Something New

  We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“COLLECTED POEMS” by Fleur Adcock (Victoria University Press, $NZ50); “SELECTED POEMS” by Brian Turner (Victoria University Press, $NZ40)

            I’ve expressed this view before on this blog, but there’s no harm in repeating it: reviewing poetry can be a chore, not because the poetry is bad or unwelcome, but because it is hard to do justice to any collection of poetry. If each poem is worthy of the name, it demands a careful and thoughtful reading on its own, and it should bring forth from the reviewer a detailed exposition and critique. But, alas, reasons of space, and the patience of readers, make such an approach impossible. So the reviewer is left with a choice. First, there is what I would call the bibliographical approach (of which I admit I have often been guilty). The reviewer neatly checks off and name-checks as many poems as possible, says how often the poet does or does not use certain forms of imagery or versification, notes dominant themes of the poet (with examples) and then draws a conclusion. This can be good, factual reportage, but as reviewing it is often bloodless and sounds like the schoolroom. The alternative is the emotional approach. The reviewer swallows the collection of poetry whole, then makes a broad statement about what sort of poetry it is, and what emotional effect it has had. This can make for robust personal criticism – a statement about the poet’s successes and failure, perhaps - and can be lively in showing the reviewer’s engagement with the work. But just as often it can lead to vague, windy generalisations about the poet’s work  - the type of thing that often ends up being quoted in puffs for the poet’s later works.

            This reviewing problem is especially difficult when the two books under review are by familiar and well-established poets. Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems and Brian Turner’s Selected Poems gather together work that has already been reviewed often. In each case we are now getting the retrospctive of a whole writing career. How can a review, which is itself less than book length, possibly deal fairly with this? I shudder, grit my teeth, and resign myself to my usual mixture of dry bibliography and (probably) windy generalisations.

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            I will take the more formidable example first. Fleur Adcock, now in her 86^th year, had been publishing poetry since the early 1960s and has garnered much applause and many literary prizes along the way. Over fourteen of her collections have appeared in more than half a century. A fine hardback tome with a reader’s ribbon, her Collected Poems run to over 550 large pages. I assume that she has chosen to omit some of her earliest poems as we get only poems “from” her first two collections The Eye of the Hurricane (1963) and Tigers (1967). Otherwise, we can reasonably assume we are getting all 54 years of her oeuvre, right up to her two most recent collections The LandBallot (2014) and Hoard (2017) both of which you can find reviewed elsewhere on this blog. To make an obvious point, Fleur Adcock is as much a British poet as a New Zealand one. Probably our most famous living literary expat, she has spent most of her life in England. Most of her collections have been published by either Oxford University Press or Bloodaxe Books.

            So much for reportage stuff. What about the poems?

            I spent a week reading – generally with great pleasure and admiration – these Collected Poems, and I can find no better way of accounting for them than by dealing with them decade by decade as the poet has matured and aged.

            In the 1960s (the collections The Eye of the Hurricane and Tigers), Fleur Adcock in her 30s is already the strong master of stanza form who makes judicious use of rhyme and shows she is fully conversant with both the great tradition of poetry and the Classics. One of her most constant themes is relationships with husbands or lovers, but she has a cool, pragmatic way of dealing with them. There are no romantic rhapsodies, but a dissection of emotional facts ex post facto. Children are addressed or mentioned, but in a way that is meant to nudge them into the real world, pushing against illusions and fantasies. This is already a poet fully formed.

            In the 1970s (the collections High Tide in the Garden, The Scenic Ride, The Inner Harbour and Below Loughrigg) Fleur Adcock in her 40s still deals with lovers – there are a number of poems addressed to “you”, being presumably somebody with whom she is in a relationship, and many poems have the “do you remember?” trope.  But she shows more assertiveness in dealing with male authority figures and imposed male images like the bogeyman. There are poems recalling her discontent, being a mother of two at the time and wanting to leave New Zealand. Then there is a major shift to specifically English scenes and talk of travels further afield (Northern Ireland, Asia etc.). Her poems explore the Lake District extensively and there are the beginnings of one of her most constant preoccupations – the search for ancestors. Poems such as “Going Back” and “Instead of an Interview” give her reactions to returning to New Zealand on a visit, but also her confirmation that England is now her real home. She still makes classical allusions and can use traditional stanza forms, but she is now more likely to use looser forms, moving towards free verse.

            In the 1980s (the collections Selected Poems, the ballad Hotspur, and The Incident Book), now approaching, and in, her 50s, Adcock displays a growing sense of the perspective given by age. Some poems do indeed refer to cuurrent affairs or relationships, and she does dissect the relationships of other people – but her personal confessionalism of such matters in mainly seen through the medium of memory. There’s now the arrival of grandchildren and more poems both about children and about her memories of being a child at school in England. There is a flowering of sometimes quite light-hearted wit, often deploying rhyming couplets for more jocular verse.

In the 1990s (the collections Time Zone and Looking Back) Adcock shows an increasing interest in British fauna (poems about toads, wrens, house-martins) and “the ploughed fields of Middle England” (in the poem “Turnip-heads”). She makes reconnections with New Zealand and Australia and parts of Europe. Settling into grandmotherly mode, she writes poems about friendship being more enduring than blazing love affairs and assiduously continues her interest in ancestors, mainly with 19^th century forebears but sometimes digging much further back. Many poems are first-person confessional (at their worst, like diary jotting or ghosts of Edgar Lee Masters).

In the 2000s (the collection New Poems and Dragon Talk – the latter dedicated to her recently-deceased nonagenarian mother) Adcock presents a long sequence of poems – “My First Twenty Years” - about her childhood and youth in New Zealand and England.  She gives us a familiar paradox here – the further away from childhood poets get, the more likely they are to dwell upon it. There are poems in which she consciously confronts age (a wry poem about getting used to computers). Increasingly there is the sense that, having paid her debt to urgent issues, she is now, “all passion spent”, lighting candles to the past. When she was younger, she struggled with husbands and lovers. Now she snuggles grandchildren.

Now, in the 2010s, the poet of Glass Wings (2013) is in her 80s and writes quite a few “in memoriam” poems about deceased contemporaries, as well as poems about the irony that some oldsters are still living. The ailments of old age are addressed in poems like “Nominal Aphasia”, “Walking Stick” and “Macular Degeneration”, and there are more poems [some heavily ironical] about specific ancestors. In this phase, we are far from the young sexual rebel. A selection of poems about insects often recalls childhood, but just as often adult encounters with wasps, fleas, bees, dragonflies, ants (and the “crabs”). Her two most recent collections are The Land Ballot and Hoard. The former is a reconstruction of her grandfather’s and father’s lives in trying to make a go of an unpromising farm in the King Country, together with some memories of the poet’s own earliest New Zealand childhood. The latter combines memories of childhood and early marriages; recalls to ancestors; poems of the English landscape and – more fully than anywhere else in her work – observations on what New Zealand is now, often in the form of evoking what it once used to be.

What has all my dutiful chronicling of the decades told you, apart from the fact that – like all of us – the poet has grown older?  Or that the perspective of a woman in her 80s is not that of a woman in her 30s? Yes, the things Fleur Adcock chooses to deal with have changed, but the poet has essentially remained the person she is – observant, unsentimental, witty, well-read, a little acidic and presenting her own view of the world

Inevitably, there will arise the question of whether Fleur Adcock is a “feminist poet”. Personally, I think it is wrong to pigeonhole a poet of such variety with such a limiting label. Adcock writes about many things. She is never a proselytiser or preacher for any cause or ideology. Nor is she primarily a political poet or satirist, though in The Incident Book there is a clutch of poems called “Thatcherland” and she has written a poem on the negative effects of insectidices.

But I can see why the label “feminist poet” has sometimes been invoked. She expresses a strong awareness of the female body and is ready to deal with it in all its physicality (see the poem “The Soho Hospital for Women” in Below Loughrigg in 1970s; and precise memories of childbirth in “Counting” from 1991’s Time Zones). She shows scepticism of some men’s motives and asks hard questions about real (heterosexual) relationships. There is much sexual frankness, especially in earlier poems like “Against Coupling” (from High Tide in the Garden), advocating, with some irony, a preference for masturbation; or, from the 1960s, “Advice to a Discarded Lover”, which basically tells men to stop whining when their time is up.  Poems about stalkers and threats to women’s safety are found in 1983’s Selected Poems. And in other hands, some of the issues she touches could have been the occasion for preachiness – a fault she scrupulously avoids. In “Witnesses” in The Incident Book she broaches the matter of domestic violence. “Central Time” in Time Zones is about the exploitation of a prostitute. Regarding Adcock’s specifically female experience, I should note how she refers to the two husbands from her marriages in early adulthood. In “Letter to Alistair Campbell” (1977) and “Elegy for Alistair” (2013) she writes about Campbell affectionately and respectfully, recalling good times even if the marriage did not work out. In contrast, the second husband, Barry Crump, is referred to as “that anecdotal ape” in “Poem Ended by a Death” from the collection Below Loughrigg in the 1970s; and Crump is also the subject of some bitter verses in her most recent collection, Hoard.

Picking out poems like these – and only poems like these – one could readily call Adcock a “feminist poet”, and she is clearly sympathetic to feminist causes (note, for example, her admiring verses about the radical English Labour Party MP and feminist Ellen Wilkinson, in Hoard). But her feminism is simply the feminism of expressing what it is like to live a woman’s life, as daughter, wife, lover, mother, grandmother and independent woman. Any adoptable “messages” are implicit only, and for readers to work out. No banners are waved.

Away with solemnity. Adcock has an excellent strain of wit and the ability to banter in verse. I chuckled at her “Proposal for a Survey”, when she was reconnecting with England in  Below Loughrigg. I guffawed at her “The Prize-Winning Poem” from 1983’s Selected Poems. I smirked at her poem resenting anti-smokers in Time Zones. (Though – sorry! – the  wit can become a little catty, as in “Festschrift” in 1997’s Looking Back.)

I must add a few personal notes before I hit my peroration. I’m glad Fleur Adcock wrote “In Memoriam: James K.Baxter” in her 1974 collection. For me, seeing such a measured farewell to the man takes away some of the sickly taste of Allen Curnow’s smug and self-important “Refusal to Read Poems of James K.Baxter to Honour his Memory etc.” I love it when Adcock goes historical and corrects Shakespeare’s fictitious version of Harry Hotspur in her ballad Hotspur. And I delighted in “Leaving the Tate” (in The Incident Book), one of the best articulations I’ve yet encountered on the way art influences the way we see things.

So what’s the peroration? Simply this. I know one week’s reading is not due attention to a whole life’s writing, but my week of reading the Collected Poems was a week of enjoying poems written so clearly and so pungently. Away with the ranks of obscure acrostic-mongers, who think they are writing poetry when they are only signalling their superiority to bewildered readers. Fleur Adcock writes clearly and unambiguously. You know what she is driving at and why. This certainly does not mean that everything can be extracted from one of her poems in a single reading. No worthwhile poem can be read that way. It simply means that she connects with her readership, without condescension. This reader was delighted to be carried along.

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Okay, comparisons are odious and, apart from this brief bibliographical note, I’m not going to make comparisons between two very different poets. A decade younger than Fleur Adcock, Brian Turner is in his 75^th year. Also a handsome hardback with reader’s ribbon, his Selected Poems is a more modest volume that Adcock’s Collected Poems, being about 220 pages of poetry. His selection covers 38 years from his first collection Ladders of Rain (1978) to his most recent Night Fishing (2016), and includes 21 previously uncollected poems. (Reviews of his Elemental [2012] and Night Fishing can be found elsewhere on this blog.) As a final comparison, Turner is unlike Adcock in that he is firmly attached to New Zealand, and very few of his poems stray outside this country. Only from the collection Inside Out (2011) do we get “Easter Monday, Hampstead Heath”, conveying a New Zealander’s  return to the country of his ancestors and his reactions to London, with all his baffled expectations. There are also, in the concluding 21 hithero-unpublished poems, references to visits to Athens, Oregon etc.

Now I move away from reporting and look at the poems themselves.

Nearly all Turner’s poems deal with the South Island landscape, fuana, flora, mountains, rivers (especially boulder-filled one), rocks, winds, deer, wild pigs, harrier hawks, the blue of the sky and those baffling creatures called human beings. There are frequent references to the poet’s pleasure in fishing (sometimes specified as trout fishing) and in cycling.

This is not to say that Turner has never changed as a poet. While the physical milieu is fairly constant, the tone and focus have gradually modulated over the years. Human interface with nature is often harsh in Turner’s earlier works. In his 1978 debut volume, the poem “Four Seasons” has a cruel and dispiriting ending where “like wilting plants / we fight a slow death by depredation”. “Hawk” has a touch of the Ted Hughes with its vision of the bird as a death-bearer. But by the time we reach the collection Footfall (2005), Turner is able to set aside some of his solemnities. In the poem “Cycling in the Maniototo” “I baa at sheep / shout at magpies moo / with cattle, marvel at / the panache of hawks / riding the air…” The very picture of a poet being gay in such a jocund company, even if in the next collection The Six Pack (2006) there are many poems about the howling winds.

As a poet who started publishing only in his mid-30s, Turner has always had an awareness of ageing and of a younger generation pushing behind him, as in the 1983 volume Listening to the River with the poems “The Age of Descent” and “Riding High”. He has also always had a strong streak of confessionalism. The collection Bones (1985) touches on such intimate things in the poems “The Visit” and “Chestnuts on a Mantelpiece”, that we seem to be eavesdropping. Even so, these Selected Poems are, throughout, always discreet about the mother of the poet’s son and other intimacies. These things may be suggested by the poet’s declared feelings, but they are not spelled out.

On the personal level, childhood and the family into which Turner was born loom very large  - especially Turner’s relationship with his parents.  These things began to be examined in Ancestors (1981) and became a major focus in the volume All That Blue Can Be (1989), with a tender poem of childhood memories relating to his mother (“The Mixing Bowl”). The title poem of Beyond (1992) deals with the tragedy of parents ageing. In later collections Turner produces empathetic poems about his father in “Monte Cassino”, “My Father in Autumn” and “Memories of War”, in all of which the father is seen as a man of another generation, doing his duty in time of war, but having his own sensitivities under a rough exterior. The detailed poem “Case Notes” concerns parents’ influence on children, while in Inside Out (2011) “Conversations with my son” looks at the same issue from another angle. The examples of childhood recall are many, with “Taieri Days” (from Just This, 2009) being almost Wordsworthian in its recall of innocence meeting a benign variety of nature.

If I invoke Wordsworth, it’s also of note that, along with the direct experience of nature, Turner also has his poetic and artistic mentors. As early as Ancestors in 1981, he is referring to Eugenio Montale and Denis Glover – joined in Listening to the River by Richard Strauss, from whose “Four Songs” Turner gleans the sad knowledge that “nothing bores deeper than the knowledge of loss”. Naturally, as for any South Island landscape poet, there is the influence of James K. Baxter. In “The Rocks Below” (All That Blue Can Be, 1989), Turner declares “On this wild exposed coast the young Baxter / mooched and meandered and grappled / with the anguish of wondering if he would ever grown up / someone of consequence.” As I’ve said before on this blog, one can’t help wondering if Turner’s “Abandoned Homestead” in the same collection didn’t take a nudge from Baxter’s “The Fallen House”. Later in the Selected Poems, Turner often expreses his pleasure in listening to classical music.

There is also a strain of sophisticated wit in Turner’s work. It really comes to the fore in the 2001 collection Taking Off with “Semi-Kiwi”, about not being a handyman, and the linguistic fun of “Take Heart”. Going aphoristic (as Turner often does) there is in the 2011 collection Inside Out, the one-line poem “New Zealanders, a Definition” which reads in its entirety  “Born here, buggered it up.”

As you can see, I have gone bibliographic in this notice so far, and have foolishly ignored Turner’s craft while counting off his most constant themes. If pithiness and aphorism are often his forte, we cannot ignore the aptness of his imagery. If I began quoting this in detail, I would continue to tedious length. I’ll satisfy myself by quoting, from 1985’s Bones, the melancholy lines of “October in the Otamita” which yield up the arresting image “the hot October sun / bastes a glaze on the water / that shines like shellac” Yes!!!

Nominating favourites from a poet’s life work is usually verboten in reviews of volumes such as this one, but I can say that I kept coming back to, and re-reading, the heart-stopper “Firstborn”, about what truths one can tell a child (from All that Blue Can Be, 1989) and the equally affecting “Beyond”, dealing with the tragedy of parents ageing (from Beyond 1992). Like them, “Easter Monday, Hampstead Heath” (from the collection Inside Out, 2011) is a densely-written and meaningful poem, carefully wrought, and saying much about the Pakeha New Zealander condition. For some reason, too, the delightful  “Alp” (from All that Blue Can Be) sticks in my mind. It is one of Turner’s best poems giving a personality to nature.

As I said at the top of this notice, comparisons are indeed odious, but I can’t help setting Turner beside some younger poets who have also dealt extensively with the South Island landscape. DavidEggleton has a broader vision, a greater sense of humanity in the landscape and a very strong sense of how the different cultures have had an impact on it. His verse bounces and is often wildly satirical. Unlike Eggleton, but like some South Island poets (Owen Marshall, for example), Turner shows very little awareness of Maori in the landscape. Richard Reeve creates more chiselled verse out of the South Island, and is our moralist of the scene, always aware of the deleterious effect of human impact upon the environment. Turner makes a few gestures to environmentalism in later poems such as “Dry River” and “As We Have Long Been Doing”, which are somewhat preachy about ecology. But he is more often the solitary man contemplating the wilderness, relating this to how his heart feels and frequently – very frequently – expressing a sense of loss. Is this the loss of childhood, or love or solidarity with the dead or a sense of the eternal decay of things? All of these things perhaps. The wind blows, the tussock moves, the mountains loom, the hawk circles and the poems stick in your mind. What more can one say?

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“BEL-AMI” by Guy de Maupassant (first published in serial form in the newspaper Gil-Blas in 1885; published in book form later in the same year )

            Three times before on this blog I’ve considered works by Guy de Maupassant (see the postings on Pierreet Jean, Une Vie and Fort Comme la Mort). Each time I’ve made the points that de Maupassant (1850-93) is a writer whom I find easy to read in the original French; and that he was as much novelist as short-story writer, even if English-speaking readers know him mainly for his short stories. But there is one of de Maupassant’s novels which has become internationally known. Bel-Ami is the novel which, I believe, cemented in English-speakers’ minds the notion that the French are a sexually-scandalous race, especially as the novel appeared in the late nineteenth century and its frank depiction of a serial seducer could never have been published in contemporaneous Victorian England. When a (slightly bowdlerised) English-language translation of the novel finally appeared in the early 1900s, it added to the title the subtitle “The Story of a Scoundrel”, just in case readers didn’t agree that the protagonist should be viewed as a wicked, wicked man. Bel-Ami was an enormous hit on its first publication in France. In the annotated French “Lire et Voir” edition in which I read it, the editor notes that the novel ran through 51 re-printings in the first two years after its first publication. It made de Maupassant rich and freed him from journalistic hack-work.

To simplify brutally, Bel-Ami concerns a careerist who sleeps his way to the top. 

Georges Duroy is a handsome, down-on-his-luck ex-army sergeant aged about 30. De Maupassant often refers to him as “un jeune homme”. In Paris and without a job, he meets his old army buddy Charles Forestier who is now making a living as a journalist. Forestier and his wife Madeleine find Duroy work on the newspaper La Vie Francaise, but Duroy (whose writing abilities are minimal) finds he can’t rise above being a lowly paid “reporter” (the English word is used in the original French text). Madeleine Forestier – who really writes her husband’s articles for him – advises Duroy that he will get ahead if he seduces the influential Madame Clotilde de Marelle. Duroy does so and, through Clotilde de Marelle’s influence and contacts, he begins to flourish in journalism and gets an increased salary. It is Clotilde’s little daughter Laurine who gives Duroy the nickname “Bel-Ami” (meaning, approximately, “sweetheart”), by which he soon becomes generally known. But when Forestier dies (he has been presented as a sick man since the novel’s beginning), Duroy promptly dumps Clotilde de Marelle and marries the widowed Madeleine Forestier, who has even more wealth and influence than his mistress. Of course Madeleine keeps the aristocratic lover she already has, and Duroy continues his priapic adventures. Even the jilted Clotilde is happy to become his mistress once again.

But Duroy, now well-paid and the newspaper’s chief political correspondent, still wants to climb higher. He is nettled that his colleagues all know it is really his wife Madeleine who writes his articles. Within his hearing they even call him “Forestier”. So how can he get ahead? Simple – seduce the fluttery and silly middle-aged Virginie Walter, the wife of the newspaper’s millionaire owner. Of course he is soon bored with Virginie’s sentimentality and clinginess and wants to dump her; but through what we would now call “insider trading” both Duroy and Virginie’s husband gain much wealth. And Duroy is able to bully his wife Madeleine into giving him half the handsome legacy her aristocratic lover leaves her when he dies. He then unceremoniously divorces Madeleine by getting the vice-squad to burst in and catch her sleeping with one of her other lovers, the Foreign Minister forsooth.

Duroy is now rich and well-connected, but he has one more step to take before he reaches the top. Virginie Walter’s naïve adolescent daughter Suzanne, unaware of her mother’s boudoir behaviour,  thinks Duroy is wonderful. M. and Mme. Walter want Suzanne to marry an aristocrat, but Duroy elopes with her. To prevent a scandal,

M. and Mme. Walter agree that Duroy can marry Suzanne. As the Church sees his first (civil) marriage as no marriage at all, and can therefore ignore both his marriage and his divorce, Duroy is able to get a big society church wedding at La Madeleine. He is now editor-in-chief of La Vie Francaise. He is rich. He has managed to be awarded the Legion of Honour by corrupt officials and he has even expunged from common knowledge his humble peasant origins by having the aristocratic title of Baron conferred upon him. Georges Duroy, “Bel-Ami”, is now officially Le Baron Du Roy de Cantal. What more could a conniving arriviste want?.... And of course, he will still be keeping his knowledgeable mistress Clotilde de Marelle.

            You will agree that this account of a man winning, without any retribution, wealth and position by progressing cynically through at least four women’s beds (not to mention short-term affairs en route) is something that could not have been published in Victoria’s England.

            Yet the element of sex is worth considering in more detail. For all the protagonist’s obvious amorality, for all the depiction of a society where marital infidelity is the rule rather than the exception, and sex is routinely exchanged for money, there are no explicit sex scenes in this novel. De Maupassant, whenever he establishes that Duroy has made another conquest, always breaks off before the bedroom is reached.

His depiction of sexual relations is brutal. It is clear that at least two of Duroy’s women have a taste for “rough”. Clotilde de Marelle insists on being taken by Duroy to the haunts of prostitutes, especially the promenade of the Folies-Bergere, and it is clear that she is both used to, and admires, the aggressive men to be picked up there. (One of the novel’s cruellest scenes has Duroy running into one of his casual women – the prostitute Rachel – at the Folies-Bergere and a fight ensuing when she realizes that she has been dumped for the woman with more social influence.) Madeleine Forestier eagerly wants to meet Duroy’s lowly peasant family once she has married the cad. Again, she wants something tougher, rougher and hornier-handed than the boyish journalists who have previously filled her bed.

And there is that little matter of how we, as readers, are supposed to take Duroy’s sex-life. How much, as he ostensibly condemns a corrupt society, is de Maupassant in fact celebrating penis-power? (This is similar to Zola’s ostensibly negative view of captalism in LaCuree – you can’t help noticing how much Zola in fact admires money-power and what it can do.) Some of the episodes in Bel-Ami are like a roue’s fantasy:- Duroy seducing Madeleine Forestier when the corpse of her first husband in still warm; Duroy getting to seduce and sleep with both mother Virginie Walter and daughter Suzanne Walter. Other episodes seem very close to the life of de Maupassant himself, a big, virile man who was also the serial seducer of women from a higher social class than the one he was born to. (He once described his hobby as “seducing duchesses”.) De Maupassant, after this novel won him riches, named his yacht “Bel-Ami” and mimicked Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!” by saying “Bel-Ami c’est moi!”. Francis Steegmuller’s 1950 biography says very quaintly “It can scarcely be denied that someone possessing de Maupassant’s savagely utilitarian approach to most of womankind, with all the brutal details of relationship which it implies, must necessarily have certain traits included in any definition of the word blackguard.” As a major criticism of this novel, I found it hard to believe that so many women would so easily fall for the handsome Georges Duroy. To me, this seemed like something of a wishful male’s fantasy. Yet, as de Maupassant himself clearly knew his way around the country of Seduction, he presumably knew what he was talking about.

De Maupassant disingenuously said this novel was based on nobody in particular, but it has been easy for literary historians to trace the real-life originals of journalists, mistresses and society people whom de Maupassant used as his models.

For balance, it has to be said that in Bel-Ami de Maupassant is as much concerned with the shabby state of journalism, and the state of politics in the France of his day, as he is with sex. He is savagely critical of France’s expansionist imperialism. Episodes in the novel concerning fictitious events in Morocco really reflect shady French dealings in Algeria. He sees public honours as a sham – the Legion of Honour is awarded to people who have either powerful friends in government or the money to buy influence. Politicians are mainly concerned to amass fortunes for themselves, as in the novel’s treatment of “insider trading” by government ministers. Venality rules society with a savagery that would have startled even Balzac. As for the newspapers, it is clear throughout the novel that they are all controlled by political interests and are in effect propaganda sheets.  In the novel, Georges Duroy learns from other journalists how to use ghost-writers when he is incapable of writing something himself; how to fake interviews with visiting celebrities; and how to gather malicious and slanted information to produce “echos” [a gossip column]. The irony is that the fictitious newspaper La Vie Francaise was closely based on Gil-Blas, the newspaper where de Maupassant worked for years, and in which some of his novels (including this one) were first serialised. Another reason for seeing some identification of Duroy with his creator.

Some people have detected a teeny bit of antisemitism in the novel. The newspaper magnate Walter is a Jew who has opportunistically converted to Catholicism and is depicted unsympathetically as a grasping vulgarian. More pervasive, though, is the novel’s strain of anticlericalism where de Maupassant, like his contemporary Zola, satirises or attacks the Church. Mme. Walter is a pious church-going woman. Duroy’s first rendezvous with her is in a church, with its odour of sanctity. This scene has been compared with Emma Bovary’s first tryst, in a church, with her lover in Madame Bovary. Even more, it is reminiscent of Valmont wilfully seducing a pious church-going woman in Les Liaisons Dangereueses. Later, jilted, Mme. Walter confuses the image of Christ with the image of her seducer. Religious piety, in this outing, is just repressed sex. Then, of course, there is the whole sham of the elaborate church-wedding that caps Duroy’s worldly success.

Bel-Ami is a swift-moving and in it own way engaging novel, even if most of its characters are loathsome. Yet there is a point at which its gallop becomes wearisome. I think Odile Bombarde, the woman who wrote the introduction to the “Lire et Voir” edition, put her finger on it when she said of Georges Duroy  “il n’evolue nullement, il se contente de perfectionner ses moyens” (“he doesn’t evolve, he’s happy just to perfect his skills”). Later she describes the protagonist as “l’antithese d’un etre du roman au psychisme subtil” (“the opposite of a character found in a novel with subtle psychology.”). Once established as cad, bounder, seducer and arriviste, George Duroy stays that way, and even if specific episodes can’t be foreseen by the reader, the way Duroy reacts to anything becomes entirely predictable. In other words, it’s a little one-dimensional.

Cinematic Footnote: Gentle reader, let me tell you that a little superficial research (i.e. a quick squizz at Wikipedia) tells me that Bel-Ami has been filmed many times, including three times in English-language versions. In 1939, only a few months before war broke out, there was a German film version which was once interpreted as anti-French propaganda (“those decadent, immoral, conniving French” etc. etc.), but which has more recently been hailed as sprightly comedy. Oddly enough, this version (without subtitles) is readily available on Youtube.  In France itself there was a film version in 1955, a telemovie in 1982 and another telemovie in 2005. As for English-language versions, there was a BBC TV serial in the 1970s and a 2012 European version with an Anglophone cast.

But probably the most notorious, and notoriously silly, version was Hollywood’s 1946 attempt called The Private Affairs of Bel-Ami, directed by Albert Lewin and with an opening credit warning us “This is the story of a scoundrel”. Georges Duroy was played by Hollywood’s resident suave English swine George Sanders, the cadaverous John Carradine played his friend Charles Forestier, and the main women in Duroy’s life were played by Ann Dvorak and a very young Angela Lansbury. One genuine Frenchman was involved in the production – Darius Milhaud, who wrote the soundtrack score. But I cannot help wondering how much he might have laughed at the finished product. For The Private Affairs of Bel-Ami is so bowdlerised and altered from de Maupassant’s novel that is is usually hard to discern any real connection with its literary source. The occasional episode derives from de Maupassant, but the film quickly smothers it with moralising dialogue reminding us what a wicked man Duroy is. And of course Duroy has to be punished for his sins. In the film’s ending, he dies in a duel (there is a duel mid-novel, but it is an incidental thing), but not before repenting and regretting that he has never truly loved anyone. In short, this is a textbook example of how frank novels simply couldn’t be filmed in the days of the old Hollywood production code.

I regret to inform you, this is the only film version of the novel that I have seen in its entirety.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

CONSTRUCTED BUBBLES

            We had been in Amsterdam for just a few days when our daughter-in-law suggested she take us on a day-trip to the ancient town of Utrecht. We’d never been there, so we accepted her invitation happily. My spirits sang as we drove through the countryside. Of course we were on a new, modern, multi-lane motorway. Of course there were signs of modernity around us as we whizzed along – wind-turbines and modern drainage systems. But the flat fields and the bare, deciduous winter trees with crows in them, and the occasional old farm-house and windmill all looked just the way 17^th century Dutch landscape painting said they would. The stuff of reverie.

But as we approached Utrecht, my heart sank. The outskirts of the city are a great, flat, anonymous plain, covered in big, box-like high-rises, some of them being apartment blocks but more of them being office blocks and company HQs with corporate logos on them. It was the kind of settlement that is plonked down in the middle of nowhere, looking like a child’s organisation of Lego blocks, blank and soulless.  Then we went through dull modern suburbs, clogged inner-city roads, and finally parked in a big, dark and noisy car-park.

A few streets away we entered “old” Utrecht – still a living and inhabited part of the city, with modern shops smelling of fresh wood and soap and cleanliness, and with cafes and commuters on bicycles, but nevertheless the traditional part of the city that we had come to see. It was centred on an old canal and the buildings were old-style Dutch, three or four storeys tall, even if re-purposed for modern life. So to a tour through the medieval Catholic cathedral of St Martin, which has been a Calvinist church since the Protestant Reformation, its great bell-tower now standing separate from the body of the cathedral ever since a great storm in the 1670s stove in part of its roof.

We spent four of five hours in “old” Utrecht, we delighted in it, we did the things tourists do.

But this thought kept nagging at me. We were not seeing the real Utrecht – the modern city where thousands of people actually work and live. We were seeing the small, unrepresentative part of Utrecht that had been preserved for tourists like us.

We had similar experiences later in our journey as we were driven into other cities. Of course Prague was for us the great castle and Wenceslas Square and the Franz Kafka museum and Charles Bridge over the Vtlava (Moldau) and St Vitus cathedral and opera at the Estates Theatre, not to mention that very spacious traditional apartment we rented just around the corner from the main old market square. But (apart from Wenceslas Square) this was not the modern city through which we were driven by taxi to and from the airport – the shabby fringes of the city, the repetitive suburban streets, the apartment blocks and the dull normality of it. Likewise our experience of Turin – a lovely apartment in a gated courtyard, within easy walking distance of the opera house, the Risorgimento musem, the church with the Shroud and other things tourists delight to see. But our night-time ‘bus journey from the airport had taken us through the most forlorn, industrialised graffiti-bombed outskirts of Turin, and the real city where most people lived.

You can see where I am heading here, can’t you? I could have detailed kindred experiences in Paris, Madrid, Lisbon and elsewhere, but Utrecht, Prague and Turin are enough to make my point. What tourists most often see and focus on, in any major city, are things that are not the norm, not representative of the local population’s real way of life. They are bubbles, abstracted from modern life and put on display. Any travel brochure, “holiday” show on television or blogsite devoted to travel and tourism really depicts an unreal world, a world of “highlights” and antiquities and treasures carefully conserved.

A constructed world.

And such worlds really are constructed. Later in our same journey, we visited our son in Yorkshire and walked the dales with him. He pointed out that all the modern houses around his town of Settle have to be built to a special code, to make them conform to the traditional look of the place. So even houses clearly having modern elements to them, such as steel window-casings, still have to be made from the same dull yellowy-grey stone [or its simulacrum] and have the same slate-grey roofs as the older houses. There is to this an element of “preserving Toytown” and allowing visitors to believe that a traditional way of life still continues here, undisturbed. Indeed, there are such building codes across the older parts of most European towns and cities. I recalled that in the spacious apartment we rented in the old city of Prague, we had to trudge up 88 stairs to our door because it is forbidden, in that area, to modify old buildings by installing lifts.

Is there any harm to this conservation of the ancient, or this recreation of the ancient? Not really, just so long as we never assume that in seeing the tourist spots we have really encountered a local population’s way of life. As for those who think that have “done” a city or country by looking only at its tourist spots – ah me, they must be the subject of another day’s sermon.

FOOTNOTE: This article was written and posted a week before news came that there had been a shooting in Utrecht killing at least three people. Of course no city is literally a bubble extracted from the world that surrounds it - but the phenomenon of the tourist bubble is still a reality.

Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“A MISTAKE” by Carl Shuker (Victoria University Press, $NZ30)

            It’s rare to come across a novel that succeeds in telling a compelling story in clear prose, with great intelligence and without patronising its readers. Carl Shuker’s A Mistake succeeds in all these ways.

I admired Shuker’s first novel The Method Actors, which was baroque by comparison with A Mistake, but which sounded deeply our reactions to, and understanding of, Japan. I wasn’t so taken by his second novel, The Lazy Boys, mainly because it dealt with a circle of people – deadbeat Kiwi university students – who are alien to me; but I wouldn’t deny the author’s skill in bringing his characters to life, or the authenticity of his tale. In their very different ways, both The Method Actors and The Lazy Boys employed many modernist and perhaps post-moderninst techniques in narration that would alienate some readers.

Is A Mistake Shuker’s deliberate move away from this style of writing?

The prose here is pared-back, straightforward (although much medical jargon necessarily comes into it) almost minimalist. The narrative is linear, without any elaborate flashbacks or flashforwards. The ideas are strictly focused and the novel is brief (fewer than 200 pages). Although not a medical man himself, Shuker draws on much knowledge of medicine, having been an editor for the British Medical Journal and having – as the acknowledgements note – drawn upon the advice of medical people.

Elizabeth Taylor (yes, some people make a joke of her name), in her early 40s, is the only woman consultant surgeon in Wellington hospital. With her registrar Richard McGrath, she performs surgery on a young woman, Lisa. In the course of the procedure, she finds severe sepsis around an IUCD (contraceptive device) in the young woman. Also in the procedure her registrar, at her instruction, inserts a surgical device, but in a way that severely damages the young woman. Elizabeth attempts to repair the damage. Post-operation, Lisa is transferred to intensive care, and dies.

So to the guilt and the recriminations. Did Lisa die because of Elizabeth’s faulty surgery? Or because of her registrar’s inept insertion of the surgical device? Or because of the pre-existing sepsis? Or because of the way she was looked after in the intensive care unit? If there was a “mistake”, whose mistake was it?

Synopsised in these terms, A Mistake could sound like the outline of a TV medical show – but it is no such thing. Through this situation, Shuker produces not only a detailed character in Elizabeth herself, but also vivid accounts of pressures upon the medical profession and the politicking that surrounds it. Elizabeth is aware that the Minister of Health is promoting “transparency” by making public reports on people who have died in surgery – in effect, publicly “ranking” surgeons. She and a colleague are trying to get published, in a prestigious British medical journal, an article about the negative effects of such a policy. They argue that it will increasingly make surgeons more risk-averse, and more likely to avoid poorer, less-healthy patients, and to take on only uncomplicated cases, to protect their reputations and career prospects. There are also, throughout the novel, many suggestions about the different conditions prevalent in private and public hospitals, and about the privileges of those surgeons who have come from private schools and who have parents in the medical profession.

Elizabeth is under many pressures. Early in the piece, we are told: “Elizabeth’s voice was cheery and pleasant. She had been up for 27 hours. This was the end of her on-call. She was so constipated she had not used the toilet in two days. It was useful for operating. She hadn’t drunk any liquids but coffee all day and her bowels burned and felt dry and heavy and wooden, reliable.” (p.11) Anybody who knows about the life of surgeons in public health will know about the long, tiring hours they have to work. Elizabeth also knows that to be a surgeon is to have to live with stress. When her registrar Richard seeks some words of consolation for the accusations he feels are levelled at him, she thinks: “How much mercy do you need? She thought what to say. How to let him hang from the hook and still function. How to learn to love the hook.” (p.31) “Loving the hook” must mean getting used to the inevitable stress. Elizabeth goes through the trauma of meeting the dead young woman’s parents, and has to face a “Morbidity and Mortality” session in which colleagues dissect her surgical abilites. Obviously this will have an impact on her career. In much of this, we are also aware that she is a woman in a male-dominated profession, sometimes patronised and often protecting herself with sarcastic wit.

Yet we are never nudged into seeing her either as a victim or as faultless. She operates while listening to thrash metal and while worrying about the article she is writing. Is this foolish distraction from the job on hand? She is often abrupt with people and comes close to being her own worst enemy when dealing with those who are assessing her case. Throughout the novel she makes snap judgements on people – often signalled by two or three lines physically summing up somebody to herself, and then thinking something negative. A whole lot of things are implied by this habit – her arrogance, but also her cocksureness. After all, you have to be not only skilled, but also self-confident, to plunge a surgical knife into somebody.

More generally, Shuker presents most of Elizabeth’s professional friends as hedonistic and smugly wealthy, like the hip bourgeois lawyer and his wife in Wellington, or the hard-partying surgeons in Auckland.

How or whether Elizabeth’s problems are resolved is for the reader to find out (I have synopsised little of the novel here). But I can note the range of images Shuker deploys to characterise her. Throughout her story, there are details of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, about which she thinks often – an apparently tiny thing that caused the death of a full compliment of astronauts. Surgical fatalities are also often the result of something tiny. Disreetly at first, but more clearly later on, we are told that Elizabeth is a lesbian whose relationships are precarious and so who is esentially a solitary person. She is childless by choice, with many implications that a woman wishing to get ahead in a highly-paid but very stressful career in surgery has to give up many things. There is also her determination to fix and restructure her house on her own – a situation which leads to another “mistake” late in the novel. The single-mindedness that allows one to become a surgeon is similar to the aggressive ability to pull a house apart and put it together again.

Like all good novels, however, A Mistake is not as neatly schematic as I might have made it seem in this notice. You are pulled along by the momentum of the story, by the sharp characterisation, by the social awareness and understanding of a whole profession; indeed by all the things that make it not only a good read but also a great brain-piece.