Other Things
by J.I.M. Stewart
- Soor Hearts by Robert Alan Jamieson
Paul Harris, 166 pp, £6.95, January 1984, ISBN 0 86228 072 9 - The Life and Loves of
a She-Devil by Fay Weldon
Hodder, 240 pp, £8.95, January 1984, ISBN 0 340 33228 X - Cathedral by Raymond Carver
Collins, 230 pp, £8.95, January 1984, ISBN 0 00 222790 8 - The Cannibal Galaxy by Cynthia Ozick
Secker, 162 pp, £7.95, January 1984, ISBN 0 436 35483 7 - The Collected Works of
Jane Bowles introduction by
Truman Capote
Peter Owen, 476 pp, £10.95, January 1984, ISBN 0 7206 0613 6 - Let it come down by Paul Bowles
Peter Owen, 318 pp, £8.95, January 1984, ISBN 0 7206 0614 4
An inexpert but frequently impressive
first novel, Soor Hearts is set in Shetland in the early years of this
century. Magnus Doull, having sailed before the mast for ten years, returns to
the fishing village from which he had fled under suspicion of having murdered
Thomas Pole. Nearly everyone believes him guilty, since the two young men had
been seen to quarrel. Both had been drinking heavily for a fortnight, and when
Pole was found ‘with his head crushed under a fearful blow’ Doull took fright
and bolted from the island. Whether or not it was he who killed Pole, he can’t
remember. For a time he is allowed to settle down in the family croft with his
widowed mother, Meenie Doull. Meenie has the ‘sight’, reinforced by a pack of
Tarot cards given her by a gipsy. She spends much time in probings of the
future. She reveals to her son that a girl called Nina, who had borne him a
still-born child after his flight, is now the village harlot, and that Isabella
Agnes, Pole’s widow, nurses a thirst for vengeance. He seeks a reunion with
Nina, but she declines it and leaves the island. He attends a church service,
and is fulminated against by the minister from his pulpit. Magnus makes a
spirited reply: ‘You call this da House o’ da Lord. Pah! It is da House o’
Oppression. A tool of da ruling classes to keep da poor fae rebelling ... ’
This outburst is injudicious. The villagers are affronted. Further incensed by
the law’s delays, they seize Magnus and lock him up in a shed. Isabella, who
knows that witches and persons possessed should be burned, not hanged, sets
fire to it. Meenie hastens to the rescue and is drowned on the way. Everybody
believes that Magnus is dead, but in fact he escapes through the roof of the
burning building, and departs for New Zealand.
In a prefatory note Robert
Alan Jamieson calls his book ‘a yarn’, and if the yarn doesn’t read too
convincingly it is perhaps because he is chiefly interested in other things:
the face of external nature in Shetland, and the quality of life – narrow,
enduring, heroic – exhibited by ‘men and women squeezing out a basic existence
from tired soil and cruel sea’. Here Mr Jamieson writes sensitively and well,
with a sharp precision of imagery that gives promise of more considerable
achievement as his art matures.
The Life and Loves of a
She-Devil also has arson in it. Ruth, who is six foot two inches tall and very
plain, is displeased with her husband, Bobbo, because he has taken to going to
bed with Mary, who is small and pretty and a successful writer of romantic
fiction. Matters bubble up at a family dinner party: ‘Nicola kicked the cat,
whose name was Mercy, out of the way, and the cat went straight to the grate
and squatted, crapping its revenge, and Brenda wailed and pointed at Mercy, and
Harness became over-excited and leapt up against Andy in semi-sexual assault,
and Ruth just stood there, a giantess, and did nothing, and Bobbo lost his
temper.’ When the dinner party breaks up, Bobbo denounces his wife as a
she-devil. She decides to be a she-devil, which means to want revenge,
power, money, and to be loved and not love in return. So after what appears to
be a symbolic initiation contrived with a dirty old man in a park, she burns
the family house to ashes, taking care to engineer such appearances of
negligence as will deprive Bobbo of any compensation from an insurance company.
Painstaking and ingenious
further acts of vengeance upon Bobbo and Mary occupy the rest of the story.
Mary has a mother (‘a part-time whore of a mother’) whom she has ruthlessly
dumped in a disagreeable Home for aged persons; she contrives that the smelly
old lady shall go on a visit to her daughter and then be refused readmittance
to the Home on the score of an incontinence which Ruth has cleverly faked.
Bobbo is an accountant. Ruth manages to insinuate herself covertly into his
office and cook and confuse his books so successfully as both to build up a
large private fortune for herself and to land him, through machinations with a
judge, with a long spell in gaol. There is a great deal of this sort of fun,
diversified with various sexual high jinks, as when the judge who sentences
Bobbo binds Ruth ‘hand and foot to the bed, beating her with an old-fashioned
bamboo carpet-beater’.
The climax of the book
moves, if a little uncertainly, into the region of parable or fable. We hate
because we envy, and because we envy we seek to become what we hate. Cosmetic
surgeons operate agonisingly on Ruth for months, years. She has provided them
with a full-length photograph of Mary, cut from the dust-jacket of one of her
trashy books. She, Ruth, must be made just like that. So successful is
this vagary that when Mary dies and warders bring a bemused Bobbo to attend her
funeral he supposes Ruth, who also attends, to be the dead woman. Ruth now owns
Mary’s former dwelling, and here she brings Bobbo on his eventual release from
prison. Sometimes she lets him sleep with her and sometimes – but only for the
pleasure of humiliating him – she sleeps with her manservant. It is a matter of
power. ‘I have all, and he has none. As I was, so is he now.’ This is an
entertaining book, but with very little of substantial human nature. Its people
are like those of Restoration Comedy as described by Charles Lamb: ‘sports of a
witty fancy’ set in ‘altogether a speculative scheme of things’.
The remaining books are by
American writers. ‘The Train’ is one of the shortest of the 12 stories in
Raymond Carver’s Cathedral. It begins: ‘The woman was called Miss Dent,
and earlier that evening she’d held a gun at a man. She’d made him get down in
the dirt and plead for his life.’ We learn nothing more about Miss Dent, except
that now in the small hours she is in the deserted waiting-room of a railway
station, proposing to board any train that turns up, and that ‘she wanted to
stop thinking about the man and how he’d acted toward her after taking what he
wanted.’ Two other people arrive together: a garish middle-aged woman and an
old man with white hair and a white silk cravat and no shoes. Little passes
between Miss Dent and these new arrivals. But ‘it seemed to Miss Dent that they
gave off an air of agitation, of having just left somewhere in a great hurry
and not yet being able to find a way to talk about it.’ But they do converse
together, speaking of a house filled with simps and vipers, of ‘that imbecile
they call Captain Nick’, of persons whose ‘entire existence is taken up with café
au lait and cigarettes, their precious Swiss chocolate and those goddamned
macaws’. This talk is incomprehensible both to Miss Dent and to ourselves. A
train comes in, and the three board it. The people already on the train are not
very interested in them. ‘The passengers had seen things more various than this
in their lifetime. The world is filled with business of every sort, as they
well knew.’ The journey is resumed and the story concludes: ‘The train began to
move forward. It went slowly at first, but it began to pick up speed. It moved
faster until once more it sped through the dark countryside, its brilliant cars
throwing light onto the roadbed.’
Whence and whither the
train, we don’t know. But what whences and whithers do we know? There is
a touch of Kafka in this story, and in others in the volume there is more than
a touch of Joyce. Mr Carver is an absorbed student of the demotic speech of his
countrymen, and employs his knowledge much as Joyce does in Dubliners:
I had a job and Patti
didn’t. I worked a few hours a night for the hospital. It was a nothing job. I
did some work, signed the card for eight hours, went drinking with the nurses.
Sometimes the impoverished
language has to evoke occasions of mounting horror. In ‘Vitamins’ the narrator
– the man with the nothing job – takes a girl called Donna late at night into
the Off-Broadway, ‘a spade place in a spade neighbourhood ... run by a spade
named Khaki’. There is another spade, Nelson, ‘just back from Nam today’,
compulsively showing round a gook’s ear in a silver cigarette-case. Nelson
overwhelms the couple with malign obscenities, and offers the girl a large sum
of money if she will fellate him. The narrator and Donna escape, and get to his
car:
I opened the door for her.
I started us back ... Donna stayed over her side. She’d used the lighter on a
cigarette, but she wouldn’t talk.
I tried to say something. I
said, ‘Look, Donna, don’t get on a downer because of this. I’m sorry it happened,’
I said.
‘I could of used the
money,’ Donna said. ‘That’s what I was thinking.’
I kept driving and didn’t
look at her.
‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I
could of used the money.’
This is a very black
epiphany, in ‘Preservation’ a young man who has been terminated in his job of
roofing new houses quickly sinks into apathy, spending almost all of every day
on a sofa. Then there is a lesser calamity. Sandy, his wife, opens the fridge
and finds everything thawed. The machine is awash in pools of melted ice cream.
Her husband turns voluble as he mops up and investigates:
‘Goddamn it,’ he said,
‘when it rains, it pours. Hey, this fridge can’t be more than ten years old. It
was nearly new when we bought it. Listen, my folks had a fridge that lasted
them twenty-five years. They gave it to my brother when he got married, It was
working fine. Hey, what’s going on? ... We lost our Freon,’ he said and stopped
wiping. ‘That’s what happened. I can smell it. The Feon leaked out. Something
happened and the Freon went. Hey, I saw this happen to somebody else’s box
once.’ He was calm now. He started wiping again. ‘It’s the Freon,’ he said.
She
stopped what she was doing and looked at him. ‘We need another fridge,’ she
said.
They search through
newspaper advertisements for something they can afford. Sandy sees that they
must go to a type of auction sale that her husband feels to be demeaning. She
turns away to prepare a meal, and when she looks at him again it is to find
that not only the fridge has broken down. The fridge is in a puddle and so is
her husband: a puddle of his own tears. ‘She knew she’d never again in her life
see anything so unusual. But she didn’t know what to make of it yet. She
thought she’d better put on some lipstick, get her coat, and go ahead to the auction.’
The unemployed man returns to his sofa.
In this story, and in
others like it, Mr Carver is advancing under cover of seemingly flat reportage
to a commanding view of character and conduct. The method is perhaps in some
danger of hardening into a formula, and in the best stories it is modified,
although never abandoned. ‘Feathers’ begins on the familiar note:
This friend of mine from
work, Bud, he asked Fran and me to supper. I didn’t know his wife and he didn’t
know Fran. That made us even. But Bud and I were friends. And I knew there was
a little baby at Bud’s house.
Fran and her husband Jack,
the narrator, have no baby; they have decided they don’t want kids – not now
and perhaps never. This may be why Fran is edgy over the invitation, and
inclined to talk tartly about taking Bud and his wife a present. Perhaps they
should take a bottle of wine, and drink it themselves if their hosts don’t like
it. Fran eventually settles for a loaf of her homebaked bread. Bud and Olla
live in an isolated house twenty miles out of town (‘It’s the sticks out here,’
Fran says) and – what is also disconcerting – own a peacock which, although
beautiful, is enormous, screeches hideously, and apparently is allowed indoors.
The loaf is handed over. ‘What’s this?’ Olla asks. ‘Oh, it’s homemade bread.
Well, thanks. Sit down anywhere.’ The evening goes quite well, although nobody
shows much conversational resource. The baby cries and has to be brought into
the room. The peacock comes too, and the baby plays with it. But if the peacock
is beautiful the baby turns out to be unbelievably ugly. It becomes clear that
the parents are aware of this, but have accepted it and are full of pride and
joy in their child. ‘He’ll by God be turning out for football before long,’ his
father says. Fran asks Olla if she may hold the baby, and soon she is fondling
it. Then, from Jack, we have this:
That evening at Bud and
Olla’s was special. I knew it was special. That evening I fell good about
almost everything in my life ... I made a wish that evening ... What I wished
for was that I’d never forget or otherwise let go of that evening. That’s one
wish of mine that came true. And it was bad luck for me that it did. But, of
course, I couldn’t know that then.
He doesn’t know it when, at
parting, they all hug one another; when Olla, in return for the bread, gives
Fran, with an ominousness we are trusted to detect, a bunch of the peacock’s
feathers; when, later that night, and on Fran’s initiative, he begets a child.
Years pass, during which the couples never meet again. But Jack and Bud still
work together, and sometimes, very cautiously, Bud, during a lunch hour, asks
how things go:
Once in a blue moon, he
asks about my family. When he does, I tell him everybody’s fine. ‘Everybody’s
fine,’ I say. I close the lunch pail and lake out my cigarettes. Bud nods and
sips his coffee. The truth is, my kid has a conniving streak in him. But I
don’t talk about it. Not even with his mother. Especially her. She and I talk
less and less as it is. Mostly it’s just TV. But I remember that night.
If this story is less than
perfect it is because of an occasional loss of momentum in the interest of
liberally documenting the commonplace or representative character of Jack,
Fran, Bud and Olla. Nothing of the kind blemishes ‘A Small, Good Thing’. On
Saturday afternoon Ann Weiss visits a bakery and orders a birthday cake for her
son Scotty, who will be eight on Monday. She finds the baker efficient but
unresponsive. The cake will say SCOTTY in green icing. On Monday on his way to school
Scotty is knocked over by a car and taken to hospital. His condition is judged
not to be serious, but through several days and nights one or other of his
parents never leaves his bedside. The doctors declare that Scotty is asleep,
and will presently awake. But Scotty passes into coma. His mother is persuaded
to go home for a brief rest, and the baker rings her up. He has evolved a
nocturnal technique for harassing customers who fail to collect their orders.
Mrs Weiss thinks the call is from the hospital. ‘Is it Scotty, for Christ’s
sake?’
‘Scotty,’ the man’s voice
said. ‘It’s about Scotty, yes. It has to do with Scotty, that problem. Have you
forgotten about Scotty?’ the man said. Then he hung up.
Scotty dies. The harassment
continues. Eventually the parents drive to the bakery, late at night. The baker
is at work and surly, but when made to understand the situation he turns
contrite and sympathetic. He says that eating is a small, good thing at such a
time. So they eat rolls and drink coffee, and he tells them about his life.
Then he brings something further:
‘Smell this,’ the baker
said, breaking open a dark loaf. ‘It’s a heavy bread, but rich.’ They smelled
it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains.
They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread
... They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the
windows, and they did not think of leaving.
This austerely told story,
with its strange sacramental conclusion, seems to me a masterpiece.
The Cannibal Galaxy presents
a very different American scene. Joseph Brill, a Jewish boy brought up in
Paris, survives the German occupation by hiding for years in cellars and
haylofts. He manages to read widely, to study at the Sorbonne, and eventually
to emigrate to the United States. A wealthy patroness establishes him as the
headmaster of a school, at which he attempts to develop what he calls the Dual
Curriculum: ‘one half concentrating on the Treasures of Western Culture, the other
half given over, in their original tongues, to the priceless Legacy of
Scripture and Commentaries.’ This noble project doesn’t go well. The pupils are
very American, which means mediocre, and Brill eventually makes the mistake of
pinning all his hopes on one of them for no better reason than her mother’s
appearing to be intellectually distinguished as ‘an imagistic linguistic
logician’. In the end everything goes wrong, including in some degree the book
itself. The early part, set in France, is taut and vigorous; the rest tends to
get snagged in strained dialogue and verbal superfluities. Here, for example,
is Principal Brill, as he is called, meditating on his own name: ‘This title,
with its syncopated engine, its locomotive rapidity, its tongue-twisting
undercarriage, its lightfooted vibration, brought one to attention like an
approaching express. The urgent stutter of its imperious syllables invested the
air with civilisation and authority.’ How does a very intelligent novelist come
doggedly to overwrite in this and sundry other ways? A solution to the puzzle
is perhaps afforded by her publisher, who tells us on the dust-jacket that her
academic employments have included that of ‘fiction workshop instructor’.
Habituated to urging upon ranks of dull apprentices the importance of keeping
language lively on every page, Cynthia Ozick has conceivably allowed herself to
become her own pupil, with unfortunate results.
Pupillage at any stage of
her career is inconceivable of Jane Bowles. Two Serious Ladies, a novel
begun when she was 21, is a strangely mature and confident achievement of a
totally original sort. When her characters speak it is to an effect at once
inconsequent and inevitable, piercing and tangential, wholly authentic to some
seldom-explored region between the outward and the inner man. And her narrative
is in perfect consonance with this. Other writers are adept at passing from
grave to gay: Jane Bowles presents a faithful vision of life as simultaneously
humdrum and bizarre. Her career as a writer was cut short by tragic illness.
The present gathering together of all her surviving work makes an important
book and an enduring monument to her genius.
Let it come down, now
reissued in this country after more than thirty years, is the strongest and most
impressive of Paul Bowles’s novels. It is also the grimmest. As one follows the
story through the vice and drug-ridden labyrinths of Tangier, one almost
expects to meet Mephistopheles himself, muttering that this is hell nor is he
out of it. Not that Mr Bowles’s attitude to his subject holds any hint of
diablerie, or offers even the most fleeting concession to gratuitous melodrama.
We are simply told – and in a dispassionate prose of unvarying excellence –
that thus things are, even to that point of total terror upon which the action
concludes.
STEWART, J.I.M, Other Things. London Review of Books, Vol. 6, no.2,
February 2, 1984. P.16-17
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v06/n02/jim-stewart/other-things/print
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