Spender

Nice, if slightly chummy piece on Stephen Spender's New Selected Journals in the most recent LRB by Karl Miller, who was there for much of this and isn't shy about telling us so.  This bit struck me in particular:

He had failed. He had failed even to fail.

I blame myself not so much for failure -- but for not having pressed ideas of work original work to the point of proof where they either failed or succeeded. What I blame myself for in a sense is that I didn't have enough failures -- but that I so often put aside the things I most deeply wanted to do -- the things that were my own thing from inside myself -- and did things that were proposed from the outside. [LRB 30 August 2012, 12]

Brave of him to admit it, as Miller notes. And striking. It made me think that, in my own work, I have (as it were) only failed, not failed even to fail. Though I must say, that's not quite as reassuring a circumstance as you, or Spender, might think.

Booker Longlist 2012, 8: Will Self, Umbrella (2012)

Ahuh Ahuh (Yea Rhianna), Ahuh Ahuh (Good girl gone bad), Ahuh Ahuh (Take three... Action), Ahuh Ahuh Trotting along to a Costa to bash out the review, my head full of orts and scraps, and wha? Whadawe got? Here it is. Self’s book: one 400 page slab of creative-writing-exercise prose, not disposed into chapters, with paragraphs that spool on for dozens of pages. It’s inside the head of 1971’s Dr Zack Busner, who works in a run-down institution for the bewildered and catatonic, and his head is full of orts and scraps of professional knowledge and contemporary pop and random shit fully faecally rendered, this novel. It’s also inside the head of Dr Zack in 2010, old and fat and sad, and wandering around North London. It’s also, ainy owld ion ainy owld ion ainy-ainy-anally ion inside the head of Audrey Death in 1918, London lass, working in the Munitions factory at the Woolwich Arsenal. Working class gal. And we know her family is working class because they talk loik this: ‘ca-a-a-t’s me-eat! Until praps a cat’s gotit. Audrey! Or-dree! Cummun get yer tea!’ and so on ... *sigh* ... Audrey has brothers, but the First World War is raging (it is all the rage) and as the war ends the Great Flu comes. Audrey goes down with encephalitis and wastes her catatonic life in one institution after another, until Dr Zack does the Dr Sacks thing of waking her up with L-DOPA in 1971. You can stand under my umbrella. You can stand under my umbrella. (Ella ella eh eh eh.) Oh it’s all written like this. Oh, there’s no let-up. There’s no. Reading it is not unrewarding, I am compelled to concede that much. Often impressive. And the novel gains something by its sheer persistence, it begins to aggregate into something weighty and memorable just by not letting up. But it’s a terribly strenuous business, reading it. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed the reading of it very much. Ha-a-a-rd work. It is more admirable than successful. It has weight, but it does not have life. Its Frankenstein clots of flesh don’t live my creations, live! In part this has to do with the sheer ponderousness of Self’s stream of consciousness, which is, formally speaking, the whole of the novel. There’s no Joycean or Faulknerian flow here. It is all too carefully studied, too clunkily welded together. Stream of consciousness? Stagnant canal of consciousness, filled with old shopping trolleys and scum. That may not be a criticism, actually. That may be exactly what Self is going for. When the clouds come we gone, we Rocafella. We fly higher than weather. Self is saying: consciousness is not flow-y; it is cluttered and jittery and broken-up and full of abstruse allusions and oblique visual description and condescending prole speak and lots and lots of this sort of thing: ‘vermiculated quoins’; ‘bulb of the sphygmomanometer’; ‘swelling embolism of the geriatric’; ‘her bombazine prow’; ‘spontaneous jactitations’ [35; 39; 134; 288; 392]. Personally, I do not think that consciousness is like this. (Nor, as it goes, do I think consciousness is a Joycean verbal-free-associative stream either, but that’s a separate matter). You may have more sympathy with Self’s sense of things than I, ‘The Great Pretentious-er’. But your gorge will surely rise, as mine did. Self wants our gorges to rise. Umbrella is a novel full of disgust. It’s full of eew! It’s a stew of eeww. Here is Audrey’s brother Stan, as a soldier in WW1, in a brothel, with his sergeant. There’s a queue of other men outside the door: ‘the sergeant took his time, the suck out of her cunny was his satisfied belch, then he pulled up his breeches by his braces and moved aside to reveal gaping wet lips, hag hairs, brown-eyed teats—a likeness of a raddled old woman’s countenance that had nothing to do with the young girl whose body it was. The sergeant turned to Stanley, his panting subsiding, his belly all shivery—he was neither annoyed nor discomfited and his hand said, Your turn. Three weeks later Stanley spotted his corpse in the no-man’s-land of the Hohenzollern Redoubt—the sergeant had done a somerset into the wire and sprawled there deadstock, all swole up—the maggots were having a terrific feed …’ [204]. Self seems to have chanced upon a rather potent sex/death thematic in this book. I wonder if any other writer has thought of it before? If not, then he has good reason to be proud. (To be fair: few writers since Swift have wallowed quite so wholeheartedly in the nasty sty of physical revulsion and satiric disgust as Self does). Fair? Ah. but it’s not fair, this novel. It’s foul. It’s the dark lady of the sonnets, Mr W. S. All Happinesse and that Eternitie Promised By Our Ever-Liuing Poet … It’s death and myriad indignities, and a bad smell, and physical humiliations and clever phrasing. And italics. Lots and lots of phrases and sentences in italics. You think the italicised portions, with which the prose is fantastically littered, follow some kind of pattern? Mr. W.S. is too clever for you there, my friend, my freud. For the first few paragraphs of the novel, up to about p.30 they present one kind of sense: we’re inside the head of 1971-vintage Dr Zack, as the Kinks rattle around his scattle-skull. First sentence: ‘I’m an ape, man, I’m an ape-ape man … Along comes Zachary, along from the porter’s lodge, where there’s a trannie by the kettle and the window is cracked open so that Muswell Hill calypso warms the cold Frien Barnet morning, staying with him, wreathing his head with rapidly condensing pop breath.’ [1; elipsis in original ...] We think: alright, the italics are inward thoughts, or, no, since it’s all inward thoughts, they must be the distractions in Dr Zippy’s stream of consciousness. But thereafter italicisation increasingly seems to be dropped in at random. It is my belief that Self uses italics in much the way Braque or De Kooning worked over their finished canvases, dirtying things up to create a more interesting texture. That in other words Self uses these italics to scratch and striate and distress his otherwise too polished prose. And occasionally to highlight a bit of writing of which he’s really rather proud (who was it said, ‘go through what you have written and when you find a phrase you’re particularly proud of, strike it out …? Self certainly does the opposite of that, here). Occasionally he’ll capitalize a word. Like this: SEPULCHRAL. Or words, like this: WHOLE HORIZON BURST INTO FLAME. The whole novel is structured like an umbrella—I know this because Self has said so, in interviews, pleased with his cleverness. And it’s hard to avoid being pleased with one’s cleverness. I’m clever, and I know: one’s own cleverness is a pleasing thing. Smuggening, though. Smuggerella, ella, ella. (‘When I was with the umbrella-makers there were always damaged frames and plenty of material offcuts—oiled cottons, art silks, that sort of thing—[147] D’you see what he did there?). The novel’s epigraph is from Joyce: ‘a brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella’, ironically applied because nothing is forgotten in this novel despite its main theme of the physical frailty of memory, catatonia, repression and so on. Self drags all his post-it-noted research into the making, weaves his cloth and sews it to its metal frame. Is there an umbrella ella, ella in this novel? Not functionally, because umbrellas serve to keep the rain off and nothing keeps the rain off in this novel; the rain it raineth every day; and the rain it getteth into every crack. It seeps through the inadequate soldering of the brass shells Audrey and her co-workers make in Woolwich, rendering a proportion (‘perhaps as high as 50%’) of the munitions duds (‘imperfectly brazed and welded the tonic wine of rainfall drips through their torn seams’ [248]). Characters in London are ‘strafed by raindrops’; the trenches at the Western Front fill with the downpour and the battlefield turns to mud. ‘Black bars in the sky that cut across the puce clouds bleeding mauve rain’ [316]. Oh, ugh, that last one’s bad writing. What else? Looking back, I think I can discern (unless it’s just my pattern-noticing brain and not present in the text at all) an eight-part unprocrustean structure to the Umbrella’s 400 pages: roughly 50 pages per section, each one shuffling all three time periods 1918, 1971, 2010, but running radially round the stem of Self’s name of the father supportive writer’s phallus: stasis—feminism—catatonia and ‘the shaking palsy’—medication—war—revival—sacralisation—movement. Good and bad. If Self hadn’t said that in interview, though, would I have noticed it? Chiz, chiz. Old slang, sliced ham, ‘on the arm of her chair her twisted hand dances fingertrot, handango, thumba' [192]. The 1918 portions are the most vivid, with some particularly horrible trench-war scenes—the officers all donkeys, the ordinary men lions who say ‘cunt’ a lot, and they’re working class, we can tell they’re working class because they say things like ‘Think on’t, Stan, iffen they knew they’d turn their goons on uz, winkle uz aht, drag uz oop’ [315]. It’s like the old nursery rhyme: Moloch come. Moloch stay/Moloch never go away/Not a thought in your white brow/Can satiate old Moloch now. ‘The piss yellow champagne foaming in real glass goblets.’ [261]. Audrey makes a sort of shrine or grotto under her bed every year out of various discarded and often unpleasant things. ‘Audrey smiles, her twiggy fingers go to her temples and scratch at the dried-out nest of white hair’ [305]. Didn’t Elvis Costello manage to get all this into a four-minute pop song. Veritably, Veronically? Does this subject benefit from being bashed and hammered for four hundred pages? And you know what? For all the myriad Anthony Burgess touches in this novel it lacks Burgess’s core belief that the reader must be entertained and seduced (by narrative, by character) at the same time as being stimulated, challenged, revolted and condescended to. Urban life, London life seagully yawp of car-alarm. A Ford flashing all its lights on, off, on, off, as if having an epileptic seizure. Puff, puff, hurrying down the street. Need to get to the coffee shop, get my laptop out, jot down my thoughts about this novel, move on. A couple thousand words? So many? Starlings flow about the sky like iron-filings under the influence of a vast and moving magnet. Some of this is Self, and some of it is myself. Is there an aesthetic virtue in muddying the borders? Now that it's raining more than ever. Know that we'll still have each other. Is Self’s novel a self-consciously Martian exercise, I wonder? That may be it. The wild Curiosity rover, sending its postcard home from a desolated, brown-and-tan coloured landscape? It’s a hard it’s a hard it’s a ha-a-a-rd Raine’s gonna fall … myriad moments of very niftily-put little shards of Martian poetry. A man checks a bicycle inner-tube for a puncture (‘Stanley mends the inner tube, feeding it through the water in the wooden pail, the kinked eel sends a piddle of bubbles to the surface. He pulls it out, mops it, marks its gills with the chalk.’ [18] The italics overegg this, though); cherry blossom (‘is frogspawn in the pond-green sky’, [52]); sparrows (‘they’re the same as the crumbs they peck at on the platform: they’ve been brushed off by the sky’ [153]); phlegm (‘we gargle the mucal ice cream deep in our throats, but without pleasure’ [321]). Lots and lots of those moments swim out of the overall fog. Many of them very neatly done. But despite the epigraph the wordplay is Burgessian rather than Joycean (‘doo-d’doo, doo-d’doo, doo-d’-doo, doo d’-doo, triplets of notes going up and down. Brarms, ’is intermetso a very high class roll for the cunny-sewer’: ah! the old cunt-cesspit connoisseur gag …). The world isn’t a very nice place. People aren’t always very nice to one another. The shit-brown trench walls, the yeast-stupefied pub, the faecal corridors of the psychiatric ward. Here’s one thing it all is: clever. It’s clever in two ways. One is that Will-i-am Selfspeare is, simply, a clever man, who has a very smart though often icky turn of phrase and who has done lots and lots of research about 1918 and 1971 … But it’s clever in another way too: because it interpellates the reviewer as, as it were, an ass for disliking it. It says: ‘to dislike this book is to take your place alongside those myopic critics who disliked Ulysses and To The Lighthouse because they were new!’ But-but-but! But Umbrella isn’t new. It isn’t even, as McCarthy’s C was last year, an attempt to revivify Modernism. It’s an exercise in a much more small-c conservative literary nostalgia. It’s 1922: the Year In Literature viewed under the aegis of Swift. Liking this novel is the old-fashioned thing, not the other way around. Not that there’s anything wrong with being old-fashioned. In the 1980s Angus Wilson wrote a Victorian Novel called Gentlemen in England which presented a mummified, dead-at-heart, pastiche late nineteenth-century novel to the Thatcherite readings classes as if it were a new thing. It did very well. With Self’s Umbrella we’ve moved thirty years forward in actual time, and thirty years forward in Literary Heritage time. The result is perfectly Wilsonian: the technical facility of its pastiche can’t be faulted; it fails to come alive in the same sorts of ways; it has done very well with the Cameronian reading public. It’s a shadowy, brown-stained novel: ‘that smell, faecal certainly, but antiseptically chemical too, with a sharp tang of floor polish … his moustache wet wiv beer and tobacco-stained … Mboya’s face is a teal whorl with deep, yellowy creases spreading out from full pink lips … a sea of speckled tan-coloured linoleum … it’s not food—it’s faecal … the air darkens and darkens : a smutstorm in lurid yellow suspension from out of which swim the castellated battlements of the Westminster Hospital … netherworld of sewage farms and shitty little fields …' I could go on; I’ve barely got started. It’s all brown and shadowy, ombre and grim, shitty and nasty, and despite its many vividnesses and moments of striking intensity it doesn’t really work. Brown coloured and unsucceeding. Now that it's raining more than ever/Know that we'll still have each other/You can stand under my Umber-failure

ailure

ailure

ailure.

Quote of the Day

"Wait," said Val, with the caution of a science fiction writer. [Anthony Burgess, The End of the World News (1982), 348]

Never a truer word spoken.

Jobbing post

God finally loses his temper with Job's whingeing:

'Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddlingband for it, and brake up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors, and said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed? Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the dayspring to know his place; That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it? [Job 38:4-13]

It's powerful stuff, but takes on an odd flavour when you think about it. Where was I when you laid the foundations of the earth? I was where you wanted me, God; inexistent. I was nothing because that's how you wanted it. This was not something I had any choice over, so it's a little hard to blame me for it. Also, the stuff about commanding the morning? Wasn't there a guy who tried doing that, instead of you, and didn't you banish him to Hell?

On homophobia

Here's a failure of imagination on my part. I can't get inside the mindset of a homophobe. To be a little more precise, I can't understand how a person can be revolted and disgusted by gay sex, yet thrilled and excited by straight sex.  It's all sex.  I could, I suppose, understand somebody who found sex revolting tout court; and once upon a time -- but a long, long time ago, surely -- culture defined sexual practice in more gender-determined ways (the missionary position for straights, sodomy for gays) so hating homosexuality was a way of indicating one's preferences in such matters.  But surely one of the fundamental problems 'homophobia' faces today is that straights and gays all get up to pretty much the same stuff in bed.  It's incoherent to hate and fear sex and to love and desire sex at the same time.

... and, of course, when I put it like that I get to the nub of the matter.  Hatred and fear is not coherent, or logical. Homophobes don't occupy a rational position.  Homophobes hate and fear because they love and desire.

Burgestoy, Tolstess

Thinking about Burgess's Napoleon Symphony recently: a really interesting novel (one of my favourite Burgess works, actually. This amazon reader has it right, I think).  But the postscript to the novel makes it plain that Burgess wrote the whole thing ridden by the nightmare of influence -- Tolstoy, of course (Voyna i mir, of course).  He doesn't say so, but I wonder if in part he used Beethoven as a structuring principle in an attempt to fight the fire of Tolstoy's withering influence with the fire of another genius.  If so, then I don't think it worked, at least not on those terms.  Napoleon Symphony is a great novel, but it doesn't match Tolstoy.

Trying to put my finger on the main difference between the two books (apart, that is, from sheer cultural stature) I wondered if it is that Burgess is fundamentally a restless, impatient writer, easily bored and fond of innovation and ingenuity; where Tolstoy is almost inhumanly patient, focussed and integral.  This latter creates an affect of Lived History that Burgess can't match.  Since I'm much more a Burgess-type personality (as a writer, I mean) than a Tolstoy one, this worries me a little. But then culture as a whole, nowadays, including the novel is much more impatient than it is patient. Hmm.

Booker Longlist 2012, 7: André Brink, Philida (2012)

We have been here before. I mean, in terms of Brink’s writing; but also in more general terms. It's a solid book, and its heart is in the right place, but, but: we have been here before.

The novel is set in South Africa in the 1820s, and although divided between a number of voices, (most of whom live on a wine-farm in Zandvliet) it’s mostly the story of the title character, Philida, a slave. Here’s one thing: the story is based on historical reality, as a lengthy appendix makes plain. Here’s another: it’s the author’s family history, for the historical Philida was owned by the Brink family, André’s own antecedents. Philida has what (without historical warrant) Brink portrays as a rather tender and loving relationship with Francois, eldest son of her owner's family; it results in four children, not all of whom survive. That's where we start.

Francois’ father, Cornelis, is an old-school bigot and thoroughly unpleasant man.  His attempt to rape Philida in a bamboo field is described at length by Brink (he tries to force the issue by grabbing and threatening to kill Philida’s latest baby; he is thwarted by nothing more than Philida’s strength of will in refusing him—it’s an uplifting scene, but I didn’t believe it for a moment). ‘I don’t take no shit from nobody and even less from a slave,’ says Cornelis during his portion of the narrative. ‘They fornicate and multiply like rats on the farm … in my childhood it was easier. They knew their place.’ [77]. Lest we miss the historical parallels with modern-day old-school bigots who oppose political correctness and pine for an imagined past, Brink slams the point home:

That was before the bloody English came here and thought they could just take over and started making laws … so many working hours per day, so many stripes if they need punishment, a Slave Protector to complain to, I ask you. [77]

And indeed it is to this very same Slave Protector that Philida goes, looking for justice. That's the main action of first portion of the novel.  You see, P.'s lover Frans promised to manumit her in return for the sex she has given him; but he has gone back on the deal. The farm is failing, Frans is set to be married to wealthy white woman called Maria Magdalena Berrangé, and furious old Cornelis wants to sell Philida to a farm up-country. Actually he wants to kill her, but he doesn’t think he will get away with it.

It’s all decently written; often it is vivid, and some of it is moving.  On the downside there’s something modish about the refusal to use quotation marks for dialogue, the use of the present tense and the un-signposted shifts in narrator. Mind you, to balance that (and staying on the downside) there’s something archly old-fashioned and winsome about Brink’s habit—not for the first time in his writing career—of giving his chapters elaborate cod-eighteenth-century titles (‘Chapter XVII: A Very Short Chapter in Which Philida Makes The Commissioner An Offer’ and the like). The novel's first hundred pages are pretty good; then there’s a too-lengthy interlude in which Philida is instructed in the ways of Islam by a character called Labyn (‘Philida grins. Korhaan is a funny name. It’s a bird like a bustard, isn’t it? I suppose it is because you can say it flies its own way, says Labyn. It puts wings in your head’ [187]). Eventually Philida converts:

All I know is I want to be one with the Slamse, that’s where I belong. You Christians treat me like dirt. [231]

Which is all fine and dandy, although it rather soft-peddles the fact that it was the Christians who spent the 19th-century (howsoever belatedly) outlawing slavery, whilst Muslim slave-traders continued happily trading human beings to the end of the century and beyond (here: 'by the 1890s the largest slave population of the world, about 2 million people, was concentrated in the territories of the Sokoto Caliphate ... the Anti-Slavery Society estimated there were 2 million slaves in Ethiopia in the early 1930s out of an estimated population of between 8 and 16 million ... Keltie believes that for every slave the Arabs brought to the coast at least six died on the way or during the slavers' raid'). Still, slavery is a great evil; and we Europeans have more than enough blood on our consciences to be going on with.

Brink takes the bare-bones of Philida’s story and fleshes them out. But he makes his central character into such a beacon of righteousness that historical plausibility begins to bend and shake. I daresay he was only too acutely aware of the dangers of his project—his great-great-howevermany-greats-uncle bodily exploited the historical Philida; now here he is, another wealthy white South African called Brink, now metaphorically exploiting Philida for money and literary prize recognition. I wonder if this is why he repeatedly errs on the side of Philida’s imagined nobility, her dignity, her strength of will. She is, for instance, rather more interested in identity politics and philosophy than was the case, I'd hazard, for most nineteenth-century illiterates. ‘Ouma Nerlla, where am I not?’ she asks at one point. ‘Tell me where those places are so I can go look for myself’ [116]. And the novel ends (it is hardly a spoiler) on an upbeat moment of self-claiming, again modishly lacking the terminal full stop:

The I who was a slave and who now is free, who is a woman and who is everything.
I

One problem, I think, is the Amistad-problem. Spielberg’s film, driven by the exigences of a Hollywood narrative logic, had to move from darkness into the light, and as a result it rather implied that the 1841 Amistad trial marked the effective end of slavery and racism in the US—as if decades of continuing actual slavery, the massive bloodletting of the Civil War and a further century of Jim Crow oppression didn’t still lie ahead. The upbeat trajectory of Philida, including an (I thought) misjudged attempt to wring a bit of sympathy out of old Cornelis, who comes to Philida on his knees: all this is rather contradicted by the century and a half of institutionalised racist oppression that lies between the 1830s and Mandela’s release in the 1990s.

But maybe this isn't fair of me. In fact I think my problem with the novel is more the extent to which it feels derivative. That part of the story where Philida kills her own child to prevent it growing up a slave, for example, is rather crashingly derivative of Morrison’s Beloved, a much, much better novel. (Brink bases it, as Morrison did too, on historical fact of course; but I’m talking in terms of literary pedigree). More to the point, this is a novel that provokes the reader to cry aloud: But Brink himself has done this before! It’s a story about South Africa, about colour, the malignity of racism, apartheid and slavery. It’s a novel in which a white character and a black character connect in complex ways; in which characters trek from the coast inland and vice versa. In other words it’s like pretty much every other Brink novel.

I suppose Brink is most famous for his contemporary-set anti-apartheid novels, books like Rumours of Rain (1979) and the still potent A Dry White Season (1979). But even those kinds of books manifest an interest in longer historical timeframes—1991’s overlong An Act of Terror blends a story about Landman (an Afrikaner South African who becomes involved in an abortive plot to assassinate the SA President) with enough detail of Landman’s ancestors, from their arrival in South Africa in the eighteenth-century to the late 20th-, to make a historical novel in its own right. One of Brink’s earliest English-language novels (I’ll confess I know nothing of the books he wrote in Afrikaans) is the solid, Patrick-White-esque An Instant in the Wind (1976), set in 1749, and concerning a well-bred white woman called Elisabeth Larsson and a black man called Adam Mantoor who are stranded in the wilderness of the SA interior and must trek back to civilisation—the journey enables them to overcome their mutual, if unequal, colour prejudices ; it ends with a shag. The First Life of Adamastor (1993) is much the same story, recast as a kind of rationalised creation myth of the nation. If Philida is parasitic upon Brink’ s own family history, it’s also parasitic upon Brink’s own oeuvre. Characters from Brink’s earlier novels make their appearances here: Cupido Cockroach is one, wandering in from Praying Mantis (2005)—another historical novel based loosely upon actual fact, about a black character’s conversion to religion. There are other characters from another Brink novel, Chain of Voices (1982) also set in the 1820s on a farm in the interior of SA, about the clash between a strong-willed black character and a venal Afrikaans slave-owner. To call Philida Brink-by-numbers would be unfair; but we are entitled to wonder at what point diminishing returns cut in, and the retelling of this docudramatic material might give way to something new.