‘Be more careful how you express yourself, my child. Calling people and things by their names has never done anyone any good.’

Gigi and The Cat, by Colette, translated by Roger Senhouse and Antonia White respectively

I grew up with musicals. As a child, staying with my maternal grandmother, I used to love watching them with her. Dazzling choreography, great songs, and all in glorious Technicolor. Singin’ in the Rain remains my favourite film.

I saw Gigi back then, the 1958 musical with Leslie Caron in the lead role, but I don’t think I understood much of what was going on. Quite recently I saw it again, and absolutely loved it. It’s a joy of a film, with some great songs (I Remember It Well being a particular standout) and set pieces. It also has a tremendous cast, including of course Maurice Chevalier (whose Thank Heaven for Little Girls remains the dodgiest song I’ve ever heard in a musical, even as a child it seemed a bit questionable to me, though at least the singer does wait for them to grow up).

Colette’s original novella, here translated by Roger Senhouse, is just as much a joy as the film was. Perhaps more so, because it can afford a cynicism that Hollywood largely had to expunge and because Colette’s observations are so utterly delicious.

Gigi is a pretty young Parisienne, still in essence a child. Her mother is a moderately unsuccessful actress who has passed responsibility for Gigi’s upbringing largely to her own mother, with whom they both live. Gigi’s grandmother has plans for the girl, and to that end is having her trained by her own sister, Aunt Alicia.

What is Gigi being trained in? Well, that’s what I missed as a child watching the film. Gigi’s aunt is a grand courtesan, her grandmother was a courtesan too, though not so grand. Gigi, the illegitimate daughter of an actress, has very few career paths open to her and the one she’s being prepared for whether she knows it or not is the life of a serial mistress.

What follows is a wonderful clash of youth and idealism on the one hand, and age and guile on the other. Gigi’s innocence and sheer spirit has captured the friendship of the most eligible young man in Paris, Gaston Lachaille, but now she’s starting to leave childhood the possibility arises that she could be something more to him than just a friend. Gigi doesn’t understand that yet, but her grandmother and great-aunt most certainly do. If only Gigi showed the slightest aptitude for their training…

Don’t ever wear artistic jewellery; it wrecks a woman’s reputation.” ‘What is an artistic jewel?’ ‘It all depends. A mermaid in gold, with eyes of chrysoprase. An Egyptian scarab. A large engraved amethyst. A not very heavy bracelet said to have been chased by a master-hand. A lyre or star, mounted as a brooch. A studded tortoise. In a word, all of them frightful. Never wear baroque pearls, not even as hat-pins. Beware above all things, of family jewels!’ ‘But Grandmamma has a beautiful cameo, set as a medallion.’ ‘There are no beautiful cameos,’ said Aunt Alicia with a toss of the head.

This is novella as macaroon, a perfectly crafted little delicacy, beautiful to look at and delightful to bite into (why yes, I do love macaroons, why do you ask?). Gigi’s lessons are full of acerbic little asides (“The telephone is of real use only to important businessmen, or to women who have something to hide.”) and pretty much every page had me laughing.

The three great stumbling-blocks in a girl’s education, she says, are homard à l’Américaine, a boiled egg, and asparagus. Shoddy table manners, she says, have broken up many a happy home.

Colette here manages to be both cynical and romantic, to have her gateau and to eat it. I could quote it endlessly, and can easily imagine rereading it. It’s just huge fun.

All of which makes it a bit of a shame that I didn’t like the other novella in the Vintage Classics edition I read at all. The Cat is actually an earlier work by Colette (1933, whereas Gigi is 1945). It’s the story of a young man who has a frankly unhealthy relationship with his pet cat and the rivalry that develops between that cat and his new bride.

I grew up with cats, and have loved them all my life. This should then be the novella for me. Unfortunately though I’ve never met a cat that behaved remotely like the cat Saha does in this story - too human to ever be convincingly cat. Then again, I’ve never met humans who behaved much like the humans do in this story either.

Alain, Saha’s owner, is an unwordly sort who is marrying more from duty than love. Here he coldly considers his new bride:

Alain listened to her, not bored, but not indulgent either. He had known her for several years and classified her as a typical modern girl. He knew the way she drove a car, a little too fast and a little too well; her eye alert and her scarlet mouth always ready to swear violently at a taxi-driver. He knew that she lied unblushingly, as children and adolescents do; that she was capable of deceiving her parents so as to get out after dinner and meet him at a night-club. There they danced together, but they drank only orange-juice because Alain disliked alcohol. Before their official engagement, she had yielded her discreetly-wiped lips to him both by daylight and in the dark. She had also yielded her impersonal breasts, always imprisoned in a lace brassière, and her very lovely legs in the flawless stockings she bought in secret; stockings ‘like Mistinguett’s, you know. Mind my stockings, Alain!’ Her stockings and her legs were the best things about her. ‘She’s pretty,’ Alain thought dispassionately, ‘because not one of her features is ugly, because she’s an out-and-out brunette. Those lustrous eyes perfectly match that sleek, glossy, frequently-washed hair that’s the colour of a new piano.’ He was also perfectly aware that she could be as violent and capricious as a mountain stream.

It’s a long quote, but an interesting one. This is his bride to be, but note the complete lack of passion. Here, by contrast, Alain considers his cat:

As soon as he turned out the light, the cat began to trample delicately on her friend’s chest. Each time she pressed down her feet, one single claw pierced the silk of the pyjamas, catching the skin just enough for Alain to feel an uneasy pleasure. ‘Seven more days, Saha,’ he sighed. In seven days and seven nights he would begin a new life in new surroundings with an amorous and untamed young woman. He stroked the cat’s fur, warm and cool at the same time and smelling of clipped box, thuya and lush grass. She was purring full-throatedly and, in the darkness, she gave him a cat’s kiss, laying her damp nose for a second under Alain’s nose between his nostrils and his lip. A swift, immaterial kiss which she rarely accorded him. ‘Ah! Saha. Our nights . . .’

Leaving aside the anthropomorphising there, we’re in distinctly creepy territory. That’s not a problem per se, though it wasn’t clear to me whether I was supposed to find Alain quite as profoundly distasteful as I did, the issue is that this is a character driven tale without a single character one cares about.

It’s about the lowest form of book criticism to say a book is bad because it has no likeable or sympathetic characters, and that’s close to where I’m getting here so I need to be a little careful. I read noir though, and it never bothers me there that frequently everyone in the story is utterly repellent.

The issue here is that Alain is so fixated on his cat he moves beyond the credible. He becomes almost an image of mental illness, but that’s not what this story is. His bride, efficient, modern, is put in the incredible situation of competing for her husband’s affections with his cat but since I didn’t believe in the husband or the cat the whole setup just became rather artificial.

As I grew distant from the story it jarred more and more. At one point, Saha becomes concerned that she’s upset Alain and so scoops “up a rusk from the table and held it between her paws like a squirrel.” Cats lack both the empathy and the grip to do anything like that. If I’d been enjoying the story I’d have read that passage generously, but I wasn’t and instead it became just another unconvincing detail.

For me then The Cat became a hugely contrived tale featuring a conflict that I didn’t believe in between characters who didn’t persuade me. It’s neat, and I don’t say that remotely as a compliment. Gigi is a vastly more accomplished tale. I’ll return to Gigi, but I doubt very much I’ll ever return to The Cat.

I should add, by way of postscript, that as I write this I’m actually surprisingly tired, my own cat having shown a distinct lack of empathy last night and having woken me repeatedly as she wanted to curl in and was annoyed I wasn’t responding. I love cats, but putting the feelings of others ahead of their own isn’t one of their core strengths as a species.

“What can I do for you?” said a new character as he executed a bow.

The Attic by Danilo Kiš, and translated by John K. Cox

The Attic by Danilo Kiš, and translated by John K. Cox

The journey of the young writer, from aspiring novelist to published author, is one of the most widely told stories out there. It’s the only story every novelist has in common. The details may vary, as may the difficulty of the path followed, but by definition every one of them has done it.

It’s a story I tend to I find particularly uninteresting, because often it’s literature talking to itself instead of to the world. What could be more insular than novels about writing novels? Steampunk fiction actually, but I risk totally digressing in my second paragraph so let’s pretend I didn’t mention that.

The Attic is a Serbian novella written back in 1962. It’s a first novel about writing a first novel. It’s even called The Attic (the original could just as easily be translated as The Garrett or The Loft), as if to underline the airless subject matter. It has though that one quality which trumps all others, it’s well written.

Orpheus, the narrator, is a young writer living in a mould and cockroach infested garret apartment with a friend he calls Billy Wiseass. These aren’t, of course, their real names.

Orpheus falls in love with a girl he names Eurydice, although it’s fairer to say he falls in love with an idea of a Eurydice that he clothes a girl in.

Back at the time I think I first met her, I was feverishly demanding answers from life, and so I was completely caught up in myself – that is, caught up in the vital issues of existence.

Here are some of the questions to which I was seeking answers:

- the immortality of the soul

- the immortality of sex

- immaculate conception

- motherhood

- fatherhood

- the fatherland

- cosmopolitanism

- the issue of the organic exchange of matter and

- the issue of nourishment

- metempsychosis

- life on other planets and

- out in space

- the age of the earth

- the difference between culture and civilization

- the race issue

- apoliticism or engagement

- kindness or heedlessness

- superman or everyman

- idealism or materialism

- Don Quixote or Sancho Panza

- Hamlet or Don Juan

- pessimism or optimism

- death or suicide

and so on and so forth.

These problems and a dozen more like them stood before me like an army of moody and taciturn sphinxes. And so, right when I had reached issue number nine—the issue of nourishment—after having solved the first eight problems in one fashion or another, the last addition to the list turned up: the question of love . . .

Orpheus tells Eurydice of his adventures in the South Seas, though they’re plainly a flight of fancy and it’s doubtful he’s ever left Belgrade. Soon after is an entire chapter which mimics a passage from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (I only know that because of the incredibly helpful foreword, thanks John K Cox). His friend Billy gets a girl pregnant and needs help with cash for an abortion, and Orpheus is keen to help because as he notes with concern a baby would mean “voilà, a new character!“

What’s going on here? It quickly becomes apparent that The Attic isn’t just a novel about writing a first novel – it’s a novel about writing this particular first novel. It’s a literary ourobouros that becomes a kind of metafiction in which the characters are aware that they are characters and the novel is aware of its own artificiality. This isn’t a book which imagines a world, but which then pretends that the created world has some form of objective existence (the standard approach for the vast majority of fiction). Rather this is a book which expressly addresses the act of its own creation (though of course, the novel titled The Attic which is being written inside the novel I read titled The Attic may not be quite the same The Attic, in fact can’t be).

Soon I was giving [English] lessons to the sluts of the port. Never before had I had pupils who were more diligent and compliant. And they paid me regularly. In kind, to be sure. How else? Then I stopped giving lessons to those girls who lived by the Bridge of Sighs, as we referred to them. Every day their madam had brought me coffee with a great deal of sugar and milk, just because once I’d said I liked it.

[They discuss his smoking, which the madam thinks excessive. She refers to "some great disappointment in your past..."]

“No, no” I said. “But I prefer a bitter cigarette to sweet coffee with sugar. It’s simply…”

Then she said suddenly: “Listen, it’s not nice of you to make your café latte sound even sweeter than it is, just so I’ll end up coming across as all the more insipid. You reporters are all the same. It goes without saying that I’m mentioning this in your interest.

If all this sounds arch and pretentious then for a fair part of the book that’s because that’s exactly what it is. The early passages are breathlessly adolescent (check out that list, above). The style is deeply self-indulgent, but then the technique becomes surer, the conceit less overwhelming. What becomes apparent is that The Attic is not merely a novel about writing a novel, but a novel that reflects in its very style and structure the process of becoming a novelist.

It opens up excitable and even amateurish. It veers off into unbounded flights of fantasy. It then faithfully follows the path set down by an earlier great writer. Only after all that does it start to find its own voice, to convince in its own right.

What is all that if not the young author’s path? Learning their craft; learning how to structure so that the text doesn’t just fly off in all directions. In the foreword to Fugue for a Darkening Island, Christopher Priest talked of how he was over-influenced by his then literary heroes, and that’s what’s happening here when the text apes Mann’s text.

At about the half way point I was close to abandoning this book. Actually though, what it’s doing is genuinely clever. You aren’t just told how a novelist learns his trade, you feel it as the novel itself makes mistakes but improves as it progresses. The novel begins to embrace something beyond its own artifice, its own influences, just as within the fiction Orpheus as a writer develops his own craft.

The Attic then isn’t insular at all, even if it often seems so as Kiš plays with words and images like a child let loose in a toy store after closing time. Rather, it is about emerging from that attic of self-referentiality and breaking through to the world beyond the writer, writing about the external and not just the internal.

“So anyway – how are you amusing yourself these days?” asked Osip.

“I am writing The Attic,” I said.

We were walking toward the fortress along the edge of the Danube because Osip had resigned himself to the fact that Marija wasn’t going to show up for their date.

“That’s bound to be some kind of neo-realism,” he said. “Dirty, slobbery children, and laundry strung up in the narrow gaps between the buildings of some suburb, and dockside dives, shit-faced railroad switchmen and, hookers…”

“There’s some of that in it,” I responded. “After all, the title itself suggests as much. But it remains a horribly self-centred book…”

I don’t want to oversell it. It’s clever and it’s fun and most importantly of all it’s well written but it isn’t a weighty tome of sombre European insight. It’s not Thomas Mann (not that he’s particularly sombre now I think about it). Then again, why should it be? It’s a first novel after all.

Some other reviews I found interesting can be found here (and that article includes a useful career overview for Kiš) and here. There are also some more quotes here.

he was but the ruin of a man

Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton

I read Ethan Frome on my kindle, and finished it on a sunny day. Part of it I read while walking down the street. It was dazzlingly bright and warm, hot even. I meant to buy a bottle of water on my way to the station, and suddenly realised I’d walked past the shop. Looking up I was momentarily surprised to find it wasn’t dark, wasn’t cold. That’s a cliché, but it’s still true.

My first Edith Wharton was Age of Innocence, and I absolutely recommend that as a first novel to try by her. It’s an incredible book. It naturally formed my image of her writing, and my impression is that it’s not too false an image – a novelist of blighted and frustrated lives choked by propriety and convention; of the constraints of the upper middle classes of late 19th Century New England and New York.

In a sense all that is true of Ethan Frome, save the class element (the characters here are mostly the rural poor). This though is a more gothic tale, eschewing strict realism for a mood of fear, horror, even loathing. As I read it I found it created a near overwhelming sense of dread, and all without a single supernatural element. The ingredients here are ice, isolation, long-held secrets, disfigurement, ruin and death.

The story comes with a framing device, where an unnamed narrator takes an interest in a poor farmer by name Ethan Frome. Frome is a solitary, lame figure crippled by some terrible accident. He is tacit, private, and people prefer not to speak of his misfortune. The narrator though is invited to Frome’s home to shelter from a storm, and from there is able to piece together Frome’s history.

“That’s my place,” said Frome, with a sideway jerk of his lame elbow; and in the distress and oppression of the scene I did not know what to answer. The snow had ceased, and a flash of watery sunlight exposed the house on the slope above us in all its plaintive ugliness. The black wraith of a deciduous creeper flapped from the porch, and the thin wooden walls, under their worn coat of paint, seemed to shiver in the wind that had risen with the ceasing of the snow.

Years before Ethan Frome was a young man married to an invalid wife, Zenobia. Zenobia had nursed Frome’s mother as that woman lay dying, and upon their marriage had promptly fallen ill herself. Ethan and Zenobia had little money but even so had taken responsibility for a destitute cousin of Zenobia’s, who now helps out around the home. Zenobia, “though doubtful of the girl’s efficiency, was tempted by the freedom to find fault without much risk of losing her”. 

The cousin is Mattie, a pretty girl full of all the life that Zenobia is lacking. Frome’s marriage is a pitiful thing, dogged by poverty and his wife’s constant complaints regarding ailments which appear more psychological than real. Mattie comes into this wasteland like a blaze of colour, red scarfed, red ribboned, and of course red lipped and cheeked.  She laughs, and her laughter is a miracle in Ethan’s life long burdened by illness and care.

Starkfield, Ethan’s home town, spends six months a year surrounded by snow and winter. It is a hard place with a puritan past. Red then is the colour of life, but it’s also in this context the colour of shame, perhaps even of adultery. Mattie’s life stands in vivid contrast to Starkfield itself, where the barren silence of Ethan’s home is echoed in the bleak landscape surrounding him, penetrating him. Ethan is frozen, early ambitions for education and escape long since abandoned. Mattie though gives hope of life.

They walked on in silence through the blackness of the hemlock-shaded lane, where Ethan’s saw-mill gloomed through the night, and out again into the comparative clearness of the fields. On the farther side of the hemlock belt the open country rolled away before them grey and lonely under the stars. Sometimes their way led them under the shade of an overhanging bank or through the thin obscurity of a clump of leafless trees. Here and there a farm-house stood far back among the fields, mute and cold as a grave-stone. The night was so still that they heard the frozen snow crackle under their feet. The crash of a loaded branch falling far off in the woods reverberated like a musket-shot, and once a fox barked, and Mattie shrank closer to Ethan, and quickened her steps.

I won’t reveal what happens, though this isn’t really a novel capable of spoilers (it opens with Ethan long crippled, and it’s swiftly obvious too what kind of accident crippled him). The key here is mood, description, the unfolding of a grim inevitability. The writing is absolutely beautiful. So much so that at times it’s almost a difficult read: wintry and steeped in despair. It’s that writing though which makes this so persuasive a book. The plot is arguably a little too neat, a little too deterministic (though Greek tragedies are deterministic and neat in that sense, which doesn’t diminish them any), but the writing makes it true.

The winter morning was as clear as crystal. The sunrise burned red in a pure sky, the shadows on the rim of the wood-lot were darkly blue, and beyond the white and scintillating fields patches of far-off forest hung like smoke.

Edith Wharton is a beautiful writer. It’s easy here to pull apart the elements, tear open the symbolism (images of death, a watchful cat, a red pickle dish which was given as wedding gift but never used, the book is crammed with symbolic elements), but in doing so you’d kill it in the way academic examinations of books can so easily kill them. This is a classic school text, and I’m glad I didn’t read it in school because sitting in a room with thirty other kids crawling between words and discussing layers of meaning suffocates a book. It’s useful, it’s how I learned myself to analyse literature and that’s a skill I value, but the price one pays for that skill is the ruin of the books one learns it with.

Ethan Frome is a slighter affair than The Age of Innocence, but it’s absolutely still worth reading. There’s an old debate about what makes fiction count as literary fiction, as opposed to some other kind. The answer of course is the prose. Few authors write even nearly as well as Edith Wharton.

“Now!” he cried. The sled started with a bound, and they flew on through the dusk, gathering smoothness and speed as they went, with the hollow night opening out below them and the air singing by like an organ.

I don’t know my husband.

The New Perspective by K Arnold Price

There is a sense in which committing to another human being is among the bravest things any of us do. What if we make a life with someone, spend irrevocable decades with them, and then discover it was a mistake? What if come middle age they suddenly have a change of heart, decide to trade us in for a younger or more successful model, or we discover that for years theyve been having an affair or had hidden some deep part of themselves?

I have a fondness for horror movies, but zombies and predatory aliens aren’t real. The true terrors of our lives are much closer to home.

The New Perspective is an 84 page novella, mostly told in the first person though occasionally in third. That first person is Pattie, married to Cormac and after 26 years together in the same house they’ve finally just seen their second son married. After decades, their home is just theirs again, their children are embarked on their own lives and Pattie and Cormac are free to just enjoy each other’s company.

Their marriage has been a strong one. They have few arguments, they are still physically attracted to each other (though sex is never directly described in the novel Pattie’s sheer desire for Cormac, undimmed over the years and children, is powerfully evoked), they don’t talk much but then they hardly seem to need to because they agree so easily.

Returning home, after the wedding of their son (“a dull boy” who “has married a dull girl” reflects Pattie, somewhat against her will) Pattie is suddenly shocked to see the home they had made for themselves over all those years. How little it now fits her:

What checks and chills me is that I come home unexpectingly, and suddenly it is not home, it is an unlikeable house stamped with mediocrity and choked with trivia.

This isn’t a home fit for their new life. It’s born of a more timid Pattie, furnished when she was young and uncertain. Now she’s a mature woman with years ahead of her. It won’t do.

They move (the novel is structured into three sections, around three homes they live in). They agree to buy their new home without even needing really to discuss it – they visit it and inspect the rooms and consider what they would do to it and without need of direct discussion know that they will buy it. Once there they begin to transform it, and it them.

Internal walls are knocked down, rooms are decorated sparingly yet tastefully, the garden is planned and planted. Pattie comes to it all with colour charts for the rooms and images of heather atop stone garden walls but the reality is frustratingly obdurate – there are too many choices of colour and each changes its appearance as the day progresses, heather won’t grow where she wills it to – but in the end it is done and it is beautiful.

This quote is, I think, quite heartbreaking:

At the beginning of the summer Pattie decided that they would eat Sunday morning breakfast in the courtyard when the weather was suitable. She gloats over her garden furniture. The young trees she has bought are still very young but the tubs they stand in are freshly painted and look very nice. One bright Sunday morning when the sun is dazzling on the white walls and the white table, Pattie puts some of her dark crockery on the table and a bowl of fruit. She brings from the kitchen a tray containing brown bread, butter, honey and tea. Then she stands under the window of the landing and calls to Cormac. After an interval Cormac puts a tousled head out the window, smells the sharp morning air and disappears.

Pattie sits at the table and begins to eat brown bread and honey. After some minutes she hears movements in the kitchen and then domestic noises – a mile clatter of utensils and crockery. She finishes her light breakfast and walks into the kitchen. Cormac is seated at the table in his dressing-gown with a plate of fried eggs and bacon in front of him.

It’s not a flawless piece of prose (the young trees are still very young, not sure the first “young” is needed there) but it’s immensely powerful. The scene is beautifully painted – the light, the freshness, the bread and honey. Then the noise from the kitchen and the keen disappointment. Indifference is much worse than arguments.

Pattie thought she and Cormac didn’t need to speak because they knew what each other were thinking, but what if he simply never cared that much what she was thinking? She thought they reached the same decisions without need of discussion, but what if Cormac just didn’t care about the things she decided on? She thought they were in love because they still regularly have sex, but does that necessarily follow?

Once in the new house, Cormac buys a violin and reveals that he played as a youth but had to give up due to a family crisis. He had never mentioned any of this, in all their long years together. If that, if Cormac plays the violin, what else is there in Cormac’s past that was never shared? Pattie thought their life without children would be about each other, but Cormac wants to rediscover his long-delayed love of music. Where does Pattie fit into that? She talks of wanting to learn Italian to read Dante, but nothing comes of it (really I think it’s there because of the extraordinary appositeness of the opening lines, about being in the middle of life and finding oneself lost in a dark forest with the straight path lost).

That’s a lot for 84 pages, and it’s absolutely to this novella’s credit that it packs so much in. It’s a devastating book in its way. A discovery that the heart of a marriage may be missing, may never have been there. Fiction by female authors on this sort of topic is sometimes categorised as women’s fiction, a category I find actually fairly objectionable because really what about this isn’t universal? It’s fiction which goes to the worst fears we can really face, rather than those fears which comfort us because they will never happen.

The New Perspective isn’t without flaws. Pattie is supposed to be a small town librarian in rural Ireland, and she describes herself and her husband as “ordinary” and “not intellectual”. Despite that she uses words like “parousia” (I don’t know, I’ll google it at some point), references Plato and reads Svevo and Moravia. Those feel to me more the interests of someone who is say a student and occasional scholar of modern literature and a published poet and author, which is what K Arnold Price was.

Worse, Price makes heavy use of italics for emphasis, of exclamation marks and of ellipses and the result of all these is frequently to tell the reader how to read the sentence. I found them intrusive, and given her skill unnecessary. I admit I have a particular dislike of overused exclamation marks, but it did feel like the book wasn’t giving me space to interpret it, but rather insisting on a sole authorial interpretation. A book though which is capable of only one interpretation ultimately struggles to merit rereading.

Despite those criticisms there is still a lot to recommend here and I’m grateful to Will of Just William’s Luck for alerting me to it. His review is here, and it also made his end of year list for that year. Colm Toibin, whom I hold in huge regard, is also a fan and talks about it some way down the page on this Guardian article.

some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty

The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

I grew up, like many people, believing memory to be a sort of hologram stored in the brain. An accurate image of what was once perceived, once felt. Of course that’s not true. Memory is a reconstruction, and frequently a faulty one. As a factoid I think that’s fairly widely known now, but knowing that and feeling the truth of it are of course two very different things. We may know that our memories are not necessarily reliable, but they often seem so very definite.  Besides, without our memories who exactly are we?

That’s a question beyond the scope of this blog (though if I had to answer I’d say we’re a constellation of cognitive processes with an illusion of continuity, and that the very concept of self is deeply problematic). It’s at the heart though of Julian Barnes’ coolly distant Booker winning novel The Sense of an Ending.

The book opens with a short list of memories. not all of which the as yet unnamed narrator actually saw. Immediately we’re on warning, if one of these memories is imagined rather than real, can any of them be trusted? As the narrator says, “what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”

From there the novel develops in two reasonably distinct halves. The first is the narrator’s (who we eventually learn is named Tony) memories of his final years at school and his early years at university. The key here is that as a reader we’re not experiencing Tony’s early life directly, we’re experiencing what he remembers it as being like which may not be the same thing at all. This is underlined, time and again, with barely a page passing without Tony/Barnes reminding the reader that none of this can necessarily be trusted (“Later that day – or perhaps another day –”, “Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.”).

A new boy, Adrian, joins the school and becomes a key member of Tony’s small clique of friends. They consider themselves philosophers, intellectual rebels, they look to great art and literature for inspiration and they are convinced as was I and as no doubt were many reading this that they have insights that the old and adult world never knew or has long since forgotten. They look down on those around them with all the haughty certainty of adolescence, and they look forward to lives which whatever they may be will not be like their parents, or so at least they hope.

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents – were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls. Of course, there were other sorts of literature – theoretical, self-referential, lachrymosely autobiographical – but they were just dry wanks. Real literature was about psychological, emotional and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time.

After school they separate, as school friends tend to do, and Tony goes to university where he meets his first girlfriend, Veronica. It’s the 1960s, but one of the charms of the novel is how it brings out that for most people the 1960s is not the 1960s as we now picture it (just as having grown up in the 1980s I can testify it wasn’t for me much like the 1980s I now see on tv). If the sexual revolution is happening, it’s not happening anywhere near Tony. If people are turning on, tuning in and dropping out they’re not inviting him to do it with them. 1960s England for most is not that different to 1950s England. Our collective memories turn out to be not that reliable either.

The second half of the novel is years later, in the present. Tony is in his 60s now. He’s retired, divorced though still on good terms with his ex-wife, he has a daughter and while they’re not as close as he’d like they get along. He has a grandson he dotes on. His life is calm, comfortable, untroubled and deeply ordinary. That’s how he likes it. His teenage yearnings for more were a product of being a teenager, nothing deeper (“I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.”).

Tony’s existence is placid, and then he gets an unexpected bequest from Veronica’s mother who’s recently died and who he’s not heard from since an unsuccessful visit to meet Veronica’s parents decades previously. That leads him to contact Veronica, and to proof that how he remembers those years (and in particular how he remembers what lead up to a particular terrible incident) may not be quite how they actually happened.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.

I won’t talk more about the plot. What happened is interesting, but it’s not the point. The point is memory, age and the myth of self (Anthony Powell would have liked this book). Back in their schooldays Adrian challenged a history master with the idea that all one can say of history is that “something happened”. Later Adrian quotes what appears to be a French historian named Patrick Lagrange who said that “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation” (what appears because as best I can tell Patrick Lagrange is himself fictional, whether Adrian made him up or Tony misremembers is unknowable).

As a teenager Tony looked forward to an uncertain future. Now he looks back to an uncertain past. He has his account of what happened, but of what use is that? After all, “historians need to treat a participant’s own explanation of events with a certain scepticism.” Tony sets off on a dogged quest to understand what really happened all those years ago. As a narrator though he’s hopelessly compromised. If he can’t trust his own memories, and so we as readers can’t trust his descriptions of the past, how can we trust his perceptions of events now or the conclusions he draws? The whole book becomes slippery, with all that can be relied upon being Tony’s own emotional response. Everything else is, at best, approximate.

To the extent The Sense of an Ending has a weakness it lies in its tone. At the start I called this a coolly distant novel, and that’s in large part because Tony is a rather detached figure (detached from his own life in fact). As Tony is the narrator the book’s nature must follow his, and the result is a book that can at times be hard to love. When Josipovici criticised Barnes, and other contemporary English writers, it was exactly this sort of bloodless text he was arguing against.

Against that is one simple fact. Barnes can write. The book is filled with sentences that are absolute delights, frequently very funny and sometimes cruelly telling. I loved this as a summary of a certain kind of life: “We bought a small house with a large mortgage; I commuted up to London every day.” And similarly this as a description of a certain kind of English town: “one of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very last minute, and ever since smugly claimed rural status.” As a final brief example, I thought this line unbearably sad: “I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded – and how pitiful that was.”

At the end The Sense of an Ending becomes a sort of detective story, but one in which the solution doesn’t really matter and anyway can never be certain. Tony tries to understand what really happened in his past, how his personal account differs from the truth, and the extent to which he was responsible for what happened.  Those are all the wrong questions though. All of them amount to an attempt to fix that which is by its nature fluid, and to ascribe responsibility.

Tony’s investigation therefore becomes a more personal search. His choices are largely behind him. His life is now set in the path it will likely stay in until he dies. He thought he knew what the future held, but it wasn’t as he dreamed. He thought he knew what the past held, but it wasn’t as he remembered. The only certainty left is death, and that before it something happened.

The Sense of an Ending has naturally been the subject of a great many reviews. Some I’d point you to are (in no particular order) by Will of Just William’s Luck, here, Kevin of KevinfromCanada here, John Self of theasylum here, Kerry of Hungry Like the Woolf here, Tom of Tomcat in the Red Room here (and if you don’t know Tom’s blog you should, it’s definitely worth checking out), and just today as I wrote this at whisperinggums here. If I’ve missed your review (and I’m sure I’ve missed some blogs I follow, I’m very late to this book), please let me know in the comments.

a case of chess poisoning

Chess, by Stefan Zweig and translated by Anthea Bell

I loved Stefan Zweig’s novella Burning Secret. It was melodramatic, but successfully so with Zweig painting a subtle but intense psychological portrait of obsession and desire. I agree with Michael Hofmann that Zweig’s no Arthur Schnitzler, but literature isn’t a competition.

Anthea Bell is among my favourite translators. In fact, seeing her name on a book makes me more likely to read it. She is extremely talented and chooses interesting works to translate.

Chess (also known as The Royal Game, and as Chess Story) is probably Zweig’s best known novella. It’s a study of obsession, it’s translated by Anthea Bell. It’s been generally well received in the blogosphere by bloggers whose recommendations I put a lot of weight on. What’s not to look forward to?

Well, for me the answer was the plot, psychology and characterisation none of which worked. On a more positive note the translation is of course excellent and it’s short. Brevity is generally a virtue, but it’s a particular virtue in bad books.

The narrator is a passenger on an ocean liner. He discovers that among his fellow passengers is Chess world champion Mirko Czentovic. Czentovic is a Slavonian peasant by background, utterly lacking in the slightest hint of intelligence or sophistication, but on the chessboard nobody can defeat him. Somehow this oaf has risen from remote obscurity to dominate his social and cultural superiors and to sweep all opponents before him.

For the moment he rose from the chessboard, where he was an incomparable master, Czentovic became a hopelessly grotesque and almost comic figure; despite his formal black suit, his ostentatious tie with its rather flashy tie-pin, and his carefully manicured fingers, in conduct and manner he was still the dull-witted country boy who used to sweep the priest’s living room in the village. To the amusement and annoyance of his chess-playing colleagues, he clumsily and with positively shameless impudence sought to make as much money as he could from his gift and his fame, displaying a petty and often vulgar greed.

…

… the knowledge that he had defeated all these clever, intellectual men, dazzling speakers and writers in their own field, and above all the tangible knowledge that he earned more than they did, turned his original insecurity into a cold and usually ostentatious pride.

What I find interesting in this passage is the extraordinary depth of snobbery it displays. I’m not immune to snobbery myself of course. My reaction might not be much different to the narrator’s (and obviously the narrator isn’t Zweig, though interestingly the text at times playfully implies it might be). Despite my own failings though the condescension is so dense here it suffocates.

As portrayed Czentovic is a peasant lacking any great abilities in life save one. Is it so blameworthy that he should seek to profit from that sole gift? Is it so praiseworthy that his socially superior opponents are more disdainful of money, a resource which unlike Czentovic they were born with? Czentovic’s real crime here is his “shameful impudence” in defeating men the narrator clearly considers his betters. The problem isn’t chess, it’s class.

The narrator is an amateur chessplayer himself and has an interest in obsessive personality types. He decides he wants to meet Czentovic, better yet play chess with him. Czentovic though only plays for money, his rates are high and he has no interest in small talk.

Luck strikes when the narrator discovers that he’s not the only one keen to see Czentovic play. In particular he meets a self-confident American engineer who wants to test his own ability against a master. A group of passengers forms, with the American paying Czentovic’s price, and a game is arranged.

On the one side then Czentovic, and on the other an alliance of players funded by the American and banded together to defeat this brute from Central Europe who scorns all values save victory. Obviously I’m not drawing any parallels here.

It’s no spoiler to say that Czentovic at first sweeps the board with them. The only obstacle to his relentless rise to domination comes from advice given to the allies by an onlooker who can’t hold himself back from commenting. When the allies follow this stranger’s suggestions they stop Czentovic’s advance and suddenly the allies have a fighting chance of holding him.

The onlooker is described in the text as Dr B, but who is he? How did he become so able at Chess that he can force a grandmaster to a draw, perhaps even defeat him, and yet nobody has heard of him? Can it be true this is the first time he has played in 20 years? These questions are the real book, to which all else so far has been just preparation. The narrator seeks out this anonymous master and discovers the terrible story of how he gained such extraordinary ability.

The line between terrible and silly can be a thin one. Here Dr B’s story involves confinement by Nazis, torture by way of sensory deprivation and chess as a means of intellectual escape. I won’t say more as to explain too much would risk damaging a future reader’s enjoyment of the book. I can say that it allows some nice ironies where chess with its constrained space comprised of set dimensions and permitted moves becomes a limitless domain of pure mind quite separate to the imprisoned self.

Zweig died in 1942. Chess was published posthumously. At the time of writing then he didn’t know that Hitler would be defeated. If one remembers that, this becomes a work of fevered despair. Czentovic is unstoppable, except by a man who is a psychological wreck. Dr B is in a sense the European intellectual (perhaps even more specifically the Jewish intellectual), able to outwit Czentovic but fragile against his stolid cruelty. That’s a lot of weight for a slight story though.

The parable is clever, but it hangs off the story, which rapidly becomes ludicrous. Dr B’s backstory seems initially improbable (were the Gestapo really so prone to subtly undermining their prisoners’ sense of self, rather than simply brutalising them?) and swiftly becomes quite incredible as chess becomes both linchpin and threat to Dr B’s sanity. Zweig’s writing depends heavily on both plot and characterisation, and I didn’t believe in Dr B and I didn’t believe in what happened to him.

That leaves just the writing. Zweig certainly can write, but this feels not quite finished and I wonder if he’d have polished it further had he lived. Certainly it would have helped avoid sentences like this: “And now, for the first time, such a phenomenon, such a strange genius, or such an enigmatic fool, was physically close to me for the first time …”

I’m in a distinct minority on this one. John Self of The Asylum liked it and found the plot ultimately plausible. Trevor of themookseandthegripes was taken by it, and so was Will of Just William’s Luck. Tom of A Common Reader liked it too (both Will and Tom’s reviews are particularly worth reading for their discussion of symbolic elements of the novella). The only blog I’ve found so far (though I’m sure I’ve missed some) that shared my concerns was Sarah’s at A Rat in the Book Pile. Links in this paragraph are to the various reviews mentioned.

So, Chess. It’s very short, most readers love it and you may do so too. For me though it crosses the line from tragedy to comedy, without being funny. If you disagree, and if you’ve read it you probably do from what I’ve seen of other reviews, I’d be delighted to hear why I’m wrong.

We thought he would enter from the right…

Comedy in a Minor Key, by Hans Keilson and translated by Damion Searls

The trouble with realism in fiction is that reality is often distinctly undramatic, and indifferent to the importance of consistent theme and genre. A cop show aiming for realism will usually be gritty, but life isn’t just grit. A war novel aiming for realism may focus on mud, pain and random death, but rarely on cleaning duties and dirty jokes.

Enter Hans Keilson, and Comedy in a Minor Key. This isn’t a realist novel. It’s far too real for that.

Isn’t that a marvellous cover by the way? Hesperus Press, which for me is pretty much a badge of quality in publishing.

Wim and Marie are a young Dutch couple living on the outskirts of Amsterdam. It’s World War II and each night the British planes fly overhead on their way to bomb Germany. The Netherlands are occupied, and in a small act of resistance Wim and Marie have hidden Nico, a Jew, in their home. The trouble is Nico’s just died of natural causes. Now Wim and Marie have a corpse in their house.

What follows is an exceptionally light and subtle novella. In just over a 100 pages Keilson explores the psychology of everyone involved (including Nico, much of the book looks back to what led them all to their current situation). It’s funny, in places, but the danger is very real. Nico’s death is anticlimactic for Wim and Marie, and inconvenient, but they can’t be found with a dead Jew any more than they could with a living one.

As Wim makes arrangements with the family doctor to dispose of Nico’s corpse under a nearby park bench, Marie looks through the dead man’s few possessions. She realises how difficult it must have been for Nico, condemned to living silently in a single room, and the narrative slips back to Nico’s own perspective. In the face of everyday tedium how long can one feel grateful to people, even if they have saved your life?

When he came here, to this house, he would have happily taken a place on a pile of coal in a barn and been satisfied. Now he slept in a bed, ate at a table, was treated as a human being.
But the longer it lasted, the greater his demands grew. Since he couldn’t demand anything of the outer world – what he did receive was freely offered, almost a gift – his demands turned inward and more and more excessive. But people were helping him, they were helping him, didn’t that mean anything? Yes, it meant a lot. But also nothing. He was turning into nothing. It was unbearable. It meant his annihilation, his human annihilation, even if it – maybe – saved his life. The little thorn that grows invisibly in anyone who lives on the help and pity of others grew to gigantic proportions, became a javelin lodged deep in his flesh and hurting terribly.

“The little thorn that grows invisibly in anyone who lives on the help and pity of others”. Beautiful. It’s that kind of quiet yet precise observation that makes this book so good.

In hiding a fugitive Wim and Marie are doing something brave, in a sense heroic, but nothing is ever purely from one motive. Their resistance contact, Jop, appeals to each household he wants to place someone with in a slightly different way. With Wim he appeals to patriotic duty, with someone else to their Christian charity, to another he portrays it as a “purely humane act”. We all sometimes need a little push, to help us do the right thing. There’s vanity too, of course, and the need to feel part of things:

She had secretly imagined what it would be like on liberation day, the three of them arm in arm walking out of their house. Everyone would see right away what he was from his pale face, the colour of a shut-in, which his appearance only emphasised even more. How the neighbours and everyone in the street would look when he suddenly walked out of their house and strolled up and down the street with them. It would give them a little sense of satisfaction, and everyone who makes a sacrifice needs a little sense of satisfaction. And then you’d feel that you, you personally, even if only just a little bit, had won the war.

Keilson takes familiar themes and stories, war, resistance, the tension of living in secrecy, but then gives them a light and human tweak which makes them fresh and powerful. The doctor, standing over Nico’s body, asks Wim and Marie what Nico did for a living. Nico, Nicodemus, wasn’t that the name of one of the ancient rabbis he asks? Nico though wasn’t a rabbi, he was just a perfume salesman. A rabbi would have been more romantic, more dramatically fitting perhaps, but perfume salesmen need saving too.

It was like a comedy where you expect the hero to emerge onstage, bringing resolution, from the right. And out he comes from the left. Later, though, the audience members go home surprised, delighted, and a little bit wiser for the experience. They feel that the play did turn out a bit sad after all, at the very end. We thought he would enter from the right…

Hans Keilson has received a reasonable amount of attention to the blogosphere. I first heard of him with John Self’s review, here, but it was Will Rycroft at Just William’s Luck here who really sold me and persuaded me to read this. Both have my thanks. I’m pretty sure that other bloggers I follow have also covered this, but can’t now recall which. Apologies to anyone whose review I’ve not linked to and if I have missed you please let me know in the comments and I’ll correct that.

On a slightly related note, since writing the first draft of this I’ve noticed that I picked almost exactly the same quotes as Will did. For some reason I always find that slightly reassuring. Validation that if I’ve utterly missed the point at least I’ve missed it in company I suppose.

… a precious moment gone and we not there

A month in the Country, by J.L. Carr

J.L. Carr isn’t I think a well-known author today. To the extent he’s remembered at all it’s for his 1980 Booker shortlisted novella A Month in the Country. William Golding’s Rites of Passage won that year. I haven’t read Rites, but to have beaten Country all I can say is that it must be bloody good.

The narrator of Country is Tom Birkin. In 1978 he’s an old man, but in 1920 he was still young and he spent a summer in the English village of Oxgodby where he uncovered a medieval wall painting located in the local church. The narrative then is an act of memory and nostalgia. Birkin is not unreliable, but this is no longer his direct experience.

Here, walking in driving rain, Birkin first sees the church:

It was an off-the-peg job: evidently there had been no medieval wool boom in these parts. This had been starveling country, every stone an extortion. The short chancel had an unusually shallow pitched roof; it must have been added a good hundred years after the main building (which had a steep pitch flattening into aisles). The tower was squat. Don’t get the wrong impression; all in all, it was pleasant-enoough looking and, when I came closer, I saw that the masonry had been fettled up very nicely – limestone ashlar not rubble. Even between the buttresses it had been beautifully cut with only a hint of mortar and, near-enough drowning as I was, I silently applauded the masons. The stone itself – just a tinge of pale yellow in it, magnesium – it must have been quarried near Tadcaster and ferried up the rivers. Don’t let the detail irritate you: even in those far-off days I thought rather highly of myself as a stone-fancier.

Firstly, that’s a lovely piece of description. Secondly though it’s a description which tells us something of the describer. This is a man comfortable with detail, with the inanimate and with the distant past. Is he as comfortable with the animate and the present? We soon find out as Birkin meets the local vicar, the Reverend Keach:

He was four or five years older than me, maybe thirty, a tall but not a strong-looking man, neatly turned out, pale-eyed, a cold, cooped-up look about him and, long after he must have become used to my face-twitch, he still talked to someone behind my left shoulder.

What I like in that passage is how not only do we get a pretty good description of Keach, again we learn a lot about Birkin too. Most importantly, we learn of his twitch, and so given the period know that he must be a veteran recovering from the horrors of the war.

Birkin knows what he is doing and the work goes well. He lives in the church tower to save money and makes friends with a fellow veteran named Moon who is now an archaeologist. Moon and Birkin understand each other. They were both in the war and they both brought it home with them. As the work continues though Birkin finds himself more and more drawn into Oxgodby life, and not least into the lives of the Reverend Keach and his stunningly beautiful wife – a woman Birkin increasingly feels a connection with.

There’s a lot going on here. The painting itself reveals a mystery. It’s a masterwork. Why then was it covered over so quickly after it was made? Why does it show a man falling into hell whose face is drawn so precisely as to seem a portrait? What happened to the painter? The distant past begins to reveal itself as Birkin’s own past recedes. He is adopted by the village stationmaster and his family who involve him in their church services and Sunday dinners. Twitching and reclusive Birkin is brought back into the world.

At times Country is an extremely funny novel. I loved Birkin being seconded to act as speaker to a small Wesleyan congregation, despite his being painfully ill-suited to the task. There’s a family expedition to buy a new church organ which is another piece of small comic brilliance. Alongside that is that sense of memory and the effects of time – what is lost and what is preserved. The act of uncovering the painting in 1920 is an act of discovery of the past in the same way that the act of remembering that long-past summer is for Birkin in 1978. In both cases the result is not what actually was, but rather as good a reconstruction of it as can now be achieved. As Birkin reflects:

… it simply isn’t possible to return a five-hundred-year-old-wall-painting to its original state. At best, I aimed at approximation, uniformity, something that looked right.

The same could of course be said for the entire narrative.

Part of the power of Country is its tremendous sense of place. Carr makes Oxgodby feel solid and alive, but at the same time it seems faintly idealised (reflecting that within the narrative it is both real and remembered). Carr has a tremendous grasp of telling detail and a knack with description which manages the unusual trick of being sentimental (even nostalgic) without being cloying.

There was a throaty smell blowing off the bilbery shrubs and withering heather when we disembarked on a sheep-cropped plain high up in the hills. There was no shelter from the sun, but it was dinner-time and the women and girls unpacked hard-boiled eggs and soggy tomato sandwiches wrapped in greased paper and swaddled in napkins. It was Mr Dowthwaite (for you laboured for your prestige amongst the Wesleyans) who built a downbreeze fire of twigs and soon had tin kettles boiling. Then he struck up the Doxology and, when we’d sung it, we settled to some steady eating.

Afterwards, most of the men took off their jackets, exposing their braces and the tapes of their long woolen underpants and astonished their children by larking around like great lads. The courting couples sidled off, the women sat around and talked. So eating, drinking, dozing, making love, the day passed until evening came and the horses were led from their pasture. Then, as the first star rose and swallows turned and twisted above the bracken, our wagons tumbled down from above the White Horse and across the Vale towards home: the Sunday-school Treat was over.

I’ve never been a huge fan of the pastoral in painting, and I’ve not read many literary examples of it. That though is a beautiful piece of pastoral writing. It sounds like Heaven made Earthly. It’s a gloriously sun-dappled piece of prose.

Carr captures that sense one has sometimes of a moment as both timeless and yet fleeting. Birkin’s summer, and the book itself, seems to last for an age and yet be over all too soon. As Birkin reflects, “… we must snatch at happiness as it flies.” Birkin’s story is one of hope, but also of loss.

There have been periods in my life, as in most, which seem much longer in memory than in fact they were. That’s natural, because what we remember is influenced so much by the personal – how something mattered to us, how it made us feel. A weekend-break can later stand out more than the otherwise uneventful year it was part of. That’s unavoidable and part of being human, but it does make such times all the more important.

If I’ve not made it clear by now this is an exceptional book. I discovered it through Kevinfromcanada who reviewed it here and Trevor of themookseandthegripes who reviewed it here. I’ve sought not to repeat their comments too much and both are well worth reading. Country is extremely well written, it’s subtle and it’s often slyly funny. It’s a genuine pleasure to read and a book that I’m sure I’ll reread. In truth it’s a joy of a work and in a small way something of a masterpiece.

A final quote. Here Birkin reflects on the character of the man who created the brilliantly executed painting that he is slowly uncovering:

Here I was, face to face with a nameless painter reaching from the dark to show me what he could do, saying to me as clear as any words, ‘if any part of me survives from time’s corruption, let it be this. For this is the sort of man I was.’

I said at the beginning that Carr is little known today. Still, if any part of him survives from time’s corruption, it should be this. For this is the sort of man he was.

He was overcome by an immense sense of discouragement

With the Flow, by Joris-Karl Huysmans and translated by Andrew Brown

Guy Savage alerted me to Huysmans’ With the Flow. A bored clerk wanders the streets of Paris eating a series of dismal meals and generally having a miserable time. It’s a tremendous study of depression (melancholy) that somehow manages to be relentlessly glum and extremely funny at the same time.

The novella opens with M. Folantin taking a waiter’s recommendation as to which cheese is best. It’s the Roquefort, but when it comes Folantin is unsurprised to find that what’s on his plate appears to have been “cut out of a cake of Marseilles soap.”

He’s unsurprised because that’s how his life is. He’s a government clerk, but it’s not a job that pays well and his early hopes of rapid promotion have long since slumped. Folantin is intelligent and as a youth won scholastic prizes, but his family were poor and he is without connections. What place is there for him in this new Paris of wide boulevards in which the old neighbourhoods are being abolished?

Folantin eats his dinner, and drinks his wine that tastes of ink:

His feet frozen, squeezed into ankle boots that had started to warp in the deluge and the puddles, his cranium white-hot under the gas burner hissing over his head, M. Folantin had hardly touched his food, and even now his bad luck refused to let go of him; his fire faltered, his lamp grew sooty, his tobacco was damp and kept going out, staining the cigarette-paper with a stream of yellow juice.

Folantin is unmarried. He has no friends, because the friends he once had did marry, and as a bachelor he had less and less in common with them. He’s, well, not happy to be unmarried but he comforts himself that things would be even worse with a woman to support and to have to spend all his time with. He’s not a sociable sort. He doesn’t even use prostitutes anymore – his libido has flickered out. His only real human contact now is indifferent waiters and troublesome household staff:

… he had at least got rid of his housekeeper, Mme Chabanel, an old hag, six feet tall, with moustachioed lips and obscene eyes set into her face over her sagging jowls. She was a sort of camp-follower who ate like a horse and drank like a fish; she was a lousy cook, and over-familiar to an impossible degree. She would plonk the plates onto the table any old how, then sit down opposite her master, hoist up her skirts and chatter away, laughing and joking, her bonnet askew and her hands on her hips.

It was pointless to expect her to serve him properly; but M. Folantin would perhaps have put up with even this humiliating lack of ceremony, if the amazing old girl hadn’t stripped him of his possessions like a highway robber; flannel waistcoats and socks would vanish, old shoes would go missing, spirits would evaporate into thin air, and event he matches seemed to light themselves.

…

Widow Chabanel had been replaced by the concierge, who pummelled the bedclothes into shape with his fists, and made pets of the spiders, whose webs he looked after.

Huysmans loves his comic servants, but he does do them very well.

Folantin’s problem is money. He has just enough to support himself, but not enough to live at all well. He regularly changes restaurant hoping to find one he can afford which has halfway decent food, but it’s all disgusting. He gets meals delivered, but he’s so meek he’s taken advantage of by the delivery staff. Worst of all are Sundays when he doesn’t even have work to keep him occupied and must somehow eke out the long day’s nothing until the time comes for bed.

It all sounds grim. It is grim. Folantin bemoans his own lack of passion. He wishes he cared about women, the office, dominos or cards, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t care about anything except having a pleasantly quiet life and the hope of one day having a decent meal. He wishes he were religious, because they at least have the delusion (as he sees it) of another life to help console them for how awful this one is.

In modern terms Folantin is suffering from depression. Huysmans though is as ever just a hugely gifted comic writer (something he never seems to get credit as) and there’s a relentless quality to Folantin’s misfortunes that makes it impossible not to laugh. One shouldn’t, but I certainly did.

The irony is that if he had money Folantin would be another of Huysmans’ decadents – his bored nobles exploring the boundaries of experience. Folantin though can’t afford to be decadent. Decadence, like a decent steak, is reserved for those with money. Instead Folantin’s existence leads to chapters opening with the words:

One evening, as he was picking at eggs that smelt of pooh…

The Hesperus edition of With the Flow comes accompanied by an interesting little short story titled M. Bougran’s Retirement. M. Bougran is another clerk, but a more senior one. Not so senior though that he can protect his job when he finds himself made redundant to make way for some ministerial favourite.

Pensioned off M. Bougran finds himself completely at a loss. Work defined his existence, and without it he just doesn’t know what to do with himself. One day though he has a brilliant idea – if he can’t go to work anymore perhaps he can make it as if work were coming to him…

I won’t say more. Again it has that mix peculiar to Huysmans of desperation and comedy. The intricacies of civil service procedure and etiquette are beautifully observed (unsurprisingly, given Huysmans was a clerk himself) and it’s all incredibly easy to imagine. Huysmans has that great nineteenth century gift of crafting almost photographic pictures from words.

In one of the two forewords translator Andrew Brown talks of M. Bougran as a sort of anti-Bartleby and there’s some truth to that. M. Bougran would prefer to, but he is no longer required to. He is pointless, and perhaps always was. It’s a beautifully crafted little tragedy which sadly still remains fairly relevant today.

Ultimately neither of these are among Huysmans’ best works. There’s a reason they’re not as well known as The Damned or Against Nature, but they’re subtle and well written and Andrew Brown is as effective a translator as ever. It’s also all up to Hesperus’s usual high standards in terms of the actual physical quality of the book.

I’ll end with a slight note of caution. The two forewords, the Andrew Brown one and the other by Simon Callow, are both very good but they do contain spoilers. If you do decide to read this you might be better off reading the forewords after the two stories themselves.

As I wrote this I discovered that Guy has actually reviewed this too, which I hadn’t originally realised. His review is here.

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.