We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think Page 8
Proust is not, of course, accusing Baudelaire of expressing false sentiments but acknowledging a gulf between sentiment and an utter commitment such as nihilism—though even nihilism has its tradition—a distance between an environment in deadly earnest, and one in which artists and poets have traditionally explored sensation in the knowledge that no such exercise need be conclusive. Not for nothing was Dubuffet in youth a Voltairean and a friend, even a disciple, of Raymond Queneau. At a relatively early stage Dubuffet published two volumes of his writings—as John Russell remarks, he took care that posterity should be well informed of his desire for Oblivion. (A preferable form of posterity would perhaps be that of Machiavelli as manifested at the conference of scholars held in 1969 at Florence, on commemoration of the five-hundredth anniversary of Machiavelli’s death.)
Our own age—the last decades of the twentieth century—has its own peculiar and new paradoxes; the justified assumption of longer life, and greater leisure together with the sense of time cosmically running out. Our disbelief—our lack of complete confidence, at any rate—in posterity, and certainly our incapacity to imagine its forms and attitudes, infect the human mood of the present and the nature of art and work produced. Public acclaim, celebration of the achiever, however fleeting his renown, takes its notorious toll of the artistic spirit and its ability to create. Writers have historically cautioned against this, but they have never had to make themselves heard over such an uproar and such commercial interests, nor to feel that their warnings might count for nothing against so precarious a future. Samuel Johnson who in early youth composed a revelatory poem on this theme called “The Young Author,” wrote in age, “When a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timorous malignity.”115 Byron—who was a celebrity indeed—has his say about the “eighty greatest living poets”;116 Leopardi wrote that “Fame, in literature, is sweet when a man nourishes it in silence and solitude as a foundation for new enterprises. But when it is enjoyed in the world and society, it is nothing.”117
Of the modern loss of this necessity for spiritual silence, perhaps the greatest of all modern deprivations for the life of the mind and imagination—for the soul, as it used to be called—Montale has said: “Only a man who lives in solitude can speak of the fatal isolation we suffer under this inhuman, mass-produced communication. Being in fashion and famous seems now the only accepted role for the contemporary artists…and I ask myself where this absurdity will lead us. Personal responsibility demands patience and solitude, and both these factors are dismissed by the modern world.”118
Some years ago in the time when the executive branch of government still sought sporadically to distinguish this country’s poets, I was invited one evening to the apartment of a prominent politician to hear a poet read. The poet had submitted the names of twenty or so friends—mostly other poets—whom he wished to be present. When we arrived we learned that the official who had invited us would not be present, having been detained, as his wife said, “at an important political meeting.” This lady then conducted the affair, and our friend the poet read several poems. When he had finished reading, there was a short silence, and the hostess said, “Well, let’s get the ball rolling.” By which we understood we were supposed to discuss what we had just heard. As no one spoke, she said, “I’ll start off. W. H. Auden said that the history of Europe would be exactly the same, wars and persecutions, and so on, if no poem had ever been written and art had never existed.”
This time there was a still longer silence. And then Cleanth Brooks, I think it was, said, “Well, it might be just the same. But would it be worth reading?”
PART 2
The Expressive Word
A MIND LIKE A BLADE
Review of Muriel Spark, Collected Stories I and The Public Image
There are aspects of the obvious that can only be revealed to us by genius. It might, for instance, be said of Franz Kafka that he has enabled even those who have never read a line of his works to say of certain situations, “This is Kafkaesque,” and to know what was implied. Something of such a singular view that speaks a truth recognizable even to those who do not explore its origins, may be said to emanate from the works of Muriel Spark.
At this moment, when, in all the arts, novelty is frequently confused with quality, Mrs. Spark’s writings demonstrate how secondary—in fact, how incidental—are innovations of style and form to the work of the truly gifted: such innovation is a natural by-product of their originality rather than its main object. When the word “humorous” has little currency in literature or in life, her wit is employed to produce effects and insights only matched in contemporary fiction, in this reviewer’s opinion, by the glittering jests of Vladimir Nabokov. At a time when our “tolerance” tends to take the form of general agreement that we are all capable of the worst crimes had we but the conditions for committing them, Mrs. Spark interests herself instead in our capacities for choice and in the use we make of them; and in those forces of good and evil that she picks out, often gleefully, beneath their worldly camouflage.
In all Muriel Spark’s work there is a sense of high spirits and of, to use one of her own similes, “a mind like a blade.”1 She does not posture instructively, not does she shade her work to appease reviewers and gladden the hearts of publishing companies: she writes to entertain, in the highest sense of the word—to allow us the exercise of our intellect and imagination, to extend our self-curiosity and enrich our view.
Such are the pleasures to be derived from the first volume of a projected series of Mrs. Spark’s collected stories and from her new, short novel. Short-story collections are often criticized as being “uneven”—presumably by those who prize uniformity in art—and it is not likely that these stories, some of them written years apart, should be of identical weight and tone. Mrs. Spark is a writer who has continually sought to develop and enlarge her art and, where necessary, to convulse it. It is precisely this “unevenness,” this diversity and range of the stories, that makes the volume extraordinary, for the author is prepared to observe us under any circumstances and to recount her impressions in the form she finds appropriate.
The stories take place in Africa, in Hampstead, on the moon. Some of them hinge on a single crucial incident, other recount a multiplicity of events inexorably brought to their common fulfillment. Several contain a difficult element of the supernatural; others, like the delightful “Alice Long’s Dachshunds” and “Daisy Overend,” go to the very roots of our nature. These stories—which, with their trains of thought that have been pursued in her novels, can now be viewed within the body of the writer’s work—seem at times varied enough to have been written by different authors: yet each is totally, movingly recognizable as hers.
Palinurus in The Unquiet Grave, speaks of “the art which is distilled and crystallized out of a lucid, curious and passionate imagination.”2 It is this passionate curiosity that extends the art of Mrs. Spark beyond the detachment that can so readily become its own victim. The uniqueness and secrecy of each soul is fascinating to her: “I found that Jennifer’s neurosis took the form of ‘same as.’ We are all the same, she would assert, infuriating me because I knew that God had made everyone unique.”3 She will not let us vitiate our perceptions with sentiment, or allow us the doubtful refuge of clinical abstractions if we are to encounter the blessed in disguise; we must also recognize those in love with their own good will or with the virtuous sense of their own guilt, those who would have us conform to their own concept of sensibility.
In one of the strongest stories in this collection, “Bang-bang You’re Dead,” a woman finds herself complimenting a poet on verses she privately considers third-rate. “She did not know then,” the author tells us, “that the price of allowing false opinions was the gradual loss of one’s capacity for forming true ones.”4 In the same story we are told, “There is no health, she thought, for me, outside of honesty.”5 Mrs. Spark’s literary strivings after this form
of health can make the efforts of other authors seem as banal as a get-well card. No modern writer has given greater attention to our revelatory turns of phrase, or more richly conjured up the inflections of meaning in our language.
By the same token, her artistry in these stories is scrupulously disciplined. She does not indulge herself in enumerating sensations or cataloguing objects merely because she is aware of them: everything must bear on what she has to tell us. Nor does she seek, as narrator, to establish her own virtue as contrasted with the fallibility of those she writes about. There is no attempt, for example, in the fine first story in the collection, “The Portobello Road,” to palliate the stern decision that leads to the narrator’s death: if we assume the writer to be human, we must allow her characteristics that will not always please us. In much of the book there is a complex sense of ultimate order, which it may not be entirely fanciful to link to an Edinburgh upbringing.
One reads these brilliant stories with conscious pleasure in the author’s fresh, independent gift and in the vitality of her intelligence. And with a sharing of her own delight.
In The Public Image, Mrs. Spark continues to sound deep waters. Annabel Christopher, a minor film actress who has suddenly, freakishly, become a star, has settled in Rome with her husband, Frederick, and their baby, in order to make a film there. Frederick, a seedy screenwriter, has brought his hanger-on, Billy, with whom he has shared the ever-widening periphery of Annabel’s success. When Frederick goes mad with envy and kills himself (on the spot “where they have placed the martyrdom of St. Paul”), leaving a set of letters and circumstances intended to destroy his wife’s career, Annabel at first reacts within her public image.6 She is tempted to perpetuate the false identity built up for her by press agents and journalists, to suppress the facts of the suicide, and buy off the blackmailing Billy. In a series of flashbacks of ironic cast, we trace the events that have led Annabel to Rome and into temptation. At the end of the book, when repudiating the tyranny of what others wish her to be, she simply states the truth—unleashes it, one might say, on those around her—we follow her out of a courtroom and into a crowd where, divested of her public image, she goes unrecognized and free.
Throughout this parable Mrs. Spark employs her sense of actions that, accumulating over years, are at last irresistibly telescoped into a liberating calamity. As elsewhere in her work, she heightens suspense not by withholding facts but by causing us to speculate as to their effects on her characters. In this book, once again, suffering is being obliged to submit to those who would have us predictable and alike. Set in the film world, this is the most film-like of her novels—interiors and objects are distinct and significant, people are sharply captured in their moment of emergency. There is an endless, dreadful housewarming, a chorus of genially vacant neighbors, and a child who does not so much blurt out truth as take a fiendish satisfaction in her own guilelessness.
The equivocal nature of public curiosity, and its infringements of private life, are depicted here in their subtlety and their brutality. Those who speak for sanity—the wordless baby, a film director, a doctor, Frederick’s Italian mistress, and ultimately Annabel herself—appear not as total embodiments of reason and justice but surprising or irresolute, as in life. We are not required to approve of everything in Annabel, but to recognize her experience and the necessity of her choice. Similarly, the author does not find it necessary to “punish” the loathsome Billy: his punishment is to be that way.
In telling us this taut contemporary tale, Mrs. Spark displays all the directness and complexity of her art, and her poet’s accuracy of thought and word. Here is a remarkable writer stimulating us with her “harsh merriment,” and with her splendid chartings of human dissimilarity.7
REVIEW OF JEAN RHYS, QUARTET
The reappearance of this first novel by Jean Rhys, originally published in 1928 (with, in England, the title Postures), is the latest dividend from a revival of interest in Miss Rhys that has recently produced new editions of her other novels. This early work opens the theme—developed in Voyage in the Dark and reaching full power in the beautiful Wide Sargasso Sea—of an imaginative, susceptible nature destroyed by the assertive, unyielding world.
The art of Jean Rhys derives from an acute, even morbid, sensibility and perception. It is the private sensations experienced and exchanged by her characters that give her novels meaning; and by extension this is her view of life. Her heroines (there are no heroes) embody not so much a capacity for suffering as a thwarted capacity for joy. Irony is never absent, even when the author is most deeply in sympathy. These attributes, which exclude any ready social message and must be judged independently on quality, in general evoke uneasiness and hostility in contemporary critics; and one may doubt whether Miss Rhys would be receiving the current highly deserved critical acclaim if her works were now being published for the first time. But a literary durability of forty years can apparently allay the insecurity of even the most assiduous avant-gardists, and readers who have always admired Miss Rhys will be pleased that news of her gifts has at last filtered through to that quarter.
Miss Rhys, who is now eighty-one and lives in Devon, is at present at work on an autobiographical volume [Ed.: Rhys died in 1979]. Her novels themselves, while they cannot be said to deal with an identical character, are progressively concerned with the incapacity of an intelligent woman to defend her affections. A surprising quotation on the jacket of Quartet finds Miss Rhys’s work “empty of self-pity”; yet for me her power lies in the very transition of self-pity into literature—a feat of artistic strength seldom accomplished even by poets.
The heroine of Quartet, Marya Zelli, is an English girl living in Paris who finds herself destitute when her shifty, shiftless Polish husband is imprisoned for petty crime. She is taken in by an English couple, the Heidlers, who are ringleaders of an ingrown group of well-to-do expatriates. This is the English-speaking Montparnasse of Ford Maddox Ford and Hemingway, and a perfectly dreadful little corner of a foreign field it is. They are the people who “[imagine] they know a thing when they know its name”—the artistic circles who, for the most part, perpetually circle art, whose only consistent contact with France is the habitual fine à l’eau in the same café.1
Lois Heidler “liked explaining, classifying, fitting the inhabitants (that is to say, of course, the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants) into their proper places in the scheme of things. The Beautiful Young Men, the Dazzlers, the Middle Westerners, the Down-and-Outs, the Freaks who never would do anything, the Freaks who just possibly might.”2 Mrs. Heidler (who addresses her husband as “Heidler”) has pronouncements to make on everything—for example, on “sensitiveness, which she thought an unmitigated nuisance.”3 In her opinion, “‘Those sort of people don’t do any good in the world.’ ‘Well, don’t worry,’ answered Marya. ‘They’re getting killed off slowly.’”4
What makes life possible for the Heidlers and their friends is taking themselves seriously. Among them, Marya is hopelessly disadvantaged by her superior sense of the ridiculous, by the ironic, tender view that enables her to understand her fate while making her incapable of preventing it. When Heidler falls temporarily in love with Marya, Lois teeters “on the brink of an abyss of sincerity.”5 Recoiling in time, she bullies the fallen Marya with a show of domestic virtue, and wins (although Heidler, hard, weak, and unhandsome, may be thought a doubtful prize).
Between them, the Heidlers reduce Marya to abject desperation. With their “mania for classification” they have tagged her a neurotic slut, and she finds herself trying, as it were, to live up to their expectations, importantly aware like a person in a dream.6 Even as she notes Heidler’s hypocrisy, his pomposity (“He looks exactly like a picture of Queen Victoria”), she grows more passionately dependent on his love.7 Heidler, who has crudely seduced her (and the word is appropriate, for it is her loneliness that has been victimized, and her poverty) under the eyes of his wife, is shocked when Marya comments on Lois’s big feet: “You’ve got to
play the game,” he says.8 The Heidlers have made themselves invulnerable, but it is the strength of the officious and incurious. “It’s all false, all second-hand,” Marya longs to shout at them. “You say what you’ve read and what other people tell you. You think you’re brave and sensible, but one flick of pain to yourself and you’d crumple up.”9 And coming away from the prison where she visits her husband, she reflects on the Heidlers and their confident circles: “How many of them could stick this?”10
Marya’s pitiful husband, Stephan, completes the wreck on his release from prison—a wounded creature, nervously babbling of a new start in Argentina, whose small reserves of delicacy and unselfishness are inadequate to the crisis. A brief meeting between Stephan and the Heidlers contrasts the intuitive humanity of the ex-convict with the bumptious Person of Importance. Without one word of prompting from the author, one is made aware how preferable is the unappetizing Stephan, who still has the grace to be shy, to be anxious, to perceive. It is a moment of inauthenticity that can only be provided by life itself, or by great art.
“Misfortune,” says La Fontaine, “is a kind of innocence.”11 Marya and Stephan are the innocents of this quartet. Each has been caught and humiliated by life, and each recognizes what it has done to them. The Heidlers are far too competent ever to acquire innocence in such a fashion: error and grief and absurdity have no place in their life-defeating formula for “success.” And their destruction of Marya is in keeping with the elimination of all such unclassifiable threat from their program.