is the late wife of a man whose second wife, as in Rebecca, is uncomfortably aware of this ghostly, possibly better-loved predecessor.

Loneliness is also apparent in the schoolmistress’s life in ‘Daffodils’. She tries to engage with a trio of her girl pupils, inviting them as they pass her house to take tea with her. But she puts them off by berating them for their lack of perception of life or fully ‘seen’ things, symbolised by those Wordsworthian flowers that she’d just bought. ‘Nothing ever comes new to them…or impresses them…Their sentimentality embarrasses me.’ It’s no surprise when they up and leave, grateful to escape this sad woman; they for their part cattily agree the teacher ‘has never lived.’

It’s difficult to convey the range and variety of these exquisite stories. I’ve possibly over-emphasised the connections between them, and their poignancy; there are also many differences, and each story is a vignette in its own right. I particularly liked ‘All Saints’, a story about an eccentric, ‘theatrical’, rather vampish middle-aged woman who leaves a vicar ‘nonplussed’ when she asks if she can donate a stained-glass window to his church: ‘I think coloured windows are so beautiful. They make me feel so religious and good.’ She wants it to be an All Saints window, but her idea of what constitutes a saint is highly unconventional and definitely not Christian. No wonder the vicar is shocked and wrong-footed.

Two novels by Elizabeth Bowen that I’ve posted about left me less than impressed, although I thoroughly enjoyed pre-blog readings of The Heat of the Day (1929) and The Last September (1948). Those two are:

Friends and Relations (1931) HERE

Eva Trout (1968) HERE

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Posted on by
10

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita. Translated from the Russian by Michael Glenny (Everyman’s Library, 1992)

I thought I’d show some solidarity with besieged, invaded Ukraine by reading this novel by Kiev-born Bulgakov (1891-1940). He began work on it in 1928, and worked on various drafts until just before his death. It was first published in censored form in Russia 1966-67 and in smuggled-out versions in Paris and Frankfurt over the next couple of years. The first complete Russian edition appeared in 1973. It was dangerous and futile to try to publish anything under Stalin’s murderous regime that showed even the slightest hint of anti-Soviet thinking. As a large part of this novel pokes gleeful fun at the corrupt ways of Muscovites in that era, its fate was always going to be troubled.

Bulgakov Master and Margarita cover It’s a coruscating novel teeming with surreal incident and characters in multiple storylines. At its heart is a passionate love story between the two in the title. Margarita, who doesn’t appear in person until Book 2, ch. 19, is unhappily married when she meets and falls in love with the unnamed master. His novel based on the story of Pontius Pilate’s crisis of conscience after sentencing Jesus to death has troubled him so much he burnt the manuscript. This reflexive part of the plot mirrors the struggles Bulgakov had with this novel. ‘Manuscripts don’t burn’, says the devil to the master when his MS miraculously reappears, intact. It could serve as the moral of this novel – censorship can only partially silence truth.

Margarita gets caught up in the small retinue attending on Satan on his visit to Moscow, where he causes mayhem with his trickster’s black magic and mischievous sending up of the venality and greed of its citizens. She acts as sexy hostess to his spring ball, a macabre event attended by the undead. There’s witchcraft and poison, decapitation and shape-shifting.

Interspersed is the story of Pontius Pilate and the crucifixion, then the master’s version. So it’s a novel, among other things, about writing novels: the blurred boundaries between supposed real life and fiction. No matter how fantastic and supernatural the story becomes, the narrative is always conveyed with conviction.

Just what it all means is difficult to pin down. It’s easy to see a satire on Stalin’s soviet regime – but it’s never overt or heavy-handedly done. There’s a lot of fun poked at the literary world in particular: the writers’ club members enjoy a hedonistic life while promoting artistic mediocrity, and critics attack the works of honest writers striving to say something worthwhile and original, like the master.

It seems also to show how a totalitarian regime imposes its own version of ‘truth’ on its people. What we now call fake news. It’s about morality and its opposite, or absence, good v. evil – among other things. If the state decrees you’re all atheists, what do you do when the devil shows up? If there’s no God, then how can you believe in the devil?

There’s a lot of dark humour. Particular satisfying are Satan’s attendants. Foremost among these is Behemoth, the wise-cracking, talking cat who rides the tram (and dutifully pays his fare), shows off his pistol-shooting skills (though these aren’t as good as he boasts), and relishes making fools of the police when they try to arrest him.

The humour and surrealism have a Gogolian/fantastic edge, maybe even a whiff of Lewis Carroll (though I have no idea if Bulgakov knew his work), but this is tempered by the lyrical historical-realist style of the Pilate passages.

This might all sound a bit of a dog’s dinner, but Bulgakov manipulates his material with such panache that it just about works. I did find some of the satanic antics sections went on just a little too long at times, but the overall zest of the narrative kept me turning the pages.

I gave up trying to figure out what the ultimate message might be, and just enjoyed the whole Walpurgis-night broomstick ride.

The bottom bar told me at the end of that last sentence that this post contained 666 words. I couldn’t leave it like that…

Surface and substance: Edith Wharton, The Reef

Posted on by
12

Edith Wharton, The Reef. Everyman’s Library, hardback, 1996. First published 1912

Anna Summers is a product of the convention-bound world of Old New York:

In the well-regulated, well-fed Summers world the unusual was regarded as either immoral or ill-bred, and people with emotions were not visited.

She’s aware of feelings and romantic aspirations deep inside her somewhere, but as a young woman under the influence of her parents and their prim social set, such stirrings would be considered improper. She has learned to regard ‘the substance of life’ as:

A mere canvas for the embroideries of poet and painter, and its little swept and fenced and tended surface as its actual substance. It was in the visioned region of action and emotion that her fullest hours were spent; but it hardly occurred to her that they might be translated into experience, or connected with anything likely to happen to a young lady living in West Fifty-fifth Street.

 Only love, she believes, could release her from ‘this spell of unreality,’ and construct ‘the magic bridge between West Fifty-fifth Street and life. George Darrow seems the ideal candidate: she feels an impulse of passion for him – but she’s incapable of indulging it, or to abandon the social poise and self-effacing tact so prized in her world. Darrow wants to kiss her, but she wants to talk to him about books and art. He turns to shallower, more compliant young women for dalliance, leaving Anna to berate herself for being so ‘cold’, such a ‘prude’. Being considered by envious mothers of such unbridled young women in her social set as a ‘model of lady-like repression’ is little consolation.

It’s difficult to say much about the subsequent plot without spoilers. On the rebound from Darrow, Anna marries another American, a dull, conventional bore called Leath. He takes her to live in a dismal French chateau that’s a ‘symbol of narrowness and monotony’. His widowed mother lives there with them, a representative of ‘the forces of order and tradition.’ Anna has chosen badly if she expected a fulfilled life. One set of desiccated conventions is replaced by another, older one.

Her trapped existence worsens: she’s desperately lonely and emotionally trammelled, even after the birth of her daughter. When her husband dies, Darrow re-enters her life after a twelve-year gap, and their romance seems set to resume – except this time she’s steeling herself to act more spontaneously, kindle her repressed sexuality, and not drive him away again with her unresponsiveness. Then all kinds of complications set in.

The title of the novel reveals that their love will not sail smoothly. The opening words indicate another kind of reef: ‘Unexpected obstacle.’ Anna has sent him a telegram just as he sets off by train from London to visit her in France. He’s frustrated and angry at yet another apparent snub from her. When a pretty young ingénue crosses his path, history repeats itself, and he turns (with rather cynical and calculated selfishness) to this natural, vibrant spirit, who acts with all the spontaneity, sensuality and joy of living that Anna so palpably fails to access or unleash in herself.

What follows is a slow-burning modern tragedy. Can love flourish when it hits the reef of distrust and infidelity? The more Darrow ducks and dives to avoid wrecking the fragile, sinking relationship with Anna, the more his lies and evasions smash her faith in him – and in love.

The Reef was much admired by Wharton’s friend Henry James, and it’s been described as her most Jamesian novel. It is, in the sense that there’s almost no surface ‘action’; the narrative consists largely of dialogue which the reader has to fathom delicately. Hardly anyone speaks their mind. True feeling is largely unspoken. All is (as Darrow himself puts it at one point), nuance. What lies beneath this apparently calm, sophisticated surface turns out to be the reef.

The first part of the novel is focalised on Darrow, and it’s his urbane world view that positions Anna as difficult and repressed. Then Anna’s consciousness takes centre stage (the novel has been filmed, though I haven’t seen it; it would lend itself, I’d have thought, to dramatization). I found myself sympathising increasingly with her as she struggled to overcome her inhibitions, to go with her instincts instead of her will for once, and to forgive Darrow his ‘moment of folly’, a ‘flash of madness’ with the young woman he’d met on his thwarted trip to visit Anna at the start of the novel.

She recoils from his glib self-justifications when he finally confesses. His masculine excuses are ‘a vision of debasing familiarity: it seemed to her that her thoughts would never again be pure.’

She wondered at his composure, his competence, at his knowing so exactly what to say. No doubt men often had to make such explanations: they had the formulas by heart… A leaden lassitude descended on her. She passed from flame and torment into a colourless cold world where everything surrounding her seemed equally indifferent and remote. For a moment she simply ceased to feel.

 Poor Anna. Just as she’d let go and started to allow herself to feel, he accuses her of being ‘too hard’ and ‘too fine’. The imminent wreck of their romance is all her fault, then. But the novel doesn’t end there.

I’ve just started reading Rosamond Lehmann’s 1953 novel The Echoing Grove; it looks set to chart similar reefs in the seas of sexual relations.

I’ve posted about nine other works of fiction by Edith Wharton: link HERE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘I see people cashing in.’ Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Posted on by
8

Joseph Heller (1923-99), Catch-22. Everyman’s Library, 1995 (19611)

 I finally decided it was time to read this famous novel after watching the first few episodes of the new TV dramatization, produced by George Clooney (who plays the gloriously named  Col. Scheisskopf – all the names are exorbitant in this novel – ludicrously obsessed with pointless, mechanistic parades). The filmed version does a pretty good job, but although it includes some of the darker elements of the novel, still unsurprisingly sanitises the narrative.

Captain Yossarian is the Everyman figure caught in the middle of the absurdity and horror in WWII of flying missions for a US Army airforce unit based at a fictitious island called Pianosa off the mainland of Italy. The Germans are in retreat so the war is in its final stages. And Yossarian has had – and seen – enough.

The novel opens with him feigning an unspecified disease in his liver. The doctors, like all the military personnel in this crazy army, are so incompetent they’re ‘puzzled by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this being just short of jaundice all the time confused them.’

That’s typical of the demotic, looping style of the satiric, wittily sardonic narrative voice. It shares some of the characteristics in tone and style of the amphetamine rush and surreal, jazzy angst and hedonism of Beat writers: novelists like Kerouac (On the Road was published in 1955, two years after Heller started drafting this novel).

Heller Catch-22 coverIn structure too Catch-22 shows its allegiance to the nascent anarchic, counter-cultural post-war reactions of the younger generation to the institutionalised, corporate capitalism and cynical opportunism (political and commercial) that had started to thrive during the war – always a good theatre for entrepreneurs – and had prospered further during the cold war. Each of the 42 chapters focuses on a single character or set of related events. These stand alone almost like short stories, but are connected thematically, and the episodes often recur in later chapters (like the  terrible death of Yossarian’s colleague Snowden, slowly revealed across the 500 pages), repeating, rearranging and accreting details (déja vu is a leitmotif; arbitrarily redacting the enlisted men’s letters home another – it’s a network of redactions and rewritings), as the narrative does at the level of the sentence, shown in that quotation above.

In this respect the novel’s development is similar to the iterative narratives of a patient undergoing therapy, talking to the analyst who gradually encourages them to remove the defensive veils that shield them from the traumas their psyche is attempting to defend itself from, by revisiting and re-narrating the events that triggered the trauma (as Salinger shows with Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, published soon after the war). Yossarian doesn’t explicitly undergo such therapy in the novel, but his frequent exchanges with anyone who’ll listen to his frenzied attempts to stop getting killed in action fulfil a similar function.

At first it’s Doc Daneeka, but he’s so disaffected at having been drafted into the military just as his civilian practice began to become financially successful (we later learn this was largely because of his dodgy dealings with drugs – he too is corrupt and amoral, like all the military in Heller’s satiric portrait) that his unsympathetic, selfish response to complaints and requests like Yossarian’s or any of his other terrified comrades is: ‘“He thinks he’s got troubles? What about me?”’ He doesn’t want to make sacrifices, he snarls; ‘”I want to make dough”’.

Later it’s the ineffective timid chaplain (who’s lost his faith), incapable of standing up to the intimidating senior officers he’d have to confront if he were to carry out Yossarian’s anguished appeal for his intercession – to have him grounded, sent home, taken out of the hellish bombing raids he has to fly.

Yossarian’s terror is exacerbated by the camp’s senior officer, Col. Cathcart, interested only in getting his name into the popular press, and thwarting officer rivals in their attempts to gain promotion ahead of him. His petty obsessions result in his regularly, callously increasing the number of missions his men have to fly. Each time Yossarian reaches or nears the magical limit – which means going home to safety – Cathcart bumps up the total, deepening Yossarian’s despair and frustration.

Yossarian readily admits he’s a coward. He’s seen too much death and mutilation suffered in a war directed by incompetent madmen like Cathcart. Nowadays we’d probably consider him to be suffering from PTSD. Yossarian’s rejection of traditional military and patriotic values, of heroism and sacrifice for one’s country and fellow servicemen, is the central feature of Heller’s satire. For all morality and human decency, values and virtues, have been inverted, perverted, replaced by inhumane, cynical self-serving amibition, and greed. Everyone in the military, he insists with sound logic, is crazy, but you’d have to be crazier to fly missions – hence the infamous ‘catch’ that thwarts him: he must be sane to know that.

Language has become as unstable as sanity; semantics are unclear. Linguistic play, puns, paradox and literary allusion and intertextuality abound: Dostoevsky is namechecked explicitly several times; Kafka’s voice is implicitly omnipresent – for example, when the chaplain is interrogated with ‘immoral logic’ by sinister agents who accuse him of crimes of which they are as yet unaware – as he is.

The absurd black humour serves to heighten the dark moral message. When Capt. Aardvark, the navigator on one mission, is asked by the pilot if the bombs had hit the target, he asks, ‘”What target?”’ Yossarian, the bombardier, asked in exasperation the same question, responds, ‘”What bombs?” His ‘only concern had been the flak.’

It’s one of the most searing indictments of the absurdity of war that I’ve ever encountered. It’s not just the physical and emotional torture endured by the combatants and civilians affected, which tends to be at the heart of canonical anti-war literature from Remarque and Barbusse to Wilfred Owen, Hemingway and…well, Helen Zenna Smith. Heller’s most acrid satire takes what Smith started to do in Not So Quiet…and increases it to monstrous, Rabelaisian proportions.

Heller takes this anti-war anger and disillusionment to a different, ferocious level. The most shocking element in his carnival of dark grotesquerie is the cynical entrepreneurship of mess sergeant, Minderbinder. He has assembled a corrupt ‘syndicate’ that harnesses the graft, villainy and amorality of the Mafia with the corporate ruthlessness of big business. His dodgy import-export scams exploit the greed of officers like Cathcart, only too happy to profit from his use of military aircraft to move his wares around the world (with making money his only cynical concern; I’m reminded of the banking crisis in 2008, and what caused it). His lust for profit takes precedence over every decent consideration. When it seems he couldn’t become more fiendishly capitalistic, he starts dealing with the Germans, aiding their war effort against the Americans for cash, culminating in the horrific bombing and strafing of his own airbase – with huge loss of life of his comrades (a detail redacted in the TV version).

This vision of a hellishly corrupt and depraved corporate-military complex is mitigated in the dramatization. There’s less, too, of the dated sexism and misogyny that mars some of the novel; the scenes in the Rome brothel, although contributing to the theme of cynical commercialism and profiteering from war, display some disconcerting attitudes to women.

But the Rome scenes also produce one of the most chilling and disturbing sequences in the novel, near the end when Yossarian seeks out the sex worker who his friend Nately naively believed he would marry. He needs to tell her Nately has been killed in action. His descent through the noxious alleys of the city’s lower depths is like the harrowing of Hell, or Dante’s progress through those tormented circles of doom accompanied by Vergil. Raskolnikov gets one of his mentions in this section. He witnesses depraved acts of cruelty, sees the poverty, suffering and despair of the innocent while the ‘ingenious and unscrupulous handful’ of corrupt sinners thrive. The narrative takes on Yossarian’s voice:

What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? [and so on for a dozen more lines]…Yossarian walked in lonely torture, feeling estranged…[next page] The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves.

This catalogue of depravity reveals Heller’s purpose beneath the black comedy: Yossarian’s sense yet again here of déja vu – of ‘sinister coincidence’ – underlines the scorching message of social criticism in the novel. The act of rape and murder that follows, and the injustice with which it’s met, indicate its shift into a nightmare world of perversion and craziness that outKafkas Kafka.

As ever I’ve gone on for far too long, but it’s difficult to be brief in assessing this complex, extraordinary novel (despite its flaws). Near the end, as Yossarian’s disgust with military corruption and incompetence reaches its climax, and we hear the final version of the death of Snowden – a terrible unfolding that explains much of his desperate condition – he has an exchange with a sympathetic but deluded officer. He tries to explain why ‘ideals’ are no longer valid:

‘You must try not to think of them,’ Major Danby advised affirmatively. ‘And you must never let them change your values. Ideals are good, but people are sometimes not so good. You must try to look up at the big picture.’

Yossarian rejected the advice with a skeptical shake of his head. ‘When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don’t see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.’

 

 

 

 

Penelope Fitzgerald, Gate of Angels

Posted on by
Reply

Penelope Fitzgerald, Gate of Angels. First published 1990. Everyman’s Library 3-vol. edition including The Bookshop and The Blue Flower, 2003

In my previous post about the first novel in this collection I suggested that Fitzgerald’s skill in evoking sense of place and time in her novels is extraordinary.

In Gate of Angels she presents the cloistered, all-male world of a Cambridge college in 1912. The action is therefore overshadowed by the reader’s knowledge that most of the young men who appear in these pages will be doomed to the slaughter of the trenches, so that the light romantic comedy that’s enacted in the narrative is clouded by this awareness.

Fitzgerald 3 novels coverTiny St Angelicus is a celibate, quasi-monastic college full of Fitzgerald’s usual collection of eccentrics. The plot is a slight affair of the romance that develops between Fred Fairly, a young Fellow, a rational scientist, and the street-wise, penniless orphaned London girl Daisy.

There are some witty glimpses of the exciting and momentous work being conducted by the likes of (future Nobel prizewinner) Rutherford on nuclear fission at the famous Cavendish lab (he became its professor in 1919). There are heady exchanges among the academics about nascent theories in atomic physics and psychology, and the competing attractions of theology and ontology. Fitzgerald has great fun satirising the antiquated beliefs of the more conservative academic scientists as ‘pernicious notions of mass’, ‘substance’, ‘the elementary particle’ and quantum physics develop around them. They refuse to believe in ‘unobservables’. ‘Scientists should not indulge themselves on quite this scale,’ declares Fred’s distressed Professor Flowerdew.

Fred is the son of a rural rector, and in one of the best scenes he returns home to try to break the difficult news to his father that he’s lost his Christian faith (as an uncle of Fitzgerald’s had done with his bishop father; he went on to be a code-breaker who worked on deciphering Enigma at Bletchley Park. Fitzgerald had a colourful family, and their unconventional talents infuse her fiction).

As always with Fitzgerald, things don’t turn out as one might expect. When Fred introduces his family to his Cockney sparrow girlfriend the clash of cultures and backgrounds unfolds with the wit and delicacy of touch characteristic of this clever and sensitive novelist. The scenes in which Daisy struggles with authority figures to become a nurse and raise herself out of grim poverty in London’s slums are vividly and sympathetically done. She’s one of Fitzgerald’s most spirited, unconventional heroines. Her refusal to conform and obey rules tends to get her into trouble – but she wouldn’t be a Fitzgerald heroine if she behaved otherwise.

There’s always a sense that the author is working at a level superior to the light comedy being played out on the pages. The plot is a vehicle for something more serious, elevated and elusive.

I’m not quite sure what it is. Apart from the science/art/philosophy debate noted above, it might be something to do with that Flanders slaughter, that puts into perspective the main characters’ struggles for fulfilment, and the petty squabbles and claret-soaked donnish banter of the college scenes. A seedy journalist gloomily predicts to Daisy that in ten years’ time he’ll be dead – a casualty of the inevitable war that will ensue from the ‘quarrel’ between the King and his ‘German cousin’. Daisy’s skills as a nurse would no doubt soon come in useful. The crazed consultant at her training hospital also runs a hospital near Cambridge for patients with mental illnesses; it’s possible to imagine the place becoming another Craiglockhart soon after the war started.

Several of the older women characters are engaged in another struggle: they’re suffragists. One of them – the intelligent wife of a crusty, unreconstructed don, who’d been a Cambridge student and prominent in the WSPU (like Matty in Lissa Evans’ Old Baggage), but is now a housewife – confronts the bleakness of a life of domestic tedium – all a woman of her class and education could aspire to at the time. Big changes were coming.

Fitzgerald writes novels that fulfil the requirements of the well-wrought plot, peopled by characters with semblances of flawed humanity. Some of the minor players are Waugh-like caricatures, but Gate of Angels is better than The Bookshop. It’s one of her lesser achievements – which means it’s superior to much supposedly popular fiction.

There’s a very good pastiche of an MR James ghost story, narrated by a crusty medievalist don who’s clearly modelled on him. That same uncle of Fitzgerald’s whose father was a bishop was a student at King’s College, Cambridge when James was provost there.

Some supernatural elements in the narrative remind me that Fitzgerald likes a bit of spookiness in her novels (like the antisocial poltergeist in The Bookshop).

Thankfully there’s no film version (as far as I know) of this engaging romantic comedy to spoil the immediacy of Fitzgerald’s narrative deftness.

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

Posted on by
10

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000), The Bookshop. Everyman’s Library 3-vol. edition (with Gate of Angels and The Blue Flower). First published 1978

I usually find that seeing the film version of a novel before reading the book is a mistake. This was definitely the case with Penelope Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Bookshop.

The novels I’ve read by her so far all have an astonishing immediacy in terms of period detail, setting and dialogue; from The Blue Flower (1995), read some time ago pre-blog, set at the time of Romantic poet Novalis (d. 1801) in a Germany that’s palpably realised, to pre-Revolution Moscow in The Beginning of Spring (1988).

In Offshore (winner of the 1979 Booker Prize) the hazardous life of an impoverished mother on a Thames houseboat in the early 1960s is evoked with the sharpness of a monochrome photograph. Human Voices just as vividly represents the people working on propaganda radio programmes during the London Blitz of 1940.

Fitzgerald 3 novels cover Florence Green, the slightly adrift middle-aged widow who’s the protagonist of The Bookshop, is another typical Fitzgerald heroine: a bit eccentric, idealistic to the point of naiveté, gifted at connecting with other people (but with a tendency to be too open and honest, which costs her dearly with unscrupulous or treacherous types – of whom there are several lushly drawn examples in this novel), tenacious but with a tendency to be wrong-headed.

It’s set in an East Anglian town called appropriately Hardborough. Florence opens a bookshop in a narrow-minded place that’s more philistine than present-day Southwold – where in real life the author worked in such a shop. The plot concerns Florence’s struggles to make a go of the business against the odds, and the oddball characters who populate this marginal town.

This is the only Fitzgerald novel I’ve read so far where I didn’t feel she conveyed a sense of the place very effectively. I know East Anglia quite well, and have been to coastal towns there like Southwold quite often, and I didn’t find the scenery described in this novel particularly convincing, or sufficiently present to contribute much to the texture of the narrative.

It’s a neatly plotted novel, with some crisply drawn characters and the gentle, perceptive humour, laced with a harder element, found in her other lighter novels. But it was spoilt for me by the vision that kept intruding of twinkly-eyed Emily Mortimer as the over-pretty, slightly vacuous,  and much younger heroine of the 2017 film version by Catalan director Isabel Coixet.

Mrs Gamart, the Cruella da Ville villain of the piece, was played well by Patricia Clarkson, cast presumably to please the American audience, but I couldn’t help associating her with other things I’d seen her in, from Sally Potter’s excellent chamber comedy The Party to the melodramatic Netflix drama House of Cards.

Perhaps the most intrusive actor, though, was Bill Nighy, turning in one of his usual turns as himself. He plays the reclusive but sympathetic old widower Edmund Brundish who in the novel champions Florence’s enterprise out of fellow feeling and antagonism towards mean-spirited provincial snobs like Mrs Gamart. To make the film more popcorn-friendly there’s an unlikely and rather silly suggestion of a romantic attraction between him and the widow.

The film’s ending is also made to conform more to the demands of a cinema audience, whereas Fitzgerald sensibly keeps things low key and unsentimental.

The best characters in the novel are the children – as they were in Offshore – especially the near-feral Christine, a ten-year-old with more street awareness than Florence could ever dream of.

I must stick to my rule of ensuring I’ve read the book before seeing the film. I’m afraid that it made this slightly twee but charming novel something rather more saccharine as a reading experience than it would have otherwise been – despite its having much darker elements than the film.

 

Henrik Pontoppidan, Lucky Per

Posted on by
13

Henrik Pontoppidan, Lucky Per. Everyman’s Library, 2019, translated from the Danish of a revised edition of 1918 by Naomi Lebowitz. First published 1898-1904

A bildungsroman normally traces the development and growth of a young person into maturity. They learn from the abrasive contacts they experience in the course of the narrative and find some kind of fulfilment and completeness. Lucky Per is sort of the opposite. I don’t know what you’d call it – a kind of anti-heroic renunciation of conventional worldly and emotional success – which Per initially craves in conventional ‘[fairytale] hero hoping to make good’ manner (he’s likened to Aladdin, among others) – in favour of acceptance of spiritual quietude and the ascetic resignation of a secular anchorite. An unlearning curve.

Peter Andreas Sidenius (nicknamed Per) is the son of a puritanical, undemonstrative pastor father in rural Jutland (like Pontoppidan). It’s a dour land, and the father’s upbringing is stern and critical. Nowadays I suppose we’d call him a religious fanatic, a fundamentalist. He’s lacking in the loving kindness and charity aspects of the religion he’s distorted into something terrible and austere. Spirited and rebellious, Per leaves as soon as he can, at the age of sixteen, to indulge his ambitious engineering schemes and find fame and fortune.

Interestingly his autodidact’s crackpot plans to harness nature’s wind and wave power through the use of turbines have become reality. In this richly symbolic novel they represent Per’s misguided, doomed attempt to harness his own powerful nature and direct it in ways that would force him to compromise himself with the bureaucratic, materialistic custodians of worldly power and finance who he despises as much as he does his father’s loveless religion or the artists he dismisses as ‘aesthetes’.

His burning desire for fame slowly turns to a realisation that his idea of success is really a revolt against his upbringing: he has to learn what it is he’s truly striving for. Fame, he discovers, is a delusion, and the famous luck he’s noted for favours the fool.

In Copengagen he pursues a wealthy and powerful Jewish financier to back his grandiose schemes, and becomes engaged to the man’s beautiful, troubled daughter whose resistance he systematically breaks down. This is another in a sequence of surrogate families. He longs for the mutual connection he never experienced as a child. He falls in love several times, pursuing his quarry relentlessly, then tiring of her.

He’s not cut out for romance or marriage, though he tries both, and finds them uncongenial, against his nature. His reverse arc towards solitude gradually becomes irresistible.

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche dominate his thinking during his extended existential-philosophical crisis and ultimate rejection of Christianity (demonstrated in the Alps when he shoots his gun to destroy a crucifix: it’s ‘the courage to kill off idols’ that lesser mortals lack: ‘I shoot in the new century!’ he exults, with a disturbing hint of the brutal totalitarianism of that century).

He yearns to belong and to love/be loved, yet lacks the wherewithal to participate in such relations. There’s a void inside him, and he struggles to reconcile this with his worldly aspirations. As the novel progresses he confronts his true self: like the troll legends of his childhood, he longs for the life above ground with humans, but is incapable of surviving outside the dark cave. Exile is alluring. At a desperate moment he sees in a flash –

the foundation of existence: it was that cold and silent, ever indifferent, pervasive wilderness of ice he had seen on his first journey through the Alps.

It’s an audacious, philosophical novel that abides by many of the conventions of 19C fiction, but has its own unique plan: ‘lucky’, as the title in Danish suggests, means both fortunate and happy; Per comes to realise that there are different orders of fulfilment in a paradoxical world that’s full of reversals, and that finding out who he is involves painful abjurations of what he once thought he wanted. Like the character in the fairytale ‘Hans in Luck’ on which this plot is loosely based (as the translator points out in her Afterword), he grows into authentic selfhood by trading down, divesting himself of the trappings he once thought he craved and learning to value and live by his own kind of ‘natural theology’.

There are some unfortunate casual anti-Semitic elements in the narrative consistent with the bigoted views of the time. Per is more broadminded and tolerant than most of his acquaintance, but still harbours an innate dislike of this ‘foreign race’. But he also envies the Jewish Salomon family he nearly joins through marriage for their strong sense of selfhood and identity.

His fiancée Jakobe Salomon is a brilliantly realised, complex and passionate character, far more likeable than moody Per. She’s engaged in a parallel course of self-discovery to Per’s – though her destination is very different from his. One of the outstanding scenes in the novel is a flashback to a Berlin railway station, where she saw hundreds of ‘fantastic, ragged forms’, all ‘sallow and emaciated’, scarred and terrified: these are the Russian Jews she’d heard about, fleeing from the pogroms, on their way to haven in an America which would no doubt today reconsider accepting them as refugees. She’s even more horrified by the callous, inhuman behaviour of the jeering onlookers. The ‘gutters were running with blood’ chillingly anticipates the rise of the Nazis that Pontoppidan lived to witness.

There are many other aspects of this rich, dense novel (it’s nearly 600 pages, packed with ideas, debates and philosophical-existential wranglings – so much more could be said about it). Tom at Wuthering Expectations has posted some thoughtful and stimulating pieces about all this here.

As a novel of ideas and a cocky young man’s struggle to make sense of existence in a godless world of self interest, ruthlessness and duplicity, it’s extraordinary. A ‘forgotten masterpiece’, as the Introduction by Garth Risk Hallberg calls it.

There’s a rather plodding but fairly faithful (apart from a softened ending) film version directed by Bille August in 2018 available on Netflix. It even riffs on the phrase ‘fear and trembling’. Unfortunately it calls Per ‘Pete’ throughout.

Update, 30.05.19. Thanks to Meredith at Dolce Belleza for reminding me that it was Dorian at the Eiger Mönch and Jungfrau blog who initiated the collective reading of this novel by the 1917 Nobel prizewinner for literature. Use #LuckyPer2019 on social media if you join in the conversation.