Every established trader in the caravan, every settled professor or solid bureaucrat, or prosperous self-satisfied preacher, each of whom is slowly accumulating fame or wealth (or both) has a side to him that warms to the picaro’s tale.
The yarn is spun out of his own backbone. A wandering no-good thief has many tales to tell. While not narrating he is acting out his falsehoods and exaggerations. Nothing daunts him.
He may be in tatters, wounded, starving after a series of misadventures that he brought on himself by unwise and precipitate behaviour, but his face is bright, his gestures cool, his words seducing. He can go from rags to opulence in a night by a chance meeting with a gullible priest, generous nobleman or warm-hearted widow — or the other way with more alarming rapidity. He is the epitome of life with the lid off where, but for the grace of God, go all. Despair is not for him, since it would rob him of the energy to pursue the kind of life that has chosen him for its victim.
He finds his way out of any labyrinth because he is God’s plaything, but he never knows the grace of God. God is for those who believe in the superiority of the spirit, the necessity of ethics, the comfort of morals. While they pray, he preys on them, without whom he would have no existence. He is the devil on two sticks, the spirit of anarchy, which resides in everyone. Neither would they exist without him. He is the open prison-window of themselves, and acts as if there is no tomorrow in a world that lives as if the day after tomorrow was worth waiting for. That is his strength, because he will live for as long as the world goes on.
By middle age the picaro must have established his identity, made or married into a fortune, and reconciled himself to the life of a gentleman. He is no longer a picaro. If atrophy or boredom get the upper hand he loses all, descending into oblivion and beggary. Age kills off our picaresque hero, but there is always another to take his place.
The picaro has existed in all ages, and it is the novelist who perpetuates him. He is the two-way mirror, in which the novelist sees both himself and society outside. It occasionally happens that the novelist, busy with literary theories, or fighting those who would dictate them to him, cannot always give the picaresque hero the fictional and philosophical honour he deserves. But the novelist neglects him at his cost, because the picaresque hero, more than any other, gives an accurate picture of the world in which he operates.
By his antics, adventures and observations, and by his fate, which is specific to that age, the eternal Guzman takes society most ruthlessly and entertainingly to pieces, for the edification and delectation of all.
Some time in the 1960s I read Guzman de Alfarache (1559) by Mateo Aleman, Lazarillo do Tormes (1553) by — as far as we know — Diego Hurtado Mendoza, and El Buscon by Francisco de Quevedo. Such an enjoyable experience gave me the idea of writing a picaresque novel set in modern-day England.
The picaresque novel came from Spain of the Siglio de Oro, and led through France to England, taking a firm hold among its writers. Where the Armada failed, literature succeeded — as it always does. Writers subsequently influenced included Defoe, Fielding, and Tobias Smollett. Sir Walter Scott later claimed to be a devotee of Alain le Sage, who wrote Gil Blas, translated by Smollett. Le Sage, however, was a Frenchman.
In August 1804 Henri Beyle — the great Stendhal — advised his sister Pauline to read Gil Blas, thinking that from his books she would learn something about the ways of the world.
How much wiser if he had told her to begin with Mateo Aleman. But at least Le Sage’s picaresque novels were to influence Stendhal, in the writing of Le Rouge et le Noir, and La Chartreuse de Parme.
For over a year — and a very enjoyable time it was — I entertained myself, as much as I hoped to amuse any future readers, by writing a novel called A Start in Life. As to what it was about, I quote in the publisher’s blurb — since I wrote it myself:
“A Start in Life describes the ordinary and not so ordinary adventures of a bastard and a proletarian to boot, of his birth and youth in his native city, and of what befalls him when the star of his destiny takes him to London and sundry places beyond. It tells of his infamous follies and foolish mistakes, of how they led to an ending which should surprise no one, but which will not be revealed until you get there.”
The hero, Michael Cullen, after many adventures, and a term in prison for gold smuggling, was left at an appropriate end. But a picaro never dies, at least in the mind of his author. My hero nagged me to take him up again, even if only to increase the breadth of his experience.
It is comparatively easy to embark on a novel, but very difficult to know in what state of finality to leave the main character, before writing — with relief and satisfaction (those two magical words) ‘The End’ on the last page. The definitive ending would be if everybody died — or nearly everybody — but an author must avoid such self-indulgence or malice, tempted though he often is.
Nevertheless, a character who had been very real for several hundred pages, and a year or two in the writing, might not be at all satisfied with his (or her) circumstances at the end of a noveclass="underline" “Why did you leave me in that situation at the end of A Start in Life? I served you faithfully for 351 pages, and you left me living in an abandoned railway station with a wife and three kids. Get me out of here, for God’s sake!”
What should I do? Almost immediately after the novel was published, in 1970, I began filling a notebook, describing perils and pitfalls I could put my dissatisfied hero through, and weaving them into a narrative. But other novels were being even more demanding, and fifteen years had to go by until the notebook was full enough for me to think once more about Michael Cullen, and release him from his servitude.
All picaros have a particularly engaging nature — when not being cruel, selfish, and downright criminal, as much as or even more than the writer who gives in to the indulgence and often pleasure of describing him
So I was impelled into writing a sequel to A Start in Life, with its title of Life Goes On. This second novel involving Michael Cullen was translated into Spanish, and published as La Vida Continua. At least one of my chickens came home to roost!
Even then, I could not leave my hero alone — or he could not leave me alone. I left him in a somewhat better state, though in an equally ambiguous condition, than at the end of A Start of Life.
After finishing Life Goes On I again began keeping a notebook, whose content suggested still further adventures for him, although rather more than fifteen years have since gone by — an author hopes he is going to live forever. I am these days tinkering with early chapters of volume three.
If, or when, the trilogy is complete, the ups and downs of Michael Cullen’s existence will have been displayed in over a thousand pages, at which point, however, I will leave him, in an elevated station for which all his adventures have prepared him, and to which, I hope, he can have no objection. I don’t, after all, want to be pestered by him for the rest of my life.