13. It Took Talent To Lead Art That Far Astray
Here are three quotations:
He spoke sententiously, breaking off abruptly. I had an uneasy feeling, unlikely as this would be, that he might be about to ask me to act as best man at his wedding. I began to think of excuses to avoid such a duty. However, it turned out he had no such intention. It seemed likely, on second thoughts, that he wanted to discuss seriously some matter regarding himself which he feared might, on ventilation, cause amusement.
If it had not been such an intolerably hot evening, Bernard would have suggested remaining in their seats in the interval. He could see no point in a meeting between Eric and Terence, though he had never hidden his relationships from either of them. They would, he felt sure, dislike one another and he dreaded a little his own acquiescence in their criticisms. They would both be so perfectly right, and they would both so perfectly miss the point.
‘Jake,’ said Madge into my shoulder, ‘don't leave me.’
I half carried her to the settee. I felt calm and resolute. I knelt beside her and took her hand, brushing her hair back with my hand. Her face rose towards me like a lifting flower.
‘Jake,’ said Madge, ‘I must have you with me. That was what it was all for. Don't you see?’
I nodded. I drew my hand back over her smooth hair and down to the warmth of her neck.
Each of these extracts, chosen at random, comes from a novel by the writers recommended, back in 1958, by the then Professor of English at Oxford, Lord David Cecil, as being in the vanguard of fiction writing in English. (Why, I wonder now, did he make no mention of Ivy Compton-Burnett? Probably because, his taste being typical of the English establishment, then and now, he did not rate her.) The first comes from At Lady Molly's, by Anthony Powell, published in 1957, the second from Hemlock and After, by Angus Wilson, published in 1952, and the third from Under the Net, Iris Murdoch's first novel, published in 1954. Occasionally they sound dated, as in Powell's ‘which he feared might, on ventilation, cause amusement’, or Wilson's ‘They would both be so perfectly right, and they would both so perfectly miss the point’. But by and large they have stood the test of time pretty well; or rather, they could have been extracts from novels published in England in 2009. They all three do what they set out to do perfectly adequately: they help tell a story and create a world and characters to inhabit that world that do not flout the laws of probability. We never doubt what they are telling us, whether it is about the way someone speaks (‘sententiously’), the weather (‘an intolerably hot evening’) or an action (‘I half carried her to the settee’). It does not matter whether the narrative is in the first or the third person, what the narrator says is, as far as we are concerned, the truth. Such narratives are easy to read. They are also illustrative, in Bacon's sense: they tell a story, they have no life of their own. The two things go together, as both Barthes and Merleau-Ponty showed: the smooth chain of the sentences gives us a sense of security, of comfort even, precisely because it denies the openness, the ‘trembling’ of life itself; the very confidence of the articulation of the narrative gives the lie to our own sense of things being confused, dark, impossible to grasp fully. That of course is why we read them: they take us, for a while, out of our confusions, drawing us into a world that makes some sort of sense, that at the very least can be articulated. By the same token they cannot really satisfy us, since they do not speak to our condition, only make us hungry for more.
As I hope I have made clear, in my discussions of Cervantes and of Golding, for example, a sense of narrative being alive does not depend on the disruption of syntax or the use of demotic speech, but on a much more fundamental relation of the writer to his medium. If Barthes is right and to be modern is to know that some things can no longer be done, then Cervantes is modern and these writers are not.
And what of their successors? Here again are three extracts, chosen at random, all from living writers. The first comes with an endorsement from Anthony Thwaite (‘a prose that has a feline grace’), the second with one from Karl Miller (‘the masterpiece of someone I think of as the best novelist writing in England’), and the third with one from John Braine (‘a beautifully written story’):
‘What is it, Mary?’ Colin said, and reached for her hand. She shrank away, but her eyes were on him … and he shivered as he fumbled for his shirt and stood up. They faced each other across the empty bed. ‘You've had a bad fright,’ Colin said, and began to edge round towards her. Mary nodded and moved towards the french window that gave on to the balcony.
She had always seen decay about her, even while going through all that the society asked of her. Slot machines on railway stations were full of sweets, but she knew they would be empty again; they were meant to be empty, as they had been when she was a child, pieces of junk that no one yet thought of taking away.
We had by now descended the long incline of our street and reached Elizabeth Avenue. No lawn we passed, no driveway, no garage, no lampost, no little brick stoop was without its power over me. Here I had practised my sidearm curve, here on my sled I'd broken a tooth, here I had copped my first feel, here for teasing a friend I had been slapped by my mother, here I had learned that my grandfather was dead.
It is clear, again, that all three passages have more in common than they have differences. One may employ dialogue, one what linguists call style indirecte libre, and one a first person narrator, but all three are concerned with telling a story and telling it in such a way as to make readers feel that they are not reading about a world that has been freshly made but about one that has always existed. Writing in the 1950s about the Citroën DS 19, Barthes pointed out: ‘It is obvious that the new Citroën has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object’. It is characterised, he goes on, at once by ‘a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter’. A recent commentator on this essay adds: ‘One of the most noteworthy features of the car was its lack of noticeable joints; its panels were not visibly riveted, they appeared to coexist in a state of magical juxtaposition. That is to say, the tangible signs of fabrication, of the labor expended in transforming raw matter into consummable object, had been magicked away.’ Like the Citroen DS 19, the works from which I have just quoted (like the earlier ones of Powell, Wilson and Iris Murdoch) are carefully made objects, exquisitely crafted in order to conceal the joints. The price they pay for this is that they are thin, illustrative, again, in Bacon's sense, recounting anecdotes which may or may not hold our attention but to which we certainly would not want to return, since they lack that sense of density of other worlds suggested but lying beyond words, which we experience when reading Proust or James or Robbe-Grillet. We read them to pass the time, to reassure ourselves that the world has meaning, and then we leave them and move on to the next book.