Cold Winds by Walter
Nash
- Answered Prayers by Truman Capote
Hamish Hamilton, 181 pp, £9.95, November 1986, ISBN 0 241 11962 6 - A Rich Full Death by Michael Dibdin
Cape, 204 pp, £9.95, October 1986, ISBN 0 224 02387 X - Leaning in the Wind by P.H. Newby
Faber, 235 pp, £9.95, November 1986, ISBN 0 571 14512 4 - The Way-Paver by Anne Devlin
Faber, 155 pp, £8.95, November 1986, ISBN 0 571 14597 3
The narrator and
protagonist of Answered Prayers is one P.B. Jones, failed writer and
competent sexual athlete, a scurrilous charmer who – to lift a pithy phrase
from the poet Martial – tantos et tantas amat. Latin allusions are
appropriate to the style of a book which oddly suggests the libertine rhetoric
of some later Roman text: in the sly elegance of the syntax, the jaunty
terseness of phrase, the not infrequent obscenity of the lexicon (there are
words like ‘muffdiver’, which you will not find in your Funk and Wagnall’s);
most of all, in the calculated scabrousness of some episodes. Truman Capote’s
title, which is also the title of a book his hero has written, is taken from St
Teresa: ‘More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.’ What
this may foretell – other than, perhaps, that couplings will end in
comeuppances – we cannot readily judge, because what Capote has left us is only
a sample, in three chapters, of a novel begun more than two decades ago,
published in piecemeal extracts, and never finished.
PB’s versatility in the
sins of the flesh secures him employment as a peripatetic stud on the books of
an agency called Self Service. The agency is run by a butch lady called
Victoria Self, who wears hausfrau braids and a blue serge suit, and who hints
at painful punishments awaiting those who infringe the rules of her exotic
craft. This is one apparent strand in the plot. Another is that PB, an operator
so unabashedly mercenary that he can describe himself as a Hershey Bar whore,
has seemingly contrived to fall in love and to taste some of the torments
reserved for venal souls who stray into sincerity. From such indications we
might predict the development of a story, but of course the clues may be
misleading. All that really happens in the three chapters is that PB is set
free to travel, to tattle, to be a man of discriminating parts (I’ll pitch,’ he
tells his employer, ‘but I won’t catch’), to be privy to all manner of miching
mallecho, to betray benefactors, and to reveal the unlovely, possibly
fictional, secrets of known persons on life’s real stage. It is not surprising
that the third chapter (called ‘La Côte Basque’, after a well-known restaurant
in New York) should have alienated some of Capote’s best friends. What is
surprising is that he was surprised.
Capote could write, not a
doubt of it; he was never boring; he had the enviable rapidity, the stride, of
a powerful wit; and like all good bar-companions, he could compel amusement.
Armed for morality, and determined to read with a visage as crusty as Cato’s, I
am nevertheless forced to laugh at the voluble impudence of some passages, the
suddenness of the comic assault. But there is very little innocent laughter in
this book. The prevailing tone is the giggling of the vicious, beside which the
crackling of thorns under a pot is a pleasantly musical sound; and it is a
melancholy thing to see, in the space of a hundred and eighty pages, a writer
become a raconteur, a raconteur become a gossip dishing the exclusive dirt. The
reader looks on at the shameful spectacle, a wincing outsider, a visitor to the
privileged unenviable zoo, where all the animals are deluded and lonely
monsters.
Monsters and delusions of a
more agreeable kind lurk in the stylish, elaborately skilful pages of Michael
Dibdin’s A Rich Full Death. Ostensibly this is a detective story, a
species of Holmesian charade penned by a paranoiac Dr Watson: yet even at this
level it teases the reader with mysteries that go beyond the conventionally
mysterious. The story is set in Florence, in the year 1855, and the narration
takes the form of letters written by a young American, Robert Booth, to his
friend Professor Prescott, an authority on Theoretical and Practical Ethics.
Booth, in retreat from rejection in love and a sense of his own failure in
literature, has known at least one stroke of luck: he has become, he tells his
friend, ‘the confirmed acquaintance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her
husband’. It is, in fact, the lesser luminary, Robert Browning, who catches
Booth’s interest from the outset, and in a strange way: for on the very evening
when Booth is introduced to the poet, news comes of a horrible death, a
suicide, and it is coincidentally the death of the lady with whom Booth has
been in love. Browning is not willing to accept the death as a suicide: his
acute and busily observant mind detects the marks of murder. This is the
beginning of an association between the two men, a relationship as of master
and disciple, growing – at least on Booth’s side – more intimate as further
deaths occur. These deaths are unmistakably murders, performed by someone who
leaves taunting clues in the shape of cryptic references to Dante’s Inferno.
Reading cryptograms is Browning’s game, and his associate watches admiringly,
though not without a sly amusement when the master’s ingenuity draws a blank.
For indeed Booth is
disposed at times to be critical of Browning. He applauds his prodigious mental
and physical energy, wonders at the diversity of his reading, greatly admires
his poems – but, as an upright Bostonian moralist, deplores Browning’s preoccupation
with the psychology of the deranged and the maimed in spirit. He treats
Prescott to a two-page exposition of ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ (a poem which sends
eerie sonorities quivering through the whole narrative), expressing the
strongest moral indignation at its depiction of a grotesque murder which is
allowed to take place with a ‘total lack of censure on the poet’s part’. By the
time the reader reaches this delicious exercise in literary criticism he has
become accustomed (thanks to Mr Dibdin’s extraordinary mimetic flair) to the
rhythms and rhetorical devices of Booth’s discursive style, and it has begun to
dawn on him that Booth talks like a Browning character. It is as though one of
Browning’s poor world-rejected monsters had stepped out of his secure poetic
frame and come alive to worship and mock the master. At about the same time,
the reader also starts to suspect that the whodunnit is not such a mystery,
because, surely, Boothdunnit. There is no better candidate than Booth, admiring
Browning, hating Browning, taunting and testing him, proving him with his own
literary weapons. The reader murmurs self-congratulations on these shrewd
insights, and is only occasionally assailed by the uneasy thought that if Booth
in this book is a Browning character, Browning in this book may be a Booth
character. Is Browning like this? With these acts does Browning unlock his
mind? If so, the less Browning he.
Now it is at this point,
when a reviewer should really begin to enjoy a walk through a wonderful warren
of literary devices, drawing attention to the significance of this, the curious
pattern of that, and the sheer diabolical cleverness of the other, that he has
to halt, hard by the church of St Mustadunnit and all the Royalties. To go
farther would be to spoil the telling of a tale that combines the sweaty
excitement of a chase, the intellectual challenge of a seminar, and the wounded
pathos of all our sad days and deathbeds. Let prospective readers therefore
take notice: leave no admonition – epigraph, heading, allusion – unobserved;
take nothing for granted; and above all, resist the temptation to peep
unseasonably at the ending.
The end can wait its turn,
for the book is full of pleasures, a box of comfits – which Mr Dibdin would
perhaps have me call confetti. Foremost among them is the style. A pastiche
running to two hundred pages, immediately characterising the English of an
educated 19th-century American, and more distantly yet pervasively evoking the
speech-style of Browning’s monologuists, is no mean achievement. The lapses in
accuracy, as far as I am able to judge, are very few. I doubt if the
expressions ‘not to bat an eyelid’ and ‘glad rags’ were current in the 1850s,
or the phrasal verb ‘to dream up’; and I am reasonably certain that the
construction of ‘convince’ with an infinitive clause, as in ‘I had convinced
Beatrice to leave Florence with me,’ is a quite modern development. But these
are trivial matters, costume details. What is totally pleasing is the ingenuity
of the book as a literary game with ethical consequences. It is a gift to
structuralist critics, out of whose bony, mirthless clutches, however, may it
be safely kept. For the rest of us it raises, in the most engaging way, such
problems of mind and matter as were formulated by the mandarin who, waking from
a dream, said he did not know whether he was a man dreaming about a butterfly
or a butterfly dreaming about a man. Behind the detective fable are such
tremulous questions about this dream of life, this life of dreams – leaving the
reader, as he closes the book, to ponder on the meaning of its title.
A lesser Victorian than
Browning, a minimus poet called Arthur O’Shaughnessy, said that the dreamers of
dreams are the movers and shakers of the world for ever. Perhaps they are; and
perhaps Dorothy Parker was also right, who sang that authors and actors and
artists and such never know nothing and never know much, and who concluded:
People Who Do Things exceed
my endurance;
God, for a man who solicits
insurance!
Either view could be
supported from the pages of P.H. Newby’s Leaning in the Wind, in which
one of the principal characters, as it happens, is both a poet and an insurance
man. Edwin Parsler, poetic and foxhunting Englishman, works in the legal
division of an insurance company, in order to keep his gadding wife Harriet in
the state to which she is accustomed. Theirs is one of the seminal
relationships (if that is a proper expression) in the book. The other is that
of their country neighbours, Aston Hart, ex-colonial farmer and soldier of
fortune, and his wife Lisa, who is of German-American extraction, and who is
convinced that her husband is descended from the sister of her favourite poet,
Shakespeare.
This description of what I
take to be the framing partnerships of a complex and sometimes rambling
narrative ignores the surrounding dance of other partners, the husbands and
wives or parents and children, the gossips, the plot-fillers, the bearers of
theme and variation, whose collective busyness gives the novel an air of
Forsyte Sagacity. If the book were simply a social and personal chronicle, it
would be a dull and watery specimen of the genre: say what you will about
Galsworthy, his soap made a creamy lather. But the story is not, after all,
about marriages and adulteries and childbeds and neurasthenic girls and bad
plumbing and folk who fall off their horses and jigger themselves; nor is it
about the folly of planting Shakespeare forgeries, even in jest, nor yet about
the menace of Idi Amin. If I understand it aright, it is about people who are
haunted; who are in one way or another spooked, and a little crazy with it; who
perceive the realities of life in principalities that are not of this world.
Of the four main actors,
only Harriet Parsler, thoroughly realistic in her appraisal of the occasionally
conflicting claims of bed and board, is not ‘spiritual’ in any sense of the
word. For this she has her reward: she is able to live without terror or
despair, without much aggrievement, perhaps without much enlightenment. She
repeatedly describes herself as ‘a bitch’, but perhaps ‘a hard case’ would be a
better description. Each of the three remaining principals has a belief in
immaterial powers which invade and in some way condition their lives. Aston
Hart, bluff, pragmatic, quite unimaginative, takes witchcraft for granted and
believes that a man must watch his back for demons. (You turn your coat collar
up, because they go for the nape of the neck.) Lisa Hart, the Shakespeare
enthusiast, comes to believe that she has inherited psychic energies, the
protective and regenerative powers of a white witch. The poet Edwin Parsler
sees in Lisa the embodiment of his Muse, the joyous and angry goddess who
awakens him to creative life. All have a conviction of spirituality. ‘There’s
something else out there,’ Lisa tells Edwin at the close of the story.
‘Spirits. Some of them bad. But all leaning in a great wind.’
In other words, while life
without the insurance man would be a very leaky vessel, without poets,
magicians, believers, and attendant spirits to swell the sails and puff the
gales, the voyage would be pointless and unrewarding. Only those who feel what
is blowing in the wind are truly alive. If the book has a paraphrasable
meaning, I take it to be something like this: but I am not sure, and I am not
sure for various reasons of style and narrative structure, the most important
of which is Mr Newby’s apparent reluctance to lend an interpretative hand now
and then. I do not expect him to buttonhole his reader with directives and
admonitions. I mean that he describes unwearyingly, but less often
appears to ascribe – an interpretation, a pattern, a connection –
through the page-by-page management of the text.
A minor instance may help
to illustrate the point. There is an episode in which a piece of Edwin
Parsler’s verse is quoted, a stanza which any reader of modern English poetry
will recognise as an imitation, and not a very good one, of a poem by W.H.
Auden. Parsler composes it while he is lying supine and fully clothed in a
stream. We are told that ‘it took some minutes of playing with words and rhymes
until he arrived at something he could accept and then forget about.’ In fact,
Auden has supplied two out of the three rhymes, with the rhyme-words, and has
provided the syntatic structure and most of the vocabulary. The ‘playing’
requires no more than the substitution of one or two new words for old.
It does not especially
matter that a character fakes a poem, but still the episode raises a point of
authorial etiquette. Mr Newby, who in other instances is scrupulously careful
to supply facts that may have eluded his reader – explaining who the Mau Mau
were, for example, or what Oxonians mean by ‘gaudy’, or the sense of the
expression ‘drag hunt’ – gives no indication that Parsler’s ‘poem’ is
mimetically framed upon one by Auden. The omission creates a real difficulty.
Does Mr Newby assume that his readers, unprompted, will recognise a parody, and
will possibly correlate the eccentric verbal act with the deviant behaviour of
a man who – at this point in the story – is possessed by disturbing emotions?
Or is this too elaborate a fancy? Is Parsler’s verse-exercise meant to be
accepted as the genuine article, an authentic specimen of the poet at work? I
lean to the supposition that I am intended to recognise a parody and understand
what it implies, but I am not finally certain how the ‘poem’ is to be read.
Perhaps Mr Newby would like to have it both ways.
This is one instance of a
problem with diverse occurrences: the problem of having to choose between the
purely descriptive reading – one that treats the book as a social chronicle
with a few peculiar happenings thrown in for spice – and an ascriptive reading
that detects a unifying significance in its catalogue of events and destinies.
To have it both ways is of course perfectly possible, but in the end the reader
looks to the author, the master of ceremonies, for a casting vote, and this
note of authorial conviction is what I miss, perhaps obtusely, in Leaning in
the Wind. The book is not to be lightly put aside: but I am left with the
impression that Mr Newby has raised a theme which he has not completely grasped
and realised.
For Anne Devlin there is no
problem in seeking a theme. Her problem, by her own confession, is to escape
from a theme – from Ireland, from the troubles, from Belfast, and indeed from
haunting visions known to so many of us, whether we are Irish or not, of the
tented terraces of grey slate, of mothers and fathers and lugubrious aunts, the
grave-breaking cry of kindred, the passions that squat sullen and famished in
the heart. You do not have to be Irish to understand this: but you do have to
acknowledge that it is uniquely Ireland that makes Anne Devlin a writer. There
is no getting away from it. Of the nine stories in The Way-Paver, only
three have no narrative root in Ireland and the family. The title-story is
beautiful, made like a lyric poem, round the complementary images of the
newborn infant slipping into the world like a seal, the seal as it breaks the
surface of the sea, the Irish girl who looks across the water to her future –
the way-pavers.
Anne Devlin has a
remarkable power of dispassionate narration, which is at times almost bleak;
her characters can give you the impression that their hands are always cold.
They live a lot of the time in dreams and memories, but their creator allows
them no indulgent sentiment. The narrative method is often abrupt, relying on
significant cuts and juxtapositions. Like any good artist in the short story,
Devlin demands unwavering attention from her readers, at times relying on it to
achieve extraordinary speed of narration. Take a brief example from ‘Sam’, the
only piece in the collection that could be called a comedy. The narrator,
having just met Sam, discovers that he is writing a novel:
‘What’s your
subject-matter?’ I asked. ‘Or am I not allowed to ask?’
‘War,’ he said firmly.
I decided to ignore this. I
invited him to come on a peace march with me. After the second peace march I
decided to seduce him.
‘I’ll go to bed with you,’
I said.
In barely six or seven
lines we have made a fine comic skedaddle from the first meeting through two
peace marches to the bold Irish girl’s offer of her body. It is the sentence
beginning ‘After the second peace march’ that marks the turning of the trick,
of course. Of course. Things like that always look easy. Anne Devlin ought to
attempt more in the comic genre. She has a sense of the absurd, and the mordant
gift that makes the Irish such formidable humorists; and perhaps among the
drifting ghosts that haunt her particular imagination there is a kindly spirit
that will allow her to find her own green place and innocently laugh.
NASH,
Walter. Cold Winds. London Review of Books, Vol. 8, No. 22, December 18, 1986.
P. 19-20
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v08/n22/walter-nash/cold-winds/print
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