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 TRIAL” by Franz Kafka (DER PROZESS written in 1914-15; first published, posthumously, in German in 1925; Willa and Edwin Muir’s English translation first published in 1935; many other translations since)

Some time ago on this blog I made a “Something Old” out of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis [look it up on the index at right]. I made the case then that the novella Metamorphosis, the longest of Kafka’s works to be published in his lifetime [1883-1924] was the most perfect of his works. After all, said I, it was a work of incredible concision and concentrated meaning, which he had given to the publisher in a finished state; whereas the three full-length novels for which he is as well known (The Trial, The Castle, America) were left unfinished and unrevised at his death. The possibility is that, had he lived, he might have polished them up somewhat. They are, all three of them, open to the charge that they repeat things in a way they might not have done had Kafka trimmed and edited them. As is well known, Kafka’s instructions to his friend Max Brod were that his unpublished works be destroyed when he died. Fortunately for us, Max Brod ignored Kafka’s request.

I stand by this view. I still regard Metamorphosis as his best work. But when I re-read The Trial recently, I had to admit that its repetitions are part of its nightmarish power. I also re-read the “Epilogue” that Max Brod contributed to the edition of Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation [the first translation into English] that sits on my shelf. Brod boasted that “nearly everything of Kafka’s that was published in his lifetime was rescued from him by dint of persuasion and guile on my part.” This implies that even Metamorphosis may not have been as “finished” as Kafka wanted, though I find this hard to believe. As a non-specialist, I am also aware that some of the very many biographies of Kafka that have now been published cast aspersions on Brod’s truthfulness about some matters and his suppression of some details of Kafka’s life.

A literary executor is not always the most reliable witness.

Anyway, as I say, I recently gave The Trial another go. I did so after having seen three adaptations of it. There was Orson Welles’ [modernised] 1962 film version of the novel, starring Anthony Perkins as Josef K. and Jeanne Moreau as Fraulein Burstner. There is, in my DVD collection, the solid and very literal 1993 film rendition of the story, scripted by Harold Pinter and starring Kyle MacLachlan as Josef K., Anthony Hopkins as The Priest and Juliet Stevenson as Fraulein Burstner. And – seen by me back in 2008 – there was a very good stage adaptation by the Auckland playwright Dean Parker, performed by an Auckland theatre company. I can forego my usual bitchings about adaptations by noting that all were very worthwhile, though Welles’ film now seems very dated.

I will not try my usual dodge of synopsising this well-known tale. Josef K., for no clear reason, is arrested and put through the fear of being suspected by the state. Or, as the opening sentence warns, “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K. for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning”. But I will note that as I re-read it, I feared my mind might be overwhelmed by images from all the adaptations I had seen. This proved not to be the case. The novel itself has very many details that no adaptation has touched, and its style is the very opposite of the type of ominous gothic or film noir stylings that the film renditions give.  Despite the bizarre and irrational nature of the story, the tone (like that of Metamorphosis) is doggedly matter-of-fact.

I have to see it as a dream novel. There are all those intensely visualised settings in improbable places – the court room or the Advocate’s home in a slummy setting; the transformation from Titorelli’s studio to the Palace of Justice. As in a dream, things converge and coalesce in ways that defy waking reality.

I attach much significance to the fact that it is Josef K’s. 30^th birthday when he is arrested, and the eve of his 31^st when he is taken off to be killed. It also seems significant that Josef K. at first thinks that those who have come to arrest him are practical jokers and, one year later, that those who have come to kill him look like cheap actors.  This is a story spun from inside Josef K’s psyche and sparked by the existential fact of his age. Is not 30 (the age Kafka was when he wrote The Trial) when people first begin to wonder anxiously what they have done with their lives or what they should be doing? I believe that, decoded, we are getting the story of a man who is self-accused and aware that others are merely playing a role in the theatre of his mind. Practical jokers. Cheap actors.

I will not go here into John Banville’s theory that the story is really a psycho-drama about Kafka’s on-again off-again relationship with his fiancée. That would reduce it to no more than psychiatrist’s notes.

Of course there is some validity to seeing the story as a premonition of totalitarianism. (Don’t we tend to use the term “Kafkaesque” to mean the terrible, anonymous power of the state bearing down upon the individual?) We are encouraged in this interpretation by the fact of Kafka’s Jewishness, and by our knowledge that, twenty years after his death, members of his family died in Nazi death camps. But I am not sure that totalitarianism, as we now understand it, was Kafka’s intended target. The law which he depicts is daunting and irrational, never laying a clear criminal charge against Josef K. and never offering any clear path to a resolution. But compared with later totalitarianism, it is relatively benign. After his “arrest”, Josef K. is free to go about his business. Though there are the torturers-in-the-cupboard, and Josef K’s eventual murder, the satire that is offered could be valid even for an open society. It has most to do with the “law’s delay”, as satirised by Dickens in Bleak House.

Continuing in the vein of finding satire, it is possible to neatly divide The Trial into satire on police (the arresters), the law (the Advocate and Examining Magistrate), art (Titorelli) and religion (The Priest) as inadequate in explaining the human condition. Titorelli’s explanation that one can never be acquitted of a charge is the directest attack on the law as a human institution. I also wonder if the Priest’s complex glossing of his own enigmatic parable isn’t intended to ridicule over-ingenious biblical commentaries, midrash etc.

Yet, as I say, this is largely a tale from inside the head of the self-accused Josef K. who, even though he does not know what he is charged with, finds himself burdened with a sense of guilt anyway. Of course one can get lost in the badlands of Kafka biography and wonder whether the tale expresses fear of anti-Semitism, even if there is no reference to Jewishness in the book, or whether it expresses the isolation of German-speaking Kafka in Czech Prague. But I think the sexual element is more essential, with the landlady Frau Grubach and the tenant Fraulein Burstner and the Advocate’s mistress Leni and all the girls crowding Titorelli’s door. Josef K. rages silently with unfulfilled desire. (Of Fraulein Burstner, he “rushed out, seized her, and kissed her first on the lips, then all over the face, like some thirsty animal lapping greedily at a spring of long-sought fresh water” – end of Chapter One).

 This is one of those waking dreams in which we have to justify our most private life in front of a court of law – except that there is no real trial and death is arbitrary. In this respect, maybe it is about God after all.

Let us not forget Kafka’s deadpan humour, as when Joseph K’s landlady worries about her house being respectable and Josef K. retorts Groucho-esquely “Respectable! If you want to keep your house respectable you’d have to begin by giving me notice.” (Chapter One). Let us not forget the foretaste of “I was only obeying orders!” when the one of the arresters who wields a whip says to Joseph K’s objections “What you say sounds reasonable enough, but I refuse to be bribed. I am here to whip people, and whip them I shall.” (Chapter Five). And, in case we forget the scary and louring element, let us not forget Josef K’s suggestion that Titorelli’s painting of Justice “no longer suggested the goddess of Justice, or even the Goddess of Victory, but looked exactly a Goddess of the Hunt in full cry.” (Chapter Seven)

Like all good art, it is complex, resists a simple formula and, at least on a second reading, is not as flawed by its inconsistencies as I thought it was the first time I read it.

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.

LIES BEHIND LIES  

 

This isn’t so much a considered essay as a brief assertion, inspired by two images.

First image:

A year or two back, a Hong Kong newspaper printed and publicised a story about a senior official of the North Korean Communist Party, the dictator Kim Jong Un’s uncle, being purged and executed. It claimed that the luckless uncle was killed by being fed to 120 hungry dogs. The Hong Kong Newspaper was an affiliate of the Chinese Communist Party. The story was picked up by some (but not many) Western journals, with the obvious intention of showing the paranoia of North Korea’s closed Stalinist state and the extreme things it did when it wanted to get rid of party members who had fallen out of favour.

Before too long, however, doubts began to appear. It was pointed out that the Chinese Communist newspaper, which first publicised the story, was noted for its sensationalism, and was often the voice of Chinese Communist propaganda when it wanted to rebuke its annoying and embarrassing North Korean neighbour. It was further pointed out that no South Korean newspaper had run the story, even though they are quite partial to running exposes of the brutality of the North. Soon the consensus was that the tale of Kim Jong Un’s uncle being eaten by dogs was a fabrication, even though (reported in quite other terms by North Korean outlets) it was true that the man had been purged and executed.

But here something very predictable happened.

Now that the lurid story was proven to be false (or “proven” inasmuch as anything can be proven about a closed state which forbids free scrutiny), apologists for North Korea took the opportunity to argue that all negative things reported about North Korea in the Western media were false. Stories of people being executed by hungry dogs? How ridiculous! Why, soon you will start believing those stories about mass starvation in North Korea, constant surveillance of the population and the country’s extensive gulag!

Second image:

Some years back, while researching the history of New Zealand’s sad little Communist movement as part of my history studies, I came across a pamphlet written in the 1950s by a CPNZ member. It was about the iniquitous things that had been said against the peace-loving Soviet Union by Western propaganda. The pamphlet was filled with lurid, and untrue, newspaper reports from the early 1920s about Bolsheviks “nationalising” women, encouraging cannibalism and so forth. The cover of the pamphlet was an early anti-Bolshevik cartoon of a hairy, bomb-throwing Bolshevik, the bomb being one of those cannon-ball-shaped things with a burning wick, such as used to appear in cartoons.

The intention of the pamphlet was obvious. Surely you can’t believe all this silly stuff, the pamphlet argued. Why, it’s pure “demonization” (a favourite word even today with apologists for Russia’s current dictator Vladimir Putin).  So why should you believe those things that are being reported from refugees and defectors about Stalin’s terror state, purges, engineered famines, ethnic cleansing, the gulag and complete lack of civil liberties? These things must be mere hysterical propaganda too.

Thus, to his own satisfaction, the CPNZ pamphleteer could discount many real and valid exposes of the USSR.

The phenomenon these two examples point to is fairly obvious. Apologists for terror regimes love exaggerated propaganda stories about them, as it gives them the opportunity to argue that all negative reportage on those regimes is false. Indeed exaggerated propaganda stories are meat-and-drink to them, in very much the same way that the actions of ISIS are beloved by atheist propagandists who want to argue that all religion is fanatical and leads to terror.

The burden laid upon the rest of us is to recognize when a propaganda story is mere propaganda, even if is appears to be propaganda in a good cause. After all, in the end fabrications defeat themselves and, when exposed, give comfort to those who want to peddle other lies.

Something New

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

“QUICKSAND” by Steve Toltz  (Hamish-Hamilton, distributed by Penguin-Random House, $NZ40)

Prologue to the review: Curse my memory because I can’t recall where I read this story, but it was in a documentary book about American adolescent problems and drug-addiction. The author related the case of a school which decided to deter adolescents from using hard drugs by getting a young ex-junkie to tell classes about his experiences. That way, the school authorities reasoned, the kids would have somebody with whom they could identify, rather than a boring adult, to tell them about the evils of drugs. Other schools thought this was a good idea and brought in the same young man to speak to their classes. Result? The taking of illicit drugs rose in every single school the ex-junkie visited. It wasn’t because he was dealing drugs. It was because, even though he’d given up the hard stuff and made a few “don’t-do-this-kids” comments, the ex-junkie was witty and charming and a great speaker who could churn out a wisecrack a minute. The real message the kids got, as opposed to the one they were supposed to be getting, was that hard drugs made you witty and a great performer – not to mention making you the centre of attention, which is what all adolescents really crave. Maybe, too, addle-headed free-association can sound like wisdom to the impressionable.

Does this have anything to do with Steve Toltz’s new novel Quicksand, which has virtually nothing to do with drugs? Maybe. Maybe not. You judge when you get to the end of this review.

The review itself: Let me raise the curtain, tell the actors to wear no make-up, ensure the scenery is left in storage, switch off the sound system and lighting effects and have them perform with just the rehearsal lights. Let me pretend that this is a novel without a distinct style of its own. Let me give you the barest of bones of that contentious thing called a “plot” which, in real literature, never exists on its own anyway.

Australian novelist Steve Toltz’s second novel Quicksand (a mere 435 pages long, after his 700-plus-page, much-acclaimed, Booker-shortlisted first novel A Fraction of the Whole) concerns two fellers of contrasting types. Not so much Yin-and-Yang as Hamlet-and-Horatio. Or somewhere in that ballpark. One is the active one who carries most of the story and the other is more-or-less his sounding board.

Aldo Benjamin and Liam Wilder went to the same Aussie high school and were both equally unimpressed by its discipline. Both were angsty teenagers. They used to lie on the roof of the school dunny in recess and share their philosophies. They had something in common in the way of family tragedies. Liam’s sister was run over and killed by an out-of-control cop car. Aldo’s sister was blown up by Bali bombings. Liam’s family were straight types. Aldo’s family were more leafy-suburb hippies, who spent their time intimidating their neighbours into selling their homes, so that they could build up an extended family community in the neighbourhood. The two boys had artistic hopes of some sort – at least they were both influenced by their art teacher Mr Morrell, who produced a book of ego-deflating aphorisms that became Liam’s Bible.

But post-school is not a land of great creativity and not a land of great fulfilment either. Liam tries to be a writer, gets nowhere, and instead becomes a cop, at first because he wants to understand the mentality of the cop who ran down his sister. Aldo is a serial failed entrepreneur, dreaming up a series of very dodgy con-trick-type schemes, then bailing out with angry creditors on his tail. Liam’s marriage to Tess goes nowhere and falls apart. Aldo is truly, madly, deeply in love with his high-school sweetheart Stella, but their marriage goes bung too after they have a still-born child, and he’s left still obsessed with her and irate that she has remarried.

At novel’s beginning (because all the above is backstory) Aldo is for some reason a wheelchair-bound paraplegic, while the cop Liam has decided that he can make a novel out of Aldo’s life. And that is their relationship throughout Quicksilver. Liam – usually the novel’s narrator – observes and comments on Aldo’s mistake-filled, accident-filled rollercoaster of a life. Let me not spike every narrative move of this novel, but let me simply note that Aldo’s life includes being accused of rape as a teenager, thinking up and failing to follow through on schemes to enrich himself, facing trial for killing a baby, later facing another trial for killing a grown woman, having the awful accident that rendered him paraplegic, going to jail, getting repeatedly and systematically raped in jail, being in a coma for months, ingesting many drugs at various times, having cheerless bonking in a cheerlessly-described brothel when he can’t link up with one of the two women with whom he is at various times obsessed…. and talking a lot to God or whatever runs the universe, and somehow managing to become some sort of paraplegic sage or guru to surfies and beach bums in a hidden Aussie cove. Did I mention, by the way, that Aldo’s father committed suicide and Aldo is fascinated by death and frequently thinks of suicide? Indeed when, in the latter half of the novel, his voice takes over the narration, his wild and crazy sex drive and his wild and crazy death wish sound like an endless conversation between Eros and Thanatos.

And all the time he is somebody’s muse – not somebody who himself creates but somebody who fires up other people to think they can create. Stella, his first sweetheart and sometime wife, writes protests songs for him. Mimi, the second woman in his life, thinks she can make arty photographs out of him. [In a Listener review, one New Zealand novelist has already complained that Toltz’s women characters are too passive. Maybe so.] Then there is listening, note-taking, interrogating Liam hoping to make a novel out of him.

Let me not be too verbose, gentle reader. For all the twists, turns, surprises, jolts, upsets and reversals of the story (and I haven’t told you the half of them), this free-wheeling, picaresque, often improvisatory, bustling, laugh-a-minute, horror-a-minute novel is quite straightforward to interpret. Or perhaps interpret wrongly.

It’s about the processes of writing and creation themselves, and how in a way they always lead to failure. Liam’s desire to turn Aldo’s life into art is the novelist knowing that the life which bustles on the page is never his own life. At certain points, Aldo and Liam discuss explicitly how Liam will depict Aldo, and how Liam will massage events to give them a different tenor. So there’s that meta-narrative thing going on here. The novel we are reading is the product of the narrator who is the product of the author who…. you get it. And we are aware that the things that make Aldo funny and compelling and sympathetic on the page are the very things that would make him an obnoxious sociopath in real life. (Read the scene where he offers what amounts to a curse at a Buddhist wedding. Read his self-absorbed burst of spite and contempt at a family funeral). Literature turns the tawdry or disgusting into the interesting and compelling. Another built-in reflection on the nature of literature, which this novel yields.

At the same time, it’s an internal psychodrama. Aldo and Liam are like two halves of the same youngish male’s psyche. Here I go a little Kafkaesque in my interpretation. [Kafka provides one of the novel’s epigraphs and is referenced a couple of times in the text]. As I will explain soon on this blog, I’ve always thought of Kafka’s The Trial as a drama played out inside the brain of its protagonist Josef K. as he hits his thirties and wonders how he has spent his life. In Quicksand, Aldo and Liam are in their thirties and so at that same self-questioning, self-reproving age. Liam, self-censoring, observing and reflecting, is like the Superego to Aldo’s Id, who is into self-pity and self-gratifying sex and risk-taking taunting of death. Again, much of this novel reminds me of the film Fight Club, where the simultaneous repression and aggression of the young male mind were seen in two characters who, in the film’s denouement, turned out to be one and the same character. Much of the second half of Quicksand is Aldo’s first-person self-defence before a judge in a court of law – the ideal place for a novelist to situate a self-accusatory internal psychodrama.

So you have the “plot” of Quicksand and my inadequate interpretation of it.

And what a miserable, dead and sorry thing I have made of it by summarising it thus.

The fact is, this novel lives more by style than anything. In Aldo’s monologues and conversations with Liam we are delivered about ten skewed aphorisms per page – zingers of which any comedy writer would be proud. You laugh and laugh even as the story gets outrageous and sordid. When, hospitalised in the second part of the novel, Aldo breaks into pages of free verse, we are given poetry of an order that would be the pride of most anthologies. Then there are those long “list” sentences in which, refusing to be terse and photographic, Steve Toltz delivers detail upon detail upon detail wrapped in surreal or horrific metaphors. Yes, this is an Australian novel written by an Australian and specifically set in and around Sydney, but the pepped-up tone of voice is the voice of much post-Beat American writing.

Of course I read it compulsively in a very short time. I couldn’t drag myself away from its verbal inventiveness and its mixture of wit and cruelty and its sick way of getting laughs out of the worst of modern ills and its clear understanding of the “God-sized hole” in modern human consciousness. And then…. And then….

            Epilogue to review: Do you remember that Prologue to this review? Now what’s all that stuff about an ex-junkie public speaker got to do with this novel? It’s just this vibe I have, dude. Look, it’s witty and it’s funny and it bounces along to the point where you’re getting something like the best-honed effort of an intellectual stand-up comic of the sick school. And then, when you put it down, you think “Whoa! Was I dazzled by the brilliant verbiage when it was selling me bullshit? I mean, isn’t this just a writer burbling on with impossible characters in a great big farce? Am I one of those kids thinking a witty ex-junkie is talking profundity when he just improvising?” I dunno. Some thought like that did strike me, but then maybe I’m hitting it over the fence.

            Footnote: Just a couple of things I’ve gleaned from an interview Steve Toltz did with the Guardian. First, he admitted that the core of this novel consisted of about 300 pages he cut from his earlier novel, because he couldn’t integrate the character concerned into his earlier plot. Second, he said that at least some of the pains Aldo suffers are drawn from his own time in hospital after an accident. But third, and to me most distressingly, he said that his preferred mode of writing is to “riff” on things. (Aargh! I hate the modish misuse of that jazz term “riff” when tired scribblers don’t know better terms for improvisation.) This gives me the idea that much of Quicksand really is simple free-association and burbling.

But what larks, Pip!

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 EGOIST” by George Meredith (first published 1879)

            We are agreed, are we not, that to give a mere plot summary of a novel is no way to assess either its impact or its literary worth? For my proof-text in this week’s sermon, I take a novel that was once highly esteemed, but is now dead as mutton and read only by Eng Lit specialists and complete-ists. I refer to George Meredith’s The Egoist, a novel which strives to be a country-house comedy, but which becomes a tasteless soup of convoluted cogitations, strained irony and pompous philosophy.

As I have remarked before on this blog, George Meredith (1828-1909), novelist and poet, was once regarded as one of the greatest of Victorian novelists, but he is now little read, despite the occasional attempt by some enthusiasts to reinsert him into the canon. I speak of him with at least a little authority. About twenty years ago, and for no reason that I can now discern, I took it into my head to read my way through all his novels in the order in which he wrote them – from his Arabian nights fantasy The Shaving of Shagpat (1856) to The Amazing Marriage (1895). Among his works I found some to admire and like, such as his first real novel, the delightful The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and his very good political novel Beauchamp’s Career (1875) [look up my views on them under “George Meredith” on the index at right]. There were also some things to like in his poetry – the sonnet Lucifer by Starlight, the famous Lark Ascending and at least some of the poems in the sequence Modern Love.

But the more I read of his novels, the more irritated I became. I could see why

highbrows once admired them. For real late-Victorian intellectuals, Meredith was a cut above even the highly intellectual George Eliot, and certainly superior to those vulgarians Dickens and Thackeray. But that is the problem. Meredith’s novels are too self-consciously intellectual. Authorial commentary and interventions stop narrative stone dead. In most of his novels, characters are lost in the author’s analysis of them. In addition, some of the issues with which Meredith dealt would have seemed “advanced” and “daring” to intellectuals of his age, but they are now sadly dated. This is particularly true of what was once his second-most admired novel Diana of the Crossways (1885), with its plot of a loveless marriage and a woman’s desire for independence.

But it is to what was once considered his masterpiece that I now turn.

The Egoist announces itself in its subtitle as “A Comedy in Narrative”, and Meredith precedes it with an introduction in which he expounds his theory of what comedy should be. He says:

“Comedy is a game played to throw reflections on social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilised men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent clashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing….[Comedy] it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dullness, and of the vestiges or rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, the sweet cook. If….she watches over sentimentalism with a birch rod, she is not opposed to romance.”

The notion of comedy as a civilising force and corrector of vice is an excellent one, but from this you may infer that Meredith’s version of comedy is oddly restricted. It will include no slapstick or vulgar farce and will confine itself to the gentryfolk. He also (elsewhere in his prologue) speaks of seeing people as being deformed by false views of themselves, which he calls Egoism. This comes close to the comedy of “humours” of Ben Jonson or Thomas Love Peacock, but those two wits handled the matter less ponderously than Meredith does.

On with the show, as I now plunge into the mode of giving you (as I warned at the top of this notice) one of those synopses that tell you nothing about the novel’s quality.

The Egoist concerns one Sir Willoughby Patterne, who lives at Patterne Hall with his admiring aunts Eleanor and Isabel, and who thinks the world of himself. Others are there either to serve his needs or to be condescended to. He is engaged to be married to Constantia Durham, but when she realises how much he intends to control her life, she jilts him and runs away with a robust army officer. Sir Willoughby’s amour propre is wounded. To console himself, he invites a distant relative, Crossjay Patterne, to live with him, in the hopes of patronising him. But when Crossjay Patterne proves to be ragged and ordinary, he is dismissed.

All this is a kind of prelude to the main action. The story really gets going (if one can say it ever gets going in this novel) when Sir Willoughby, aged 32, becomes engaged to the lively Clara Middleton, aged 19. The arc of the story has Clara rapidly becoming aware of Sir Willoughby’s self-absorption. She wishes to be freed of her promise of marriage. But Sir Willoughby will not let her go as he fears that society will laugh at him for having been twice jilted by possible brides.

Clara is really the centre of the novel’s consciousness. Her realization that Sir Willoughby wants her just as an ornament (“a dainty rogue in porcelain”, as one minor character calls her) and her frustration at being engaged to Sir Willoughby, are counterpointed by her growing affection for the non-egotistical Vernon Whitford, and her easy, cheerful, chummy relationship with the boy Crossjay Patterne (son of the ragged chap whom Sir Willoughby had peremptorily dismissed).

Sir Willoughby’s egoism is acted out in many ways. He sees servants as mere minions and at one point he cruelly dismisses from his post the carrier Flitch, even though the poor old chap has no other income and a large family to support.  He wants people to gather around him and admire his wit, style and poise. (Damme! He’s so camp that sometimes one suspects in another age he wouldn’t be seeking to marry a woman at all). He shows ostensible charity by letting the boy Crossjay reside at Patterne Hall, but he thwarts the boy’s ambition to be a naval officer as he wants him to stay there as one of his entourage of admirers. Eventually, about three-quarters of the way through the novel, and having failed to reason, shame, bully or cajole Clara Middleton out of her desire, he releases her from her promise to marry him. It is implied that Clara duly marries Vernon Whitford.

But there is a sort of happy ending for Sir Willoughby Patterne. Early in the novel we have been introduced to another woman in his life, the sharp and waspish Laetitia Dale. Sir Willoughby likes Laetitia to come and admire him and exchange witticisms with him, but when she dares to have an intellectual life in writing, he regards her coldly. Having been twice rejected by women, however, Sir Willoughby proposes to Laetitia. She turns him down, as she can see right through him. But by complications of the plot, with which I will not bother you, she reconsiders and decides to accept him in a purely pragmatic spirit and with no illusions. She tells Sir Willoughby that she too is an Egoist and that Sir Willoughby must accept her with all her intellectual strengths and on equal terms.

So the Egoist is rewarded with another Egoist and jolly suited they are to each other too. And so the novel ends.

Once again, you see how useless plot summaries are on their own, don’t you? In the hands of Jonson or Peacock (or maybe even Oscar Wilde), this tale that I have just spun could have been witty, farcical and very amusing. But unfortunately it is in the hands of George Meredith.

Now believe me, while I may be a cad and a bounder, I am not a chump, and I can see moments of real and penetrating wit in this novel. Relish with me some of the choice moments I noted down in my reading diary.

Here is the moment where Sir Willoughby first meets Laetitia. Oh what a paradigm of narcissism!

“  ‘Your name is sweet English music! And are you well?’ The anxious question permitted him to read deeply in her eyes. He found the man he sought there, squeezed him passionately and let her go…” (Chapter 4)

And here is a word of sound commentary from the level-headed Clara:

“ Cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb’s feathers; and it seems to me that cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves.” (Chapter 7)

Then there is the long passage in Chapter 11 in which Clara’s consciousness leads Meredith to comment on how intelligent women can see that men who idolise them and praise their purity are really enslaving them. It begins with the following fine sentence:

“The capaciously strong in soul among women will ultimately detect an infinite grossness in the demand for purity infinite, spotless bloom.”

I relish the remark Clara makes about I minor character:

“I must avoid her. The thought of her leaves me no choice. She is clever. She could tattoo me with epigrams.” (Chapter 27)

The last sentence there could describe many a smart-arse conversation I have heard, not to mention much of the dialogue of Wilde and Shaw when they use clever-dick one-liners to resolve complex problems.

My soul joins Vernon Whitford when he is in a state of depression:

“Books he could not read, thoughts were disturbing. A seat in the library and a stupid stare helped to pass the hours…” (Chapter 30)

Been there, done that!

I like Laetitia’s caution to Clara when she suspects her of being disingenuous:

“Similes have the merit of satisfying the finder of them, and cheating the hearer.” (Chapter 48)

Finally, I like the passage in which Laetitia makes her pragmatic decision to marry Sir Willoughby after all. Meredith’s wit is positively feline as he shows how much self-interest is involved in her rational decision:

“Those features of the possible once beheld allured the mind to reconsider them. Wealth gives us the power to do good on earth. Wealth enables us to see the world, the beautiful scenes of the earth. Laetitia had long thirsted for both a dowering money bag at her girdle and the wings to fly abroad over lands which had begun to seem fabulous in her starved imagination. Then, moreover, if her sentiment for this gentleman were gone, it was only a delusion gone; accurate sight and knowledge of him would not make a woman the less helpful mate. That was the mate he required and he could be led. A sentimental attachment would have been serviceless to him. Not so the woman allied by a purely rational bond…” (Chapter 49)

So you see, I can go through the novel and pick out gems of wit which, on their own, might seduce you into thinking that the whole novel sparkles.

But it doesn’t.

What kills this novel? Partly it is the sheer artificiality of the story, and its arch and calculated poise. Note that, as in other “humour” comedies, Sir Willoughby does not grow or change. He is there to be described and to be the foil of more sensible people, but he is a stage caricature who cannot be subjected to the type of psychological analysis that a novel demands – even a purportedly comic novel. (Note that subtitle “A Comedy in Narrative”, meaning that Meredith is aware he is producing a theatrical situation in prose.) We might laugh at Sir Willoughby if he were placed in a farcical situation on stage; but too much suspension of disbelief is required when we met him on the printed page. Only by an act of faith can we continue to believe that the egotistical Sir Willoughby would have a clique of hangers-on when he is so grossly, and so self-evidently, a completely selfish prat.

This is a country-house story with a restricted cast of characters in a limited setting contending with a rigid (and dead) social code. It is also (in spite of what my synopsis might have lulled you into believing) very static, with little forward dramatic momentum. Most of the story is conveyed in dialogue or interview scenes, with artificial contrivance to bring characters together or set them apart. It is amazing how often meetings occur because somebody just happens to be strolling on “the lawn” of Patterne Hall.

I am aware that this was once seen as the most polished of Meredith’s novels, and it was regarded as awfully clever that he had patterned the tale of Sir Willoughby Patterne on the Willow Pattern “legend” that came with English-manufactured crockery. To explain: in the late eighteenth century, English potters produced plates and pots in imitation of genuine Chinese ceramics, and incorporating a white-and-blue image of willow trees, two birds in flight and people crossing a Chinese bridge. To publicise their products, a “legend” (which is now known to be of English origin) was invented, saying that the pattern depicted an ancient Chinese tale of two lovers fleeing from a cruel prince who would not allow them to wed. In other words, the “legend” was an early example of English advertising copywriting. Obviously in The Egoist, Sir Willoughby Patterne is the cruel prince, and Clara and Vernon are the two lovers he prevents from marrying. (Crockery also comes into the novel in the form of a vase, given as a wedding present, which is symbolically smashed en route to its recipient; and a set of porcelain also given as a wedding present).

One also notes Meredith’s choice of names for his other major characters. Clara (=clear-sighted about Sir Willoughby) is also the Aristotelian desired medium (=Middleton) between extremes of feeling and self-conceit. Laetitia (=Joy) brings wit and a certain sort of joy to the Egoist in the end. This is in the tradition of “humours” comedy.

Despite its supposed polish, however, this is so often an obtuse and opaque production. Meredith frequently gives way to his least lovable stylistic habits. There are so many lengthy sentences, with metaphors dribbling through long subordinate clauses in which the subject of the sentence is lost. Much of the dialogue is allusive and indirect, as if the characters are speaking in a particular social code to which we are not privy. (The same is horribly true of another of Meredith’s novels Evan Harrington). When Meredith begins to philosophise in long digressions about “the Book of Egoism”, it has the same affect as his ramblings about “the Philosopher” in his novel Sandra Belloni. We want him to stop telling us and start showing us.

I do note Meredith’s attempts to let some sunshine into this closed world. There are a few bursts of boyishness. When the boy Crossjay Patterne goes out hunting birds’ eggs, it has the welcome freshness of the scenes in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel where Richard goes on country rambles (or the scenes in one of Meredith’s many duds, Harry Richmond, in which young Harry consorts with gypsies.) At least there is an attempt to break with the artificial decorum and etiquette of Patterne Hall. I also note that trademark habit of Meredith’s novels, where the expected denouement (Sir Willoughby releasing Clara from her engagement) occurs well before the end of the novel.

But ultimately, this once-esteemed classic does not breathe. It is too polished, finished, artificial and verbose – and seems mostly hermetically sealed off from the world outside Patterne Hall. A group of unbelievable characters preserved in aspic.

I know that in making this call, I am putting myself on the wrong side of the judgments of E.M.Forster, Virginia Woolf and other worthies. But it’s not my fault if they sometimes got it wrong.

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.

GEORGE MEREDITH AS POET

It is too easy, isn’t it, to dismiss writers who were once esteemed as if they were mere irrelevancies? I have more-or-less done this on this blog in the way I’ve dealt with George Meredith’s The Egoist. But please note, dear readers, I have earlier on this blog said very positive things about the man’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and Beauchamp’s Career. And while his poetry isn’t on my list of favourites, it does sometimes show genuine spark and inspiration. I say this on the authority of having worked my way through the two volumes of his collected poetry, softbacks printed in 1909, which I once bought for the modest sum of $6 from an Auckland second-hand bookshop which is no more.

Let me say at once that I am not particularly enamoured of his Love in the Valley, which was once one of his most admired. Too damned “purty” for me, as Ezra Pound might have said. But I do raise the flag of admiration for his fine sonnet Lucifer in Starlight, one of the best expressions of Decadenz in Eng Lit, and a poem which T.S.Eliot saw fit to quote (satirically and sardonically) in his early verse Cousin Nancy. I mean, “the army of unalterable law” is a damned good phrase isn’t it? Even if you are taking the piss out of it.

Here is Lucifer in Starlight:

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.

Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend

Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,

Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.

Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.

And now upon his western wing he leaned,

Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened,

Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.

Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars

With memory of the old revolt from Awe,

He reached a middle height, and at the stars,

Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.

Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,

The army of unalterable law.

Looking back at my reading diary, I see I tried for witticism when I first undertook to read Meredith’s sequence Modern Love (each poem in the sequence is like an extended sonnet, being 16 lines long) I wrote facetiously that Modern Love presented “thoughts on a strained marriage as acute as those of T.S.Eliot – but unfortunately expressed in the language of Elizabeth Barrett Browning”. Such hauteur really does violate my creed that a poet who writes even one poem that is still remembered years later should be esteemed. And in the sequence Modern Love there are some good individual poems. Take Poem Number 47 which, despite some flowery vocabulary, does express that intense sense of the death of love even in the moments when love is most being enjoyed. Can’t help feeling that that distinctly elegiac tone, with the swallows gathering to depart, is copied from the way Keats ends his Ode to Autumn – but then Meredith has made good use of the borrowing. Here is Poem 47 from Modern Love.

WE saw the swallows gathering in the sky,
And in the osier-isle we heard their noise.
We had not to look back on summer joys,
Or forward to a summer of bright dye;
But in the largeness of the evening earth	5
Our spirits grew as we went side by side.
The hour became her husband, and my bride.
Love that had robb’d us so, thus bless’d our dearth!
The pilgrims of the year wax’d very loud
In multitudinous chatterings, as the flood	10
Full brown came from the west, and like pale blood
Expanded to the upper crimson cloud.
Love, that had robb’d us of immortal things,
This little moment mercifully gave,
And still I see across the twilight wave	15
The swan sail with her young beneath her wings.

And finally, not wishing to stretch your patience, I quote only the first third of his best-known poem The Lark Ascending (best-known in part because Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote a tone poem inspired by it – which a young relative of mine once said was his favourite piece of music). Here are the first 44 lines of Meredith’s 122 line poem. Because of Vaughan Williams’ music, it is often associated with pre-Great War pastoralism. Fair enough, I guess, though I prefer to see it as an exercise in pure sound.

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,
All intervolv’d and spreading wide,
Like water-dimples down a tide
Where ripple ripple overcurls
And eddy into eddy whirls;
A press of hurried notes that run
So fleet they scarce are more than one,
Yet changingly the trills repeat
And linger ringing while they fleet,
Sweet to the quick o’ the ear, and dear
To her beyond the handmaid ear,
Who sits beside our inner springs,
Too often dry for this he brings,
Which seems the very jet of earth
At sight of sun, her musci’s mirth,
As up he wings the spiral stair,
A song of light, and pierces air
With fountain ardor, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day,
And drink in everything discern’d
An ecstasy to music turn’d,
Impell’d by what his happy bill
Disperses; drinking, showering still,
Unthinking save that he may give
His voice the outlet, there to live
Renew’d in endless notes of glee,
So thirsty of his voice is he,
For all to hear and all to know
That he is joy, awake, aglow,
The tumult of the heart to hear
Through pureness filter’d crystal-clear,
And know the pleasure sprinkled bright
By simple singing of delight,
Shrill, irreflective, unrestrain’d,
Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustain’d
Without a break, without a fall,
Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical,
Perennial, quavering up the chord
Like myriad dews of sunny sward
That trembling into fulness shine,
And sparkle dropping argentine…..

Now that will do for a taste of a very good poem. The style and sentiment are not those of our age – but then whoever said that all good poetry has to conform to our norms?

Okay, enough to convince you that George Meredith wasn’t a bad poet.