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.     

“THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST” by Norman Mailer (first published 2007)

Dear Normie,

            You don’t mind my calling you Normie, do you? Your mum  - sorry, mom – and  your dad called you Nachem Malech Mailer and that sounds a perfectly good name to me, but you had to Anglicise it as Norman Kingsley Mailer and I’m damned if I understand why. Did you want to fit in with the crowd? I think you did, didn’t you? I mean you were always trying to join the hipsters or trying to be a boxer or a gangster or showing how you could consort with crims (and glamourise them) and telling women to get back into the kitchen as if you were trying to prove something. It always sounded to me very like that mummy’s boy Ernest Hemingway trying to be all macho by shooting animals and catching big fish. Normie the tough guy? Nah – it never quite worked, and a lot of the real hipsters (especially black jazz musicians) saw you as a bit of a clown.

Anyway, Normie, how’s it going in the land of the dead? I don’t really believe you’re going to read any of this because you kicked the bucket in 2007 when you were 84, and frankly I like the fact that you’re dead. I’m just being realistic here, not vindictive. If you were still around, you’d probably try to punch me out, the way you did with a number of people, or maybe you’d stab me and almost kill me the way you did with your second wife. Speaking of wives, you went through six of them, not to mention a horde of casuals and groupies. I’m told that you were basically good to your nine children, so good for you; but a guy who burns through so many women is clearly lacking in real intimacy, love, commitment or respect. Oops! I’ve used words that reveal me as a square, right? But I’m still right to see you as a guy who thought love began and ended with an orgasm and that was it.

God, how fragile you were – how ready you were to take offence and wanted to bash people! The funny thing is, I was sometimes on your side when it came to such fracas. Yes, Gore Vidal was an irritating, smug member of the WASP ascendancy, and he richly deserved to be taken down. Part of me wishes you’d head-butted or punched him harder. But then you were really falling for the smug guy’s trap, weren’t you? Snide Vidal wanted to rile you up so that you would lose your temper and he could play the innocent victim. It’s an old scenario easily played against short fuses. Better to treat such provocateurs with silent contempt.

 

By this stage, Normie, readers of this blog will be losing their patience with me. Haven’t I just thrown a whole lot of ad hominem at you without getting on to your work? Okay, here’s your crime sheet. When I was in my twenties, in the 1970s, I read The Naked and the Dead and thought it was terrific. I mean a war story up there with The Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front and a few others.  I still see the importance of your closing word – “Hotdog!”  - which sums up a lot about American culture. But guess what? That was probably the best thing you wrote and you were only 25. Later, also in the 1970s, I was alert enough to current affairs to read your political commentaries The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, and they seemed important at the time. But your “new journalism”, your “creative non-fiction” quickly became a big fat ego trip when you pushed yourself forward as the main character in your reportage. You didn’t write so much about important current affairs as you did about how you felt, and what you wanted other people to think. Your supposed interest in the world’s big problems was just a platform to advertise yourself. As for your critiques of feminism – okay, there was a lot to criticise in feminism as there is in any movement; but your way of dealing with it was blunt, boorish and often downright stupid. The Prisoner of Sex indeed!

Worse than all this, though, you succumbed to the dreaded American disease of literary elephantiasis. You made your books BIGGER and LONGER as if you were trying to fill up an empty prairie - that horrible delusion that if it’s BIG and LONG it must be an important book. I don’t need to be told there are many great and canonical novels that run to many hundreds of pages (Clarissa if you can stand it; War and Peace; Moby Dick; A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, the last of which I admit to not having read). So trying to show your chops and join the immortals, you produced Harlot’s Ghost (1300 pages), Ancient Evenings (unreadable, but relatively modest at 700 pages) and The Executioner’s Song (1050 pages in the copy that sits on my shelf). Okay. Calm down. I know you won a Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song, and Joan Didion and others liked it; but I also know enough about critics and book awards to know that their judgements are not definitive.

So there you see, Normie baby, is my overview of your literary career – a potentially good writer who got lost in opinionated brawls, verbal thuggery and grandiosity. But I’m nothing if not forgiving and when I get the chance I do occasionally look out for books by you which I have not read.

And so at last we arrive at our destination. Some months back, I happened to be passing through the small city of Whanganui  (alright – you’ve never heard of it - it’s in New Zealand) and I noticed there was a large sale of second-hand books going on in a community hall. I plunged in and bought three or four books for peanuts. One of them was The Castle in the Forest (silly title which you only half-explain in your coda) - your very last novel published the year you died. I bought it and have finally got around to reading it.

Normie, it did not impress me.

Very well, you wanted to write a trilogy about the whole personal life of Adolf Hitler, but you produced only this (by your standards) relatively modest first volume of 467 pages covering the boy Adolf, his ancestry, his babyhood, childhood and adolescence up to the age of about 18. Like poor old Frank Norris, you never completed your trilogy.

Now here’s my problem Normie. Your novel is fiction based on fact. The fact comes from the copious history books you consulted as listed in your very long bibliography. But the fiction comes from your fertile brain. This means we have many verifiable things and many unverifiable (fictitious) things, which leaves us less enlightened about the boy Hitler than worthwhile non-fiction books have already told us. Yes, there was apparently incest among some of Hitler’s forebears. Yes, Hitler’s father Alois was a pompous and violent brute who liked to see himself as a person of importance because he had been an official in Austria’s Customs service. Yes, Adolf’s elder half-brother Alois Junior got  so tired of being beaten up by his father that he ran away and never returned. Yes, Alois’s (third) wife Klara, Adolf’s mother, was probably a close relative of Alois – maybe a cousin – so there’s more incest. Yes, Klara seems to have mollycoddled little Adolf (whom she nicknamed “Adi”). Yes, young Adolf was arrogant, self-centred, lazy in his schoolwork and often called out by his teachers. Yes, Alois often beat up the boy Adolf, and relented a little bit only when Adolf’s other brother Edmund died and left Adolf as Alois’s only (male) heir. Yes, adolescent Hitler did like to play at war games with groups of boys he gathered around him and he tended to be the boss of such games.  All this can be found in the work of reliable historians.

But Normie, where do all the sex and scatological scenes come from? From your imagination, amigo. I grant you that some of the Hitler (originally Hiedler) family might have had ropey and peasant ways, and its likely that late 19^th – early 20^th century rural-and-peasant Austria wasn’t the most hygienic of places. Even so, why do you fixate so much on excrement with your scenes of toddler Adolf shitting on the floor or sofa; or of Adolf’s brother taunting him with a fresh turd; or of Adolf ripping up and crapping on his school diploma? And why do you theorise that Klara worshipped and admired baby Adolf’s anus? And what about adolescent Adolf masturbating regularly, to an image of a terrorist, as he nurtures his one descended testicle? And what of all that stuff about Adolf sucking at his mother’s dugs when he was too old to do so? And how about the scene where you have Klara and Alois rutting in a very perverse way? And then there’s your character Der Alte, who seems to practise sodomy with Alois Junior and violates other people in perverse ways. I assume, Normie, that you were trying to set up an atmosphere of degeneracy and perversity in order to explain how Adolf grew up to be the perverse, genocidal maniac that he became. But I have a counter-thought. Many thousands of people have been mistreated in childhood and become warped and/or criminals as adults; some may even have been the products of incest; but very, very few have become mesmeric speakers and leaders of huge crowds. Hitler’s evil cannot be explained by the nature of his childhood alone. I’m sure you would have elaborated on this in volumes two and three; but as you didn’t get to write them we are stuck with an unsatisfactory explanation.

At which point, Normie, you might protest (or in your case bellow) that you DID provide a theory of evil. After all, you chose to have the whole story of little Adolf narrated by a devil working for Satan (known in this novel as “the Maestro”), who is part of the army eternally fighting against God (known by the devils as DK, meaning “Dummkopf”, because God is seen as stupid for creating the universe so flawed). So there is a Manichean explanation of evil  (not that you use this term Normie). You have an eternal battle between Good and Evil, equal in strength and neither fated to definitively win. It’s a diligent devil who grooms the young Adolf. Frankly, I don’t think you really believe this, Normie, because you’re not a religious person and you don’t subscribe to such mythologies. But you are Jewish so you must certainly know the first chapters of Genesis and you know how to read metaphorically. Forget the mythic garden and the snake, but remember the lesson that human beings, thanks to their power of free will, are morally flawed and capable of doing great evil. It’s a more coherent explanation of evil than devils battling angels.

I’ve raised the question so I’ll have to push on. This Jewish matter. It’s amazing that you hardly ever mention antisemitism in the 19^th century Austria you depict. Were you saving that issue for the following books you never lived to write? I’ll charitably assume that was going to be the case, but it is a hole in The Castle in the Forest. I’m interested, too, that you break off your narrative to insert 44 pages giving an account of the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. What were you up to here? It seems completely divorced from the boy Hitler. I’ll take a wild guess. Were you going, in later parts of your unfinished trilogy, to discuss how Tsarist Russia was the most ferocious antisemitic country in Europe before Hitler came along? Just a guess, Normie.

And I’ll add another little fiction of yours. Every so often you insert pointers to Adolf’s adulthood. It is an historically verified fact that Alois at one time took to bee keeping, but that is all historians know about it. You, however, have Alois discoursing on bees to little Adolf, saying that the lazy and unproductive bees have to be exterminated as should be the case in any orderly society; and later we have Alois destroying a hive by gassing the bees. Forcing the issue with a pretty obvious case of forewarning, right?

Sorry Normie. Your trilogy might have added up to something, but The Castle in the Forest is so flawed in so many ways that it’s hard to take it seriously. One of your fails… and don’t remind me that it was a bestseller on its first release. But (nice person that I am), I’m not chastising you too much. Fictitious versions of Hitler are fiendishly difficult to carry off. I still think Richard Hughes’s The Fox in the Attic came nearest to the prize, with his portrait of Hitler as the provincial fanatic cursing the decadent city of Berlin. Others, like A.N.Wilson in his Winnie and Wolf, have fallen into comic caricature in which Hitler’s greatest fault is that he farts so much.

Not exactly subtle, Normie, but then neither are you,

Best wishes whether you are in Heaven, Hell or Nowhere – or at least too far away to land a punch.

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.  

                                           A MOMENT OF FEAR

            Please bear with me as I tell you a story that seemed real terror to me at the time, but that later proved trivial when compared with what other people had to suffer.

            It was when the first blast of the tropical Cyclone Gabrielle hit Auckland. Rain we were used to – isn’t there that old joke “If you don’t like Auckland weather, wait half an hour”? Aucklanders are used to rain, and lots of it. But the rain rarely lasts long. The narrow isthmus on which Auckland is built means that weather rushes across it skittishly. Rain. Sunshine. Rain. Sunshine. Rain. Sunshine, in equal measure. But this cyclone was something else. The sky was uniformly black, and stayed that way. The rain came down vertically, not pushed by the wind even though the wind was blowing, in heavy, bullet-like drops. At first it drummed down like any ordinary downpour of the sort that eases off after a few minutes. But this downpour did not ease off. It continued for hours.

            I was alone at home in our North Shore suburb. My wife had driven off to the other side of the city, baby-sitting for one of our adult children who was out at work. At first I was certain that the rain would stop. Nothing so heavy could go on for long. But it did go on, relentlessly. I was agitated. I couldn’t concentrate on what I was trying to write. I kept pacing around my study, looking out the window then going downstairs to the front door and looking at how things were getting on. I had never seen weather like this.

            Under the deluge, water was rushing down our street. At first I could see the white line in the middle of the road, but soon it became invisible under the torrent. The road was turning into a river. Further down our road, a drain was blocked with sticks and rubbish. A large and wide pool developed, slowing down the very few cars that were still daring to go this route. By now the torrent was overflowing, rushing over the kerb and over the berm and into the properties on our, lower, side of the street. Our house is built on a relatively gentle slope, but water was flowing steadily over our grass, around our house and into the back yard. Mulch we had put in our front garden was being swept away.  I rushed to our back windows, and saw half of the back yard turning first into a pool and then into a shallow lake, fed in part by another torrent that was flowing through the back yards of our neighbours.

            The deluge kept on for hours. The drumming on the roof never stopped. And this was the time I felt fear. When would it stop? How many more hours would it go on for? For the first time in years, a leak began dripping in our sun-room. I heard a scraping sound and watched our wheelie-bin being pushed down our drive by the force of the water. How would my wife be able to get home safely in this flood? Would our house be permanently damaged somehow? The only time I could remember being as frightened by nature this way was years ago, when we were walking part of the way down the Fox Glacier and we heard the growling and scraping of ice and rocks crashing down on a part of the glacier behind us.

            Slowly – far too slowly – the rain eased off, but the road was still a river. I rang my wife and told her to delay her journey until the water had subsided in our street. When she eventually made it home, she told me that a trip which usually took about 35 minutes had taken her the best part of two hours, negotiating flooded highways with the water nearly up to the hub-caps, miles of stationary cars in a massive traffic jam, and idiots going at top speed through the outer lane, making waves in their wake.

            The following morning, the sky was still dark, but the rain had gone and there were even a few, very brief, glimpses of the sun. We checked the damage. Our front garden had been partially denuded. The bean-vine was largely destroyed. The back-yard pool was slowly draining away. Water had got into what we still call a “garage” – even though we haven’t used it as such for years – and a few items had to be dried. As for our house, it was completely un-damaged, standing as it does on firm foundations. The worst was that some water had got under the house, leaving a very mild pong which disappeared after a day or two.

            Within a couple of days everything was back to normal. A second blast of the cyclone, a week or so later, brought down the branch of one tree, but we were able to easily cut it up. This time the rain wasn’t as relentless and water didn’t overflow the kerb. As for a third warning about a downpour, it turned out to be no more than an average storm, no damage caused.

            So is this a tale of terror and fear? Of course not, though it felt that way at the time. The reality is that ferocious storms, like the one that passed over Auckland, are suffered regularly by inhabitants of islands further north in the Pacific. The other reality is that, while there was no major damage in our suburb, in other parts of Auckland homes were flooded and made uninhabitable, families had to seek temporary shelter, there were slips on cliffs and hills undermining the foundations of nearby buildings and loss of power. Many homes were red-stickered and many streets rendered impassable. And then there was the even greater disaster going on in the North, in Coromandel , in Hawkes Bay and in much of the east coast - bridges destroyed, roads drowned, many communities cut off from the rest of the country, crops destroyed, farms turned into plains of silt, a huge number of homes destroyed, people killed, people missing…

            How small, how tiny, my brief hours of worry were in comparison – a slight itch measured again a national tragedy. How wrong it is to see things only through your own eyes.

Something New

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

“A PRIVATE SPY – The Letters of John le Carre” edited by Tim Cornwell (Penguin – Viking; distributed by Penguin/ Random House, $NZ40)

How do we remember John le Carre (1931-2020) who died of cancer shortly before his ninetieth birthday? Born David Cornwell, he never explained why he had adopted the particular le Carre pseudonym, although he did at first need some cover to disguise his connections with espionage. Following in the footsteps of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, le Carre was the novelist who definitively punctured the idea that espionage was glamorous -  a great antidote to the James Bond fantasies of Ian Fleming. In his breakthrough novel (his third) The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, he gave a very disillusioned view of the Cold War and the sordid deals spying involved on both sides of the Iron Curtain, even while being aware of the malign nature of the USSR. His Smiley books created the same mood. In later life, however, he became annoyed that people still referred to him as a Cold War writer when his writing career continued for forty years after the USSR had collapsed. He protested that, in many of the 27 novels he wrote,  he had moved on to writing about other things in other locations, even if they still involved spying and treachery, as in The Little Drummer Girl (Israeli and Palestinian tensions in the Middle East), The Tailor of Panama (set in Central America) and The Constant Gardiner (set in Africa and concerning the negative influence of “big pharma” [pharmaceutical corporations]). Even so, he will be remembered mainly for sophisticated spy plots, many of which are as well known for the films and television serials that were made of them as for the original novels.

A Private Spy – The Letters of John le Carre was researched, selected and edited by le Carre’s son Tim Cornwell, but Tim died just before the book was published, leaving his three brothers to write a tribute to him, which appears as a sort of preface. It is, to say the least, a very bulky book – 632 pages of letters followed by over 70 pages of index, notes and chronology. And of course, although David Cornwell was known to friends and family as David Cornwell, his son deliberately calls him John le Carre throughout so as not to confuse readers. In his Introduction, Tim Cornwell tactfully notes what sort of letters will not be found here – “it contains only a smattering of letters to his lovers, of whom there were quite a few throughout his life” (p.xvi)

To put it bluntly, it requires stamina to work one’s way through a large collection of letters like this. There are very many letters about and to people he met or befriended in countries where he researched material for his novels (Middle East, Germany, Russia, Panama, South-East Asia). There are many bland, polite missives going into detail with publishers, literary agents and film producers which are really in the nature of business letters. Sometimes he takes to flattering people (especially fellow writers who have written positively about his work) as when, in 1986, he effusively thanks American novelist Philip Roth for calling his novel A Perfect Spy “the best English novel since the war” (pp.267-268) There is also the occasional annoyance when we hear only le Carre’s side of an argument or discussion. Le Carre might have been a formidable stylist in his novels, but there is very little humour in his correspondence. Perhaps the funniest things in the book are his uproarious account of his dinner with Margaret and Dennis Thatcher (pp.283-284); and a rare example of raucous wit when he was cheering up the actor Stephen Fry, who had had what amounted to a nervous breakdown (pp.407-409).

One thing hangs heavily over his life, and which is featured in many letters to friends and family members. It is the unhappy childhood he and his siblings endured. Their father was, quite simply, both a bully and a criminal. Ronald (“Ronnie”) Cornwell was a confidence trickster (jailed a number of times) who had even done deals with the likes of the Krays and Rachmann as well as being involved in arms dealing (see pp.598-600). Tired of being beaten up by him, and perhaps having passed onto to her a sexually-transmitted disease, Ronnie’s wife walked out on him when le Carre was only five. Only much later in adult life did le Carre re-connect with his birth mother. The one consolation in the Cornwell children’s lives was that Ronnie then married Jean, who proved to be a good and caring stepmother and with whom le Carre kept in touch for the rest of his life. In his last years, le Carre wrote a heartfelt letter to his brother Tony on the childhood that had traumatised both of them (pp.482-484).

Yet, while rebelling from his father, le Carre had some of Ronnie’s traits, including a disorderly sex life. Le Carre married Ann in 1953 when he was 22. They had three sons and stayed married for 27 years until they divorced in 1971. In the early sections of this collection, there are many love letters that were sent to Ann when they were courting. In 1972, le Carre married Jane. They had one son and stayed married for over 40 years, until le Carre’s death in 2020. Jane died two months after him. But, especially in his middle years, le Carre was a philanderer. It is awkward to read in this collection, sitting side-by-side, first a letter le Carre wrote to the Scottish novelist James Kennaway, offering him sober advice on writing; and then the same week sending a love letter to Kennaway’s wife, with whom he was having an affair. (The affair was fictionalised in le Carre’s novel The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, which is often regarded as his worst)

Then, of course, there was le Carre’s own experience of espionage. While a student at Oxford, he was recruited by MI5 to spy on, and pass on details about, Communist students. Nearly 60 years later, in 2006, he had a lively correspondence (pp.445-446 and pp. 475-476) with Stanley Mitchell, one of the Communist students upon whom he had reported. Mitchell was still angry about this betrayal, with le Carre replying that Mitchell had been a naïve young man who should have seen what a negative force Communism was.

            Le Carre went from Oxford to the Foreign Office in 1958, acting as a diplomat but in fact being an agent of MI5. Later he switched to MI6, but he stopped working there, and became a full-time writer in 1963 when his cover was blown during the publicity his first bestseller The Spy Who Came in From the Cold attracted. For a man who had such a detailed and intimate understanding of how espionage worked, and whose literary reputation was built on that knowledge, he had in fact a very short career in the security services – a mere five years. In one of his many editorial notes, Tim Cornwell says that when le Carre joined the Foreign Office and spy system “Le Carre served at a time of dark betrayals with the public exposure of Foreign Office spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, and the Soviet double agents George Blake and Kim Philby, spanning his years of intelligence from 1948 to 1963… The problem with le Carre, one MI6 colleague observed, was that he had never experienced a successful operation in the service.” (p.87) Hence, perhaps, his depressing view of espionage. In 1966, le Carre he wrote an open letter (pp.152-155) to the editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta, the Soviet literary journal, after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was criticised by the Soviet publication (and of course banned in the USSR), pointing out that his books revealed moral bankruptcy on both sides of the Cold War.

            Also made clear as one reads these letters, one understands how many of le Carre’s fictitious characters were based closely on real people. Vivian Green was an Anglican parson who had taught him at school, mentored him at Oxford and officiated at le Carre’s first wedding. His manners, demeanour, coolness, relatability and logic were, as le Carre openly told people, the basis for Smiley in four of his novels. Even as a young man, le Carre could be very frank with Green. When, after Oxford, he spent five terms teaching at Eton, he wrote to Green about the flaws of the ruling classes and their sons. At Eton “the thing that sticks in my throat more and more… is the ‘Herrenvolk’ doctrine that is encouraged in the boys by the ruling body of masters, the free use of comparisons with the ‘oik’ classes etc., and the 19^th century conviction of the efficacy in every sense of the ‘gunboat doctrine’…” (p.75) Another real person turned into a fictitious character was le Carre’s actress sister Charlotte, who had the habit of taking up radical causes. She became the main character of his novel The Little Drummer Girl, which centred on a woman who got out of her depth in pursuing some of her causes (see p.283). The novel later had the misfortune to be made into an appallingly mis-cast film. Then there were two or three of his nastier minor characters who were based on his father (who once threatened le Carre with a suit for defamation).

It is interesting to learn that for somebody who wrote prolifically (27 novels and a mountain of letters) le Carre never used a typewriter or word-processor and wrote everything by hand – with a secretary to neatly type up all his novels. (Eventually this task fell to his second wife). Letters were sent hand-written but they were always first drafted. Le Carre was also a very good caricaturist and many of his satirical drawings were appended to his letters. Some are reproduced in this collection.  Even more interestingly, le Carre claimed that he himself was a very slow reader – and not just in old age. Writing to Al Alvarez in 2009, he admits “I read extremely slowly and am probably a late onset dyslexic. Over a single year, I complete the reading of very few books, most of them either classics or non-fiction. I haven’t read a thriller for decades, and know next to nothing of my contemporary writers, or their work. I have a distaste for the ‘literary scene’ ”(p.506) Much later, to the American activist Daniel Ellsberg he writes. “When will I read your books? Slowly and carefully over time. I read at a snail’s pace, am absurdly dyslexic; probably I read at speaking speed, which is how I try to write…” (p.609) Despite this, he was still able in very old age to hand out good advice to aspiring novelists. Take these very wise words he wrote to a correspondent about writing in 2020, the last year of his life “… about finishing. It’s everything. If you can’t see the final frame of your novel when you enter it, don’t go there is my experience. How many first chapters have I not been sent, with the question ‘can I write?’ Answer, show me you last chapter & maybe you can.” (p.630)

Clearly le Carre had some favourite correspondents outside his family. They included the actor Alec Guinness, the critic Al Alvarez, his mentor Vivian Green, his long-time friend John Calley, the playwright Tom Stoppard and the intelligence agent Dick Franks. Many times he wrote to Alec Guinness saying he was the best embodiment of his master spy Smiley in the long television series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (pp.213-214 and 217-218), although later he thought Gary Oldman made a better Smiley in the film version.

One important correspondent, but not a person to whom he wrote regularly, was Graham Greene. Le Carre was fully aware that Greene was one of his main inspirations as a writer, a man with a similar disillusioned attitude towards spying and a strong nose for sites of political conflict.  In 1963, le Carre wrote to a friend that his The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was “a sort of Quiet American story set in Berlin” (p.123) Graham Greene boosted le Carre’s novel by providing a blurb in which he called the novel “the best spy story I have ever read”. In 1966 le Carre wrote letters to Greene praising his novel The Comedians (p.158). While researching South-East Asia to provide background to a novel, le Carre wrote to Greene praising the accuracy of his South-East Asia setting in The Quiet American (pp.191-192)… but the editor notes that Graham Greene privately said that le Carre’s novels were increasingly becoming too long for the stories they told (p.192). Le Carre wrote (p.219 ff.) to the Observer, objecting stridently to Clive James’ reviews of his novels because James had said in public what Graham Greene said only in private – that le Carre’s novels were unnecessarily drawn out.

            Le Carre admitted that his novel The Tailor of Panama was in part inspired by Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, as both books turned in part on agents building careers by producing  for their employers fabricated information. In 1991, he wrote a generous obituary on Greene and wrote a letter to Nicholas Shakespeare (pp.302-304) expressing similar respect. But later (quoted p.304) he wrote more frankly to the same correspondent “As a young writer, I looked up at Greene as a role model, and nothing in my writing life has made me happier than the supremely generous support he gave to my early work. As a diplomat in Bonn, I blushed for him when he stood on the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall and made some unhappy comment about preferring it there. I thought his anti-Americanism too much. I thought him daft about the possible marriage of Communism and Christianity, and dafter still in his defence of Kim Philby” (p.304). Years later (in 2010) he wrote a similar critique of Greene in a letter to a history professor: “I knew Greene a bit & was in awe of him, but I never really believed in his Catholic convictions. As a literary tool, they work to a point, but God is best denied in fiction – Camus & Co – and morality left to struggle without him. Does anyone remember that Greene stood the wrong side of the Berlin Wall & said he’d rather be there than here? He who lived in Antibes and fell in love with Central American dictators? Novelists on the whole make pretty daft politicians, but Greene was in a class of his own…”(p.519)

            How do I personally judge this contest? I think Greene’s novels will last longer than le Carre’s, if only because they are more various in subject matter. I also agree (with both Greene and Clive James) that some of le Carre’s novels wear out their welcome by sheer length. On the other hand, I agree with le Carre that some of Greene’s political judgements were naïve and foolish. He did have a utopian view of the good Communism could achieve, he did have the habit of lauding left-wing dictators and he refused to see the harm Kim Philby had done. (Like le Carre, Greene had served in Britain’s spy service and knew Philby personally.) My impression is that, seeing the many flaws of Britain and America, Greene over-reacted and thought there was a brilliantly better society existing elsewhere. There wasn’t. [For the record, you can find elsewhere on this blog a number of critiques of Greene if you look up Graham Greene in the index at right. Also, in my account of Greene’s early 1930s travel book Journey Without Maps  you will find an early warning of Greene’s proclivity to praise mercenaries and dictators whom he wrongly thought were doing some good.]

            If le Carre didn’t do humour very well, he could certainly do anger and scorn, especially on political matters. A Private Spy – The Letters of John le Carre charts such anger.

            In 1977, le Carre wrote a rather tart response to a Swedish correspondent who asked his opinion of the Nobel Prize. Le Carre replied “It is very kind of you to seek my opinion on the Nobel Prize in Literature, but I must tell you honestly that I have never given the subject a moment’s thought, except perhaps to reflect that, like the Olympic Games, a great concept has been ruined by political greed.” (p.202)

            Le Carre could be very contentious – when Salman Rushdie was under threat of fatwa because of his book The Satanic Verses, le Carre criticised Rushdie for allowing a reprint of the book to be released when, in some countries, people who had read and/or published it been murdered by Islamacist fanatics (pp.295-297). Possibly the angriest letter he ever wrote concerned his novel The Constant Gardiner. In that novel he criticised pharmaceutical corporations which used people in Third World countries as unsuspecting guinea pigs in trials of some drugs. A member of the pharmaceutical giant Novartis wrote to him wanting him to debate him under their rules. He roundly (and angrily) both decline their challenge and called them out. (pp.452-454) In 2002, he joined protesters in a march condemning Tony Blair for committing Britain to the USA’s invasion of Iraq (p.459) and later wrote to Nicholas Shakespeare, describing Blair thus : “Look at Blair! How did we spawn the mendacious little show-off? This child, playing grown-up games, & fucking up the world in his Noddy car….” (p.480). Later he wrote to a German journalist “My response to the political scene is vehement: I hate Brexit, hate Trump, fear the rise of white fascism everywhere and take the threat seriously indeed; the craving for conflict is everywhere among our pseudo dictators.” (p.572). In 2020 wrote to Swedish author Pierre Schori “ Britain is again in the hands of far-right Trumpists, as every small new event indicates. Journalists suspected of unsound sympathies are excluded from official press briefings, which now take place, not in the people’s parliament, but at No. 10 on Johnson’s home ground. Cowardice & bullying go hand-in-hand, & Johnson is a practitioner of both. The Democrats in America are making prize asses of themselves, Putin is appointing himself Ruler for Life, so we look like having a pretty awful decade…” (p.607)

            Despite his very Englishness, and his love of the Cornwall where he settled for much of his writing life, le Carre dreaded becoming identified too intimately with the “Establishment”. His son Tim says in his introduction (p.xxviii) “My father accepted major awards from France, Germany and Sweden, but declined any honour from the British state.” In 1981 he declined a C.B.E. which had been offered to him by Margaret Thatcher, writing to an official friend “I didn’t feel I could take it. I don’t quite know why: the guilts, a peculiar modesty, a feeling I wanted to stay out of the citadel. Certainly not pique or false pride so far as I know. Secretly, I think, a feeling I hadn’t earned it.” (p.239) He later turned down a knighthood. Finally, in the last year of his life, he was so angry about Brexit, and the new form of English chauvinism, that he cancelled his British passport and took out Irish citizenship (to which he was entitled because one of his grandmothers was Irish). In this book’s section of photographs, there’s a shot of the elderly writer cheerfully wrapping himself in the Irish tricolour.

            I finished reading this long collection of letters with very contradictory feelings about le Carre. A very good novelist for sure, but sometimes overshooting the mark and spinning out his stories too long. A master at debunking the world of espionage while at the same time understanding that there were rights and wrongs in the Cold War. Sometimes a cranky man, but usually in good causes. Sometimes fickle in his married life, but striking gold with his second wife who was as devoted to literature as he was. As to whether his novels will stand the test of time – I’m not sure. Possibly the very topicality of them will make them of more interest to historians than to general readers of the future. For the moment, however, they are still worth reading.

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.   

 

                        THE FICTION OF MICHELLE DE KRETSER, PART TWO

 

 

First published in 2014, Springtime is a short novella, easily read at one sitting. It is subtitled “A Ghost Story”, but it is very much in the tradition of some of Henry James’ stories – especially The Turn of the Screw. Is there really a ghost or is the ghost a figment of a disturbed person’s imagination? Bear in mind that Michelle de Kretser pondered much on Henry James in her earlier novel The Lost Dog and also had some Jamesian references in Questions of Travel.

            Frances has moved from Melbourne to Sydney. Frances is in her twenties. Her partner Charlie has left his wife and young son Luke to be with her. Charlie is quite a few years older that Frances. Frances is not really capable of dealing with young Luke when he pays them a visit. Frances sometimes hears odd noises on her phone and wonders if they are malign messages from Charlie’s ex-wife. Frances is unnerved by her situation.

            When Frances takes her dog Rod on walks around their Sydney suburb, she sees through the trees a strange woman who seems not real. The strange woman appears to her only when Frances is alone on a path. Is this a ghost? Frances is further unnerved. I offer no spoiler, but I can say that the novel’s conclusion gives us a definite verdict.

            This novella is really about adjustment to a new environment. Sydney is very different from Melbourne. Frances is an intellectual (researching a book on 18^th century French portraits) and so is Charlie. Intellectuals are notoriously bitchy and there is a party scene of unpleasant intellectual one-up-man-ship, further intimidating Frances. Melburnians often regard themselves a superior to uncouth Sydneysiders. And then there is the more intense heat.

            As always, Michelle de Kretser’s powers of precise observation are excellent, a time and place are conjured up vividly and Frances’ situation is credible. Even so, Springtime is very much a minor work by de Kretser and in retrospect the “ghost” element is redundant – a bit of a trick.

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Here is a warning to anybody who wishes to read the novels of Michelle de Kretser. Do not start with  The Life to Come (first published in 2017) or it may deter you from reading her other work. This is definitely NOT to say that The Life to Come is an inferior piece of work. Far from it. But in terms of structure, it is a very difficult work. Characters we at first think are going to be the novel’s main protagonists are shoved aside as new characters are introduced. The novel is not a linear narrative. There are flashbacks and flash-forwards and sometimes we discover a young person has suddenly transformed into an old person. It takes a long time to see how the opening chapters are in fact related to the later chapters. Indeed I went through a phase of wondering whether The Life to Come was really a set of long short stories, loosely connected, rather than a novel. And yet, in its final and most compelling long chapter, it is all knitted together like a puzzle finally solved. In short, this is a novel that requires close attention of the reader.

What does that title The Life to Come mean? I’m sure de Kretser is aware that the phrase has often been used in religious services to mean life after death, or the promise of heaven. But that is not what it means in this novel. The “life to come” is the life that characters expect to be living some day: their aspirations and hope for success, always looking forward rather than living the moment. But such hopes are often delusory as is the case with at least some of the characters. Ultimately there is disappointment for those who have too high an opinion of themselves. Possibly – as is at least implied in the closing chapter – the best “life to come” is simply living everyday life without expecting reward or great public applause.

Many in de Kretser’s cast are novelists and the condition of being a novelist is one of her major concerns. So too – as so often – is her interest in the state of being an immigrant or refugee in a new country. In the opening chapter is Ash, a Sinhalese Sri-Lankan living in Sydney, working towards being an academic, and meeting the completely alien when he visits that dead heart of Australia’s hinterland and the type of farmers who work there. For a time he cohabits with the Australian Cassie. At one point Cassie remarks “postmodernly tutored… ‘Isn’t history just a set of competing stories?’ ” to which Ash replies laconically    “Not really”. (p. 52) His understanding that there are hard realities in history is rooted in the fact that, as a child in Sri Lanka, he saw the riots between Sinhalese and Tamil and the concerted killing of Tamil. It was not just a story. In fact in many ways, de Kretser takes on the current modish dogmas of academe. Cassie is studying Australian literature. Cassie’s tutor criticises the fiction of Shirley Hazzard because “one of Hazzard’s stories sinned in implying that a former colony’s efforts to modernise might entail painful consequences for its citizens…” (p.59) Michelle de Kretser knows damned well that modernising a former colony always does have some “painful consequences”. [Incidentally, de Kretser is an expert on the work of Shirley Hazzard and has written a book about her.]

When the novel switches from Sydney to Paris, we get a different cast, centring on Celeste, an elderly translator of books, living a single life, never quite admitting (or acting out) her lesbianism and always vaguely hoping to make a married woman her partner. Again, there are culture-clash problems. Celeste’s mother was French but Celeste was raised in West Australia. In Paris, Celeste and her mother have seen the ethnic tension of the early 1960s when Algerians were targeted and harassed by French police.

Then, taking a very large part of the novel, there is the ambitious Australian novelist Pippa Reynolds. Pippa marries a guy called Matt, whose parents are Polish. Matt’s mother Eva is not only Catholic – very alien to Pippa – but is also intensely concerned about the welfare of refugees, especially in an Australian political climate that does not welcome refugees. But Pippa, often very critical of other people, wonders if Eva’s compassion for refugees is just a sham and a pose – a way of scoring points with liberal friends. There are such people, after all. Yet there is much ambiguity here. Eva is domineering, but Pippa is far too ready to judge other people. Could it be that Eva is truly compassionate while Pippa simply lacks charity? The situation can be read either way. In another context, Pippa, in the closing chapters, encounters a Sri-Lankan woman Christabel, and Christabel’s Anglo-Sri-Lankan friend known as “Bunty”, again with many misunderstanding between ethnicities.

So, with Australian and Sri-Lankan; French-Australian and Algerian; Australian and Pole, here are many situations of culture-clash, bafflement, misdirected ideas and misunderstanding – played out in Australia and France.

Yet just as important is de Kretser’s focus on the nature of novelists and by implication the nature of truth-telling and the distortion of the truth. To put it simply, de Kretser takes a very critical view of novelists, even if she herself is dedicated to the profession. There are, for example, novels, barely comprehensible, that appear to be designed for an intellectual, and somewhat snobbish, coterie – a form of chic. In Celeste’s trade as a translator, “she translated books for a small New York press that published obscure European fiction, novels devoid of spirited heroines, novels that offered no clear message nor any flashing sign as to how that should be understood… sometimes they were even Swiss.” (p. 96) There is, too, in the novel’s last chapter, a scornful, semi-comic account of a Readers and Writers Festival in Sydney, which takes apart both the performance tricks of the starring novelists and the vapid nature of the audience.

Pippa Reynolds is the epitome of an ambitious young novelist and apparently quite successful. But she desperately wants to be admired, is constantly posting tweets promoting herself, and is extremely competitive to the point of being abrasive. There is a hint here and there that she is intensely insecure since her parents’ marriage disintegrated when she was a child. More cuttingly, de Kretser suggests that she is essentially a voyeur, taking other peoples’ lives and using them as material for her novels often in a very cruel way, describing habits that real acquaintances have, using conversations jotted down after going to dinner parties with real people and so forth. In effect, using people. This comes to a head in the last (and best) chapter when Christabel confronts Pippa whom she had trustingly believed was her friend.

… But isn’t this what all novelists do somehow? And is de Kretser in fact criticising herself? The critique is valid but the irony is there to read.

I can’t close without noting that there are many meals described in this novel, be they domestic scenes or at literary or diplomatic junkets. They always seem to say something about ethnicity and Westerners’ taste for what is “exotic”… but also meals often reveal different ethnicities taste and suggest what often puts peoples at odds. A fascinating form of sociology.

Despite my opening caveats, the novel finally holds together.

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Published in 2021, Scary Monsters is really two separable short novels, each approximately 150 pages long. You have to turn the book upside down when you finish one and wish to get on with the other, because one is printed this-way-up and the other is printed that-way-up, if you understand what I mean. Each has a different "front cover". Even if she has clear preoccupations and concerns, I would never accuse de Kretser of being didactic, but Scary Monsters conveys specific messages more overtly than most of her works do. In case you were wondering what this book’s “scary monsters” are, they are conveniently defined in the blurb, to wit “racism, misogyny and ageism”, trends which figure in both these short novels. Both of the two novels are narrated in the first-person, one by Lyle and the other by Lili. By pure chance, I began by reading the “Lyle” novel first.

The setting is Australia, but a very dystopian Australia in the near future. Immigrants and refugees are treated very badly. The country has absolutely no climate policy. Some parts of the continent are now labelled PFZs – Permanent Fire Zones – as huge bush-fires are always out of hand. And the government clamps down on all forms of dissent. At one point Lyle, who works for a government department, has to ask questions to weed out potential subversives – questions such as “Is anyone in your community leafleting farmers about sustainable crops or tree-planting or animal rights?... Anyone speaking out against Proud Nazis? Anyone advocating for Aboriginal rights or women’s refuges or a universal basic income?” (p.85) Lyle fears the possible repercussions for his family as his son Sydney is an ardent Greenie, and his daughter Mel [presumably short for Melbourne], when she talks furtively with liberal friends, finds it’s desirable to say she’s a New Zealander because New Zealand is less racist than Australia and “being Australian is so like shameful. Everyone just assumes you’re a racist, Islamophobic climate vandal and coffee snob.” (p.77)

            Which brings us to another issue. In this Australia, Islam has been outlawed. Lyle’s heritage is Muslim, but he and his family have to renounce their former religion and take on non-Muslim names. Former Muslims now have names like Ikea, Porsche, Chanel, Fanta and Prada, suggesting that the accepted religion is consumerism. And, to be approved by his employers, Lyle has to play such charming computer games as Whack-a-Mullah. As an immigrant, Lyle notes “Immigration breaks people. We try to reconstitute ourselves in our new countries, but pieces of us have disappeared. Immigrants are people with missing pieces.” (p.15) He can never be an Australian in terms that would fully appease the government. What’s more “Every newcomer to this country fears repatriation. Even those born here aren’t exempt if their parents or grandparents weren’t – one immigrant in four is enough.” (p.50)

            The “scary monster” of racism is clear to see, but what of the misogyny and ageism? Lyle’s wife Chanel is a buxom woman, but she is told to have breast-reduction surgery before she will be accepted as a suitable company executive. Then there is Lyle’s elderly in-law Ivy, an eccentric who was once an ardent Communist but is used to luxury. When she is not ignored or ridiculed (more misogyny), she is being coaxed into submitting to euthanasia, as the nice, kind government has passed an Amendment making it easier to put old people down (extreme ageism), obviously to get rid of the non-earning, pension-granted elderly. To gussy it up, the moment of killing is called a Joyful Occasion.

            The “Lyle” novel is obviously a work of raw protest against current trends in Australian society, but it has a singular subtlety. Remember Lyle, a covert Muslim, works for a government department which is part of the mechanism of his own intimidation. He conforms to the very policies that dehumanise him. This may suggest to us that he is craven. But I suggest de Kretser is warning us, in comfy democratic countries, that it is too easy to condemn “collaborators”. What other options do people have if they want to survive under a totalitarian regime?

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            Flipping the book over, I find the “Lili” novel to be totally different in tone from the “Lyle” novel, even if similar issues are raised. Far from dealing with a dystopian future, the “Lili” novel is set in the past – the early 1980s – in France. Bear in mind that in the early 1980s, when she was in her twenties, de Kretser took a Master degree in Paris. It is hard to avoid the idea that at least some of “Lili” is built on her youthful memories of France, even if the tale is fiction. Indeed some of it reads as nostalgic, light-hearted and amusing student matters, even if there is a large downside to the story.

The narrator Lili has gone to Montpellier to teach English. She is an Australian, though some of her forebears were Armenian and many came from an (unspecified) Asian country – very much the situation of the Sri Lankan Australian Michelle de Kretser. Lili aspires to be an independent, fearless, feminist intellectual, modelling herself on Simone de Beauvoir; but in fact she is timid and tortured with a sense of loneliness. She makes friends with a much more confident young women called Minna who has a boyfriend called Nick. Minna is progressive. Minna condemns racism. Minna expresses daring left-wing views… except that at the same time Minna likes the most chic clothes, the best restaurants, and the latest fashion. Much of Lili’s experience is discovering who or what exactly Minna really is. She comes to realize that free-wheeling, confident  Minna actually has family money resources and relies very much on her boyfriend Nick’s work. At a point where Lili is disillusioned with Minna, she thinks scornfully “Dependent women and bread-winning men: the Bold, Intelligent Woman had relied on a conventional script.” (p.56).  Another thing nags at her. Has Minna befriended her solely because she [Lili] is “ethnic” and therefore it is chic for Minna to be able to show off, to her liberal friends, her brown-skinned friend? In Lili’s mind “There was the thought of rich Minna versus poor Lili. There was the thought of white Minna versus brown Lili.” (p.57) In conversation with another young woman, Lili remarks of Minna “Saving brown people is a principle with her… It’s the reason she’s friends with me.” (pp.104-105)

De Kretser has presented similar purely-performative anti-racists elsewhere in her oeuvre [notably in The Life to Come]; but she does not stoop to caricature, for in later sections of the “Lili” novel, we learn that Minna has her own problems and is not a totally unsympathetic character.

The matter of racism is raised in the interaction of Lili and Minna; but it is also in the environment of 1980s France, where there are still tensions with, and prohibitions against, immigrants – especially Algerians. There are still painful memories of the Second World War, when French collaborators helped send French Jews to the death camps. And (referring to Albert Camus’ Algerian-set novel L’Etranger), Lili comes to wonder if some esteemed French literature isn’t also racist. She thinks: “All round the world, young people are studying a really brilliant novel about the murder of an Arab. They would say, If the most celebrated postwar French novel, venerated in France, is about the murder of an Arab, what might be the consequences of that? They would say, Why didn’t the Arab have a name? Then all the sentences would coalesce into a shiny purple headline: CE N’EST PAS NORMAL.” (pp.97-98)

Of the three “scary monsters”, ageism is largely absent from the “Lili” novel; but misogyny is rampant in the form of men who try to hit on young foreign women – especially Lili’s devious landlord M. Laval.

Given that she is dealing with young and rather callow main characters, de Kretser punctures their naïve optimism a little. The “Lili” novel ends with young people rejoicing that a Socialist (Mitterand) government has just won an election. Utopia and radical change seem to be dawning… except we, older, wiser and many decades later, know this is not going to happen.

Footnote: Even before the 1980s, when the “Lili” novel was set, there were already critics who pointed out the quasi-racist element of Camus’ L’Etranger. I refer to Conor Cruise O’Brien’s monograph on Albert Camus, published in the Fontana Modern Masters series in 1970, which still sits on my shelf. To add an egotistical anecdote, in 1971 or thereabouts, we freshers studying French at the University of Auckland had to read L’Etranger. One of the attractions of the novel, at least to freshers, was that it was short. In a tutorial, I dared to ask the lecturer why Mersault shot the Arab. In reply, the lecturer launched into a tirade about how you only had to live is Algeria to know how sneaky these Arabs are… Ouch!

A general assessment: So, having read all but one of Michelle de Kretser’s fictions, how do I assess her work? Obviously, she has some dominant ideas and themes. Drawing often on experience, she is interested in migrants and refugees and how they mix, or do not mix, into Western society. She is aware of widespread xenophobia in Australia, often linking her stories to current or historical facts or events. But she sharpens her satirical pen most often for liberals who claim to support new migrants, but who remain condescending towards foreign customs and ways of life. She is also very concerned with the matter of time, ageing and maturation. It is interesting that so many of her fictions rely on memories of a childhood or parental past. This is always in the interest of seeing how and why people grow up the way they do, and how distant events can have long-lasting consequences. Growing up also means interrogating sexual behaviour. Misogyny is one of her repeated targets. As an Australian citizen of long standing, de Kretser also can’t help considering the matter of colonisation – not only in Australia’s past, but also in the colonisation of Sri Lanka (and in one novel, India). But neatly setting out dominant “themes” like this does not really give the measure of the author. More than anything, de Kretser has an advanced skill in observation – she can describe people, customs, fashions, and especially places in such a precise way that they are presented to the eye, ear, nose and touch. And, while some of her characters earn our sympathy, she never indulges in sentimentality. Even migrants and refugees who are victimised are whole characters – they are not saints.

Is Michelle de Kretser a great novelist? It’s too early to say. While admiring and following many of her narratives, I also found some things that read in a confusing way. I’ll leave it to history to assess her work.