He stood in front of the Tegel Prison gate and was free.

Berlin Alexanderplatz, by Alfred Döblin

I read this book badly; much worse than it deserved. When I read it in solid chunks of fifty or a hundred pages it fizzled and raced along, forcing me to work to keep up. When, as I mostly did, I read it in ten or twenty page slices it lost me instead in a sea of disconnected images.

That’s the risk you take with Modernism. It does rather make demands of you.

Published in 1929, Berlin Alexanderplatz is the story of Franz Biberkopf, a newly released ex-convict determined to go straight. He’ll suffer three tremendous blows, is laid low, but ultimately comes to a kind of redemption, or at least a sense of meaning and self-awareness. Are these spoilers? If so blame Döblin, because the book opens with a foreword which forms part of the novel and in which Döblin sets all this forth. Like Nabokov’s much later novel in Laughter in the Dark, we know where we’re going, what’s interesting is how we get there.

That foreword is the first clue that we may not be in for a straightforward narrative here. Then again, the back of the book with its comparisons to Joyce and Dos Passos (and Dos Passos for me is easily the more relevant of those comparisons) gave that away anyway.

Franz leaves prison fearfully. He’s been institutionalised, and he doesn’t know how he’ll make it outside though he wants to do better than he did before he went in. He takes a tram into the centre, but is soon overwhelmed by the indifferent crowds, by the sights of people doing ordinary things like drinking beer and having lunch. He doesn’t know how to cope, outside the ordered environment of the prison.

A passing Jew takes pity on Franz, invites him into his home and gives him a moment’s refuge in which to find himself again. Franz, and the reader, listen to an old Jewish man tell a story, and by the end of it Franz is ready to head back into the streets and to take on the world. There won’t be many more examples of altruism in the book, and in a German book written in the late 1920s it’s hard not to see some significance in the only real act of kindness coming from Jews.

Berlin Alexanderplatz does have a plot; mostly concerning Franz’s attempt to go straight, his friends and girlfriends and how he becomes entangled against his will with crime once more. It’s actually not a bad story on that level, and it’s not a surprise it’s been made into a TV series and film because Franz’s journey is interesting in its own right.

The real interest though of Berlin Alexanderplatz is its evocation of Berlin as a city. Döblin draws heavily on film techniques of his day, with the novelist’s eye panning like a camera across scenes and with frequent use of montage. Descriptions merge with fragments of adverts, with overheard conversations, fragments of newspapers, even with street signs. Here’s an early example:

From the south the Rosenthaler Strasse runs into the square. Across the way Aschinger provides food as well as beer to drink, music, and wholesale bakery. Fish are nutritious, some are happy when they have fish, and others are unable to eat it, eat more fish, the healthy slimming dish. Ladies’ stockings, genuine artificial silk, here you have a fountain pen with a 14- carat gold point.

Genuine artificial silk, how can you resist?

Berlin is awash with politics and people trying to make a Deutschmark. They all rub against each other, live-stock dealers, thieves, communists, ex-soldiers, the revolutionary left and the far right. Among all this Franz is trying to find his own place, at one point selling gay magazines, at another necktie holders, whatever it takes to get along.

Two days later it is warmer. Franz, who has sold his overcoat and is wearing thick underwear, which Lina got him somewhere, stands on the Rosenthaler Platz in front of Fabish & Co., high class men’s tailoring to measure, excellent work and low prices are the characteristic of our products. Franz is hawking necktieholders. He reels off his patter:

‘Why does the smart man in the West End wear a bow tie when the proletarian doesn’t? Ladies and gents, right up here, you too, Fraulein, and that lady with her husband, children under age admitted without extra charge. Why doesn’t the proletarian wear bow ties? Because he can’t tie ‘em. Then he has to buy a tie-holder, and after he’s bought it, it’s no good and he can’t tie his tie with it. That’s swindling. It makes the people bitter; it pushes Germany still deeper into poverty than she is already. But why don’t they wear those big tie-holders? Because nobody wants to put a dustpan around his neck. No man or woman wants that, not even the baby, if he could speak for himself. Please don’t laugh at that ladies and gents, don’t laugh, we don’t know what’s going on in that dear little child brain. Oh Lord, the dear little head, the little head and the little curls, it’s pretty, ain’t it, but when you have to pay alimony, it’s not to be laughed at, that gets a man into trouble. Go and buy yourself a tie like this at Tietz’s or Wertheim’s or, if you don’t want to buy it from Jews, get it somewhere else. I’m a Nordic, I am.’ He raises his hat, blond hair, red ears standing out, merry bull’s eyes. ‘The big shops don’t have to get me to advertise them, they can exist without me. Buy a tie like the one I have here, and then decide how you’re going to tie it tomorrow morning.’

The patter continues for another page and a half or so, often quite funny, but then that’s part of the point of patter. Notice the little dig against the Jews there, the assertion of racial purity. Later Franz changes profession again:

Franz now peddles Nationalist pro-Nordic newspapers He is not against the Jews, but he is for law and order.

Franz isn’t in fact “against the Jews”, and he knows perfectly well it was Jews who first helped him when he left prison. Franz though is not a reflective man, and if a little anti-Semitism helps pay the rent he’s not the sort to think about any wider issues that might come with that.

In Döblin’s Berlin everyone is hustling in one way or another. Crippled veterans of the Great War beg in the streets; those with jobs mostly seem to be just getting by while pimps and burglars are leading the good life. Berlin is a vast human hive, permeated by adverts, noise and bustle.

Everywhere there are building works, rents are going through the roof, empty political slogans are disgregarded while the promises of literature and philosophy are packaged and commoditised and sold in the same way as ale or life insurance. There’s an extraordinary three page section, too long to quote here, which merges all these elements and more cutting between adverts, description, court rulings, and tiny vignettes showing the marital problems of a couple running a shoe business and the tensions between a poor lawyer and his cleaning lady.

In one harrowing sequence Döblin’s gaze wanders into a slaughterhouse, where he follows cows, pigs, sheep and lambs all going to the slaughter. He observes them dispassionately, no different to how he regards the people who will later eat them. What separates us from them? Perhaps just that we can kill them, and they do not know that and cannot in any event kill us. Döblin’s gaze is not without compassion, but those he watches largely have none.

At these times the narrative wanders like a camera. When that takes you inside the slaughterhouse it’s chilling, when it enters homes and shows neighbours packed in together it’s fascinating. Here’s an example, from the end of a five and a half page passage:

At the very top a tripe butcher, where of course there’s a bad smell and also the howling of children and plenty of alcohol. Next door a baker’s apprentice with his wife, an employee in a printing shop, she has inflammation of the ovaries. Wonder what those two get out of life? Well, first of all , they get each other, then last Sunday a music-hall show and a film, then this or that social meeting and a visit to his parents. Nothing else? Well now, don’t drop dead, sir. Add to that nice weather, bad weather, country picnics, standing in front of the stove, eating breakfast and so on. And what more do you get, you, captain, general, jockey, whoever you are? Don’t fool yourself.

Here’s a slightly different illustration of how Döblin applies this technique:

Opposite, in front of the little Web Radio Store – till further notice free charging of batteries – there stands a pale young woman, her hat pulled down over her face, she seems to be thinking intensely. The driver of the big black and white taxi standing nearby thinks to himself: Is she wondering now whether she ought to take a taxi, and if she has enough with her or is she waiting for somebody? But what she does is to twist about in her velvet coat as if her body were being wrenched, then she walks on again, she’s unwell, that’s all, and has the cramps, as usual. She is about to take her teacher’s examination, today she would have liked to stay at home with a hot water bottle, she’ll be better tonight, anyway.

What this passage does is show the difference between film and literature. Film can show the outside of things, and does so much more efficiently than language can. Film though can’t show us what’s on the inside, and so Döblin uses his language-camera to show us the Berlin not just of people’s homes and streets, but of their thoughts too.

Berlin Alexanderplatz is then a challenging novel. It demands close concentration, and when I couldn’t do that the result was that I became deeply confused about who was who and what was going on. When I did pay attention though, it unpacked itself into a brutal vision of the life of a city, and showed itself as a huge accomplishment.

It’s a moral book. That’s clear from the outset of course, when we’re told that Franz will receive three setbacks on his path to self-knowledge, but it’s present too in a frequent use of the most powerful biblical language and imagery, applied to lives as far from biblical as one can imagine.

The last 150 pages or so of Berlin Alexanderplatz I read over a weekend, and it was a joy. I read while listening to early Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, to Bix Beiderbecke with Frankie Trumbauer, and to Jelly Roll Morton. They work with it, because the book itself is a form of jazz, pushing its own boundaries and veering so far on tangents you wonder how it will ever get back to the main themes and yet it does. It pulses, full of rude life and the vitality of a new century in which anything, everything, is possible.

Is it worth reading, given the challenge it represents? I think so, yes, but again like the best jazz it’s not background music to listen to while making polite dinner conversation. It’s not a book that goes down easily; it’s not tasteful. Franz Biberkopf is in many ways as unsympathetic as a protagonist can be (particularly as details of his past crimes and his propensity to violence against women become clearer), and yet he is the spirit of his age, hustling and prepared to do whatever he needs to, steeped in blood and error yet perhaps not beyond hope.

Is it still relevant? Here’s a final quote, taken from a diatribe from one of Franz’s political friends which Franz only part listens to:

Not the satisfaction of human needs, but the expectation of profit is at the hands of modern production. Every technical advance multiplies the wealth of of the possessing classes to an infinite degree, in shameless contrast to the misery of vast sections of the community.

As I write this some 83 or so years have passed since this was published. Sadly, despite that great passage of time, it remains a contemporary novel.

a better, fairer future

Satantango, by László Krasznahorkai and translated by George Szirtes

Normally I hate writing reviews weeks after finishing a book. It tends to make the task much harder, as details start to blur and impressions fade. In the case of Satantango those concerns don’t really apply. Firstly, because the impression this book made will take a lot more than a few weeks to fade; and secondly because there was never any way that Satantango was going to be easy to write about however quickly I’d written my review.

Here’s the first sentence of the novel:

One morning near the end of October not long before the first drops of the mercilessly long autumn rains began to fall on the cracked and saline soil on the western side of the estate (later the stinking yellow sea of mud would render footpaths impassable and put the town too beyond reach) Futaki woke to hear bells.

I was going to quote the first paragraph, but the book has no paragraphs, just some 270 or so pages divided into twelve dense chapters. I suspect that makes it sound unapproachable, and I won’t lie, it’s not the most accessible book out there. It’s a book that requires effort on the part of the reader. It’s also though easily one of the best works of fiction I’ve read this year and one that more than repays the reader’s dedication.

The first six chapters describe a small Hungarian village. Once an industrial estate, the factory the village served is long since closed and now only a handful of inhabitants remain. They exist in a slum of mud, spiders and decay; in a landscape that psychologically as well as physically has a post- (or perhaps pre-) apocalyptic feel to it.

Rumour reaches the village of the return of two men long thought dead: Irimiás and Petrina. Irimiás is seen as a messianic figure, his arrival will mean a chance of escape, renewal, at the very least change. The first six chapters of the novel count up, I through VI, towards the arrival of Irimiás and Petrina and the remaining six count down, VI to I, from that arrival. Here Godot turns up, but it’s questionable whether he was worth waiting for.

The people of the estate live in a condition of mutual despair and loathing. The local teenage girls sell themselves in the disused factory, but have few customers. Futaki, whose perspective opens the book, is sleeping with another man’s wife. The local doctor is concerned only with his own ailments and with his relentless cataloguing and observing of the habits of the other villagers.  This is a place without purpose peopled by those who though technically neighbours are each fundamentally alone.

The book swiftly reveals Irimiás and Petrina as police informers, dubious adventurers and con-men. Their interest in the village is predatory; they bring no salvation. The flyleaf of the book suggests that Irimiás may be the devil, but though the book is shot through with religious imagery there’s no real evidence that he has any importance beyond that the villagers place on him.

Satantango is a mudslide of prose. Translator George Szirtes has spoken of Krasznahorkai’s language as a “slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type.” There is a hallucinatory sense to the text, with apparent realism turning to symbolism or dream without pause or comforting marker of where one state ends and another begins. On the second page Futaki has a vision of “himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin” as he looks at an acacia twig. Later a roomful of drunkards is covered in spider webs as they gradually fall asleep – a thing that makes no logical sense but yet which seems inevitable within the book’s insular context.

Here’s another quote, illustrating how Krasznahorkai makes use of language:

The table beside Halics made a creaking noise and the rotting wood of the bar gave a low sigh like the quiet easy movement of an old carriage wheel over the buzzing chorus of horseflies: it conjured the past but also spoke of perpetual decay. And as the wood creaked, the wind outside, like a helpless hand searching through a dusty book for some  vanished main clause, kept asking the same question time and again, hoping to give a “cheap imitation of a proper answer” to the banks of solid mud, to establish some common dynamic between tree, air and earth, and to seek through invisible cracks in the door and walls the first and original sound, of Halics belching.

Notice the use of quotes there. Characters frequently speak in what appear to be set phrases, folk-sayings or received wisdom. Sometimes the narrative itself does the same. Each time these phrases are placed in quotation marks, as if flagging their essentially phatic nature. I’m not of course familiar with common Hungarian sayings, but some of these phrases appear highly unlikely to be traditional or ever used outside of this novel. That makes the quotation marks unreliable, perhaps themselves meaningless, ironically underlining the impression already given of speech without thought.

Spoilers are essentially meaningless with a book like this, though I’ll avoid them anyway out of courtesy to those who’d prefer to discover that for themselves. The novel consists of a combination of black comedy, petty yet vicious cruelty, Beckettian existentialism and Kafkaesque farce. At times it feels near-medieval, with the villagers at one point forming a procession of fools on a pilgrimage to the empty shrine of the abandoned factory. It should be relentlessly depressing. The imagery is of mud, rain, death, mould and decay. The village is a slough of meaninglessness populated by fear, greed and stupidity, and the outside world seems little better.

What’s it ultimately about? It’s hard to say; it feels almost like the wrong question (or I’m the wrong person to answer it anyway). It doesn’t come with answers; it just is. Reading it I become as lost as the characters, sensing meanings and chasing after them but finding them slipping from my grasp just as I seem to reach them. In the end all I am left with is the language itself; Krasznahorkai’s sentences that seem to twist upon themselves continuing long after all sense should demand that they stop and yet still remaining no longer than they ought to be. Here’s just one sentence, by way of final quote:

The entire end of October night was beating with a single pulse, its own strange rhythm sounding through trees and rain and mud in a manner beyond words or vision: a vision present in the low light, in the slow passage of darkness, in the blurred shadows, in the working of tired muscles; in the silence, in its human subjects, in the undulating surface of the metaled road; in the hair moving to a different beat than do the dissolving fibers of the body; growth and decay on their divergent paths; all these thousands of echoing rhythms, this confusing clatter of night noises, all parts of an apparently common stream, that is the attempt to forget despair; though behind things other things appear as if by mischief, and once beyond the powers of the eye they no longer hang together.

This is a spectacular translation of a genuinely gifted writer. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing; mesmeric. It is the opposite of escapist, rather it is a book that addresses directly the problem of existence in a universe without meaning and without ultimate authority. Perhaps then it’s natural that it’s a book that has no answers, because the world has none.

Here are three other reviews of the book, each of which I thought particularly insightful: from the New Statesman, here; from the blogger Bookslut, here (some spoilers); and from an online magazine I’m unfamiliar with, here (the last paragraph of that last review explains how the book’s structure reflects the structure of the tango, something which not knowing the dance I couldn’t speak to myself). If you read this and you’ve reviewed it on your own blog please leave a link in the comments below as I’d be fascinated to know how others who’ve read it found it.

Dried stains on sheets.

Three, by Ann Quin

Ann Quin’s second novel, three, is superbly written. It’s a book as much about its own form and structure as it is about story, although here form and story cannot be separated. It’s less than 150 pages long, but is distinctly not a quick read.

Leonard and Ruth are a middle aged couple. Until recently they had a younger woman identified as S living with them. S is dead, drowned, though whether by suicide or accident is unclear. Leonard and Ruth speculate as to what happened, and their conversations intertwine with excerpts from S’s diary and audiotapes which she left behind. The language is frequently confusing, intentionally so, and requires extremely close attention to tell who is speaking. Sometimes, often, I would have to backtrack to find the thread of a conversation. This is not an accident.

Here’s the opening couple of paragraphs:

A man fell to his death from a sixth-floor window of Peskett House,

an office-block in Sellway Square today.

He was a messenger employed by a soap manufacturing firm.

Ruth startled from the newspaper by Leonard framed in the door-way. Against the white-washed wall. A wicker arm-chair opposite the Japanese table. Screen. Sliding doors. Rush matting. A mirror extended the window. Gardens. A bronzed cockerel faced the house.

What’s the latest then? Fellow thrown himself out of a window. Ghastly way to choose. But Leon her wasn’t like that – I mean we can’t really be sure could so easily have been an accident the note just a melodramatic touch. No one can be blamed Ruth we must understand that least of all ourselves. Yes yes I know and one could say it was predictaable her sort of temperament. I don’t know. You mean you don’t really care Leon? Ah you should know the answer to that my love.

Here the prose acts as a camera, panning across the room “Screen. Sliding doors. Rush matting. A mirror extended the window. Gardens.” The viewpoint slides across, yet in staccato fashion. The dialogue here can be worked out, Leonard and Ruth speak alternately, but it requires a little thought before that becomes apparent. This is not prose one can lose oneself in.

Ruth and Leonard try to comfort themselves, and they go through the rituals of married life. Their surface troubles are quotidian ones. Underneath though is the question of what S meant to them, how she fitted into their lives and what she brought that they couldn’t provide for themselves. Their conversation ends and Leonard goes out to the greenhouse to inspect his orchids while Ruth goes upstairs to look through S’s cupboards.

What follows is three pages of sustained erotic charge. Leonard strokes the fat leaves of his orchids while Ruth wanders through upstairs rooms naked and searching through piles of clothes. The prose builds up, becomes frenzied, then peaks and tails off. Here’s a taste:

Still murmuring he reached up, brought one down, parted a layer of tiny leaves, and looked in. His fingers trembled. His body sloped. Face flushed in the one stream of light. He pressed the earth in, smoothed over. Paused longer at some, peered into centres, ran a finger along stems, pink against pink laid there.

…

Breathing slowly, he listened with the plants that sucked, dripped around and above.

She went from room to room, closed windows, doors, cupboards. Tried on clothes, shoes too narrow, hobbled to mirrors. Squeezed into dresses, struggled out, touched the material, traced the design. Folded, unfolded blouses, cardigans. Slipped them on, off, until the bed, floor were covered with layers of clothes. Into which she flung herself, motionless, face buried.

…

She powdered her flushed face, neck, brushed her hair.

As I say, three pages. It’s prose written in the rhythms of sex, but there is no sex. What replaces it is a sense of frustrated desire, of sex reaching out and infusing the house. As the novel continues there are some actual sex scenes, but they are brief and Ruth refuses when she can. She services Leonard as marital duty, on his relentless insistence (or, on one occasion when she says no, his outright force). It’s not that Ruth’s without desire, it’s that the only desire Leonard cares about is his own.

Against this are the fragments left by S. Most challenging of these are what I took to be the audiotapes, which become prose poems the meaning of which is at first unclear (and much of which never becomes wholly clear). S is recording emotions, impressions, and some of it can be understood in the light of her diaries, but it would I think take several readings of this book to understand most of them and an unreachable kernel would always remain.

This is one of the more accessible audiotape sections:

Surrounded by chairs. Animals released. Octopus faces gullet

corridor. Float from island to island. Inherited from both sides

Sofa. Flora-pregnated

Chippendale chairs. Unchipped. Upholstered in blue.

They call turquoise.

Persian rugs. Second skins. For them.

Warm napkins.

Silverware pawns. Salt-cellar dominates.

Rooms soundproofed.

Paintings

not hung

too small. Not small enough. But still-lifes that she used to do.

Burglar-proofed.

China plates

on the wall. Glass doors. Concealed lighting. White curtains

transparent.

Nursery done in egg.shell blue. Empty.

A special place for the cat. Never used.

Visitors. Change of linen. Every other day.

Existence bound by habit. Hope. Theirs. Nothing to contend

with.

The worst effort not to contradict their next movement

At first.

Again there’s that sense of prose as camera there, but this is more an exploration of significance than space. It’s reasonably easy here to understand what S is saying and what it means to her, but other sections are far more opaque.

This then is a novel of shadows. S played games with Leonard and Ruth in which they would all wear masks and improvise dialogue in mini-plays. Leonard and Ruth fight a pointless battle to keep ramblers off their section of the beach, which they privately own. Everywhere there is ambiguity and boundaries that shift or are ignored.

The Dalkey Archive edition of Three comes with a dismayingly perceptive introduction by writer and academic Brian Evenson. Dismaying because it leaves little for me to add. The best review I could write would be to type out his words. Evenson, rightly, points to Quin’s refusal to resolve the book’s strands. He points too to how the structure unsettles the reader, leaving them with doubt and a lack of finality as to what really occurred. He talks of the book “dragging readers into the text, demanding they plunge into the experience the characters find themselves in. The book refuses to stay at a comfortable distance.”

That’s exactly right. Here Quin forced me to engage closely with what she had written. I had to,  because otherwise I didn’t even know who was speaking let alone what was being said. She brought me into an emotional post-mortem in which the only judgement is an Open Verdict. She infected me as reader with the uncertainty of her characters.

The result is a difficult and often disquieting book. The rewards though match the effort, and unless I have a truly exceptional 2012 or some terrible fate befalls me between now and the end of the year I will be very surprised if this isn’t the second Ann Quin novel to make one of my end of the year lists. Quin has been overlooked, but she shouldn’t be and if you’ve any interest in modernist or experimentalist (a term I dislike) fiction then she deserves attention.

By way of balance I found a more negative review online here, and another positive review here. There’s also quite an interesting general overview of her work here, which to their credit the negative reviewer also linked to.

all the more human

Flypaper, by Robert Musil and translated by Peter Wortsman

Robert Musil is famous (being a bit generous with that word there for a moment) for his unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities. By all accounts it’s an incredible work. I’m too fond of editors to ever welcome the idea of reading an interrupted book – one that not even the author finished polishing – but I’ve been told that for Musil I should put that prejudice to one side.

Fair enough, but The Man Without Qualities has another barrier besides being incomplete. It’s nearly 700 pages long. That’s a lot to launch into with an author I don’t know.

Enter Penguin Modern Classics with their pocket editions each coming in at around the 60 page mark. Flypaper is a collection of fueilletons, short essays, by Robert Musil. There’s nine of them in this tiny collection, and as an introduction to Musil it’s about as good as it could be. That’s the joy of these little Penguin editions. They cost almost nothing, they’re concise and they’re a tremendous way to try out an author who for one reason or another you might be unsure about investing in.

Each of the nine little pieces in this collection is a small marvel of mercilessly precise observation. The title narrative, Flypaper, consists of a description of a piece of flypaper and the slow death of the flies that land on it. It’s at times hard to read. Partly I admit because I had nightmares about flypaper as a child (someone unwisely left some above my bed at a relatives home, meaning I had a front line view of exactly what Musil describes here. Whether that caused the peculiar horror I still have of the sight of dying insects or whether that fear already existed and so made the flypaper terrible I have no way of knowing). Partly though because Musil takes something as insignificant as the death of a fly and by not looking away invests it with majesty and with a more universal significance.

Here’s Flypaper’s first paragraph, after which it gets much more disquieting:

Tangle-foot flypaper is approximately fourteen inches long and eight inches wide; it is coated with a yellow poison paste and comes from Canada. When a fly lands on it – not so eagerly, more out of convention, because so many others are already there – it gets stuck at first by only the outermost joints of all its legs. A very quiet, disconcerting sensation, as though while walking in the dark we were to step on something with our naked soles, nothing more than a soft, warm unavoidable obstruction, and yet something into which little by little the awesome human essence flows, recognised as a hand that just happens to be lying there, and with five ever more decipherable fingers holds us tight.

Musil then explores the flies ever tiring attempts to free themselves, each miring them more firmly to the paper. He talks of moments of furious struggle, of sudden exhaustion, of the slow despair and futility of a fight against inevitable disability (as wings and limbs become stuck fast) and death.

There is real empathy here, and it is the empathy which makes it so awful. The next, Monkey Island, examines a small island in the heart of Rome. A wide and deep ditch separates the island from the land around it, and on it is a tree and a colony of monkeys none of whom can quite jump or climb that ditch.

This then is the monkeys’ kingdom. Musil’s gaze sweeps over it, from the strongest monkeys who form the royal family of the island to the outcasts who live within the ditch itself. It is a microcosm of us, a point Musil has no need to underline but which cannot be avoided as he shows the social and literal gulf dividing those monkeys who have from those who feed from fallen crumbs.

I won’t describe each essay. They are superbly written. Some, like those first two, draw out uncomfortable truths about our own existence. Some, such as The Painstpreader or It’s Lovely Here are satires, of artistic mediocrity on the one hand and of tourists’ desire to encounter “something that is acknowledged by experts as beautiful” on the other.

The briefest piece, titled Sarcophagus Cover, is a touching description of two ancient Roman sarcophagi that have on them a couple still gazing affectionately at each other through the long centuries. The last, The Blackbird, is a sort of fable different in nature from all that has gone before. Not so much an essay as an example of his fiction, but no less finely crafted. Musil has range.

This next quote is an entire piece, albeit a very short one. I hesitated to quote it, since after discussing Flypaper and Monkey Island there’s a risk of giving the impression that Musil only focuses on the cruel. That’s not true of course. What Musil focuses on is the world.

Fishermen on the Baltic

On the beach they’ve dug out a little pit with their hands, and from a sack of black earth they’re pouring in fat earthworms, the loose black earth and the mass of worms make for an obscure, moldy, enticing ugliness in the clean white sand. Beside this they place a very tidy looking wooden chest. It looks like a long, not particularly wide drawer or counting board, and is full of clean yarn; and on the other side of the pit another such, but empty, drawer is placed.

The hundred hooks attached to the yarn in the one drawer are neatly arranged on the end of a small iron pole and are now being unfastened one after the other and laid in the empty drawer, the bottom of which is filled with nothing but clean wet sand. A very tidy operation. In the meantime, however, four long, lean and strong hands oversee the process as carefully as nurses to make sure that each hook gets a worm.

The men who do this crouch two by two on knees and heels, with mighty, bony backs, long, kindly faces, and pipes in their mouths. They exchange incomprehensible words that flow forth as softly as the motion of their hands. One of them takes up a fat earthworm with two fingers, tears it into three pieces with the same two fingers of the other hand, as easily and exactly as a shoemaker snips off the paper band after he’s taken the measurement; the other one then presses these squirming pieces calmly and carefully onto each hook. This having been accomplished, the worms are then doused with water and laid in neat, little beds, one next to the other, in the drawer with the soft sand, where they can die without immediately losing their freshness.

It is a quiet, delicate activity, whereby the coarse fishermen’s fingers step softly as on tiptoes. You have to pay close attention. In fair weather the dark blue sky arches above, and the seagulls circle high over the land like white swallows.

The phrases there. “A very tidy operation.” The fishermen with their “kindly faces” impaling the worms. The transition from fat life to “squirming pieces” and the tidy convenience of the sand-filled drawers. The fingers that “step softly as on tiptoes”. Marvellous imagery culminating in that final vision of freedom and beauty and utter indifference. To the fishermen the worms are no different to the hooks or the drawers; the gulls are part of their scenery, as they are to the gulls.

I’ve not commented on the translation. Obviously I’m not familiar enough with German to read the original (or I would have), so I can’t say how faithful this is. I can’t say that of any translation really. Still, the language is spare and precise and beautiful and I can’t believe but that Wortsman has done an excellent job here.

The point, as I understand it anyway, of the Penguin pocket editions is to tempt readers to try new writers. For me it’s worked. I’ve tried Musil, who I knew about but was daunted by, and I’m no longer daunted. I plan now to pick up a copy of his short novel The Confusions of Young Torless and that going well I think The Man Without Qualities is looking a lot more enticing than it once did. Well done Penguin.

It was like difficult music heard for the first time.

Murphy, by Samuel Beckett

Murphy has one of the most arresting opening sentences I’ve read.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

I’ve barely started the book and already there’s a sense of futility, of inevitability. It’s a jarring sentence, both in terms of content and structure. It left me immediately unsettled.

What follows is no more comforting. Here’s the entire first paragraph of Murphy:

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect. Soon he would have to make other arrangements, for the mew had been condemned. Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings.

Already Beckett is ignoring many of the customary rules of fiction. The paragraph is deeply repetitive. It takes a fairly long time to tell us very little in terms of solid information. Murphy lives in West Brompton in a condemned mews in a residential area. Shortly he will have to move. That’s it. You could pull out a little more, but in terms of bare fact there’s not a lot more to say.

Dig a little deeper though and there’s something more interesting. There is the phrase “Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free”. What does that mean? Is he not free? Is there something special in how he sits? When Murphy sits “out of it” is that just out of the sun or out of it in some wider sense?

Murphy lives “in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect.” The only distinction between one set of cages and another is Murphy’s presence in one and in the differing aspects. But who cares what aspects they have? As a reader what use is knowing an aspect?

Then too there is the sense of routine which is created by the words “eaten, drunk, slept and put his clothes on and off”. It’s a routine that’s shortly to be transplanted to “quite alien surroundings.” If though this mews is so indistinguishable from its surroundings what does it matter if Murphy is transplanted?

So many questions from just one paragraph. The book’s barely begun.

The story here is both notional and absurd. Murphy is an Irishman living in London. He is attractive to women, though there’s no reason he should be. He and various other characters pursue each other and are pursued while holding conversations of quite remarkable irreality. Incidents may make sense in isolation, but in combination give rise to a plot which is both simple and yet hard to follow. The characters are barely distinguishable and make no attempt at credibility.

Beckett delights in language. He delights too in playing with the reader. Early on Murphy is on his own, tied hand and foot to a rocking chair. He tied himself to it, naked, and he enjoys sitting and rocking until his mind becomes quite separated from his body.

If Murphy is tied hand and foot though, and tied himself, how did he tie his last hand? He couldn’t have. Someone else must have. But nobody else is present.

Of course that’s not true. Someone else is present. Two people in fact. Beckett and me. If Murphy’s hand is tied and he couldn’t have done it and I didn’t do it logically Beckett must have done it. The author is within the book, not explicitly but necessarily.

There wasn’t a page in Murphy that didn’t contain words I didn’t know. Most books don’t have any words I don’t know. I’m a lawyer. Words are my business. Here many were deeply obscure, but I came to realise some were also just plain made up. I could stop every few sentences and research what something meant, or I could just go with the flow and accept that the language would stream around me part understood and part bearing an implied meaning from context. Sometimes the meaning, if it existed, would be (was) wholly unclear.

So then, thin characters, a flimsy plot, frequently opaque language, events that couldn’t happen as described, it’s no surprise Beckett’s not topping the bestseller lists. The traditional novel is essentially realist, and this decidedly isn’t.

What it is though is well written. Beckett apparently did better later, but there’s plenty here to enjoy. By way of example, in one passage a woman runs out on to the street having discovered a violent suicide. Beckett reflects: “Her mind was so collected that she saw clearly the impropriety of letting it appear so.”

That’s tremendously astute and for me very funny. It’s absurd that it should matter how one reacts, that one should think of such a thing at all when someone has just died. As Meursault finds out in The Stranger though how one reacts to a death can be very important indeed.

As jokes go it’s a particularly tragic one. Beckett has a vicious sense of humour. It’s not so much that he’s cruel (though at times he does tip over into cruelty) as that existence is cruel and he’s laughing at it or at us (or both) and so the laughs become uncomfortable.

Murphy is full of humour. In fact that’s mostly what makes it ultimately enjoyable to read. Sometimes it’s mordant (I do love that word) observations such as in the quote above. Other times the comedy is less straightforward. I found the following paragraph again extremely funny, but I’ve read Plato. If I hadn’t I’m not sure I’d have got the joke:

Thus Murphy felt himself spit in two, a body and a mind. They had intercourse apparently, otherwise he could not have known that they had anything in common. But he felt his mind to be bodytight and did not understand through what channel the intercourse was effected nor how the two experiences came to overlap. He was satisfied that neither followed from the other. He neither thought a kick because he felt one nor felt a kick because he thought one. Perhaps the knowledge was related to the fact of the kick as two magnitudes to a third. Perhaps there was, outside space and time, a non-mental non-physical kick from all eternity, dimly revealed to Murphy in its correlated modes of consciousness and extension, the kick in intellectu and the kick in re. But where was the supreme caress?

Later there is a reference to the “beatific idols of [Murphy's] cave”, underlining the Platonic motif. Descartes is another frequent reference point here with his famed mind-body duality (which it’s fair to say Beckett here seems unpersuaded by). I’ve read too that Spinoza is referenced, but I’ve not read Spinoza so can’t speak to that.

I’m going to digress for a moment. Murphy is a book containing an awful lot of references. I got the ones to Plato and Descartes, I didn’t get the ones to Spinoza (if they’re there). I’ve no doubt there were some I didn’t even realise I wasn’t getting.

That’s obvious here, but it’s potentially true of any book. Apparently Lee Rourke’s The Canal on some views has references in it to Leda and the Swan. If you read my review you won’t find any mention of that – I didn’t notice them. So it goes. I like to see the currents beneath a book’s surface, but I have to accept I won’t always do so. That’s not a problem. It’s a good thing. If we saw everything what room would there be for rereading? For later consideration?

Beckett plays then with language, with propriety and with philosophy. He plays too with his own role as author and with the reader’s as reader:

Miss Counihan sat on Wylie’s knees, not in Wynn’s hotel lest an action for libel should lie, and oyster kisses passed between them. Wylie did not often kiss, but when he did it was a serious matter. He was not one of those lugubrious persons who insist on removing the clapper from the bell of passion. A kiss from Wylie was like a breve tied, in a long slow amorous phrase, over bars’ times its equivalent in demi-semiquavers. Miss Counihan had never enjoyed anything quite so much as this slowmotion osmosis of love’s spittle.
The above passage is carefully calculated to deprave the cultivated reader.

That last sentence breaks out of the fiction. The book becomes curiously self-aware. It recognises its own artificiality. It blocks the possibility of escape into the text because as reader you cannot pass through the text into the story. Even if you could get past the tied breve (no idea) and the bars’ times its equivalent in demi-semiquavers (seriously, no idea) that final sentence makes it quite apparent that none of this is real.

I wouldn’t call Murphy an easy read. I had to think about each paragraph, often each sentence. I had to pause to consider what words meant, or might mean here. Beckett uses intentional misspellings, created vocabulary, motives so alien as to be near horrific (Murphy becomes an attendant in an insane asylum and dreams of one day himself becoming a catatonic).

At times in fact Beckett rather overdoes all this. One conversation between three characters goes on for several pages (several too many) with everything almost making sense but none of it ever quite doing so (except apparently to them, but they don’t exist and the sense they make of nonsense underlines their impossibility). Pynchon pulls that sort of thing off well. I wasn’t wholly sure Beckett did. Often the book is a delight, but occasionally one has to eat some linguistic Brussels sprouts to get to the playful literary chocolate mousse.

As the novel continues Murphy seeks to separate the mental and the physical. To retreat from the shared world into his own internal world. There is though no lasting retreat possible. If you’ve seen Waiting for Godot you know the territory. There is literally nothing to wait for. There is literally nowhere to escape to.

I said above that I understand Beckett went on to write better books. Here there is still some recognisable version of our world. There are hospitals, cafes, parks. Beckett is at his best though when playing with language and thought alone. None of his characters are, or are intended to be, sympathetic but that doesn’t excuse his rather doubtful (distasteful even) observations on, and portrayals of, women. If Murphy were to be improved it would be by less contact with Beckett’s external reality. Ironically it is when it attempts to show our world that it is least convincing.

Murphy as a character is in a sense engaged in a quest for meaning, for self-realisation even. The problem is that there is no meaning to be found. The mind is not in fact separate from the body. The world of forms does not exist. There is nothing to be realised.

Murphy the book struggles to break free from the inherent constraints of its own form (as Murphy the character tries to break free from his). The author’s invisible hand implied in tying Murphy to the chair, the asides direct to the reader, the made-up words, all of it acts to tear the novel down from within. Perhaps the last joke of Murphy though is on Beckett.

Murphy tries to undermine its own authority as a text, but ultimately it can’t do so because it relies on that very authority to make the attempt. Perhaps in the end Murphy says too much to be able to talk about nothing. Godot says less, and so more.

I only write what I feel has to be written.

Everything Passes, a novel, by Gabriel Josipovici

When I finished Gabriel Josipovici’s book What Ever Happened to Modernism? I wasn’t quite sure what to read next.  I looked at the shelves and pulled off  a Beckett, Josipovici’s Everything Passes, a Huysmans and JL Carr’s A Month in the Country.

I took a look at the opening page of Josipovici’s novel to see how his critical theory manifested in practice. I’d already pretty much decided to read something else first. Here’s the opening two paragraphs. the entirety of the first page:

A room.
    He stands at the window.
    And a voice says: Everything passes. The
good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow.
Everything passes.

A room.
    He stands at the window.
    Silence
    He stands.
    Silence.

I’d read What Ever so I had some idea what was going on, what questions to ask. What room? Who is he? What voice is this? His? An internal one? Is someone else present? Is it the author’s voice? God’s? There is no evident answer. Still, it was easy to read. I read on.

Before I knew it I was around 2o pages in. The whole book is only 60. I figured I should stop as it was very late, but I was 30 pages in before I did and only then because I was too tired to continue. It’s hard to capture it from such small quotes as those above, but Josipovici can write. I found myself turning the pages as if it were a thriller.

As the book continues it becomes apparent that it is not written in chronological order. The paragraphs may be the man’s memories and thoughts as he gazes out that unidentified window (is it always the same window?). They may not be. Still, as the words slide past a sort of story began to emerge. I began to get a picture of the man’s life, forming from the fragments before me.

When I reviewed Berger’s A Painter of Our Time I spoke of it as being a cubist novel. That’s what’s happening here too (though the style is very different). Through fragments of perspective one sees the whole life, but no part of that life is given priority over any other.

Here’s another quote which should illustrate what I mean:

His face at the window.
    Greyness. Silence.
    The crack in the pane.
    His face at the window.
    Silence.

Sunlight.
    The garden.
    The shuttlecock flies into the bushes.
    – I can’t! she says. I can’t play any more!
    – You want to stop?
    – I want to lie down, she says. I’m sweating all
over. I want to lie down with you in the grass.

Who is she? Where is this garden? At the time I read that I didn’t know. By the end of the book I had a pretty good idea. On its own it makes little sense, in the context of the whole work though it comes together and why this incident matters becomes apparent.

In What Ever Happened to Modernism? Josipovici made a number of arguments about what modernism is and what it’s a response to. I discussed that there, so won’t here, but the arguments are present here too. They’re present though in vastly condensed form, and are perhaps better for that.

- Rabelais, he says, is the first author in history to find the idea of authority ridiculous.
    She looks at him over her coffee cup. -
Ridiculous? She says.
    – Of course, he says. For one thing he no
longer felt he belonged to any tradition that
could support or guide him. He could admire
Virgil and Homer, but what had they to do with
him? Homer was the bard of the community. He
sang about the past and made it present to those
who listened. Virgil, to the satisfaction of the
Emperor Augustus, made himself the bard of the
new Roman Empire. He wove its myths about
the past together in heart-stopping verse and so
gave legitimacy to the colonisation and
subjugation of a large part of the peninsula. But
Rabelais? If enough people bought his books he
could make a living out of writing. But he was
the spokesman of no one but himself. And that
meant that his role was inherently absurd. No
one had called him. Not God. Not the Muses.
Not the monarch. Not the local community. He
was alone in his room, scribbling away, and then
these scribbles were transformed into print and
read by thousands of people whom he’d never
set eyes on and who had never set eyes on him,
people in all walks of life, reading him in the
solitude of their rooms.
    – Do you want another coffee? she asks.
    – Yes please.

That’s an extraordinarily didactic passage. So much so that on first reading it I was rather troubled by what then seemed to me a blatant (and rather clumsy) authorial intrusion into the text. I normally avoid ascribing character views to authors, but here I’ve read the author’s theories on the same point and I know this is his view. He really is inserting himself into the text.

It’s not that simple though, because it’s also the character’s view. Josipovici has used his character to present his thesis, but it soon becomes apparent that the character himself actually is didactic within the fiction, perhaps even a bully.

- The trouble with most works of literature, he
says, is that they face you head on. It’s never like
that in real life. Things just slip past us and
we’re hardly aware of them before they’ve gone.
You know what I mean?
    – Your food, Felix, Sally says.
    – Can I finish what I was saying?
    She is silent.
    – Damn, he says. I’ve lost the thread.
    They eat.

As the novel continues it becomes increasingly questionable what use this truth of the character’s is. Even if he’s right, so what? What good does it do him? He criticises the art, the writing, of others which he sees as pandering to the market but he struggles to write himself and there’s no evidence that he’s correct when he accuses another writer of not being true to his own voice. That writer replies that what he writes is his own voice. Who’s to say he’s wrong?

Worse yet, it’s not even clear that reality can live up to the rigor of the character’s views on the relationship between art and the world. At one point someone tells him that they are in love:

    -In love? he says. Do you think you’re in a
film or something?

Josipovici set out his thesis, but his own text undermines it. His character proposes, but his life seems to negate that proposal. This is plainly not accidental.

Josipovici subtitles his book “a novel”. It’s sixty pages long, and as you can see from the quotes those aren’t pages packed with text. What then does he mean by making that assertion? For me it said that this is a novel because it contains a life. It contains all that needs to be said, and leaves nothing unsaid that needed to be said. I’ve used the novella category in making this post because at 60 pages it fits neatly into that category on my blog, but that doesn’t detract from the point the subtitle makes.

In writing this I’ve had to avoid discussing what’s actually happening. A huge part of the pleasure of this book is putting it together. Who is she? Are all the she’s the same she? What are the events of this man’s life? What leads him to the window, if that’s a destination at all?

When I finished Everything Changes I took a breath, turned back to the first page and started again. I never really do that. I found it though an absolute blast of fresh air and I found myself wanting to see what I’d missed, to puzzle out more of what Josipovici was doing. On finishing a second time I seriously considered reading it a third. I’m sure I shall read it again at some point.

In the comments to my What Ever review Caroline asked if Josipovici does what he preaches. Having read Everything Passes I can firmly say yes, he does. In this book Josipovici addresses themes as diverse as love, a parent’s relationship with their children, life versus art, illness, death, and the value of truth. That’s big stuff for 60 pages. Enough for a novel.

I found online this review at ReadySteadyBook which I thought rather good. I would caution though that from my perspective it does contain slight spoilers and I think it would be better read after reading the book rather than before. It’s very good on the structure of the novel, which is critical and which even so I’ve not addressed. It’s difficult to discuss that structure without discussing content, which is why I made that choice. That same decision means there’s a lot of symbolism in the novel I can’t really discuss, but I can say it’s fun discovering it.

The death of enchantment

What Ever Happened to Modernism, by Gabriel Josipovici

It’s perhaps fitting that in sitting down to write this review I found myself struggling with how to start and with questions about my authority to say anything.

There are three broad strands in What Ever Happened to Modernism? Josipovici writes a brief history of modernism (though he wouldn’t thank me for saying that). He makes an argument for why modernism is not a historical event or movement but an ongoing challenge to art (he might thank me for that). Finally he offers a critique of contemporary English literary culture (which got his book more discussed than read, but then that’s true of so many books).

I … want to argue that Modernism needs to be understood … as the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities, and therefore as something that will, from now on, always be with us.

A few years back I had a fondness for popular science books. Among my favourite authors in that field was John Gribbin. Gribbin writes about complex concepts in modern physics, but he does so in a hugely accessible way. He knows his stuff, but he can explain it to laymen. If you’re interested in understanding the rudiments of quantum physics and lack the relevant background Gribbin’s your man.

I read a fair few Gribbin books, and thanks to him have a reasonable grasp (as reasonable as I probably can have anyway) of what’s going on in the world of modern cosmology. Even so, I couldn’t pick up a text aimed at actual physicists and have a hope of understanding much beyond the commas.

What Ever Happened to Modernism? is a work of literary criticism. Literary criticism is a bit like economics. If we read and enjoy literature then literary criticism can seem intuitive, obvious even. In the same way because we all, with varying success, balance our bank accounts economics can seem intuitive, obvious even. The truth is though that I, and probably most people reading this blog, lack the background and training to engage in literary criticism at the academic level.

That’s relevant to a key problem with this book. What is it? Populist or academic? It’s a bit of both, and that raises difficulties which I’ll return to.

Finally, I should note that in order to talk about the book I’ll have to summarise its nearly 200 pages of closely argued text in my own words. That means I can’t do the argument justice. In paraphrasing it I diminish it. To properly capture what Josipovici says I would have to write it out again verbatim.

For Josipovici modernism is a response in art (all art, music and painting too for example, not just literature) to the “disenchantment of the world”. That disenchantment is the loss of the Medieval sense of the numinous as being part of everyday life. In short, the Medieval vision of a world filled with purpose and divine meaning gave way to what would ultimately become the Enlightenment with its vision of a secular world governed by reason and natural laws (yes, I did just gloss over about 400 years there).

This is absolutely critical to everything that follows. The death of enchantment does not mean that people were happy in the middle ages but disillusioned thereafter. It is not a personal loss of enchantment. The point is that the European concept of the world changed from it being a place in which the natural and supernatural were different facets of the same reality to a world in which the natural and the supernatural were firmly separated (and in which the supernatural could therefore potentially be discarded entirely).

With the death of enchantment comes the death of meaning. Before the disenchantment of the world it is possible to speak with authority, because the world has meaning from which authority can be derived. After that disenchantment there is no longer such an authority. The only authority that exists is that which we assert.

For Josipovici this raises questions about the authority of the artist. In particular, the authority of the author. If the world no longer grants authority then where does it come from? What right has the author to assert that what they write is in any sense true? Worse, if the world is without meaning is not the act of writing a novel itself a form of lie about the world, an imposition of narrative where none in fact exists?

Josipovici explores this in part by a frankly fascinating discussion of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. He focuses particularly on the way through the foreword and other authorial insertions Cervantes undermines the reliability of his own work and on how the text is no more reliable than Don Quixote’s perceptions within it.

Don Quixote’s madness dramatises for us the hidden madness in every realist novel, the fact that the hero of every such novel is given a name merely to persuade us of his reality, and that he has giants created for him to do battle with and Dulcineas for him to fall in love with simply to satisfy the demands of the narrative. And it dramatises the way we as readers collude in this game because we want, for the duration of our reading, to be part of a realised world, a world full of meaning and adventure, an enchanted world. It is no coincidence that the novel emerges at the very moment when the world is growing disenchanted. We need enchantment and are prepared to pay good money to get it. The profound irony of Don Quixote is this: that we as we read about the hero’s obvious delusions we believe that we are more realistic about the world than he is, less enchanted, whereas we are of course ourselves in that very moment caught in Cervantes’ web and enchanted by his tale.

Historically, BC (before Cervantes) the artist could appeal to tradition. The death of enchantment though means that tradition can no longer be trusted. It is founded on nothing beyond itself. The author can of course create their own tradition, can create their own reality, but in doing so they create narrative and so write something which has no real relation to the actual world around us.

In this sense then modernism is an attempt to address the problem faced by art in seeking to represent a world that is independent of humanity. When the world was created in our image we could trust it in some sense to reflect us. If it is not, we cannot, and tools of art such as perspective, harmony, narrative, may all be nothing but our own inventions; not mirrors at all.

In our modern age, an age without access to the transcendental and therefore without any sure guide, an age of geniuses but no apostles, only those who do not understand what has happened will imagine that they can give their lives (and their works) a shape and therefore a meaning; the shape and meaning conferred by an ending.

What does all this mean though for the author? If you are driven to write because writing is intrinsic to your very nature, but you no longer believe in tradition and are troubled by the implications of the act of writing, where does that leave you? The problem of modernism is the problem of the artist who no longer believes they have authority but yet must create art.

We are now in a position to understand a little better the nature of the anxieties that gripped the writers of our opening examples. What is afflicting Mallarmé, Hofmannstahl, Kafka and Beckets is the sense that they feel impelled to write, this being the only way they know to be true to their own natures, yet at the same time they find that in doing so they are being false to the world – imposing a shape on it and giving it a meaning which it doesn’t have – and thus, ultimately, being false to themselves.

Modernism then is “… the effort, through art, to recognise that which will fit into no system, no story, that which resolutely refuses to be turned into art. That effort is at the heart of modernism.” This is the essence of Josipovici’s argument.

Modernist fiction is fiction which seeks to engage not only with reality but also to engage with its own reality. If the only possible authority is that which the author establishes for themselves then the work itself must establish that authority and in order to do so must recognise its own existence. That means that in order to be realistic, it must acknowledge its own artificiality and therefore the fact that it is not real.

Or perhaps not. Josipovici spends a fair while attacking “false friends” of modernism. Various critics and writers who while advocating it and defending it have missed the point and so diminished it. This raises again of course a question of authority. What authority does Josipovici have to assert his interpretation over those others he regards as mistaken? Naturally, only that he establishes through his arguments through the course of his book.

That takes me back to something I mentioned early on – the issue of whether this is a populist or an academic book. Josipovici backs his arguments through frequent references to Hegel and Kierkegaard, neither of whom I’ve read. In a very real sense I’m simply not qualified to debate the points he raises. This isn’t though an academic text. Stylistically it feels aimed very much at me. It makes its arguments in lay terms but by reference to texts that most laymen won’t be familiar with.

The problem is that Josipovici is making a case for modernist literature as a valid and relevant literary form. He argues that it is a form which is superior to the novels currently enjoying success among the English speaking literary readership. To do so he must write at a populist level, but his argument is not populist and understanding it takes real work. As I write this I’m unsure that I have understood it (but am sure some would say I haven’t). This may not be an avoidable problem, but it could be that modernism needs a John Gribbin and Josipovici is by nature a physicist, not a populariser of physics.

I’m conscious that I’ve made this book sound terribly dry. That’s unfair because it’s not. Josipovici ranges widely in his use of examples, moving within the space of a page from Mann to Stravinsky to Picasso. He quotes even more than I have here, and his quotes are well chosen. He examines the poetry of Wordsworth and makes an excellent case for it as being more exciting, more innovative than in all honesty I had ever recognised. He is excited by modernism, and he communicates that. I finished the book with a fresh (if possibly wrong) understanding of modernism and a renewed desire to engage with it.

There’s a lot in here and I can only touch on a fraction of it in this blog entry. Josipovici talks about Greek drama and its focus on action (praxis) and social context rather than the individual. He made me reconsider my views on some of Picasso’s work and has me reaching for Stravinsky recordings my wife owns that I hadn’t previously even bothered to listen to. At times reading it is invigorating.

Where Josipovici is less successful is where he criticises others. To his credit he doesn’t hide behind generalities. He names authors that he regards as having missed the point of the challenge raised by modernism and who he sees as producing works that are flat, unexciting, mere anecdote. He doesn’t always persuade me on them though.

Among his examples of writers of slightly dull realist fiction (which he would note is nothing of the kind) is Anthony Powell. I have though read the entirety of A Dance to the Music of Time and to read it as purely a story, as an exercise in narrative, is rather to miss the point.

Powell is telling a story, yes, but he’s also exploring issues of the nature of personal identity, the degree to which the individual is an extension of a social context rather than an atomic unit. Powell is quite consciously looking back himself to Greek drama and to questions of what it means to have free will (arguably Nick Jenkins lacks free will, Widmerpool possesses it and this is not necessarily to his advantage).

Put bluntly, I don’t agree with Josipovici on Powell. Equally, I don’t agree that the problem with McEwan is that he is a stylistically conservative writer who writes supposedly realist novels that are in fact suffused with a wholly fictitious meaning. Actually, as I write that (and I’ll let it stand) I’m persuaded that’s precisely the problem with McEwan. He writes ostensibly realist novels that are in fact so slavishly plot driven that they become more fantastic than anything Tolkien wrote.

The irony here is that I only heard about What Ever Happened to Modernism? because of a handful of pages where Josipovici criticises certain members of the current literary canon. That got his book discussed, but it’s a very small part of it. Josipovici’s main interest is in arguing for modernism, not against what we have instead (though he is absolutely scathing about Nemirovsky, querying why a fairly middlebrow novelist is being hailed as a major literary discovery).

A little controversy is nothing to be afraid of. To argue for something is inevitably to argue against something else and I like that Josipovici names names. It also doesn’t hurt that I instinctively agree with him. I do think current Anglo-American publishing is deeply conservative and that we lack in a formally unexciting period.

… ours is an age which, while being deeply suspicious of the ‘pretentious’, worships the serious and the ‘profound’, so that large novels about massacres in Rwanda or Bosnia, or historical novels with a ‘majestic sweep’, are automatically considered more worthy of attention than the novels of, say, P.G. Wodehouse or Robert Pinget.

Quite. Still, was there ever a time that wasn’t true? Did The Great Gatsby outsell The Green Hat? I doubt it (though if it did that analogy will look pretty silly). Modernism is on Josipovici’s account a challenge, and the challenging will always be less popular. We most of us read for enjoyment, perhaps for escapism, and narrative is inherently enjoyable. It’s a lie, but it’s a beautiful lie.

I opened unsure how to start, and I close unsure how to finish. Josipovici ends by recognising that he has himself no intrinsic authority. He recognises that it could be argued that all this is just a matter of taste, though he hopes he’s shown it’s not that simple. He expects the argument to continue, and I expect he’s right. Like him, I’m glad that’s true. There are no endings in art, no final summations, so it’s probably right that I don’t really have one here either.

Here is a (predictably acid) review by Philip Hensher, here a (predictably glowing) one by Tom McCarthy. There’s also an excellent blog entry on the book by Danny S Byrne here which I strongly recommend. As I wrote this I was given the link to this blog entry which I have yet to properly engage with (partly as I didn’t want it to influence my own thoughts while I was still crystallising them) but which looks exceptionally well informed.

Within a Budding Grove, by Marcel Proust

Within a Budding Grove, by Marcel Proust, translated by Moncrieff, Kilmartin and Enright

Where does one start? During the last few weeks my reading has been disrupted by a burst water main, various home repairs, a bout of minor illness and of course by work. I started Within a Budding Grove during a long weekend where I thought I’d have uninterrupted time to enjoy it. I wasn’t so fortunate. In fact there were times in which a week would pass and I wasn’t able to read a single page.

It’s lucky then that Within a Budding Grove is a masterpiece. It’s lucky that Proust is an extraordinary writer. Without the sheer quality of the book I’d have had to abandon it part way through (which I have done once before). As it was though each time I dipped into it I was refreshed by it. That sounds trite, but the truth sometimes is.

I wrote about the first volume of In Search of Lost Time here. In this volume the narrator discovers girls. That may not sound like a lot with which to fill over 600 pages. Proust joins it though with the exploration of art, the gap between dream and reality, a superb portrait of upper-middle class Parisian life in the late 19th Century, a healthy dollop of satire, and with a thousand other things some of which I’m sure I missed.

Besides, as anyone who has been through adolescence knows, the discovery of sex could fill 6,000 pages. The miracle of Proust is that he finds new things to say about what must be the oldest of subjects.

I’ll turn to the plot, such as it is, in a moment. First though I wanted to note something which is becoming increasingly obvious to me. Reading Proust is inescapably personal. As I read I remembered incidents from my own life. It made me think about how I had felt in adolescence and about my small disappointments. It made me think about some of the ways I act. Proust tells a story, and he tells it well, but he also holds a mirror up to me as a reader and that for me takes his work beyond the merely good. This is great art. I’ll come back to what I mean by that.

Within a Budding Grove (in the French, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower) is in two parts. In the first the narrator, in his early 20s but by modern standards emotionally much younger, falls in love with Gilberte who does not appear to love him in return. She is the daughter of Swann and Odette, whose story was told in the first volume. Gilberte is pretty and the narrator is obsessed with her but the reality is that he is in love with being in love. This is infatuation, fevered and intense. Here they mock-fight over a letter:

She thrust it behind her back; I put my arms round her neck, raising the plaits of hair which she wore over her shoulders, either because she was still of an age for it or because her mother chose to make her look a child for a little longer so as to make herself seem younger; and we wrestled, locked together. I tried to pull her towards me, and she resisted; her cheeks, inflamed by the effort, were as red and round as two cherries; she laughed as though I were tickling her; I held her gripped between my legs like a young tree which I was trying to climb; and, in the middle of my gymnastics, when I was already out of breath with the muscular exercise and the heat of the game, I felt, like a few drops of sweat wrung from me by the effort, my pleasure express itself in a form which I could not even pause for a moment to analyse; immediately I snatched the letter from her. Whereupon, Gilberte said good-naturedly: “You know, if you like, we might go on wrestling a bit longer.”

The narrator is emerging from childhood in other ways beyond the sexual. He starts to appear in society in his own right. He has his own income and is beginning to form his own ambitions.

As he is gaining independence, the narrator starts to realise some of his earlier goals. He attends the theatre and sees the famous actress Berma perform. He has dreamed of her for years. He has memorised the plays she is most famous for. When she appears in a revival of a play he already knows by heart he is so excited at having a ticket he is almost unable to attend, sick from anticipation.

The performance is a disappointment. Nothing can live up to the expectations the narrator has formed. Similarly when he meets the writer Bergotte, a major influence on the narrator’s idea of his own style, he finds him not at all what he expected. Bergotte doesn’t even look like a writer. Despite this and despite some discouraging remarks from an influential friend of his father’s the narrator still determines to become a writer himself. He loves writing as he loves Gilberte, not the reality of the thing loved but the dream of it.

Everything here is beautifully observed, and often extremely funny. Proust is at home describing a tea party as he is the uncertainty of wondering whether a friendship could be something more. He is as comfortable examining theories of art as which homes will open their doors to Mme. Swann and which will not. A passage where the narrator accompanies Mme. Swann and her entourage on her daily stroll is too long to quote here, but a marvel of description. In her blog Book Around the Corner described Proust as “the Monet of literature: small touches which, seen as a whole, are as vivid as life and move deeply the reader.” That’s spot on. Take this little vignette:

The wife of an elderly banker, after hesitating between various possible exposures for her husband, had settled him in a deck-chair facing the esplanade, sheltered from wind and sun by the bandstand. Having seen him comfortably installed there, she had gone to buy a newspaper which she would read aloud to him by way of diversion, one of her little absences which she never prolonged for more than five minutes, which seemed to her quite long enough but which she repeated at fairly frequent intervals so that this old husband on whom she lavished an attention that she took care to conceal should have the impression that he was still quite alive and like other people and was in no need of protection.

There is so much of love in that passing description of a minor character; one who barely recurs in the narrative. On a different note here’s an example of one of Proust’s many asides. I liked it for its continuing relevance. Proust writes about a very particular time and place, but his comments are frequently universal.

… whenever society is momentarily stationary, the people who live in it imagine that no further change will occur, just as, in spite of having witnessed the birth of the telephone, they decline to believe in the aeroplane. Meanwhile the philosophers of journalism are at work castigating the preceding epoch, and not only the kind of pleasures in which it indulged, which seem to them to be the last word in corruption, but even the work of its artists and philosophers, which have no longer the least value in their eyes, as though they were indissolubly linked to the successive moods of fashionable frivolity. The one thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been “great changes.”

In the second part of this volume the narrator goes on holiday to the seaside, to Balbec. There, after some disappointment when he sees the famously beautiful local church which fails to live up to his imagining of it, he is dropped into the stiffly social world of his hotel.

The hotel is Paris in miniature; divided by class and money. The upper classes ignore the middle. The middle form exclusive little social circles within themselves and pretend that they did not wish to attend the salons of the upper classes (to which they were not invited). The staff show differing levels of deference according to their perception of the station of those they serve. The poor press against the windows at night, looking in on a world full of distinctions they cannot see and a luxury they cannot attain.

Like any extended summer holiday of youth, nothing really happens but it happens intensely. At first the narrator is unhappy and homesick. Later he makes a new friend and reencounters an older one, Bloch.

Bloch is another beautifully observed character. He is more worldly than the narrator (Bloch takes him to his first whorehouse, where the narrator loses his virginity), but less socially adept. Bloch is a good friend, but not a flawless one.

Bloch is Jewish. The narrator is not. The narrator thinks nothing of this difference, but others do and through their reactions and comments Proust makes apparent the casual and widespread anti-Semitism running through French life of this period. It’s a theme I understand the next book develops further.

The narrator falls in love with every girl he sees. The less he sees of her in fact, the more he falls in love. A glimpse of a woman from a moving carriage lets him fill in what he can’t see with imagination.

Let but a single flash of reality – the glimpse of a woman from afar or from behind – enable us to project the image of Beauty before our eyes, and we imagine that we have recognised it, our hearts beat, and we will always remain half-persuaded that it was She, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake.

I noted that quote, but there’s several on this theme. It’s that constant thread of imagination against reality. The dream of Berma, of Bergotte, of the Balbec church and of every passing farmgirl is the same dream. It’s the dream of the perfect other which once encountered will give meaning and beauty and comfort.

The narrator daydreams of running off with a girl who sells fresh milk to train passengers at a crossing. He hopes to meet some willing country girl who will let him explore her inner self, and he convinces himself that what he wants is not just physical (not just).

I know how he feels. I spent much of my own life stunned by the beauty of women I hadn’t properly seen. At the narrator’s age I would routinely see someone, partly, from the top floor of a bus or across a tube platform and be desperate to meet them. The few occasions I did then run into them they rarely looked much like the image I had formed. My brain took a scant few details and filled in the rest from desire. I conjured futures from an arm downed with light brown hair; from the curve of a hip.

I said Proust was personal.

As he spends his days by the sea the narrator gets slowly drawn into the world of the hotel, and of Balbec. Social doors open for him and opportunities beckon. Then, however, he sees walking alongside the beach a band of girls. They are young, confident, beautiful. They look liberated and rebellious. If he could only meet them then surely one of them, it scarcely matters which, would be as interested in him as he is in them.

… the interplay of their eyes, animated with self-assurance and the spirit of comradeship and lit up from one moment to the next either by the interest or the insolent indifference which shone from each of them according to whether her glance was directed at her friends or at passers-by, together with the consciousness of knowing one another intimately enough always to go about together in an exclusive “gang,” established between their independent and separate bodies, as they slowly advanced, an invisible but harmonious bond, like a single warm shadow, a single atmosphere, making of them a whole as homogenous in its parts as it was different from the crowd through which their procession gradually wound.

He spends days waiting where they walk in the hope of casually running into them. He avoids expeditions with his grandmother (whom, with the easy resentment of adolescence, he treats at times quite badly though he still loves her profoundly), because he fears missing them. He gives huge thought to deducing the patterns of their appearances so he can put himself in their path.

At school I would walk a mile out of my way to talk to a girl I liked, pretending I happened to be going the same way regardless of the inconvenience. I doubt I was alone in that. The level of unnecessary invention at that age is staggering.

What’s wonderful here is the intensity of it all. All the emotions are raw; the friendships and the loves. A passed note holds unbearable significance. A brief touch of the hand has more meaning read into it than a thousand scholars could discover in a thousand obscure texts. The narrator meets an artist (I’ll have a separate post about that hopefully later this month) whose work affects him profoundly but it means nothing against the chance of meeting Albertine, one of the band of girls who finally takes note of him.

I said earlier that this is great art, and that I would expand on that comment. Proust has a daunting reputation. The full six volume work is huge, it lacks chapters and each volume represents hundreds of pages of introspection, digressions on art and psychology, and detailed social comment. It doesn’t look like an easy read. It isn’t particularly.

Proust isn’t though a difficult read either. Yes, it’s dense stuff and yes it needs a bit of attention (the more it gets the more it repays), but it’s incredibly well written and that makes it easier to keep going than you’d expect. It’s often very funny and a joke is rarely that far away.

This is an extraordinarily honest book. It’s an utterly unflinching examination of a life and because while we are none of us alike we are none of us so utterly different either it’s hard not to find parts of one’s own life in that life. It’s a portrait painted with immense skill but also with compassion and wit. It’s a world entire, as we all are.

Proust addresses questions of life, of art, of literature and of mortality. I’ve barely touched here on a fraction of what this book contains. Bookaroundthecorner wrote three excellent blog posts on this volume alone, here, here and here. I haven’t even discussed M. de Norpois whom bookaround rightly focuses on in one of her posts.

If I had one message I’d want anyone reading this to take away it’s this: yes, this is challenging, but it is absolutely worth it. Put the time aside, ignore your overflowing drains, your racking cough and the press of emails and push yourself a little. It won’t be work. It’s not the book to read when you feel like a bit of light escapism, but with just a little dedication it gives back far more than it asks. It’s brilliant and I feel such frustration that I can write so much and still have managed to capture so little about quite how wonderful it is.

Oh God, I’m going to think, don’t let me think.

La Grosse Fifi, by Jean Rhys

A little while back I wrote a post about my personal canon as it stands today. It was a list of authors whose work particularly resonates with me. I wrote the post on a particular day and the result was a particular list. Another day might have produced a different one. Whichever day I’d written it though it was always a certainty that Jean Rhys’s name would be there.

As I write this the Man Booker International Prize has been in the news. Philip Roth won, which led to one judge quitting the panel in part on the rather odd basis that Roth writes the same novel time and again. I haven’t read Roth yet so I don’t know if he does, but if he does what of it? Many, many highly regarded authors mine the same territory for their entire careers. That fact alone says nothing of their work’s quality.

Jean Rhys has her territory. Hers is the landscape of women not quite doing ok. Her characters are outsiders looking in on a world that doesn’t particularly understand them and doesn’t particularly want to. Men are unreliable and other women offer little support. It’s a lonely world and one in which the existence of a woman on her own can be extremely precarious.

Penguin Modern Classics recently brought out a series of pocket editions in its modern classics range. Each one has a few short stories by an author, or a short novella. La Grosse Fifi features four stories excerpted from Rhys’s 1927 collection The Left Bank and Other Stories and it’s a nice little introduction to Rhys’s style. If you already like Rhys, you’ll like this. If you don’t know her this is a pretty good place to start.

The title story, La Grosse Fifi, is classic Rhys. The narrator, Roseau, is an Englishwoman staying on her own in a questionable hotel in France. She becomes interested in another guest, Fifi, and forms a sort of friendship with her.

Fifi [...] was stout, well corseted – her stomach carefully arranged to form part of her chest. Her hat was large and worn with a rakish sideways slant, her rouge shrieked, and the lids of her protruding eyes were painted bright blue. She wore very long silver earrings; nevertheless her face looked huge – vast, and her voice was hoarse though there was nothing but Vichy water in her glass.
Her small, plump hands were covered with rings, her small, plump feet encased in very high-heeled, patent-leather shoes.

Fifi is not the sort of woman a well bred English girl should be seen with. She’s fat, vulgar, worse yet she is accompanied by a gigolo to whom she is devoted but who like Fifi is both a bit seedy and a bit absurd. Roseau herself though is not entirely the right sort of woman. She says the wrong sort of thing, stays in the wrong sort of place, she’s interesting but perhaps a little too interesting.

‘He’s running off to tell his wife how right she was about me,’ thought Roseau, watching him. ‘How rum some English people are! They ask to be shocked and long to be shocked and hope to be shocked, but if you really shock them … how shocked they are!’

(The ellipses there are in the original text.)

Things rarely go well for women in Rhys’s world. A choice must be made between freedom and respectability. Respectability though is money too. A woman might live as she chooses, but without a husband she will struggle to survive and dependable husbands do not marry undependable women. Fifi is tragic and her love affair with her gigolo slightly pathetic but as Roseau recognises Fifi is also a woman leading her own life on her own terms. Others laugh at her, but Roseau does not.

For God knows, if there’s one hypocrisy I loathe more than another, it’s the fiction of the ‘good’ woman and the ‘bad’ one.

If there’s any quote that summarises Rhys for me it’s that one.

La Grosse Fifi is a strong tale shot through with compassion. The last two, Tea with an Artist and Mixing Cocktails are much shorter mood pieces. Effective enough but limited in their scope. The other story in the collection though is Vienne and that’s worth the price of admission on its own.

In Vienne a young woman is in Vienna with her husband. He plays the currency exchanges and they spend their evenings among the well off and the women who accompany them. Her husband has money, but they came from poverty and she fears they could easily return to it. She loves him, but are his sure investments as sure as he thinks they are? As she reflects “Lovely food. Poverty gone, the dread of it – going.”

Vienne is a dazzling tale. It captures a between-the-wars Vienna caught in a fever dream of money and sex. Most women in the story are dancers who sleep with the rich men who attend their shows; not prostitutes, quite, but not romantics either. Those women are free but depend on men, and when their looks go the men and the money will too. Their best bet is to marry one before their looks fade and hope they’ve made the right choice.

The narrator isn’t a dancer, but her position isn’t that different. Her existence is precarious. Her happiness dependent on her husband’s success. She’s married while she still has her looks. She’s in love. She hopes she made the right choices.

Few authors capture the fear of poverty like Rhys does. I grew up poor myself, my mother and step-father unemployed in a council estate in a grim part of London. It’s impossible really to explain to those who haven’t left a place like that how strong the desire is never to go back to it. Impossible for me anyway. Rhys manages. This is a long quote, but the clarity of Rhys’s gaze makes it well worth setting out in full.

We dined in a little corner of the restaurant.
At the same table a few days before we came, a Russian girl twenty-four years of age had shot herself.
With her last money she had a decent meal and then bang! Out -
And I made up my mind if it ever came to it I should do it too.
Not to be poor again. No and No and No.
So darned easy to plan that – and always at the last moment – one is afraid. Or cheats oneself with hope.
I can still do this and this. I can still clutch at that or that.
So-and-So will help me.
How you fight, cleverly and well at first, then more wildly, then hysterically.
I can’t go down, I won’t go down. Help me, help me!
Steady – I must be clever – So-and-So will help.
But So-and-So smiles a worldly smile.
You get nervous. He doesn’t understand. I’ll make him -
But So-and-So’s eyes grow cold. You plead.
Can’t you help me, won’t you, please? It’s like this and this -
So-and-So becomes uncomfortable, obstinate.
No good.
I mustn’t cry. I won’t cry.
And that time you don’t. You manage to keep your head up, a smile on your face.
So-and-So is vastly relieved. So relieved that he offers at once the little help that is a mockery, and the consoling compliment.
In the taxi still you don’t cry.
You’ve thought of someone else.
But at the fifth or sixth disappointment you cry more easily.
After the tenth you give it up. You are broken – no nerves left.
And every second-rate fool can have their cheap little triumph over you – judge you with their little middle-class judgement.
Can’t do anything for them. No good.
C’est rien – c’est une femme quie se noie!
But two years, three years afterwards. Salut to you, little Russian girl, who had pluck enough and knowledge of the world enough, to finish when your good time was over.

There is a problem with this collection. Rhys wrote assuming a certain kind of audience with a certain kind of education. Characters often break into French, and it’s not translated. If you don’t have at least a memory of school French then there are bits here you’ll just plain struggle with. You need at least a passing familiarity with the language.

My French is weak but managed just well enough that I could follow what was happening and being said. If you’ve none at all that will be an issue. In Vienne it’s worse because Rhys also expects a very basic understanding of German. I really do mean very basic, a handful of words would be fine, but I don’t have any German at all and that meant I had to guess meanings a couple of times and at one key point had to ask my wife to translate a particularly key word.

Perhaps ironically given Rhys assumes a certain level of fluency in the reader Rhys herself gets it badly wrong with the names of some of the characters in Vienne. That story features a number of Japanese investors present in the city, and their names are pretty obviously made up to sound Japanese-ish or are Japanese words that sound about right (one is called Shogun of all things). I appreciate that Rhys couldn’t (as a contemporary writer could) just google some actual Japanese names but it is jarring.

In the end though it’s not the problems I had with languages that stick with me, or Rhys’s problems with Japanese names. It’s these women hoping for the best and knowing they’re not going to get it. Rhys is an extraordinary stylist. She captures an inner world which doesn’t change much story to story, novel to novel. It’s probably her inner world (Vienne seems very close to some real events in Rhys’s life). She’s writing the same thing over and over. But she writes it beautifully. Novelty and literary merit have very little to do with each other.

M. de Norpois recommends some investments

Currently I’m reading Within a Budding Grove, by Proust. For various reasons it’s taking me a lot longer than I’d hoped. Mostly the issue is that I wasn’t able to read it on holiday as I planned. That’s a shame because Proust needs time. He’s incredibly readable, but dense too. Every sentence requires attention. The sheer volume of wit, psychological insight, sociological comment and just sheer style demands concentration. It’s a great read, but it’s not a great daily commute read.

Quite honestly I’ve no idea how I’ll write it up once I have finished it. Inadequately is probably the best answer I have. How else could it be? To write with any accuracy about the scope of this volume alone would need more words than Proust needed to write it. Still, it should be fun to make the attempt doomed as I know it will be.

It’s impossible, for me anyway, to read Proust without being sent off on hundreds of digressions and tangents. Every page sends my mind racing in different directions. This quote, almost a humorous aside in the book, like so much else sent me well beyond the page I found it on:

My father, who was trustee of this estate until I came of age, now consulted M. de Norpois with regard to a number of investments. He recommended certain stocks bearing a low rate of interest, which he considered particularly sound, notably English consols and Russian four per cents. “With absolutely first-class securities such as those,” said M. de Norpois, “even if your income from them is nothing very great you may be certain of never losing your capital.”

Recently at bookaroundthecorner’s blog there was a discussion regarding the familiarity characters in 19th and early 20th Century fiction have with the financial markets. Often they display a casual knowledge of the merits of different classes of investment that’s quite alien today. The modern middle classes don’t, can’t, discuss gilt rates over dinner unless some of them actively work in the bond markets.The middle classes of the late Victorian/Edwardian period appear much more comfortable in this territory.

My personal theory is that it’s related to the need to procure a remittance (a competence as it was once wonderfully called) which doesn’t require the beneficiary to actually engage in work. The range of occupations open to the upper middle classes and upper classes was relatively narrow. There was no real social safety net. To maintain position, particularly in old age but also during the more active years, required a source of income not dependent on a job.

In this period the only pension you had was likely that which you provided for yourself. The only illness or unemployment protection came from your investments. If you wanted to live as part of “society” you needed a source of income that didn’t tie you up when you could otherwise be calling on people and participating in the social whirl. Class and money are ever hard to separate, and while one is not the same as the other (even in America) class is hard to sustain without money and after a generation or two money tends to buy class.

The characters of the novels of this period then know financial instruments because they have to. It’s an integral part of their world. They know them because not to know them would be folly, and because their parents would have known them too. They are part of ordinary conversation because familiarity with them is key both to survival and to social position.

Today it’s very different. There isn’t the same stigma about working for a living, and the growth of the superrich has made incomes that would once have been counted wealthy now merely comfortable. The young men (and now women) of the upper middle classes who would once have lived on their competence while doing some light duties at the bar or the City now compare themselves to oligarchs, CEOs and top traders and in that company a solid competence from land and investments really doesn’t cut it anymore.

On the other hand, we do now have pension plans, occupational contribution schemes, unemployment benefit and sick leave (to varying degrees of protection according to country). Equally importantly, perhaps more so, we no longer have the stigma of debt. The characters of these great novels of the past fear debt as social catastrophe, but now it’s commonplace (consumer debt is even an underpinning of our economic model). At worst those characters could even face prison for debt. That’s unthinkable today.

The characters of these novels mostly live lives of considerable comfort but comfort stretched over an abyss. Today that comfort is less easily obtained, but the abyss too is no longer bottomless. There’s a long way one can fall, but not so far as prison and the workhouse.

That’s why I think finance is so important to pre-First World War fiction. The anticipated readers of literary fiction of the day would have needed to know such matters and so would have been interested in them. Today finance is more abstruse, less common knowledge. It is alchemy and the ways of the bond market are neither known by nor of interest to a contemporary readership.