Later, in the early 1980s I became a regular reviewer of novels in the Sunday Times. This is perhaps the most thankless form of reviewing available, but a good apprenticeship for the tyro critic. To be given four novels and, say, 800 words in which to summarize and review them — amusingly, cleverly, accurately — is a taxing and demanding subclass of critical writing whose particular merits are very hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t attempted it. However, as you are at the bottom of the contributors’ food chain, your copy is also the first to be cut if space is required. This happened regularly and the corresponding terseness has not made the reviews wear all that well. Consequently, only a few of my Sunday Times reviews make it into this volume.
My first novel, A Good Man in Africa, was published in 1981 and as I published more books myself and gave up my teaching at Oxford (I was a college lecturer there, at St Hilda’s College, from 1980-83) to move to London and write full-time I was happy to give up the three-weekly review. It’s hard work; you burn out. I carried on reviewing but I felt I’d paid my dues in the salt-mines of critical writing.
The organizing principle in this section has been to present the reviews as I wrote them, starting in 1978 and moving on, rather than arrange them under any thematic or geographical scheme. This is what came across my desk as the years went by. As time has progressed the space provided in which to write has steadily grown. It is a welcome corollary: the luxury of having a few more pages in which to expound your opinions is all the sweeter because of that earlier discipline.
Patrick Kavanagh (Review of By Night Unstarred)
Patrick Kavanagh repudiated his early and best-known book The Green Fool as “Stage-Irish autobiography,” and in one sense his so-called “autobiographical novel” By Night Unstarred looks like an attempt to reclaim Irish rural life from the lush romanticism and sometimes strained folksiness that marred the earlier venture. Tarry Flynn, Kavanagh’s only other major fictional work, also has its roots in his formative years and like The Green Fool concerns itself with the growth of the poet against the background of the Irish countryside. Although Kavanagh was much more pleased with Tarry Flynn — modestly finding it “uproariously funny”—both it and The Green Fool are damaged by Kavanagh’s semi-mystical love of nature and a certain platitudinous idealism that occurs whenever the subject of the poet’s privileged insight and depth of feeling is raised.
By Night Unstarred on the whole avoids these pitfalls; largely, I suspect, because the main portion of it has nothing to do with poets or poetry. Although claiming to be a “novel,” the book really consists of an unfinished short novel and a short story that would have been far better left unjoined. Peter Kavanagh, the author’s brother and the editor, has sought to produce a unified work of fiction by labelling the two disparate stories parts 1 and 2, and by supplying an apologetic explanatory interjection that in the end only exposes the artifice of the link.
Part 1 is far and away the most successful of the two, and, not surprisingly, the least autobiographical. Set in the parish of Ballyrush near Dundalk at the beginning of the century it charts the remorseless rise to prosperity of a weaselly Irish peasant called Peter Devine. Initially an impoverished farm labourer, he impregnates the local half-wit Rosie and has to flee the wrath of her family and the censure of the parish. He returns seven years later an obsessed and oddly motivated man. Maniacally set on becoming the richest man in the county, he courts the bulky daughter of the wealthiest farm-owner in the district and enlists the help of various colourful local characters to this end. By sly manipulation and unscrupulous use of the village gossips a myth grows up about his eligibility and fairly soon he is accepted as a suitor. Devine’s sole interest is in wealth and his romantic yearnings are wholly subservient to this drive (“When he noticed her wobbling breasts beneath the loose blouse he dreamt of the field before the door with the deep hollow in the middle”). Ultimately his dedication proves highly successful, and in material terms Peter Devine triumphs in everything he does from siring children to planting potatoes. The end of part 1 sees him poised on the edge of bourgeois prosperity — a rich mill owner and county councillor — with his financial horizons beginning to broaden: “The priest had smoked three cigarettes since coming into the room: a bit of money in a cigarette factory would be no dead loss, he thought.”
The strength and vigour of Kavanagh’s portrayal of the villagers of Ballyrush are due to the constancy of his ironic gaze; a steadfastness of viewpoint that The Green Fool and Tarry Flynn sadly lacked. Kavanagh sees all too clearly that country people are as pusillanimous, bitchy and determinedly mercenary as the rest of us, if not more so: “The misfortune of a neighbour provided nearly all the best delights of that part of the country.” And Peter Devine, who dominates part 1, is explicitly alluded to as a personification of “the slime-stuck peasant unconscious of cities, of cultures, of everything but the power of money.” There is a sharp Flaubertian cynicism in evidence, free from any romanticism or fond simplicity, which makes Ballyrush as mordant a picture of a rural community as Yonville in Madame Bovary.
Part 2 jolts uneasily some decades ahead and the central figure now becomes “Patrick Kavanagh” (in an Isherwoodian third-person return to his younger self) fruitlessly searching for a job in Dublin. The Devines have resurfaced as the De Vines, now, thanks to Peter’s acumen, a large, vastly wealthy and powerful Dublin family with an interest in the arts. Patrick’s attempts to advance himself — and thereby to marry the girl he loves — are continually thwarted by his refusal, or inability, to ingratiate himself with the monolithic De Vine family. The cynicism of part 2 is of a more embittered and personal sort. Kavanagh’s skilful, distanced irony turns to shrill vituperation and the personal venom is all too apparent in the vignettes of literary and middle-class poseurs.
This is where the autobiography obtrudes and once again Kavanagh returns to the question of the poet’s role and function in society which, with the weight of personal invective behind it, inevitably damages the fiction. By all accounts the first fifty years of Kavanagh’s life were remarkably unpleasant and frustrating, and it seems he had every justification for bitterness and self-pity. And it’s the self-pity in the end that emerges and weakens this section of the novel and which makes “Patrick Kavanagh” such a hard character to sympathize with.
1978
Katherine Mansfield (Review of Katherine Mansfield: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers)
Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis on 9 January 1922 at Gurdjieff’s Institute, the Prieuré, near Fontainebleau. D. H. Lawrence commented that it was “a rotten, false, self-conscious place of people playing a sickly stunt” and, having earlier accused her of “stewing” in her illness, he must have seen a singular aptness in her dying there. For in one sense, as this biography makes clear, most of Katherine Mansfield’s life had been composed of sickly stunts of one sort or another.
Born into a prosperous New Zealand family in 1888, she spent her childhood and early adolescence hankering for release, already thinking of herself, according to Meyers, as “an artist who lived in a world of her own.” She felt stifled by the bourgeois philistinism of life in the colonies and left to go to school in London at the age of fourteen. The abandoned country soon became transformed in her imagination — as is common with most exiles — into a land of beauty and innocent childhood pleasure. She returned there briefly in 1907 but from 1908 onward lived in England and Europe. It was a notably unhappy existence too, spent in a succession of drab rented properties and hotels and featuring, among other mishaps, a temporary addiction to Veronal, an abortion, a one-day marriage, lesbian relationships, continual ill-health and, most unfortunately perhaps, marriage to Middleton Murry.