Selected Books (2)
Buzzards, Bloody Owls and one Hawk
This generation is frequently being scolded by its elders for its insular assumption that the only interesting literature has been and is being written in the Anglo-American languages. There is also the opposite attitude, equally extremist and against which the post-war writers healthily reacted, namely the assumption that anything written in French, German, Greek, etc., is for that reason wonderful. Somewhere in between lies common sense, but I must admit that publishers seem to me to be erring into the second fallacy. Maybe too many middlemen are concerned with the selection and translation process before the publisher can see the version he is going to print. Whatever the reason, out of seven translated novels I have been reading in the last few months, only one and a half are really worth while (half being one of the two novels in Hlasko’s double volume). Interestingly, the others fail, though in different degrees, mostly on the same count: moral earnestness. As the late Ernest Hemingway said, ‘a serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl’.
Up to a point, it is of course a question of humour, but we need not feel superior about that. I think our famous sense of humour is much overrated, and although it is by and large true that many continental writers seem to us to take themselves very seriously indeed, we tend to think we can escape that charge and keep our upper lips innocently stiff of dangerous emotion merely by indulging in a horribly camp humour of caste and one-upmanship; or, among the younger writers reacting against that, the same thing turned upside down from inverted snobbery, together with a slapstick humour of ‘hilarious scenes’ and verbally witty sketches deriving from the music-hall. Both kinds of humour are equally liable to date, but this in itself doesn’t matter (it can always acquire a period charm if the work survives). No, what is wrong is that it easily becomes prefabricated: this social witticism, that scene, that funny face, might just as well go into another part of the novel, or another novel altogether.
The humour I am talking about, which lifts a writer out of the bloody owl class, is in the very fabric of the novel, and it is always ambiguous: in the very same breath funny and sad, or satiric and melancholy, or frightening and grotesque, or any other combination according to the writer’s bent. It comes, in the last analysis, from a quality of mind, which can enable the writer to be both hatefully involved and devotedly detached.
Sometimes a writer shows this, or something of it, in one work but not in another. Marek Hlasko, for instance, in Next Stop — Paradise (Heinemann, Blue Passport Series) — a tough, unrelenting story of Polish outlaws condemned to drive trucks in impossible conditions out in the wilds — tempers the violence with a wry humour, especially in the irreverent dialogue, and with flashes of political irony, as in the stilted conversation between one of the drivers and the inspector, who says afterwards:
‘You’ve got to know the right approach . . . that’s the most important thing of all, Comrade Zabawa. Did you see how I talked to him? With warmth, in a proletarian, working-class way, in our way. And just like that’ — he snapped his fingers — ‘I made contact . . .’ He looked disapprovingly at Zabawa. ‘Why isn’t he in the party? Why don’t you work on him a bit? You can see he’s a shy fellow, but he responds to friendly words.’
Zabawa was sucking a dry branch. ‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to talk to him, in our own proletarian way . . .
The other novel in the volume, however, The Graveyard, falls well below that level. It is the story of a good party member who gets arrested overnight for drunkenness and himself precipitates his own ruin with the party by confessing the things he said, only to discover, at the very end and when even his own son and daughter have disowned him, that the police never kept his file. In form it is Kafkaesque. It ought to be sad-and-funny, indeed tragic through the satire. But it fails because the tone is wrong — too much is made of too petty things, not only by the hero but by the author.
Even so, it is considerably better than the other three books in the Heinemann Blue Passport Series, all without respite in the bloody owl class. There is The Red-Head, by Alfred Andersch (Germany) — the various melodramatic adventures of a German girl in a very film-thrillerish Venice, with long and intense thoughts by all on life, art, etc., in italics. Or The White Stone, by Carlo Coccioli (France), the story of a search for an Italian priest who lost his faith in the moment when he was not after all executed by the Germans as he had hoped. It opens intriguingly enough with a long document from the German officer in question, the only person, curiously enough, to show any wit-in-wisdom. ‘Why do you believe yourself to be a saint?’ he asks the priest.
Don Ardito opened his eyes wide and raised his head. I thought he was going to answer in some remarkable way — but no he sneezed! And he wiped his nose, sighed, stammered, ‘I’ve caught a cold, what a nuisance!’
Then, in a low but clear voice, ‘I have performed a miracle.’
This is the beginning of a quest — always an exciting formula. There are enough contrasts, thanks to the author’s distance at this point, to rouse our interest in the man. Sustained throughout, the author’s distance could have moved parallel with his approfondissement, but it is not sustained. The search becomes unbelievably solemn, with long, long letters from those who knew Don Ardito in Italy, in a prison camp in Poland, in France, in Mexico. There is an underlying mystical homosexuality in all the relationships and everyone is so desperately earnest about the poor man that one rapidly ceases to care whether or not he ever did regain his faith.
The moral earnestness of The Flowers are Fallen, by Riinzo Shiina (Japan), is equally intractable. An office girl gets into a tremendous frazzle because a man has tried to hold her hand in the train. All men are beasts. It is true that her friend has recently committed suicide rather than become impure ever, but even so, it is hard to go along with the heroine’s intensity, which leads her into the most unlikely situations: a man she hates at the office catches her in tears after a street approach and hears her cry out that she wants to die, which item of information apparently gives him such a blackmailing power over her that more and more incredibilities follow, all tied up with her unwitting ‘betrayal of the workers’ in her factory. This kind of innocence, treated differently, might have been immensely refreshing to our jaded Western sensibilities, but again, the tone is wrong, and he makes very heavy weather of it.
I said earlier that it was only up to a point a question of humour. Linked to the Hemingway dictum is something I. A. Richards once said, in a very different context (I think it was about Ella Wheeler Wilcox):
Such overstressing is often a very delicate indication of the rank of the author — when a commonplace either of thought or feeling is delivered with an air appropriate to fresh discovery, we can grow suspicious. For by the tone in which a great writer handles these familiar things we can tell whether they have their due place in the fabric of his thought and feeling, and whether therefore he has the right to our attention. Good manners, fundamentally, are a reflection of our sense of proportion, and faults of tone are much more than mere superficial blemishes.
Perhaps we should not expect too much. One and a half worthwhile novels out of seven isn’t bad, considering that only one out of fifty or more English novels is any good. There is, too, a sense in which everyone in the world is writing the same novel — a bit of his own reality presented for our information and possibly entertainment. So why fuss about The Novel? On the other hand, these writers are highly selected, at the top of their profession in their own country. We are entitled to enquire into what Dr Richards would call their rank.
Sometimes a writer tries to cheat himself into the right tone with tricks and knowingness. Mr Heinrich Böll, for example, in Billiards at Half Past Nine (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, who give us the best dust-jacket I have ever seen, by Mabey and FitzClarence), opens well enough with the right blend of humour, mystery, irony and tenderness, as we view Robert Faehmel through the eyes of his young and puzzled secretary. But it is easy to be mysterious before introducing the hero. If the hero is an author-persona disguised as an architect, the third in three generations of architects, all there, he can in no time at all turn into a crashing bore. Mr Böll moreover disguises his very earnestness with a style so jerky, such frequent shifts from interior monologue to snippets of dialogue to narrative to flash-back to past stories retold, that the book soon becomes unreadable.
Less unacceptable is The Novice, by Giovanni Arpino (Hodder & Stoughton), which describes in detail the growth and progress of an obsession in a middle-aged clerk for a young nun he sees each day at the tram-stop. As Denis de Rougemont has observed in a recent book (Comme toi-même), now that everything is allowed, the Tristan aspect of love, in which the loved one must be inaccessible, can only be treated today by making her under-age (Nabokov), incestuous (Musil), or politically removed (Pasternak). To make her a nun is, I suppose, another possibility, but in this case the inherent absurdity of their eventual meetings — given the circumstances — automatically destroys the Tristan aspect. However, the young nun is only making use of him to get out, and the denouement is not without humour. A slight tale, a light touch.
Is tone then a question of light touch? Not necessarily. In the end, it hardly matters what a novel is about, or what techniques the writer uses. What does matter, always, is the quality of his mind, present in every sentence, in every character and situation. An interesting mind will have the humour, the passion, the tenderness, the wisdom, in brief the right tone, at its disposal, simply by virtue of being what it is — in other words it is interesting because of them and those are the reasons for which we enjoy being in touch with it at every turn.
Signor P. M. Passinetti has such a mind. Venetian Red (Secker & Warburg — translated, incidentally, by himself and thus cutting out numerous middlemen), is a more important and better book than Lampedusa’s, which created such a fashionable fuss last year. It is formally old-fashioned, and within the form the author makes some elementary mistakes: the mystery figure of Marco, for instance, the disgraced son renounced by the Partibon family and mythologized by his eccentric niece and nephew, Elena and Giorgio, should not perhaps have been allowed to appear in the flesh at the end, he and his diary being a grave disappointment; there are also too many sudden switches into the minds of newly-introduced persons, accompanied by short case-histories; and some over-earnestness when characters too visibly speak the views of Signor Passinetti. None of these things matter, because they get absorbed into the author’s successful grappling with themes larger than his characters, larger than himself — war and peace, the meaning of patriotism (in a country where, as Giorgio says, the word ‘patriot’ is treated as a profession in biographical entries), the meaning of family ties, the functioning of the liberal imagination (the Partibons, who on the whole behave foolishly, losing the world but gaining their souls), as against the functioning of accepted forms in life, love, politics, death (the Fassolas, who gain the world and lose much else). The whole is shot through with a quiet humour, not only in the poetic, Chekhovian elisions of the dialogue, but in the concept of individual characters (such as aunt Ersilia, who fears for the family tombs on account of Venice sinking), and in individual scenes:
She sat near Paolo, looked at him intently and said with decision: ‘Delia and I have already composed a telegram.’
With a ceremonious gesture Paolo pointed to the medium-sized glass which the maid had filled for her. ‘Composed. But,’ he said, his eyes glowing, ‘where will you send it?’
For as Elena says to her lover:
You see, Ruggero, the really good family relationships, the ones that really work, are not the real ones, they are invented — how can I put it? They are honorary. And relationships should be like that even if by chance they happen to be real, that is, legal. They must have that kind of tone, of a thing which has been invented.
And that, in a nutshell, not only epitomizes the art of Signor Passinetti. It might also be included in somebody’s new Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction.
Page(s) 76-80
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