The moment of recognition in Pincher Martin, the moment when we grasp that what we had taken to be an adventure in the world is only (only?) a desperate mechanism by the psyche for survival at any cost, is one of the eeriest and most powerful moments in literature. Nothing in The Hothouse by the East River can match it. But that novel has its own strengths. We are in New York, where the radiators burn too hot and no-one knows any longer why they are alive. This is where the protagonists have ended up, after what we gather has been a full life. The book opens in a shoe-shop, with Elsa trying on a pair of shoes. Suddenly she has the impression that the salesman who is helping her is someone she has once known. She hurries out. Everywhere she goes people are startled by the fact that she casts her shadow in the opposite way to everyone else. Gradually the figures out of her past gather and the mystery of the shadow is explained. Elsa and her husband died many years before, in a train accident. They have, in a sense, only been kept conscious by their deep visceral determination to deny death, but here too the law holds that if you seek to deny him, Death will eventually remind you of his presence. As in the Golding, the novel itself comes to be seen as the result of that effort, and so its end signals the final release of those desperate souls into a kind of peace, the final defeat of the fevered imagination. Yet all this had itself to be imagined, as Wallace Stevens says. Imagination dead imagine, was how Beckett put it.
By an act of imagination and the mastery of their craft Golding and Spark, like Borges and Beckett, have escaped the strictures of Kierkegaard and Sartre. They have done so not, of course, because they wanted to be on the right side of eminent philosophers, but because, in a sense, their life depended on it. It is the same with all the Modernists, from Mallarmé to Kafka, from Virginia Woolf to Alain Robbe-Grillet. And there are, of course, as many ways of proceeding as there are artists. But the point is that, in a world without authority, each of them has to find his way for himself. No-one can do it for them. Each new attempt, as Eliot wrote in what could almost be described as a manual of Modernism, the Four Quartets,
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.
Always precise, though, he adds that we must not thereby be discouraged: ‘For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.’
6. The Marquise Went Out at Five
I have been talking about the classic novel as a lure and a temptation, to which the
real
writer, in Kierkegaard's terms, succumbs at his peril. I have been suggesting that because it subtly confuses possibility and actuality it produces in the reader the impression that he or she understands something — what it feels like to be a tiger, to be boiled alive as lobsters are — when full understanding is impossible and what the writer who cares for reality should be doing is making us grasp the distance that separates us from the tiger in his tigerness, the lobster dying. Further, since we cling to the belief that we ourselves will never die and use our imaginations to bolster that belief, the novel, the unfettered product of the imagination, actively prevents us from having a realistic attitude to ourselves and the world, and therefore from achieving any sort of firmly grounded happiness. Novels, in this analysis, are like drugs — a view Wordsworth seemed to have reached two centuries ago (‘The invaluable works of our older writers’, he writes in the Preface to the
Lyrical Ballads
, ‘are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’) and the sooner we are weaned off them the better.
But there are less apocalyptic reasons for feeling uneasy with the classical novel, for feeling that to write well one must somehow write against it. One of them is the sense of the novel's distance from gut feeling, and, linked to it, the sense of the arbitrariness of its plots. Holden Caulfield, in Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, catches this brilliantly when he describes an English film he sees:
Then he meets this nice, homey, sweet girl getting on a bus. Her goddam hat blows off and he catches it, and then they go upstairs and sit down and start talking about Charles Dickens. He's both their favourite author and all. He's carrying this copy of Oliver Twist and so is she. I could have puked.
In his conversations with David Sylvester, Francis Bacon returns again and again to the contrast between what he calls ‘illustration’ and what he himself is trying to do. ‘Is that what illustration means?’ asks Sylvester, ‘a kind of caution, a lack of relaxation?’ ‘Well,’ answers Bacon, ‘illustration surely means just illustrating the image before you, not inventing it. I don't know how I can say any more about it.’ But he does say more in another conversation:
When I was trying in despair the other day to paint that head of a specific person, I used a very big brush and a great deal of paint and I put it on very, very freely, and I simply didn't know in the end what I was doing, and suddenly this thing clicked, and became exactly like this image I was trying to record. But not out of any conscious will, nor was it anything to do with illustrational painting. What has never yet been analysed is why this particular way of painting is more poignant than illustration. I suppose because it has a life completely of its own. It lives on its own like the image one's trying to trap; it lives on its own and therefore transfers the essence of the image more poignantly. So that the artist may be able to open up or rather, should I say, unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently.
‘It lives on its own like the image one's trying to trap.’ That is the key. That is what Wordsworth achieved in his greatest poems, what Rabelais and Cervantes, in their own ways, achieved. Illustration is accurate but dead. Bacon does not want to produce an image of what he has before him or in his mind, he wants in some sense to make what he does live a life of its own, just as what he has before him or in his mind lives its own life. He also, as he tells Sylvester, tends to prefer to paint one figure only because more than one leads to what he calls ‘story-telling’, the anecdotal, which is an extension of illustration: ‘I think that the moment a number of figures become involved, you immediately come on to the story-telling aspect of the relationship between figures. And that immediately sets up a kind of narrative. I always hope to be able to make a great number of figures without a narrative.’ ‘As Cézanne does in the bathers?’ asks Sylvester. And Bacon replies: ‘Exactly.’