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. 

“MEMOIRS OF MADAME DE LA TOUR DU PIN” (“Le Journal d’une femme de cinquante ans”, written between 1820 and 1840; edited and translated into English by Felice Harcourt - English translation first published 1969)

Sometimes people of no particular achievement and no notable intellectual attainment can write memoirs that are very revealing about the times in which they lived. One such specimen was Madame de la Tour du Pin. I first came across the English translation of her memoirs about twenty years ago, and read them with great delight – not because I endorsed or shared her worldview, but because she expressed so perfectly the attitudes and values of her social class. The historian in me was constantly interested in how she (and implicitly others of her social standing) saw the events of the French revolution and much that followed it.

The Marquise de la Tour du Pin (1770-1853) was born Henriette-Lucy Dillon, the Irish surname coming from the fact that she was descended from an Irish family who had supported King James II in 1688 and therefore had fled to France when William of Orange usurped the British throne. In France the family were ennobled by Louis XIV. Henriette-Lucy was largely brought up by her grandmother in the house of her great-uncle the Archbishop of Narbonne.

In her teens Henriette-Lucy Dillon became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie-Antoinette in her last troubled days at Versailles. She married the Comte de Gouvernet, who later inherited the title de la Tour du Pin and who held a diplomatic post in The Hague early in the revolution. Henriette-Lucy and her husband were in Paris in 1793, at the time Louis XVI was executed. They managed to escape imprisonment and execution in the Terror by retiring to the de la Tour du Pin estate, Chateau du Bouilh, near Bordeaux. Still under threat from the Jacobins (the radical faction in the revolution), the couple managed to escape to America with the surprising help of Madame de Fontenay, the wife of the notorious Tallien, one of the most zealous of the “Terrorists”.

Husband and wife lived as amateur farmers in Albany, in upstate New York, for some of the mid-1790s. Because the Comte de la Tour du Pin was a diplomat, they were acquainted with the wily ex-bishop and diplomat Talleyrand, who was also at this time sitting out the revolution in America and who was later to become an important figure in the couple’s life. All three returned to France in the Directory period, when the Terror was over, but then fled into exile again, this time to England, when the Fructidor coup of 1798 purged possible royalist sympathisers. As French émigrés in England, they had some blood relatives among the English gentry. They welcomed the advent of Napoleon as a stabilising influence, and returned to France in 1800. The Comte de la Tour du Pin worked in Napoleon’s diplomatic service, but accepted the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814, did not support Napoleon’s return in 1815 (the “Hundred Days”), and therefore was part of the French contingent negotiating at the Congress of Vienna.

The Marquise de la Tour du Pin lived to the ripe old age of 83. She wrote her memoirs mainly in the 1820s (although she was still tinkering with them by the late 1830s), addressing them to her sole surviving son Aymar. She was in her fifties in the 1820s, hence the title her memoirs were given when they were published years later, Le Journal d’une Femme de Cinquante Ans. She stops her narrative in 1815.

From this brief summary of her life, you can see that how she lived was mainly dictated by the changing historical situation in France – the end of the Bourbon monarchy, the revolution, the Terror, the Directory, Fructidor, Napoleon, the end of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons.

How do we assess her memoirs? They are the memoirs of a minor French aristocrat, often limited in her judgments by her education and class. Her memoirs are very gossipy – naturally filled with family details of limited historical interest. She is frequently, and quite un-self-consciously, vain about her own good looks, wit and superiority. Often they read as the memoirs of a supernumerary or hanger-on who, quite falsely, sees herself as being at the centre of events.

Husband and wife are (naturally and understandably) often trimmers in dangerous historical times. (I recently reviewed for Landfall an excellent new biography of the great French explorer Dumont D’Urville, and I realise how much being a trimmer was the natural condition of most educated French people in revolutionary and Napoleonic times.)  Basically they belong to the ancien regime – Madame de la Tour du Pin is often snobbish in her judgments upon later upstarts who did not manage the effortless style of her own aristocratic generation – such as the ladies of Napoleon’s court. And yet the couple’s attitudes are not inflexible. The weaknesses and inadequacies of the ancien regime are duly noted. Napoleon is admired as the restorer of French honour. And the Restoration of 1814 is seen as faintly ridiculous. (Bear in mind that France had undergone yet another revolution and regime change in 1830, before these memoirs were first published in France).

There is, I repeat, absolutely nothing remarkable in the mind that produced these memoirs. Perhaps this is the real reason that they are historically interesting. They show the judgments and reaction and prejudices that were typical of Madame de la Tour du Pin’s minor aristocratic class.

And yet… and yet…. I do not wish to underestimate Madame de la Tour du Pin any more than I want to build her up as a major literary figure. Sometimes her observations and judgments are quite shrewd – even witty – and she has seen enough not to romanticise “the good old days”. She knows full well that the revolution was not causeless and did not come out of nowhere.

To illustrate the quality of this book, I can do no better than to quote some of the passages that found their way into my reading diary. [All page numbers are according to the Harvill Press edition of 1969.]

Here is Madame de la Tour du Pin on the destructive laxity and scepticism of the old regime:

“In my earliest years, I saw things which might have been expected to warp my mind, pervert my affections, deprave my character and destroy in me every notion of religion and morality. From the age of ten I heard around me the freest conversations and the expression of the most ungodly principles. Brought up, as I was, in an Archbishop’s house where every rule of religion was broken daily, I was fully aware that my lessons in dogma and doctrine were given no more importance than those in history and geography.” (pp.13-24)

She notes that in this archbishop’s household, there was not even a chaplain to serve daily devotional needs. She goes on to speak of the general breakdown of public morality:

“The profligate reign of Louis XV had corrupted the nobility and among the Court Nobles could be found instances of every form of vice. Gaming, debauchery, immorality, irreligion, were all flaunted openly. The hierarchy of the Church, summoned to Paris for those congresses of the clergy which the King… was obliged to call every year… had also been corrupted by contact with the dissolute habits of the Court… The older I grew… the more sure I became that the revolution of 1789 was only the inevitable consequence and, I might almost say, the just punishment of the vices of the upper classes, vices carried to such excess that if people had not been stricken with a mortal blindness, they must have seen that they would inevitably have been consumed by the very fire they themselves were lighting.” (pp.26-27)

Having been a young courtier, she paints an affectionate enough portrait of Louis XVI, but she is not dazzled by him:

“He was stout, about five feet six or seven inches tall, square-shouldered and with the worst possible bearing. He looked like some peasant shambling along behind his plough; there was nothing proud or regal about him. His sword was a continual embarrassment to him and he never knew what to do with his hat, yet in court dress he looked really magnificent” (pp.71-72)

As she deals with the events that led up to the revolution, she is highly critical of the king’s inactivity and sequestration at Versailles, but she is even more critical of what she sees as the devious behaviour of the leader of the rival branch of the royal family, the Duc d’Orleans. She interprets his actions as undermining real royal authority in his own interests. As for the abolition of feudal dues and rights, she is livid as one would expect a minor aristocrat to be, declaring of this early revolutionary event:

“… the happenings of the night of the 4^th of August when, on the motion of the Vicomte de Noailles, it was decreed that feudal rights should be abolished, ought to have convinced even the most incredulous that the National Assembly was unlikely to stop at this first measure of dispossession. The decree ruined my father-in-law and our family never recovered from the effect of that night’s session. It was a veritable orgy of iniquities.” (pp.116-117)

Lafayette is depicted as an honest but theatrical fool who did not realize how much he was being manipulated by Orleans. The story that royal troops donned the white cockade and cursed the people is discounted as a fiction. And we get this unflattering description of Marie-Antoinette:

“She was gifted with very great courage, but very little intelligence, absolutely no tact and, worst of all, a mistrust – always misplaced – of those most willing to serve her. She refused to recognise that the terrible danger which had threatened her on the night of the 6^th of October was the result of a plot by the Duc d’Orleans, and from then on vented her resentment on all the people of Paris and avoided appearing in public.” (p.139)

While she is largely contemptuous of the feast of federation on 14 July 1790 (the first official celebration of “Bastille Day”, at a time when the king was still on the throne) she is generous enough in spirit to acknowledge the high ideals that motivated it:

“Laundresses and knights of St.Louis worked side by side in that great gathering of all the people; there was not the slightest disorder or the smallest dispute. Everyone was moved by the same impulse: fellowship.” (pp.142-143)

She is scandalised by army officers who fled abroad early in the revolution, leaving the armed forces to more radical “other ranks” and hence hastening the breakdown of order and violence against the royal state. She quotes with approval (p.160) Napoleon’s later observation that “Had I been in Lafayette’s place, the king would still be sitting on his throne.”  She also gives a chilling account of the silence that fell on the city of Paris (p.177) on the morning that the king was executed, while she and her husband, in their house outside the old city walls, awaited evidence of popular revulsion against the act of regicide.

Some of her portraits of individuals are waspish and backhanded. Here she is on the revolutionary era’s supreme trimmer Talleyrand:

“M. de Talleyrand was amiable, as he unvaryingly was to me, and his conversation had a grace and ease which has never been surpassed. He had known me since my childhood and always talked to me with an almost paternal politeness which was delightful. One might, in one’s inmost mind, regret having so many reasons for not holding him in respect, but memories of his wrong-doing were always dispelled by an hour of his conversation. Worthless himself, he had, oddly enough, a horror of wrong-doing in others. Listening to him, and not knowing him, one thought him a virtuous man. Only his exquisite sense of propriety prevented him from saying things to me which would have displeased me, and if, as sometimes happened, they did escape him, he would recollect himself immediately, and say: ‘Ah yes, but you don’t like that.’ ”  (p.246)

Later she remarks that “It was impossible to feel surprise at anything M. de Talleyrand did, unless, perhaps, it should be something lacking in taste. Although he served a government drawn from the dregs of the gutter, he himself remained a very great gentleman.” (p.304)

The sniffy ancien regime aristocrat comes out in Madame de la Tour du Pin when she describes Napoleon’s wife Josephine (pp.341-342) as “gracious, amiable and kindly…not outstandingly intelligent” and obviously not the sort of upper crust lady who would once have been received at royal Versailles.

In the closing pages of her memoirs, there is a continuous ambiguity in Madame de la Tour du Pin’s attitude towards the restored Bourbon monarchy. She openly expresses the opinion that the Bourbons had learned nothing in their years of exile, that they were weak and indecisive and that they shamed France in comparison with the military glories of Napoleon. But her sense of loyalty still makes her see Bonapartists as upstarts and she presents her husband as having made the right decision in standing by Louis XVIII and not joining the Hundred Days.

If you feel that I (and Madame de la Tour du Pin) have been boring you with the minutiae of French history, allow me to add that Madame de la Tour du Pin does tell some quite delightful anecdotes that have little to do with historical circumstances. She relates the tale (p.145) of a highly intelligent convent-educated girl who read the Classics in the original and who, when finally coming out of the convent in 1790, was bewildered to find that modern France was nothing like the world described in Caesar’s commentaries. Then there is this little gem, with which I will close:

“We received a visit from the father of M. d’Aix, a gentleman of the old school, without a vestige of intelligence or learning. It used to be said of him that he had, quite literally, bored his wife to death. Nonetheless, he enjoyed an income of sixty thousand francs or more a year…” (p.357)

Ah yes – boring, wealthy idiots. They are always with us.

Egotistical footnote: If the general subject of this “Something Old” interests you, you might be interested to look up, via on the index at right, my takes on Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (the dyspeptic Scot’s version of the whole sequence of events); Frances Mossiker’s The Queen’s Necklace (about a great pre-revolutionary scandal) and Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe (his novel which gives a fictionalised version of his affair with Madame de Stael, whom Madame de la Tour du Pin credits in her memoirs with influencing appointments to the French Foreign Office in the Napoleonic era, when her husband was a diplomat). You might also look up my take on Honore de Balzac’s wonderful novel La Rabouilleuse / The Black Sheep, which concerns in part the discontents of former Bonapartists. You might have noticed that French history and literature are things that interest me.  

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.

AUCKLAND POEMS

It is somehow easier to imagine an alien city than the city in which you live. In your mind, and thanks to the printed page, you can wander in Baudelaire’s Paris or Walt Whitman’s New York more easily than you can wander in Auckland.

Now why is this?

Because your city is a mundane thing. You take it for granted. It is the dull everyday, the drive to work, the view out the window, the thing routinely noisy and annoying and battered by rain, or too hot and crowded in the sunshine. It does not spark your imagination as much as the stink and mystery that somebody else has caught in memorable words. Why should you memorialise the diesel fumes of your commuter bus when you can ride Whitman’s ferry or follow les sept vieillards to their rendezvous? Bland city, city filled with ads, where in broad daylight nobody in particular grabs the passer-by.

But you try. You try even if some of your efforts are overwhelmed by European imagery. Some mystery can be caught in this derivative, gulch-filling metropolis. And your efforts do have the merit of being  based on personal experience.

FROM THE SKY TOWER

From the Sky Tower, it’s a planner’s map.

Each boulevard is flattened, Albert Park

is a smooth greensward with no cranky hill.

20 degrees from upright, the near roofs

are mould- and rust-specked, grimy, but beyond,

at 45, they’re architects’ templates.

On arrowed arteries, the matchbox cars

slide silent journeys past homunculi

scaled to the bath-tub yachts and bonsai trees.

Ideal city on an ideal plane

Toytown to the horizon, dropped among

volcanoes, greenery and shipping lanes.

Unreal city from a tower-top

where laws of gravity are put aside

by abseilers, whose risk is pocket-deep.

Time for those fantasies from table-top

and childhood bedspread, when each fold and crease

was a defile for ambush and broadside.

The men of Ponsonby, with shields and spears,

do war with galleys from the Howick coast

and fuel 20 books of epic verse.

Condottiere, paid by Ellerslie,

force-march their way to Northcote in mere weeks

and pillage to their mercenary code.

A Grande Armee plods up the motorway

to Remuera Borodino where

Mt Hobson is the aristos’ grandstand.

The wind that shakes the tower is a mob

of orator-enraged Parisians

called out to sack casino or Bastille.

Unreal Toytown from a tower-top.

We Harry Lime it on our Ferris wheel

with cash-value assigned to human dots.

Till down the baculum we drop at last

to noise, humanity, the proper scale.

Reality. The city on the ground.

MIRROR GLASS

They make us catch the bus outside the law courts now.

It can be louche. Last week some vandal had smashed

the bus timetable out of its frame. We had to pick the placard up

off the pavement to check the times, even though

we really knew them already.

You meet some interesting people there, though.

I had my bum planted on that shop-window frame

where you sit because the council can’t be bothered providing seats

and this Samoan guy came and sat next to me

and we got talking.

A city bus came hurtling down the road past us.

We could hear its gears crunching and then its brakes

going squeak-squeak-squeak when the driver had to stop for the light,

and this guy said “You’d think they’d put some money

into servicing them, wouldn’t you?”

A few moments later a young couple came walking past us,

him long-haired and leather-jacketed,  her tattooed on one cheek,

and we were almost pushed through the plate glass by the pong of marijuana.

We both laughed and this guy said “They probably lit up

coming out of court.”

I looked across the road. In the tinted mirror glass of an office block,

jigsawed up in the uneven squares of the separate windows,

I saw reflected the Catholic cathedral spire behind us, on Wyndham Street.

The tinting made the sky and clouds look unreal,

you know, that ideal mirror world.

So of course I went off wool-gathering in it for a few beats.

Like, was the world better when they built that spire?

Or if not, did they think it was going to be better? And did they hope more,

and imagine their little city would one day be

a metropolis of worship and justice?

Really, of course, it was just the colour of the clouds

in the tinting that was making me go like this, trying to jump

into neverland, away from the courts and the pong and the squeaking brakes,

until I heard that familiar decelerating sound

and this guy said “Your bus”.

Something New

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

 

“DEATH AND FORGIVENESS” by Jindra Ticha (Mary Egan Publishing, $NZ30)

Once upon a time on this blog I preached a long sermon on the theme that a book may express quite obnoxious ideas, but still be a great piece of writing - if it is both perceptive and well written. The example I analysed at length was Henry de Montherlant’s Les Jeunes Filles / Pitie Pour Les Femmes [look it up on the index at right under Henry de Montherlant]. This was part of my crusade to convince you that literary criticism must, quite legitimately, concern itself with a book’s ideas as well as with the quality of its writing.  And under the same judgment comes the opposite case. A book may express ideas with which the reviewer is sympathetic, but not be very well written.

I am relying entirely on the blurb of Death and Forgiveness to tell you that Jindra Ticha is a Czech who emigrated to New Zealand in 1970 and has made New Zealand her homeland ever since. Because of her political opinions, she had been fired from her position as a senior lecturer at Charles University in Prague when the communist authorities reasserted themselves after the crushing of the “Prague Spring” in 1968. But she revisited the Czech Republic at the time of the “Velvet Revolution” in 1989 when communism there at last collapsed. In her native tongue she has published seventeen novels and she sends a regular monthly newsletter from New Zealand to a leading Czech journal. Death and Forgiveness is her first novel to be written in English.

The premise first of all.

Death and Forgiveness is told in the first person by Anna, a woman embittered by experience and going through a time of stress and mourning. With her daughter Marie she has come to Prague for her old mother’s funeral. While there she receives the news, first that her former husband Jan has gone missing in New Zealand; and then, when his body is found, that he has clearly committed suicide. So, with Marie, she travels back to Dunedin for Jan’s funeral. She is filled with mixed feelings of grief, anger and resentment; and anxious speculation on why Jan did away with himself. As she travels she thinks back over the circumstances of her marriage to Jan – how they met, how they fled from old communist Czechoslovakia and especially how they travelled to New Zealand in 1969, as assisted immigrants, on the Italian liner the Achille Lauro. So the technique in the novel is to cut between Anna’s journey to New Zealand in the present and her memories of the journey to New Zealand over 45 years ago.

The title very clearly spells out where all this is going. Death and Forgiveness tells us promptly that Anna has much to forgive Jan for. After years of marriage, and after she had given up her career for him, he left her for a younger woman, Clavdia, who is now waiting in New Zealand to be a daunting part of the funeral gathering. On the other hand Anna had also had a long-running affair behind Jan’s back, and some guilt is added to the turmoil of her feelings. But we know that somehow forgiveness will trump all this.

Thus the set-up. Let me say at once that the concept of the book is a good one, the structure of two journeys leads us sturdily to the conclusion and many wise things are said along the way. The narrator (or is it the author?) holds in contempt the old communist state in which she was raised, and is frequently appalled by “liberal” Westerners who refuse to understand what a closed and oppressive society communism created. Typical is the following passage in which Anna reflects on her status on the Achille Lauro:

“I admit that it had never even crossed my mind that as a first-class passenger I would have different privileges from the people who travelled in the second class. From childhood, I had had the idea drummed into me by the communists that I am a nobody, just like the rest of their unfortunate subjects, and that no matter how smart, talented and hard-working I might be, no special privileges are due to me. Privileges were only for the party bureaucrats. In this sense the communist idea triumphed: everyone was convinced of their own insignificance. I believed that every street-sweeper, every cleaning lady deserved the same esteem in society as doctors, lawyers, university professors. Actually it went even further than that: I had been taught that every labourer was worth more than someone with a university education. The general rule was that someone with talent, or someone from a family distinguished because it helped to create the wealth of the country, deserved nothing but scorn.” (p.57)

Elsewhere, she remarks of her former lover:

“We went to the same school together some fifty years ago. I was twelve, he was thirteen and his harsh life was just beginning. Unlike the rest of the class, he was denied any higher education because of his supposedly bourgeois background. The communists were the first and only masters of this land who cut off the benefits of education to the brightest children. Not even the Nazis came up with this diabolically simple idea of how to strangle the intellectual elite.” (p.69)

Yet rejection of communism does not automatically deliver a strong basis for ethics. Anna sometimes gets to analyse fairly shrewdly the emptiness inside her and a deep-laid reason for her marriage’s collapse, as when she declares:

“There was little doubt that I had behaved immorally. I was the first one to betray the vows of devotion in our marriage. My views on morality were deeply flawed. I was an atheist, I did not believe in God but rather in the power of reason. Morality was in my opinion quite independent of reason. Like the majority of atheists, I was arrogant and believed in my own moral standards. And my standards were quite simple: I acted as I pleased. Without faith, morality does not make much sense. Who would guarantee moral laws? I came to the conclusion that there were no moral laws; hence I did not have a duty to follow conventional morality.” (p.119)

Later in the novel, and especially as the funeral in Dunedin looms, there are some interesting passages on the nature of forgiveness, on learning to understand even people who have blighted your life, on the important corporate role of religion and especially on the long-term experience of grief. I was also struck by the passage in which Anna recalls (in her memories of 1969) her complete cultural shock in trading sophisticated and ancient Europe for a raw and small New Zealand city.

All in all, then, I was in sympathy with what the novel was saying – or rather, what I think it intended to say.

Unfortunately, the style does not match the intention. The prose of Death and Forgiveness is flat and often unconvincing. Given that the author is for the first time venturing outside her native language, this might be a cruel thing to say, but it is true nevertheless. Too often things are told to us, rather than being dramatized, as in the following too obvious analysis of the narrator’s feelings:

“When I return home, Marie is already there, as gloomy and bad-tempered as I am. We had had a fight in the morning; it was my fault, I had blamed her for something unimportant. My behaviour was stupid. I had suddenly felt a surge of anger, something that happens to me quite often of late. My anger was totally irrational and impossible to control. A tidal wave of hatred envelops me in such moments and I cannot fight it however hard I try; struggling against it is as impossible as struggling against a real tidal wave. Just as my black anger reaches its height, it vanishes as inexplicably as it arrived and I am left calm and composed again. I have a tendency to find an excuse for myself. It is the people around me who provoked me, I tell myself. Deep down, though, I know very well that these attacks are inexcusable and unpardonable. I am afraid of this characteristic; there is an element of madness there.” (p.21)

It is noticeable, for example, that while we often hear of the narrator’s feelings for Jan, we hardly ever have a scene of sustained action involving him and hardly ever hear any dialogue from his lips. Rather, the narrator tells us explicitly what was good and bad about him. Indeed there is a major problem lurking here. First-person narrations are one thing, but in this case the author leaves no trace of irony, no sense that this is in any way an “unreliable narrator”, but instead seems to identify wholeheartedly with her fictional creation.

This novel is preceded by the standard disclaimer that “all characters and events are imaginary, and any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental”. Of course I know nothing of the author’s personal circumstances, and do not know how much she is dealing with issues from her own life. But it is clear that she first voyaged to New Zealand at about the same time her Anna did and much that she writes about the voyage on the Achille Lauro seems more like reminiscence (or perhaps worked-up diary notes) than novel. Why are we introduced to some of these shipboard characters when they do nothing to advance the central dramatic situation? And why do we get clunky tourist brochure stuff such as the following? :

 “The Sydney Opera House is unique in its beauty. The view it commands over the Sydney harbour is magnificent: no other opera house in the world provides such a spectacle at intermission. Theatregoers can walk on the great balcony and watch the myriad of illuminated ships sailing by. The opera house truly belongs to the harbour, as if nature itself could not find a better place for it.” (pp.88-89)

I am not knocking the author’s conception, her ideas or whatever message she has to deliver on grief, forgiveness and the healing power of time. But I am saying that her grasp is not as great as her reach, and I too often had the sense that I was reading a memoir, giving one party’s view of a failed marriage, rather than a novel with rounded characters.

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. 

 “ON CHESIL BEACH” by Ian McEwan (first published 2007)

 

            Am I allowed, if just occasionally, in this “Something Old” spot, to tell you how much I disliked a novel and how I alert you to it solely as a means of deterring you from reading it?

            Of course I’m allowed, because I run this ruddy blog and there’s not an awful lot you can do about it. So there!

I am neither hot nor cold about the English novelist Ian McEwan (born 1948), despite all the acclaim he has received. McEwan has been both commercially and critically successful. Seven of his novels have been filmed. He has been six times nominated for the Booker and four times shortlisted. On this blog, when I was reviewing his weak 2012 effort Sweet Tooth [look it up on the index at right], I suggested that when McEwan won the Booker in 1998, for his lame novella Amsterdam, there was a widespread suspicion that the judges were compensating him for the failure to even nominate his earlier, and much better, Enduring Love (1997).

Despite its consistently sardonic and superior tone, I quite enjoyed Enduring Love, essentially the story of a mentally-deranged man who believes himself to be in love with another man and causes trouble when he is spurned. I couldn’t help being aware, however, of McEwan’s negative and destructive views on love, marriage and domesticity. He is rarely able to write about them without putting the knife in. It is neither right nor seemly to attribute an author’s views to his own domestic circumstances, but McEwan was involved in a very messy and public custody battle when his first marriage broke up, and this may have had at least some influence on the way he depicts the relationships between men and women.

In my review of Sweet Tooth, I referred to On Chesil Beach (shortlisted for the Booker 2007) as “an interesting, if limited, reflection on defunct sexual mores”. I was being far too polite. This short novel is in fact a smug and very self-satisfied piece of work.

Alerting us to the short novel’s main themes in a clumsy and obvious way (but regarded as brilliant compression by McEwan’s devotees) the opening sentence reads: “They were young, educated and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.”

            In the very early 1960s, an English couple, Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, both 22, come to a seaside hotel in Dorset for their honeymoon. He is nervous that he will not perform properly in bed. She is mildly repelled by the whole idea of physical contact. There is a dim, and very faint, suggestion – hinting at catchpenny pop psychology on McEwan’s part - that she has been sexually abused by her father. In great close-up physical detail we get every least physical reaction they have to each other as they eat a meal and prepare to go to the bedroom. We also get long flashbacks to their respective family backgrounds.  He is more lower-middle-class than she is, more of a country boy, with a taste for jazz and brawling, a schoolteacher father and a mentally-damaged mother. She is more wealthy, upper-middle-class, her father prosperous in business, her mother a lecturer in philosophy at Oxford. He has vague ideas of becoming an historian. She is a musician, plays in a string-quartet and hopes to perform at the Wigmore Hall. She is at least relieved that her parents did not condescend to his parents at the morning’s wedding.

            Eventually, after all their mutual anticipation and anxiety, the bedroom scene comes, and it is a complete disaster. Virginal, over-excited, and inexperienced in love-making, he ejaculates prematurely and messily all over her. She is disgusted and runs off down to the pebbly strand of the title. (Ah yes – a pebbly strand. Such a symbolically liminal place.) He later follows her. They argue and she runs off.

Flashforward. The marriage is annulled for non-consummation. Years go by. They never see each other, though he hears of her success as a musician. He goes through various women and an unsuccessful marriage. Occasionally he wonders why they didn’t make a success of it, and regrets the happy marriage and children that could have been. End.

When I checked them out, I found a number of English reviews of this novel immediately plunged in by quoting Philip Larkin’s poem “Annus Mirabilis”, which begins:

“Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.”

This is clearly because the historical setting of On Chesil Beach is so very specific – the early 1960s with lots of deliberate period detail. Hanging over much of it is the implicit idea that these two virgins would have benefitted sexually from the permissiveness and openness that was to come later in the 1960s. In other words they were, by McEwan’s implication, victims of the social and sexual constraints of their time. In its mixture of close-ups and long-shots, the novel is stylistically competent. But as to its major themes, I’m not so sure. Frankly, I’m not convinced that the level of sexual ignorance was then as great as McEwan depicts it. McEwan would have been 14 at the time the novel is set. One wonders if this is really the dramatization of every spotty adolescent’s delusion that his parents didn’t know anything about sex. Or is On Chesil Beach in fact the portrait of the repressed habits of a particular English social class?  Or is it simply a tale of two neurotic and atypical individuals – in which case it has little meaning for the rest of us, unless we are to accept McEwan’s caricature of an earlier age?

To McEwan’s credit, there is at least a little ambiguity in the ending. Far from celebrating the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, it seems to suggest that Edward took a wrong path in not persisting with Florence, and that he now regrets it. The moral may simply be that Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting (gosh, how deliberately Victorian those surnames sound) should have talked to each other, and that openness of communication about sexual matters is essential for a happy marriage. But none of this atones for the superior and condescending view that McEwan takes of an earlier age, and the thinness of his conception.

There. You really don’t have to read this one now.

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.

FRANCHISE MENACE

I will try to recreate imaginatively how the film industry and the publishing industry, way back in earlier decades, used to attempt to perpetuate their profits by the making of sequels.

Let’s say Universal Pictures had just had a big hit with Bela Lugosi as Dracula or with Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster. Of course the studio executives would ask immediately “How can we further milk the market that liked this stuff?” And they would set about making a series of sequels until such time as profits went down and the series ceased. Thus the existence of various Returns of, Brides of, Sons of, Ghosts of Dracula and/or Frankenstein, each one usually a little cheaper than the last, each one churned out simply to make a buck and often deploying the same sets and costumes as the successful original in order to minimise costs. (Though some would say Bride of Frankenstein was a better movie than Frankenstein.) Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1950s was awash with sequels, and as late as the 1970s the original Planet of the Apes spawned a series of sequels, each one a little limper than the one that went before.

But, with few exceptions, the tendency for the movie industry to make sequels was running down by the time television came along and audiences got used to seeing recurring characters and repeated formulaic plots on the small screen rather than the big screen, in the form of TV series. (Oh very well – in Britain there was the endless witless “Carry On…” series of films from the 1950s to the 1980s, but they were specifically made for people who wanted to experience the equivalent of television on the big screen.)

At the same time, the publishing industry, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, has never been averse to series of popular novels featuring the same characters and tapping into the same market. From Sherlock Holmes to Bulldog Drummond to Lord Peter Wimsey to Inspector Alleyn to Maigret to Mike Hammer to Nero Wolfe to James Bond, this has been the case particularly with detective stories and thrillers. “Pulp” novels lived by recycling the same characters and story ideas, and some of the “pulps” even achieved a certain literary merit. Outside detective stories and thrillers (and the likes of the Tarzan novels), series of sequels tended to appeal most to juvenile readers, with all the Biggles and Bobbsey Twins and Famous Five books.

Okay – so I’ve established that the exploitation of the same characters in sequels is no new thing in either films or books. But there was something about the way sequels used to operate in popular culture that was different from the way they operate now. It was always assumed that each story in any given series was a complete entity in itself with a beginning, middle and end. Sure, there were sometimes tricks to link an earlier story with a later one. To revert to the example of Universal’s old Frankenstein movies, you find that the monster perishes horribly at the end of each instalment so that an excuse has to be made to “revive” him at the beginning of the next one. It was also true that for each commercial series, the original story that set the series off was conceived of as an individual book (or film). Sequels came only when that book or film had proved commercially successful.

But now we are faced with a different phenomenon. Now we are faced with the FRANCHISE.

Publishers of books for teenagers are loath to publish a new book unless it promises to become a series (enter Harry Potter, Percy Jackson etc.). The idea is not to publish an individual book with a complete beginning, middle and end, but to initiate an addiction. Blockbuster fantasy films are always try-outs for a series, and reviewers talk openly about whether each individual episode enhances or damages the franchise. Even more aggressively than in the days when Walt Disney pioneered the practice, every new film series or pop novel series for teenagers is linked to the marketing of toys, dolls, posters, computer games and various extras. The point is that the film or novel itself is reduced to being merely part of a marketing strategy; an incitement to “brand recognition”. As for the beginnings, middles and ends of good storytelling, they evaporate in the need to keep the franchise going as a unit.

I remember as a film-reviewer in the 1990s watching the teen-centred Back to the Future series. This was near the beginning of the new era of aggressively-marketed franchises. When the first film ended with a note telling audiences to watch out for future developments of the story in a sequel, one fellow reviewer was heard to wail “What is this? Television?” She was thinking in terms of films as individual pieces of storytelling, not as franchises.

I am aware of the economics. It is fiendishly expensive to make films with convincing special effects in an age when fantasy is the preferred poison of young audiences. Therefore the film industry is always trying to find sure profit-making things and the concept of the franchise – the ongoing story with a guaranteed audience – becomes the norm. But it takes a huge toll. The special effects dominate. The arc of good storytelling suffers. And (mercifully, I think) even young audiences become aware that they are being played with, that stories are being dragged out to unnecessary length simply to make an excuse for yet another episode in a series.

Note how, in the current juvenile Hunger Games franchise, one of the source novels was unnecessarily split into two films.

Worst offender in this department is Peter Jackson. Overlong, poorly-scripted and unimaginative in presentation though they were (especially the snail’s paced last episode), the three Lord of the Rings movies at least had the excuse that they were based on a sequence of three long novels. But what excuse was there for turning the simple little kiddies’ book The Hobbit into three or four “epic” films? Padded with unnecessary action, business and set-pieces which in no way advance the story, the Hobbit films are merely an exercise in dragging out a franchise as long as possible.

I am aware that the word “franchise” is now over-used, and sometimes in irrelevant contexts. (I heard one inept young English lecturer trying to be hip by referring to the “Shakespeare franchise”). As I have defined the term here, however, the film franchises reduce film making to the marketing of cheese. Their effects on good cinematic storytelling are wholly negative.