Book Club

“Ordinary corrupt human love”: Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

greene

I’m tired and I don’t want any more pain. I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love. Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain, but I don’t want it now. Take it away for a while and give it me another time.

My local book club met Tuesday night to discuss Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. We chose this novel as the follow-up to Lady Chatterley’s Lover: as I’ve explained here before, we pick a thread to follow from one book to the next, which in this case was adultery. (The last time we read Graham Greene we had followed a “depressing novels about priests” thread from Such Is My Beloved to The Power and the Glory.)

Quite by coincidence, because I had forgotten that they had often been compared, I started Christopher Beha’s What Happened to Sophie Wilder just before I had to turn to The End of the Affair. (Or was it a coincidence? Perhaps it was all part of some grand design by the great publisher in the sky!) The connection came back to me as I was reading and writing about Beha’s novel, though, thanks especially to Nicole’s comparative discussion at Book Riot, so inevitably I was thinking a lot about Sophie and and Charlie as I read about Sarah and Bendrix. As Nicole very adeptly explains, the two novels are indeed strikingly similar in structure, but reading them feels very different: Beha’s has a (somewhat deceptive) colloquial clarity to it, and (I thought) a lot more emotional detachment, especially, and paradoxically, where Sophie’s religious experiences are concerned, while Greene’s is more overtly written, more conspicuously literary, as well as emotionally intense — to the point of claustrophobia.

At the purely subjective level of taste, I preferred Greene’s: I enjoyed (if that’s the right word) Bendrix’s palpable bitterness, and the twisty self-justifying but also self-loathing ways he tells his story. I was fascinated to learn that Greene tried this experiment in first-person narration because he’d been reading Great Expectations: apparently he felt he hadn’t really pulled it off:

Dickens had somehow miraculously varied his tone, but when I tried to analyze his success, I felt like a colourblind man trying intellectually to distinguish one colour from another. For my book there were two shades of the same colour —  obsessive love and obsessive hate; Mr. Parkis, the private detective, and his boy were my attempt to introduce two more tones, the humorous and the pathetic.

I can’t think of a novel I would be less inclined to compare to The End of the Affair than Great Expectations if I were approaching it thematically, but it’s interesting to think of it, as Greene apparently did, as a technical problem he was unable to solve. One thing Dickens does that perhaps he didn’t adequately consider was use retrospective narration to add a layer of painful self-knowledge over top of Pip’s obsessive love. The End of the Affair is told retrospectively (except for Sarah’s diary), but all that does is infuse the love story with that “obsessive hate.” Imagine the novel told in a way that really reflects the religious conversion that the ending points us towards: wouldn’t that complete or perfect the narrative by returning Bendrix, and thus us, to love, by way of forgiveness? It’s impossible to imagine any Dickens novel, much less Great Expectations, stuck in hatred the way Bendrix is: even Miss Havisham is brought to repentance, after all. As for “the humorous and the pathetic,” well, I agree with Greene that he doesn’t quite achieve either (at all, never mind to Dickens’s level), but it’s hardly a fair contest.

Anyway, I liked reading Greene better for the style and the emotional intensity … but I also found myself thinking back on Sophie Wilder (and bringing it up during our discussion) because there were things about The End of the Affair that left me dissatisfied, too, in ways that Beha’s novel helped me understand. I was particularly frustrated by Sarah’s “conversion.” Having protested Beha’s failure to explain Sophie’s conversion in more depth, I found I objected to Sarah’s on different grounds: it didn’t seem religious at all! She has no epiphany, no spiritual revelation, no breakthrough. She just makes a deal with a deity she only kinda sorta believes in, and then feels coerced into keeping up her end of the bargain. It seemed so pragmatic — and hardly inspiring, as it boils down to “I’ll be good if you grant me my wish” — which rather neatly sums up negative clichés about Catholicism.

That moment is only the beginning of Sarah’s newly-defined life, of course: does her contract with God lead her into genuine faith? She spends a lot of time doubting and arguing, as in the bit I chose for my epigraph (which nicely captures the central conflict between human and divine love, fought in the novel over the territory of the human body). But she does seem to find something like peace eventually, and of course once she dies she’s apparently capable of working miracles. There’s little saintly about her during her life, as far as we know, or as far as Bendrix will admit (“She was a good woman,” says Father Crompton: “She was nothing of the sort,” retorts Bendrix irritably) but being a saint doesn’t necessarily require that: as Father Crompton replies in his turn, “There’s nothing we can do some of the saints haven’t done before us.” But it didn’t seem that Sarah was working towards doing good, not the way Sophie is when she cares for her dying father -in-law. Still, struggle and debate are compatible with belief, and Greene did well precisely at conveying faith as something to be achieved through effort, not simply succumbed to or carried along by.beha

That said, I certainly didn’t see why Bendrix came round (or is on the verge of coming round) to it in the end. Greene apparently said he wanted to box him into a corner so he couldn’t help but accept the religious explanations. Here too I end up giving Beha the edge: both novelists play metafictionally with novelist / God comparisons and make room for ambiguity about the ultimate source of structure and meaning, but in offering the resolution I thought I wanted (“all right, have it your way. I believe you live and that He exists”), Greene frustrated me in a different way, because his ending felt both manipulative and reluctant. If your conversion is really a reluctant concession, what’s the thrill in that, especially if you haven’t in fact earned it by winning the argument against coincidence or rationalism? Beha at least seems to be saying “make up your own mind.”

We had a pretty lively discussion of The End of the Affair over our book club dinner. There, of course, the immediate comparison was to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, since I was the only one who’d read Sophie Wilder, and plenty of interest came out of that, particularly around the affair itself and what it meant to the characters, as well as the overall treatment of sexuality and desire in the novel (we thought poor Henry seemed not altogether unlike Clifford, for instance). We were intrigued by the war setting, and by the possibility that the blast that leads to Sarah’s deal with God might itself be interpreted as some kind of divine intervention. By and large we thought the ending of the novel was unsatisfying because the crucial interventions that build up to the “Sarah is a miracle-working saint in Heaven” theory seemed ad hoc: there’s the mother ex machina, for instance, who appears on the scene just in time to save Bendrix from himself. We were all fond of Parkis, which made me think we should maybe try some Dickens one day (or some Trollope — isn’t Parkis a bit like Bozzle in He Knew He Was Right?). We were also intrigued by the discussions of the novelist’s craft, and from this we picked up on the mentions of Forster and decided that should be the thread to our next book. Though Maurice would have been a cute choice (because that’s Bendrix’s name), we settled on Howards End, which I am very pleased about as it has long been near the top of my Humiliation list.

“The Leap of Life”: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Rohan Maitzen13 Comments

chatterleyConnie went to the wood directly after lunch. It was really a lovely day, the first dandelions making suns, the first daisies so white. The hazel thicket was a lace-work of half-open leaves and the last dusty perpendicular of the catkins. Yellow celandines now were in crowds, flat open, pressed back in urgency, and the yellow glitter of themselves. It was the yellow, the powerful yellow of early summer. And primroses were broad, and full of pale abandon, thick-clustered primroses no longer shy. The lush, dark green of hyacinths was a sea, with buds rising like pale corn, while in the riding the forget-me-knots were fluffing up, and columbines were unfolding their ink-purple ruches, and there were bits of blue bird’s-eggshell under a bush. Everywhere the bud-knots and the leap of life.

Why, what did you think “the leap of life” would refer to in the context of Lady Chatterley’s Lover? And yet if you were imagining that it was somehow a sexual reference, you’re not wrong just because the phrase actually comes from this lush description of nature, because unless I misunderstand the novel profoundly (which is not by any means impossible*), its central preoccupation is our dissociation from nature — the intrusion or domination of the mechanical, “the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanized greed,” both literal (industrial) and spiritual — and the resulting failure of tenderness, to both of which sex is (or at any rate can be) the antidote. The world in which Lady Chatterley takes a lover is a broken, alienated, isolating place:

Merrie England! Shakespeare’s England! No, but the England of today, as Connie had realized since she had come to live in it. It was producing a new race of mankind, over-conscious in the money and social and political side, on the spontaneous, intuitive side dead, but dead. Half-corpses, all of them: but with a terrible insistent consciousness in the other half. There was something uncanny and underground about it all. It was an under-world. And quite incalculable. How shall we understand the reactions in half-corpses? When Connie saw the great lorries full of steel-workers from Sheffield, weird, distorted smallish beings like men, off for an excursion to Matlock, her bowels fainted and she thought: Ah God, what has man done to man? What have the leaders of men been doing to their fellow-men? They have reduced them to less than humanness; and now there can be no fellowship any more! It is just a nightmare.

She felt again in a wave of terror the grey, gritty hopelessness of it all. With such creatures for the industrial masses, and the upper classes as she knew them, there was no hope, no hope any more.

 Who wouldn’t seek refuge from this nightmare in a lover’s arms? Except Lady Chatterley’s affair is not really an escape from it — or, at any rate, it provides no escape for the reader (it does appear to be intermittently distracting for the lovers themselves) because every encounter is so saturated with symbolic and thematic significance. The prose is always straining so much towards the metaphysical that the physical act seems almost beside the point, even as we are being urged to see it as the whole point:

 She quivered again at the potent inexorable entry inside her, so strange and terrible. It might come with the thrust of a sword in her softly-opened body, and that would be death. She clung in a sudden anguish of terror. But it came with a slow thrust of peace, the dark thrust of peace and a ponderous, primordial tenderness, such as made the world in the beginning. And her terror subsided in her breast, her breast dared to be gone in peace, she held nothing. She dared to let go everything, all herself, and be gone in the flood.

penguinchatterleyI tried not to find these morbidly florid passages ridiculous, really I did! I understand he’s trying both to convey bodily sensations with some immediacy and to go beyond them to other more abstract issues.  I appreciate, too, as the editor of my edition emphasizes, that despite his “phallocentrism” Lawrence is making “strenuous efforts to describe the female orgasm.” I also recognize — speaking as someone who has now read a fair number of romance novels — that writing  successfully about sex is always challenging because people have such different preferences, in language as in life. (There have been some very good discussions of this problem at Liz’s blog, e.g. here and here.) Lawrence’s language is especially tricky, though, I think, because he wants the sex to be about so much more than sex that it almost completely fails to be sexy. It is sexually explicit, of course. Maybe it is also sometimes erotic: your mileage may vary, as they say. But if sex is going to be the answer to all the ills of civilization, it had better not seem silly.

Or maybe what’s absurd or otherwise disconcerting is precisely making sex the answer to everything. Hard as it was not to laugh at some of the lovers’ antics (flowers woven in their pubic hair? really?), it was even harder not to recoil from the ways the novel essentializes both men and women but especially women, who are made to seem fully alive and human only insofar as they are sexually active and fulfilled. I thought there was something very sad about the scene of Lady Chatterley contemplating her naked body in the mirror and thinking that it looks “as if it had not had enough sun and warmth; it was a little greyish and sapless.” “Disappointed of its real womanhood,” it continues,

it had not succeeded in becoming boyish, and unsubstantial, and transparent; instead it had gone opaque.

Her breasts were rather small, and dropping pear-shaped. But they were unripe, a little bitter, without meaning hanging there. And her belly had lost the fresh, round gleam it had had when she was young, in the days of her German boy, who really loved her physically. Then it was young and expectant, with a real look of its own. Now it was going slack, and a little flat, thinner, but with a slack thinness. Her thighs, too, they used to look so quick and glimpsy in their female roundness, somehow they too were going flat, slack, meaningless.

Her body was going meaningless, going dull and opaque, so much insignificant substance. It made her feel immensely depressed and hopeless. What hope was there? She was old, old at twenty-seven, with no gleam and sparkle in the flesh. Old through neglect and denial, yes, denial.

How poignant (if also, at 27, absurd) — and yet must the answer to this sense of withering away, this descent into meaningless opacity, be (to quote, surprisingly enough, Lady Chatterley’s father), “a good bit of fucking”? Overjoyed that his daughter has been saved from life as a “demi-verge,” Sir Malcolm is delighted with Mellors when they meet: “You set fire to her haystack all right,” he exclaims; “Oh, she’s a nice girl, she’s a nice girl, and I knew she’d be good going, if only some damned man would set her stack on fire! Ha-ha-ha!” He’s drunk, so there’s that, but doesn’t the novel more or less agree with him? For me, something about a woman without a man being like a fish without a bicycle comes to mind: aren’t there other ways she could find some source of energy and meaning in her life? Not that there’s anything wrong with wanting to be sexually active and fulfilled, but sweep away the excess verbiage and how different is Lawrence’s appeal to nature from the Victorian antipathy towards spinsters and “redundant” women? It sounds different — more celebratory — but overall I wasn’t sure whether Lawrence’s vision was liberating or reductive and retrograde. It doesn’t help that Mellors interacts with Connie more as “woman” generically, and as a collection of body parts, than as a particular woman: theirs is hardly a meeting of true minds. And then there’s his bitter hostility towards women who like sex their way rather than his.

Overall, though, what struck me most about the book is its melancholy: I didn’t expect it to be so sad so much of the time. Even when Connie and Mellors are happiest in the moment, there’s sadness: “As it drew out and left her body, the secret, sensitive thing, she gave an unconscious cry of pure loss, and she tried to put it back. It had been so perfect! And she loved it so!” And what moved me the most about it was its appeal to tenderness, which is the quality most threatened by the harshness of modernity:

He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman. Poor forlorn thing, she was nicer than she knew, and oh! so much too nice for the tough lot she was in contact with. Poor thing, she too had some of the vulnerability of the wild hyacinths, she wasn’t all tough rubber-goods and platinum, like the modern girl. And they would do her in! As sure as life, they would do her in, as they do in all naturally tender life. Tender! Somewhere she was tender, tender with a tenderness of the growing hyacinths, something that has gone out of the celluloid women of today. But he would protect her with his heart for a little while. For a little while, before the insentient iron world and the Mammon of mechanized greed did them both in, her as well as him.

“He’s lovely really,” Connie says to her sister about Mellors; “he really understands tenderness.” If sex is the extremity of tenderness, then it is not about desire or passion or even physical feeling at all so much as it is about trying to reach each other and nurture each other. Tenderness brings us back to nature, to the hyacinths, to “the tender green leaves of morning.” It’s tenderness, maybe, that is the real “leap of life.” And since I do love the way Lawrence writes about nature (as, for example, in the quotation I began with), and since for him nature is tenderness is humanity is love is sex, it occurs to me that maybe I don’t find the way he writes (or thinks) about sex as absurd or alienating as I thought.

*I decided to write this post without studying for it: after all, Lawrence’s first readers had to make what sense of the novel they could without the benefit of literary scholarship, and if I once started down the “you can’t write about it until you’ve done your research” road then I might as well throw in the towel on blogging and go back to writing academic articles. That means, of course, that I fully expect and even look forward to being re-educated in the comments.

Steps in the Dark: Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

Rohan Maitzen14 Comments

toews_allmypunysorrows_cover

we had to go back and retrace our steps in the dark which I suppose is the meaning of life.

Miriam Toews’s conspicuously autobiographical novel All My Puny Sorrows is the story of two sisters, Elfrieda and Yolandi — from a Mennonite community, like Toews, and with a father who, like Toews’s, committed suicide. Elfrieda, like Toews’s sister, is a pianist; the novel is narrated by Yolandi, who (like Toews) has dealt for much of her life with  her sister’s depression and suicide attempts. Because Yoli’s perspective necessarily dominates, we never understand Elf’s feelings as clearly as we do Yoli’s rage and grief and love and baffled desperation. But this seems right in any case, since Elf’s point of view and feelings are, almost by definition, not neatly explicable: if they were, she wouldn’t be so tormented, not to mention so frequently hospitalized, medicated, and restrained.

Yoli is dedicated to saving Elfrieda from her “weariness of life.” But does saving Elf mean keeping her alive or letting her die — or even helping her find a way to die? Much of the novel turns on Yoli’s deliberations about whether and how she might do the latter: sneaking away to Mexico for a final toxic cocktail by the beach, or going boldly to Switzerland, where “mentally ill people … have the same rights as anybody else who wants to die.” “The core of the argument for [suicide],” Yoli explains to a friend, “is maximizing individual autonomy and minimizing human suffering,” but she herself remains irresolute about whether it’s better for Elf to live or die, or about whose choice that is to make, and ultimately she is saved from decisive action by the unwitting intervention of other characters. The ending hints that Yoli would have decided for Switzerland, but it’s suggestive, not definitive: it may be that she is just wishfully comparing the orderly Swiss process she imagines to the jarring reality.

Toews does Yoli’s voice well: by the end I definitely felt as if I’d been up close and personal with her trauma. The novel is not all crisis all the time, though: something else Toews does well is mix in humor, sometimes to nicely ironic effect — which can certainly happen when we’re dealing with sad or scary things in real life too. The family members and friends are vivid and lifelike, with their eccentricities and tensions and intertwined histories, and there’s tenderness, too, along with the laughter, as they do their best, as we all must, to get from one day to the next. But the colloquial first-person narration was ultimately too chatty and artless for me: Yoli / Toews is neither a great writer nor a great thinker, so not only is the prose mostly quite pedestrian but the novel does not expand beyond Yoli and Elf to explore the abstract problem their conflict dramatizes. To me, the novel ended up feeling small, even confined, as a result, even though it deals with some of the biggest questions there are. I would have liked to learn something, to have been offered some illumination, something to take away from the novel beyond description at the level of “this is what it felt like for me” — and while “for me” officially means “me, Yoli,” it’s hard not to think it also means “me, Miriam.” There’s a pleasing humility in sticking so close to home, and so close to one’s own heart, but there’s also something unambitious, even unimaginative, about it. Toews does a good job at “write what you know,” but All My Puny Sorrows also shows the limitations of that precept: as a reader, you get to know her, but not a lot else.

But why isn’t that enough? I realize that I am criticizing Toews not for failing at what she set out to do (because she doesn’t) but for not setting out to do something different — something less personal but broader and more ambitiously philosophical, something less intimate and colloquial and more stylish. (One of my marginal notes asks whether coming up with good one-liners really counts as having a style. She does get in some good ones: as a long-time user of the product, I chuckled especially at her observation that Vaseline Intensive Care lotion has been renamed “Vaseline Intensive Rescue lotion,” “to reflect the emergency atmosphere of current life on earth.”) I’ve been struggling for a couple of days to explain (or maybe justify) my lack of enthusiasm, especially when there are other small-scale novels I like very much — most of Anne Tyler’s, for example.

It’s possible that my dissatisfaction with All My Puny Sorrows is a side-effect of reading it right after King Hereafter, which is not just large in its scope but deep in its inquiries, not to mention challenging, and thus exhilarating, to read. (For a book about suicide, All My Puny Sorrows really skips right along.) But I think that another reason for my impatience is, a bit paradoxically, that the situation of the novel is in some ways quite familiar to me. For years a very close friend of mine struggled with serious and suicidal depression, so Toews’s novel brought back a lot of memories, of anxious waiting, of difficult, sometimes frantic, phone calls, and of many, many hospital visits — during all of which I had no power or responsibility except just to be there as much as I could and keep on being her friend. Because I was not family, I had less say and, in a way, less at stake than Yoli does in Elf’s care and future. It was an intense and pretty challenging experience nonetheless, and the novel’s focus on the supporter’s perspective rather than the patient’s had a particular resonance for me.

Shouldn’t that personal connection have made All My Puny Sorrows more, not less, meaningful to me, though? Why, with that experience of my own to think back on, did I find myself resisting Toews’s novel rather than appreciating it all the more? My theory is that it’s because her story is precisely not mine, and so the similarities between them only become really interesting if we go to a higher level of abstraction. She can tell her story, and I can tell mine (though I decided not to do so in more detail here, since in so many ways it is someone else’s story more than mine — which for me raises further questions about Toews’s strategy of making art out of her sister’s death). Unless there’s more to it than that, though, the result is just an accumulation of anecdotes. I don’t deliberately seek out literature that I expect to reflect my own life back at me, but because in this case I did find myself prompted to retrace my steps through some very dark territory indeed, I would have liked to do so in the company of someone who had more to say about the meaning of it all than I can manage on my own.

I have an uneasy feeling that I’m selling All My Puny Sorrows short. Lots of people have really, really liked it — including readers whose judgment I greatly respect. I’m not even sure that I’ve figured out my own reaction: all I know is that I wanted something from it that I didn’t get. I look forward to discussing it with my book club tomorrow night. At this point my favorite thing about the novel is that it included Philip Larkin’s “Days,” which inspired me to spend a sunny hour on the deck yesterday reading through his collected poems.

“She wrote. She wrote. She wrote.” Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

orlandoOrlando had so ordered it that she was in an extremely happy position; she need neither fight her age, nor submit to it; she was of it, yet remained herself. Now, therefore, she could write, and write she did. She wrote. She wrote. She wrote.

Part way into my book club’s discussion of Orlando, one of my friends spoke out with the intensity of someone who has reached a difficult conclusion. “I think that’s my problem,” she said. “The world is overwhelming enough: I want my books to be little, to focus in on something, not to open out onto everything.”*

I liked Orlando better than she did, but it’s hard not to sympathize with that sense that it’s a book that is always on the verge of spiraling off into chaos. There’s just so much in it. It kept giving me a crazy mental image of Woolf at her desk dipping her hand into a bowl full of confetti representing everything she knew and had read and, with a flick of her wrist, tossing her handful into the air and letting it settle onto her pages — except that the result of that would be random, and Orlando is full of stories and patterns and repetitions. Still, it feels ebulliently excessive and joyfully disorderly, at least to someone approaching it more or less for the first time. (I had read it before, sort of, years ago, but since then I had only returned to the marvelous opening of Chapter 5, in which “the Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun” — which I have used many times as a part comic, part provoking starting point for courses on 19th-century fiction.)

It is so many things all at once: a satirical but erudite sketch of 300 years of English history; a sideways look at literary history; a feminist polemic; a love story; a hymn to what in A Room of One’s Own she calls being “man-womanly” and “woman-manly.” It offers meditations on time, on biography, on our many selves, on writing in general and poetry in particular, on nature, on gender. What doesn’t it address, really? And it does it all in those paragraphs that only Woolf writes: they start out so purposefully, then come unmoored and drift away, only to make their way confidently to what turns out to have been their destination all along.

I won’t pretend that I found reading Orlando entirely pleasurable. I was often a bit bored, a bit frustrated, a bit irritated. If I hadn’t spent a lot of time on A Room of One’s Own in class recently, trying my best to coach my students to cope with its meandering structure, I would probably have allowed myself to react even more negatively, but I tried to learn my own lesson and find the logic and the rhythm of it. I do think that A Room of One’s Own is easier to make sense of than Orlando, because after all, it states its thesis right away and proceeds to explore and defend it. Does Orlando have a thesis? Why should it? It’s a novel, after all. Does it have a point? a central “aboutness”? I’m not sure. I think if it does, it might lurk in one of the sentences I underlined as I was reading: “we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person.” Or it might be in here somewhere: “when the shrivelled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning it satisfies the senses amazingly.” Or here: “everything was partly something else, and each gained an odd moving power from this union of itself and something not itself so that with this mixture of truth and falsehood her mind became like a forest in which things moved; lights and shadows became like a forest in which things moved; lights and shadows changed, and one thing became another.”

But why does it have to have one point or be about something? I think my friend is right that it’s about everything — at least, everything Woolf cared for. One of our group found it very sad, and there is a lot of failure and disappointment and heartbreak in it, but overall it didn’t seem dark to me. It seemed to me like Woolf was playing, having fun. It’s a pretty strange game, I suppose, but how else is a mind like hers supposed to enjoy itself? When I was bored, I think it was because I didn’t understand how to play along. That might get better if I kept rereading it, but I expect I would never quite be able to catch or match the spirit of the book.

Even this time, though, I did find plenty of moments delightful, beautiful, or wonderfully sharp. The parts I liked best (besides the onset of the Victorian period, which remains my favorite section) were soon after Orlando becomes a woman and she has to reconsider everything about her place in the world. It’s not that the gleefully surreal fantasy of the first half gives way to something altogether different, but you can sense the angry political Woolf of Three Guineas when Orlando has thoughts like “what an odd pass we have come to when all a woman’s beauty has to be kept covered, lest a sailor may fall from a mast-head. ‘A pox on them!'”

*Or at least, to the best of my recollection, she said something very close to this! It was a convivial night out and I wasn’t exactly taking notes.

“And neither was content”: George Gissing, The Odd Women

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

gissingI suggested Gissing’s The Odd Women to my book club as our follow-up to The Murderess: though the two novels are drastically dissimilar in style and setting, they are fairly near chronologically and, more to the point for my book club, extremely close in the problem they address: the hazards of being a “redundant” woman in a society that sees unmarried women as either aberrant or burdensome. “But I ask you, do there really have to be so many daughters?” asks Papadiamantis’s anti-heroine Hadoula — and the same question launches The Odd Women, where in the first chapter we meet Dr. Madden and his six daughters: Alice, Virginia, Gertrude, Martha, Isabel, and Monica. Dr. Madden has the best intentions for his girls, but when he dies suddenly and uninsured, they are thrown into a world for which they are woefully unprepared: “it never occured to Dr. Madden that his daughters would do well to study with a professional object.”

By the second chapter, Gissing has — with Hadoula’s ruthlessness — killed off three of the sisters. But there are still too many for the doctor’s small legacy to support, and the work the remaining ones can find is grueling and poorly compensated. Alice and Virginia look to younger, prettier Monica to fulfill what they still believe is a woman’s real destiny: “Thank heaven, she was sure to marry!” Monica, worn out from long hours in a draper’s shop, has much the same ambition for herself, though the men she meets in the ordinary course of things are hardly good economic prospects. When she makes the acquaintance of Mr. Widdowson on one of her afternoons off — “an oldish man, with grizzled whiskers and rather a stern visage,” but well-dressed, with a gold watch and other signs of prosperity — he seems like a solution to her (and her sisters’) problems.

One of Gissing’s central concerns in The Odd Women is precisely the way financial exigencies like the Maddens’ lead to moral compromise because women had so few ways to support themselves. The uncomfortable proximity of a “good marriage” to prostitution is a theme often touched on in Victorian fiction (think of the narrator in Vanity Fair, for instance, reflecting on poor Rose Crawley, who sold her heart “to become Sir Pitt Crawley’s wife”: “Mothers and daughters are making the same bargain every day in Vanity Fair”). That a woman would invest her beauty for a good financial return might shock in a novel like Lady Audley’s Secret, but it was easier to gloss over or defend when other “career” options for women (at least for middle-class women, which is where most novels focus their attention) were both rare and not obviously necessary (except for their intrinsic satisfactions, of course, but that’s rarely the point). The context is different in The Odd Women, though, and so too are the arguments. The novel directly confronts a widely-discussed statistical imbalance between men and women addressed in other works such as W. R. Greg’s essay “Why  Women Are Redundant,” and it proposes a more radical solution than Greg’s preference, emigration: independence!

oddwomen

In counterpoint to the faltering Maddens — raised to fulfill an ideal of womanhood that is repeatedly shown up as both outdated and unnatural — Gissing gives us two feminist activists, Mary Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn, who run a training program that prepares girls for office work. Both are single, and Rhoda in particular has set herself against marriage: “I maintain that the vast majority of women lead a vain and miserable life just because they do marry,” she replies when Mary proposes that marriage remains a better alternative than some more degrading ones. She disdains “the sexual instinct”: “women imagine themselves noble and glorious when they are most near the animals.” Rhoda prides herself on the stringency of her principles, though Mary cautions her that “the ideal we set up must be human.” Cue Mary’s dashing cousin Everard, who finds himself increasingly fascinated, first by Rhoda’s mind (“His concern with her was purely intellectual; she had no sensual attraction for him”) — but then with everything she represents (“Rhoda might well represent the desire of a mature man, strengthened by modern culture and with his senses fairly subordinate to reason”). As his interest in her grows into passion and a desire to see her “yield herself,” Rhoda also becomes caught up in feelings that greatly confuse her and test her commitment to living up to her surname.

It takes Gissing a while to get all his pieces on the board and into position, but the game that plays out after that is fast-moving, dramatic, and consistently surprising. Hardly anything turns out quite as you expect, from Monica’s disintegrating marriage to Widdowson (another highly suggestive surname!)  to Rhoda and Everard’s “romance” (which, trust me, deserves the scare-quotes). The plot twists that bring about the final crises are precisely those of a farce or comedy of errors, but they are anything but funny. And though there’s not one main character that is easy to like or admire wholeheartedly, even the worst characters are hard to blame for their failings, which arise from expectations ingrained in them from early on — poor Widdowson, for instance, who is driven to Othello-like rage and violence because he really believes Ruskin’s “Of Queens’ Gardens” is a good guide to women’s roles. Ironies abound: for example, that Monica’s brief exposure to Rhoda and Mary’s ideas (which at the time she disdains in favor of Widdowson’s proposal and her idea that marriage is the easy way to a comfortable life) turns out to have planted seeds that take root and grow into theories of and demands for equality once she experiences the oppressive subordination of actual marriage to him. There are no easy solutions to any of the problems Gissing highlights: though some new standard for relations between the sexes seems urgently needed, one that acknowledges women’s right to “live a life of her own” (as Monica comes to advocate), nobody in the novel seems to know what it could be, or to be ready for it. The most rapturous love scenes leave the partners discontented; desire clouds judgment; new compromises emerge that seem no more satisfactory than the old ones.

I’ve assigned The Odd Women several times, usually in the upper-level seminar I offer on “The Victorian ‘Woman Question.'” It has been a few years since I offered that class, though, and thus since I read it through. I remembered its plot very clearly, along with the ways I’ve come to read its central themes, but I had forgotten how emotionally intense it is and also how strange it feels, because it refuses to sort anything out nicely for us. Even Jude the Obscure at least gives us the cathartic satisfactions of tragedy, but the griefs of The Odd Women are more sordid. It’s possible (we debated this last night) that Rhoda’s story has elements of triumph in it, but at the very least they are equivocal. I don’t consider Gissing much of a prose stylist, but another thing we discussed last night is how specific he is, especially about money, or its lack, and the difference this makes: as one of my friends observed, The Odd Women has a lot in common with Pride and Prejudice, including this economic preoccupation and its focus on the precarity of women’s lives absent good matrimonial prospects — The Odd Women is what Pride and Prejudice would be if Mr. Bennet died before Bingley ever came to Netherfield. Suddenly Mr. Collins doesn’t look so silly, just as Mr. Widdowson looks pretty good when you’ve been standing for 18 hours at a shop counter.

Another aspect of The Odd Women that we discussed was the confusion around men’s roles as well as women’s in it. Our interest in the ways its men were sometimes “womanly” and its women “manly” led us, eventually, to choose Woolf’s Orlando as our next book. The only part of that novel I know well is the wonderful riff on the arrival of the 19th century:

The damp struck within. Men felt the chill in their hearts; the damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth one subterfuge was tried after another. Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on both sides. And just as the ivy and the evergreen rioted in the damp earth outside, so did the same fertility show itself within. The life of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty; for twins abounded. Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus — for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork — sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes.

When I read the whole novel, years ago, I think I was not ready for Woolf in general, or for it in particular. I’m looking forward to giving it another go. I’m also looking forward to working through The Odd Women again in the fall, as I’ve assigned it for the Victorian fiction class.

“Torn by the claws of reality”: Alexandros Papadiamantis, The Murderess

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

papadiamantisMy book group’s last read was Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic. We like to follow some thread from one book to the next; we got to Mary Stewart from Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn  by way of romantic suspense, and decided to make Greek islands our next connection. The obvious choice would have been Zorba the Greek (and I wouldn’t be at all sorry if we read that next), but we were also looking for something relatively short this time, and so we fixed on Alexandros Papadiamantis’s novella The Murderess. (I blame Tom.)

If the setting of This Rough Magic is, as I proposed, the Greece of tourists, the setting of The Murderess is the Greece of your nightmares. Not that it’s ugly — quite the contrary! The beauties of the scenery are lovingly evoked by Papadiamantis (via his translator, Peter Levi):

It was a sweet May dawn. The blue and rose clarity of heaven shed a golden colouring on plants and bushes. The twitter of nightingales could be heard in the woods, and the innumerable small birds uttered their indescribable concert, passionately, insatiably.

But this beauty only makes the harshness of the story more shocking. Though not a mystery novel, The Murderess is definitely a crime story, and this aspect of it reminds me of P. D. James’s comment that setting “enhances the horror of murder, sometimes by contrast between the beauty and outward peace of the scene and the turbulence of human emotions.”

The turbulent emotions in this case are those of Hadoula, known also as Frankojannou, and the plot is what a canny publicist might describe as “Hardy meets Gissing meets Stephen King.” Like Father Time’s in Jude the Obscure — and with a similarly parable-like resonance — Hadoula’s crimes are “Done because we are too menny”; as in Gissing’s The Odd Women, it’s women who are present in excess, their value as individuals weighed as nothing against the burden they represent to the families that must struggle to marry them off and maintain them if this effort unsuccessful. Add in the pressures of the Greek dowry system and a general climate of ignorance and superstition, and you have the ingredients of a real witch’s brew of cynicism and desperation. Thus Hadoula, sleep-deprived from tending to her infant granddaughter, reflects, “The minute girls are born a person thinks of strangling them!’ “Yes,” says our narrator,

she did say it, but she would certainly never have been capable of doing it. Not even Hadoula herself believed that.

 After all, Hadoula is a healer, a brewer of ‘medicines,’ someone whose mission is to sustain life, not destroy it. But just as Hadoula does not really believe in the remedies she peddles, she is inconsistent about whether the right thing is to nurture or murder little girls:

But I ask you, do there really have to be so many daughters? And if so, is it worth the trouble of bringing them up? ‘Isn’t there,’ asked Frankojannou, ‘isn’t there always death and always a cliff? Better for them to make haste above.

It only makes sense to hasten girls out of life: after all, religion teaches that “grief is joy and death is life and resurrection, that disaster is happiness and disease is health. . . . Would it not really be right,” she plausibly argues,

if only humans were not so blind, to assist the scourge that fluttered in the angels’ wings, instead of trying to pray it away? . . . Ah, the more one works things out, the more one’s brain goes up like smoke.

And sure enough, overcome by the imponderable cruelty of a world in which wanted sons die and unwanted daughters give their parents “a forestaste of hell in this world,” Frankojannou’s brain does “go up in smoke,” and, “out of her mind,” she begins her career as a murderess.

If only she clearly were out of her mind, The Murderess would be a simpler novel and the judgments it brings to bear on its protagonist would be easier to identify and take sides on. The Murderess is not a simple book, though. The murders are shocking, no question, but they make perfect sense, not just in Hadoula’s crazed mind but as a literalization of the many ways in which (according to her own life story and experiences) women are degraded and devalued by the world they live in. Hadoula is wracked by her conscience, tormented by “the lamenting voice of the infant, the tiny girl unjustly slain”; she runs from man’s justice “but prison and Hell were within her.” At the same time, at the next opportunity she finds herself once more with her hand’s at an infant girl’s throat and remembers the context of her cruel acts:

Then the baby daughter began to cry very softly, moaning unbearably. Frankojannou forgot all the remorse she had felt so deeply under the black wings of her dreams. Once again she was torn by the claws of reality, and began to think inside herself,

‘Ach, he’s right, poor Lyringos . . . ‘all little girls, her bad luck, all little girls!’ And what a consolation it would be for him now, and for his unhappy wife, if the Almighty took her straight away! While she’s small, and leaves no great sorrow behind her!’

Is it Hadoula who is really murderous? Or does the blame go to a society that has made such reasoning plausible? Why should she be held accountable for her attempt to short-circuit the tragic cycle these little girls, by their very existence, perpetuate?

But Frankojannou’s own despair at her actions is enough to show us the inhumane flaw in her reasoning — which is in any case more unreasoning intuition than logic, maybe even (as the narrator has said) madness. She seems ultimately, to be running from herself as much as from the “regulars” who pursue her; the voice that haunts her with the cry “Murderess! Murderess!” is as much hers as anyone else’s.

The final sequence of the novel is an extraordinary set piece as we follow her to her death “midway between divine and human justice.” Was she in some sense an agent of justice? Is she herself a victim? Or is she only an unleashed terror, acting on hatred in the guise of mercy? I am caught, myself, in this ambiguity, unsure of my interpretive footing. I expect our discussion next weekend will be a lively one!

You can read more about The Murderess from Steve here and from Tom here. Iagree with Steve about the effectiveness of Levi’s translation: at first I found the book uncomfortable and stilted, but it finds its rhythm, and there are many grimly, hauntingly unforgettable passages. Tom calls it “a hardboiled feminist crime novel.” I think I agree that it is feminist, even though witch-like homicidal Hadoula plays into misogynistic stereotypes: perhaps (as with some women in the original hard-boiled tradition) she upsets those stereotypes even as she inhabits them. Like Tom, I couldn’t resist looking up something about Skiathos: it looks beautiful.

The Enchanted Island: Mary Stewart, This Rough Magic

Rohan Maitzen11 Comments

stewartIt was very interesting reading This Rough Magic so soon after Jamaica Inn. My book club likes to follow a thread from one book to the next; we picked Stewart as another good example of vintage romantic suspense, and settled on This Rough Magic because it’s one of her most popular titles. We did better than we knew: This Rough Magic turns out to have more than genre in common with Jamaica Inn, for it too turns on secrets pursued in the dark of night, and on the threat and power of the sea. Both novels highlight close relationships in an isolated and, to our outsiders’ eyes, exotic community, and both writers spend a lot of time on the landscape that provides the setting for their characters’ adventures.

The juxtaposition was not really to Stewart’s advantage, though. Her novel seemed thin by comparison: her landscapes are picturesque but unlike du Maurier’s they do not evoke unfolding layers of character and plot; her story is simplistically suspenseful — it induces curiosity about how things will turn out — but not ingenious, twisty, or, again, layered; her people are deceptive on the surface but offer no surprises once they are known as good guys or bad guys. I enjoyed reading This Rough Magic, but it didn’t provoke me to much thought: unless I really missed something, it doesn’t have much “aboutness.”

This is not to say that there’s nothing notable about This Rough Magic. Most obvious is its saturation with allusions to The Tempest: there’s the title, of course, but also the epigraphs to every chapter are from the play, and a number of characters are named for it too. The novel is set on Corfu, and much is made of the possibility that the Greek island is the play’s “real” setting. It has been a long time since I knew much about The Tempest, so I could be wrong about this, but it didn’t seem to me that this material was being used more than decoratively — to create an atmosphere of otherworldly enchantment. It’s a highly theatrical novel, quite literally, as the heroine, Lucy Waring, is an aspiring actress and the nearby “Castello” has been rented out to Sir Julian Gale, a legendary actor whose mysterious ailment folds into the rest of the novel’s mysteries. They both have occasion to use their acting skills in service of the plot, but I didn’t see this as a thematically telling development except to the extent that in any mystery, a lot of people are “acting” parts that aren’t entirely their own.

Another notable feature of the novel is its attention to its literal setting. Stewart is clearly fascinated by a certain vision of Greece — and of Greeks, Greek men in particular. There’s actually a character named “Adonis,” for instance:

In a country where beauty among the young is a common-place, he was still striking. He had the fine Byzantine features, with the clear skin and huge, long-lashed eyes that one sees staring down from the walls of every church in Greece; the type which El Greco himself immortalised, and which still, recognisably, walks the streets. Not that this young man conformed in anything but the brilliant eyes and the hauntingly perfect structure of the face  . . .

Corfu

Stewart knows she and Lucy are trading in clichés and saves the moment by having Adonis himself wink at it: “It’s a bit much, isn’t it?” he says. But he and the rest of the Greek characters really do seem little more than types, and like the allusions to The Tempest, the details of local culture fill in the setting but add no particular meaning. They also feel somewhat touristy — that is, this is Greece for visitors that we’re seeing, with its quaint parades and stoic villagers and handsome young men and blue, blue water. I recognize it, because I was there once (that’s me on Corfu many years ago) and saw it much the same way. It’s a very beautiful place to look at (or let one’s imagination linger in), but This Rough Magic is not a novel about Greece in any meaningful way. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But I wonder if I could convince my book club to read Zorba the Greek next.

The other really memorable thing about This Rough Magic is the dolphin. I think maybe the dolphin is the reason the novel needs The Tempest — and Corfu, for that matter. Corfu makes the dolphin plausible, but  The Tempest allows the dolphin to be magical.

“Defying Man and Storm”: Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Inn

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

jamaicaI’m no connoisseur of romantic suspense, but it’s hard to imagine it being done better than Jamaica Inn. Really, this book has it all: a grim, windswept, yet beautiful landscape; a grim, brooding, yet charismatic villain; a grim, twisted, yet convincing plot; Jamaica Inn itself, “a house that reeked of evil . . . a solitary landmark defying man and storm”; and, in Mary Yellan, a heroine bold and determined enough to survive them all. There’s also a deceptively colorless vicar, a dubiously trustworthy horse thief, and a whole supporting cast of rogues; there’s treachery, murder, and, of course, true love. If it sounds like the stuff of clichés, it is — and yet, amazingly, it really isn’t, because du Maurier is just that good.

The most terrifying part of the novel, for instance, is not a scene of rapidly unfolding action or immanent violence (though there are such scenes, and they are plenty suspenseful). Instead, it’s a story told over the kitchen table. “Did you never hear of wreckers before?” is the speaker’s chilling question, and the pictures his words paint haunt us as they will Mary, his unwilling audience:

‘When I’m drunk I see them in my dreams; I see their white-green faces staring at me, with their eyes eaten by fish; and some of them are torn, with the flesh hanging on their bones in ribbons, and some of them have seaweed in their hair. . . . Have you ever seen flies caught in a jar of treacle? I’ve seen men like that; stuck in the rigging like a swarm of flies. . . . Just like flies they are, spread out on the yards, little black dots of men. I’ve seen the ship break up beneath them, and the masts and the yards snap like thread, and there they’ll be flung into the sea, to swim for their lives. But when they reach the shore they’re dead men, Mary.’

He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and stared at her. ‘Dead men tell no tales, Mary,’ he said.

Mary can only hope that when she reaches the safety of her own bed, she can hide from what he has told her in the stark cold of the kitchen:

Here she could see the pale faces of drowned men, their arms above their heads; she could hear the scream of terror, and the cries; she could hear the mournful clamour of the bell-buoy as it swayed backwards and forwards in the sea.

It’s not just crime Mary comes face to face with that night, but evil. It’s embodied in Joss Merlyn, the landlord of Jamaica Inn, who is Mary’s uncle through his marriage to her Aunt Patience. Patience was a bright, happy young woman when she married Joss, but she is now a “poor, broken thing,” cowering and apologetic and fearful, but loyal, too, and loving, in her pathetic way. Joss is a wonderfully terrible figure of a man: huge, almost monstrous, but capable of an unexpected delicate grace that Mary finds more sinister than his overt cruelty. In her introduction, Sarah Dunant calls him “a Mr. Rochester without a Jane to redeem him,” which fits well enough, except that for all his faults, Mr. Rochester was never as bad as this! Patience must have married him “for his bright eyes,” Mary mockingly speculates, and it turns out that the power of sexual attraction to lure people off course is one of the novel’s central interests. Mary herself feels its pull (and understands Patience’s bad choice better) when she meets his younger brother Jem, who (to Mary’s dismay) almost charms away her suspicions:

He was too like his brother. His eyes, and his mouth, and his smile. That was the danger of it. She could see her uncle in his walk, in the turn of his head; and she knew why Aunt Patience had made a fool of herself ten years ago. It would be easy enough to fall in love with Jem Merlyn.

But Mary’s not looking for love. A farm girl, “bred to the soil,” she has no romantic ideas. At the same time, she understands the demands of the flesh:

Jem Merlyn was a man, and she was a woman, and whether it was his hands or his skin or his smile she did not know, but something inside her responded to him, and the very thought of him was an irritant and a stimulant at the same time. It nagged at her and would not let her be. She knew she would have to see him again.

I was fascinated by Mary’s frankness about her own desires: “Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all.” Her aunt’s abjection should be cautionary tale enough, you’d think, but even as Jem jokes “Beware of the dark stranger,” they kiss in the shadows.

Mary worries about giving “too much away,” about losing her independence and finding that her weakness for him makes “the four walls of Jamaica Inn more hateful than they were already.” The mixture of heady excitement and mistrust she feels for Jem adds, also, to the mysteries of the novel: how far is he involved in the murky activities of his brother? how much does he know about what happens at Jamaica Inn under cover of darkness? why does he ask Mary so many questions? Will her love for him save or destroy her? Du Maurier keeps her, and us, guessing as Mary struggles to figure out the answers and find her own way through the moral and physical dangers of her situation.

There are both predictable and implausible elements of the plot, but I forgave them both because they come with the territory and because du Maurier writes so well. When I wrote about Frenchman’s Creek I described her prose as “purple” (“royal purple, richest velvet,” to be precise). I expected more of the same here, despite having recently read The Scapegoat — which surprised me by being restrained and shadowy, not purple at all. I’m now adding du Maurier to my list of writers who impress by their versatility: she can clearly “do” the novel in different voices to suit her purposes. Jamaica Inn could easily have been full of cheap thrills, but for all its melodrama it never struck me as silly (whereas I called Frenchman’s Creek “ridiculous” — mind you, that was in 2010, so I may have been reading / judging differently). It’s not really a novel of character, and Joss especially borders on caricature, but (partly through Jem) he is humanized enough to be monstrous, but not a monster. I’m not so sure about the other chief villain, but at any rate he’s not a stock figure but has his own unique style of nastiness. For me, though, it was the scenery that made the novel truly memorable. The descriptions are vividly sensual without being florid, as here:

The drive was silent  then, for the most part, with no other sound but the steady clopping of the horse’s hoofs upon the road, and now and again an own hooted from the still trees. The rustle of hedgerow and the creeping country whispers were left behind when the trap came out upon the Bodmin road, and once again the dark moor stretched out on either side, lapping the road like a desert. The ribbon of the highway shone white under the moon. It wound and was lost in the fold of the further hill, bare and untrodden. There were no travellers but themselves upon the road tonight. On Christmas Eve, when Mary had ridden here, the wind had lashed venomously at the carriage wheels, and the rain hammered the windows: now the air was still cold and strangely still, and the moor itself lay placid and silver in the moonlight. The dark tors held their sleeping face to the sky, the granite features softened and smoothed by the light that bathed them. Theirs was a peaceful mood, and the old gods slept undisturbed.

Jamaica Inn is this month’s reading for the Slaves of Golconda book group. Come on over to read more posts and join in the discussion! It is also (fortuitously!) the book I’ll be discussing with my local book group in another week or so. I’m eager to find out what everyone else thought. If they had as much fun as I did, we might do My Cousin Rachel next, which was our second choice this time around. If not, I’ll certainly read it myself, if only to find out what else du Maurier can do.

“He was my shadow, or I was his”: Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

The Scapegoat is the third novel I’ve read recently with a plot that turns on stolen identities. It’s really interesting how differently they deal with the dangerous temptation to be someone else. In each case, the usurper is at least somewhat sympathetic because what he wants is so simple and recognizable: belonging, acceptance, communion. But while in Highsmith’s Tom Ripley this longing becomes an amoral readiness to betray or kill to protect his deception, and in Tey’s Brat Farrar it leads to unexpected heroism in defense of the people he intended to defraud, in du Maurier’s John it becomes something deeper still: in taking over the life of Jean de Gué, our protagonist is drawn not only into a history and a family steeped in their own secrets and lies, but into his own soul. What kind of man does he want to be — is he capable of being? How can his presence, as an undetected stranger in their midst, change the lives of the people Jean de Gué has damaged and now abandoned? In taking their pain and suffering into himself, can he free them somehow from the burdens of their past, even as he’d hoped that to be among them would liberate him from his own failures?

When the novel opens, John, a repressed English scholar and lecturer in French history, has been traveling in France. His pleasure in the sights has been haunted by his sense that for all his expertise, he remains an “alien” among the people whose language he speaks like a native:

Years of study, years of training, the fluency with which I spoke their language, taught their history, described their culture, had never brought me closer to the people themselves. . . . My knowledge was library knowledge, and my day-by-day experience no deeper than a tourist’s gleaning. The urge to know was with me, and the ache. The smell of the soil, the gleam of the wet roads, the faded paint of shutters masking windows through which I should never look, the grey faces of houses whose doors I should never enter, were to me an everlasting reproach, a reminder of distance, of nationality. Others could force an entrance and break the barrier down: not I. I should never be a Frenchman, never be one of them.

He longs to come out from the shadows of his “pale self,” to let loose “the man within” and discover “what urgings and longings he might possess.” Though his new identity is not freely chosen but thrust upon him, it is also the realization of his dream “to unlock the door”; no wonder that as he drives towards the chateau to take up Jean’s life, John finds himself rejoicing:

I drove faster still, overtaking the cars ahead of me, possessed by a reckless feeling I had never known before, the sensation that I myself did not matter any more. I was wearing another man’s clothes, driving another man’s car, and no one could call me to account for any action. For the first time I was free.

At first it’s just a lark to John, who can hardly believe nobody realizes he’s not really Monsieur le Comte. That’s a stretch for the reader’s credulity too, I have to say, but the dog at least growls at him (much to the family’s puzzlement), and we learn eventually that Jean’s mistress, too, was not taken in (“A woman would have to be a great fool not to distinguish between one man and another, making love”) — though she hasn’t turned him away either. Figuring out the puzzle that is Jean de Gué’s life is initially interesting and confusing but not terribly meaningful to John; his own missteps cause no deep feeling or alarm. Before long he realizes, though, that in moving into the chateau he has, however inadvertently, inserted himself into a complex and still unfolding story, and the shift from “library knowledge” to real life is fraught with dangers, the worst of them not physical but moral. To be “one of them” is to be called upon to act, even (as head of the family) to lead. But with what motive, and to what result?

Du Maurier brilliantly evokes the chateau’s brooding atmosphere, which we see, through the eyes of John the historian, as part of a broader national story of threat and struggle, of longing and destructive indifference:

The chateau, which had seemed a jewel in sunlight, was more forbidding at the approach of dusk. The roof and turrets that had blended against blue took on a sharpened tone against the changing sky. I thought how like a bastion it might have been when water filled the moat, before the eighteenth-century facade of the central portion linked the early Renaissance towers. Were they any more lonely, the silken ladies peering through those slits, than the Renée and the Françoise of today, with the clammy water damping the mouldering walls, and the forest, thick and shaggy, shrouding the very door? Did the wild boar, fiery-eyed, come rooting where the cattle wandered now, and the thin horn of the huntsman sound in early morning when the mist still clung about the trees? What drinking, roystering nobles of Anjou must have clattered forth over the drawbridge to hunt and fight and kill; what love-making by night, what long uneasy births, what sudden deaths? And now, in another time, how much of this was repeated, oddly, in a different way, with stifled emotions and hungers more obscure. Cruelty was of a deeper kind today, wounding the spirit, hurting the secret self, but then it was more openly brutal: only the tough survived, and the lonely Françoise or the frustrated Renée of that age went like blown candles into disease and death, lamented or forgotten by their lords, who, prototype of Jean de Gué, feasted and fought, shrugging a velvet shoulder.

It’s more recent events, of the kind that wound the spirit, that have set in motion the particular conflicts of Jean’s generation, and thus John’s new reality: the war-time occupation, and the subsequent brutal accounting between resistance fighters and collaborators, have set family and friends against each other, but also provided useful cover for other, more personal, reckonings. As John untangles the threads of Jean’s past actions and current relationships, he gradually feels himself becoming part of the history that he had previously only read about in books, and this in turn fills him with a powerful longing to do right by not just the people but the place:

I was no longer isolated, watching apart, numb with exhaustion, but one among many, part of St. Gilles. . . . I knew suddenly, with conviction, that it was not a stranger’s curiosity that drew me to them, a sentimental attachment to the picturesque, but something deeper, more intimate, a desire so intense for their wellbeing and their future that although akin to love it resembled pain. This longing, strongly felt, was yet somehow impersonal: it did not spring from a wish to stand well with them, and it embraced, in some curious fashion, not only the village people and those who now seemed part of me, sleeping within the chateau, but inanimate things beyond — the contour of a hill, a sloping sandy road, the vine clinging to the master’s house, the forest trees.

 Even before this point John has, rather bumblingly, been trying to act in the best interests of his strange, unhappy new family. He’s not overtly successful, but his good intentions are perhaps what Jean’s mistress acknowledges when she remarks, “you have something that he doesn’t possess . . . You may call it tendresse.” It may be, though, that his best course is not to live among them but to leave, taking with him everything he has learned, every burden or grief or sin he has shared while in Jean’s place. When the novel begins, John is contemplating a stay at the Abbaye de la Grand-Trappe: perhaps there among the monks, he had hoped, he would “discover what to do with failure.” “They might not give the answer,” he confides in Jean de Gué on the night of their fateful meeting, “but they could tell me where to look for it.” He ends up at the chateau instead: it is in action, not silence and solitude, that he finds his answer, and his belonging.

But is this success?  John believes it is just failure in another form: “[failure] merely became transformed. It turned into love for St. Gilles. So the problem remains the same.” After all, he doesn’t belong — not really — and as the novel ends he is once more on the road to the Abbaye, now with a different question that is somehow also the same one: “What do I do with love?” In seeking freedom, he found new obligations; in being someone else, he became, more than ever, himself.

Book Club: Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

talented-mr-ripleyMy local book club met Monday night to discuss The Talented Mr. Ripley. We were all newcomers to Highsmith, and though not everyone exactly enjoyed reading the novel (I definitely did), I think we were all intrigued and impressed by it — or perhaps I should say by her, and the quietly insidious way she got us on Tom’s side, even to the point that we would catch ourselves rooting for him at the worst possible moments.

How exactly does Highsmith pull this off? It’s certainly important that the novel keeps very closely to Tom’s point of view, but that doesn’t make it inevitable that we will fall into sharing his point of view: even with first-person narration, after all, we can learn to distance ourselves (think of the gap that opens up between us and, say, Stevens in The Remains of the Day, to pick just one of many possible examples). And it’s not that Highsmith plays any tricks on us with Tom. There’s no ambiguity about his actions; even the most horrific ones, which risk alienating us completely, are related with the same cool, remorseless detail as the scenery:

Tom glanced at the land. San Remo was a blur of chalky white and pink. He picked up the oar, as casually as if he were playing with it between his knees, and when Dickie was shoving his trousers down [to go swimming], Tom lifted the oar and came down with it on the top of Dickie’s head.

“Hey!” Dickie yelled, scowling, sliding half off the wooden seat. His pale brows lifted in groggy surprise.

Tom stood up and brought the oar down again, sharply, all his strength released like the snap of a rubber band.

There’s an element of horror, but there’s an equally strong feeling of impatience: Die already, Dickie! And why is it so hard to get you overboard? Much later, when Marge finds Dickie’s rings, don’t we wait with Tom to learn her fate, not so much with dread as with anticipation? To be sure, he’s not looking forward to “beating her senseless with his shoe heel,” but just as “his stories were good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them,” this story is good because somehow we come to believe in Tom as our guy — the guy we’re interested in and thus, however perversely, rooting for.

How can this happen, though? Is he like Becky Sharp or Shakespeare’s Richard III — an anti-hero we appreciate because at least he’s active? It’s true that Tom is more interesting than any of the other characters. It’s partly that he’s busy, and it’s suspenseful wondering what he’ll come up with next and how he’ll get away with it. His constant spinning of new stories, duly adjusted to fit the new facts in evidence, is actually quite the feat; it’s remarkable that he manages to keep all the details straight. I wonder if some of the readerly pleasure the novel offers, as well as our investment in Tom himself, doesn’t come from his creativity, which is itself quite novelistic. There’s also not much about the other characters — especially his victims — to make us really care what happens to them. It’s an old trick of the mystery novelist to offer up an unsympathetic corpse, to minimize the tragedy and maximize the suspects — but we are still supposed to root for the detective, not the murderer, whereas here we have a decentered crime novel, one in which there’s no mystery, no anchoring moral weight from the detective or the police — who here are just risks and obstacles in Tom’s plots.

And Tom himself is not completely despicable. Indeed, for a sociopathic killer, he’s really quite an ordinary guy, even kind of a sad one. Is it because it’s possible to feel sorry for Tom that it’s hard to completely condemn him? He seems a kind of Everyman. He’s a dreamer. He wants such simple things: acceptance, friendship, a place to belong, a better life. Oh, and not to be himself. Is that so strange? Who hasn’t wanted to be someone more successful or interesting? It’s so much better being Dickie than Tom, or so he thinks:

He hated becoming Tom Ripley again, hated being nobody, hated putting on his old set of habits again, and feeling that people looked down on him and were bored with him unless he put on an act for them . . . He hated going back to himself as he would have hated putting on a shabby suit of clothes, a grease-spotted, unpressed suit of clothes that had not been very good even when it was new.

The path he’s chosen, too, isn’t an easy one: “it was a lonely game he was playing.” Secrets and lies — and Tom has so many, tells so many — isolate us from each other.

If only that were the wholesome lesson of The Talented Mr. Ripley: that it’s better to be ourselves and genuine than to play a part (OK, steal an identity) and be alone (better Tom Ripley dissatisfied than Dickie clobbered and dead?). But there’s no such comforting conclusion to Tom’s adventures. Instead, he walks away with “Dickie’s money and his freedom.” Is that the point, that there’s no harm in doing as he has done — and there might even be profit in it? No again, for even Tom realizes that “he’s going to see policemen waiting for him on every pier.” That’s a relief, anyway.