Something New

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

“THE INVISIBLE RIDER” by Kirsten McDougall (Victoria University Press, $NZ30)

            Who is the invisible rider? By definition, he is a rider who cannot be seen easily .

            In this short novel, he is the lawyer Philip Fetch, married with two kids, who often rides his bicycle through Wellington’s suburbs. Motorists sometimes fail to see cyclists, so the invisible rider is often in danger of being skittled. But Philip Fetch is invisible in a less literal sense, too. He is the working husband and father who is often ignored, and rarely analysed, in our literature. Not of interest to most novelists and social commentators, he is therefore invisible.

            The Invisible Rider, Kristen McDougall’s first book, is such a good piece of writing that I am afraid of over-praising it lest I hex a talented emerging writer’s career. I will limit myself, therefore, to listing the book’s verifiable merits.

            The first is McDougall’s acute observation of the external conditions of Philip’s life – in this account of a suburban man trying to be happy, Philip has the shock of finding out that colleagues [the office help Lukas] and clients [the businessman Stan] have private lives too. He walks his kids to school, takes them on outings, referees their soccer games. He worries about how real estate developments are going to change his neighbourhood. He takes refuge in reading and in bookshops and in conversation with his neuro-scientist mate James.

            All this might appear both loosely episodic and commonplace, but the skill of McDougall’s writing is in the way she gradually builds up a very detailed sense of  the social pressures that bear on this man, and his uncertainty about his own status.

            This is the novel’s second great merit - the acute observation of the main character’s psychological states. Kirsten McDougall writes in the third person, but stays with Philip’s consciousness and outlook. We therefore get Philip’s view of the world. Speaking as a male reader, I salute a woman writer who has climbed so perceptively into the male psyche. Her acuteness is seen in many passages.

            Thinking of people other than himself, Philip notes “they squash themselves down and down, until there’s nothing particularly noticeable about them.” (Pg.30) The observation is similar to Thoreau’s “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” and clearly bears on Philip’s own sense of inadequacy and of being “invisible”.

            Self-criticism leads Philip to believe that his perception of the world may be defective, and that any problems he is experiencing are the product of his own mind. Indicative of a quiet man in the grip of an identity crisis, this mindset is seen in passages such as: “Out the window, Philip thought he saw the hem of Anna’s coat disappear around the corner, but it was almost dark and when he blinked and looked again it was just himself and the room behind him that he could see reflected in the glass. He looked tired.” (Pg.39)

            Then there is that nagging male suspicion that women are more competent than men in social situations. When his wife receives an invitation to a party which Philip doesn’t particularly want to attend, he reflects: “Marilyn looked good at parties. She had a soft glow about her that quietly attracted people. Philip would stand beside his wife and make his own small gestures. After a while he’d felt that he was weighing her down, clouding her grace. He’d remove himself to a quiet room that would, with luck, have a magazine to flick through (a book was an obvious sign of failure) and try to look self-contained.” (Pg.50)

            All I can say about these observations is that they strike me as authentic, and true to the way many men think. The one that really grabbed me was this passage on how Philip does (or does not) sleep: “He could not remember his life before insomnia grabbed his tail and twisted it. It was rare that he woke feeling rested or spent the night oblivious to the stunned forms that stalked the dark outside his window. Sometimes he envied the dead with their unbroken sleep. He sat up at 1:03 a.m. with nothing to show for the three hours he’d been in bed. Marilyn slept beside him. She was, he’d often thought, a talented sleeper.” (Pg.103)

            God, I’ve been there often!

            Precise in both physical observation and psychological analysis, the novel’s third great merit is its delicate use of fantasy and dream [echoed in the five full-page drawings by Gerard Crewdson that illustrate the text.] In one episode Philip takes his young sons on a visit to zoo, and one of them gets trapped in the lemur enclosure. The episode sounds far-fetched. Indeed it sounds like fantasy. But it could be read as a projection of the father’s anxieties, or the anxieties of any parents as they manoeuvre young children past displays of wild animals. Later Philip’s deceased mother appears to him, during an eclipse, and she takes on a role in the novel, periodically scolding him. Philip himself sees her as a literal ghost and worries for his sanity – but again, this can be read as the persistent weight of the grown man’s upbringing. Other moments of dream occur. In every case, they grow out of the character, give us a greater sense of the geography of his mind, and do not seem arbitrary. There is nothing fey about them.

            The greatest merit of The Invisible Rider, however, is the author’s lack of condescension. Hovering in this novel is a sense of love – love desired, love thwarted, love not always guaranteed. It is found in the episode where Philip steps aside from his role as a lawyer and attempts, a little ham-fistedly, to reconcile a client to the wife he is considering divorcing. Underlying this is Philip’s esteem and appreciation of his own wife and (again a typically male thing) his fear that he doesn’t match up to her expectations and isn’t worthy of her. Later, the novel delivers a very credible epiphany when Philip understands that he, too, often ignores other invisible riders, just as he himself is ignored. This is the novel’s real moral centre. It is not saying Philip is an exceptional human being – only that he, like others, deserves the respect that should be awarded to all human beings.

            A real sympathy for people lives in this novel. Philip’s problems may seem quite commonplace in the telling - his sense that his life doesn’t quite add up, much as he loves his wife and kids; his sense that what he does for a living is not of huge importance in itself; his insidious sense of his own insignificance [and invisibility]. His clear victories are rare, and they are short-lived – when, at a party, he forthrightly tells a politician what he really thinks of him, he is at once gripped by a sense of social embarrassment. Many have experienced the feelings that Philip experiences. That may explain why it reads so well.

            At fewer than 150 largish-print pages [if we exclude Gerard Crewdson’s drawings], The Invisible Rider is a beautifully-proportioned work. Deliberately not giving away one crucial plot development, I note that Kirsten McDougall takes it just as far as it should go and no further.

            Brava!

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "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 five or more years ago.

“THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (first published 1851)

            It is odd to reflect that there are some novelists who are admired for most un-novel-like qualities. It is even odder to reflect that some novelists have been inflicted upon generations of schoolchildren, who have not a hope in hell of understanding what the novelist is really on about.

            Both these oddities seem to me to apply to the nineteenth century New Englander Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64). Hawthorne wrote some things specifically for children. I can remember a kindly teacher giving me Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales – his retelling-for-children of Greek legends – to keep me quiet in “study” periods when I was about twelve. But Hawthorne’s reputation rests on his short stories for adults, and on two of his novels, The Scarlet Letter (1850), generally regarded as his masterpiece, and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). His two later novels The Blithedale Romance (1852), about a failed experiment in communal living, and The Marble Faun (1859-60), a rather fey fantasy set in Rome, tend to be read by the specialists only.

            Some years ago, to while away a summer week, I read my way through all four of these novels, and a very good Oxford Classics selection of Hawthorne’s short stories called Young Goodman Brown and Other Stories. Hawthorne has one quality very rare in nineteenth century novelists. His novels (or “romances” as he preferred to call them) are very short. Shorter even than the average twentieth century novel. What I judge to be their “un-novel-like” quality is the fact that they are situations, not plots. Rather than things happening in them, things have happened, and we are then presented with a static scene as characters interact in a minimal way, until a late burst of action rounds it off. Anterior narrative rules. This is certainly true of The Scarlet Letter – the “sin” that blights Hester Prynne has happened before the novel begins, and hangs over the Puritan settlement like a miasma – and it is true of my favourite Hawthorne novel The House of the Seven Gables.

            If I were to iron out its “situation” as a plot, it would sound like this.

            In the nineteenth century, the formidable house of the title lies under an ancestral curse. The seventeenth century Puritan Colonel Pyncheon cheated Matthew Maule out of the land on which the house was built, by having Maule executed for witchcraft. Before he died, Maule laid a curse on Pyncheon and all his descendants. Now, two hundred years later, the Pyncheon family have come down in the world. They never did discover the deeds to the vast tracts of land that would have made them rich. The house’s present occupants are genteel old Hepzibah Pyncheon, sadly reduced to running a shop to make ends meet, and her feeble-minded, but oddly visionary, brother Clifford, who has been in prison for thirty years for a murder he probably didn’t commit. These two, who are ill-equipped to defend themselves, are preyed upon by their rich, rapacious cousin Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon. The judge believes (wrongly) that Hepzibah and Clifford are wilfully concealing the deeds, and he thinks he will be able to cheat Clifford out of them.

            This is the situation, or “argument”, as writers of epic poems would have said. The novel’s action really begins only when new life comes to the gloomy house in the form of another cousin, the bright, optimistic, young Phoebe Pyncheon, and the “daguerrotypist” (i.e. photographer) Holgrave, who lives in one of the gables. After all the foreboding family curse stuff, the novel has a happy conclusion. The deeds to the land are eventually discovered, but Maule’s curse is fulfilled when Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon suddenly dies of what seems to be hereditary apoplexy. Hepzibah and Clifford flee from the judge’s corpse, and from the gloomy old house, in search of a new life. They return for a reconciliation with the forgiving Maule descendants, one of whom turns out to be Holgrave. The union of Phoebe and Holgrave buries the family curse.

            Even to tell the story this way is to make it sound more coherent and incident-filled than it actually is. As always, Hawthorne’s conception is essentially static and pictorial, as if he has imagined an ideal situation but has not worked out the means by which it can be dramatised. But in this case, the stasis is thematically appropriate. The leading characters, beholden to their past until the spell of the past is broken, are simply unable to do anything or to develop in any meaningful way.

            For us, ancient family curses seem to be the stuff of fairy-tale rather than of serious adult fiction. Yet I think I would agree with Kay Redfield Jamison’s hunch in Touched with Fire, her analysis of manic-depression and artistic creation [look it up on the index at right], that nineteenth century tales of ancestral curses often encode something else – namely hereditary mental disease, the genetics of which were not understood at that time. Clifford’s manic feeble-mindedness and Judge Pyncheon’s apoplexy would suggest so.

            More consciously, though, Hawthorne seems to be saying something about the baleful influence of the past and of mistaken family pride in destroying people’s relationship with the living present. He preaches the need to escape from this inhibiting past. This is the theme of some of the novel’s set-pieces – the introductory background to the family curse; a story Holgrave tells about mesmerism and death; the passage in which Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon is confronted with the ghosts of the past; and the eventual discovery of the deeds to the land behind a mouldering portrait of the Puritan Colonel Pyncheon. Inherited family traditions are also the theme of a wonderful passage in Chapter 8, where Phoebe reflects on the hold which Judge Pyncheon’s obsession with finding a document has over the family’s fortunes:

            “But ancient superstitions, after being steeped in human hearts and embodied in human breath, and passing from lip to  lip in manifold repetition, through a series of generations, become imbued with the effect of homely truth. The smoke of the domestic hearth has scented them through and through. By long transmission among household facts, they grow to look like them, and have such a familiar way of making themselves at home that their influence is usually greater than we suspect.”

            I would add something else to the novel’s thematic mix. There is in the nineteenth-century Hawthorne an ambiguous love-hate reaction to real historical Puritanism. Sober and conscientious and carefully accounting for morality and sin, Hawthorne himself has many of the reflexes of a Puritan. Certainly, like all good Puritans, he gets upset about aspects of Catholicism in his Roman novel The Marble Faun and doubts whether it is as “real” a form of Christianity as Protestantism is. Yet Hawthorne was a direct descendant of the notorious Puritan Judge Hathorne who had condemned “witches” to death at Salem. [Some sources say the novelist deliberately changed the spelling of his name to Hawthorne as he was ashamed of the connection.] He was fully aware of the destructive, fanatical side of Puritanism. The novel’s premise of the execution of Matthew Maule for witchcraft, and the dishonest motives that led to it, are an acknowledgement of this.

            So here, symbolically, in The House of the Seven Gables, is the whole stagnating, inhibiting weight of inherited Puritanism upon modern American civilization. Clifford says in Chapter 17, in what could be the epigraph to the novel: “There is no such unwholesome atmosphere as that of an old house rendered poisonous by one’s defunct forefathers and relatives.”

            As this inadequate summary might already have indicated, this novel reeks of symbolism. When Phoebe and Holgrave blissfully tend a garden together, we have not only an image of growth in opposition to the other characters’ moral stasis, but an evocation of a sinless Eden. Of course Phoebe’s very name links her with the sun (“Phoebus”) and hence with life, growth and development. It occurs to me that at least one other American novelist chose this same name to indicate the same qualities in a girl – in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield’s lively little sister, representing new and unaffected life, is called Phoebe. More intriguingly, though, I note that Dickens wrote Bleak House just a year after Hawthorne’s novel appeared. As you might remember, that too has a young woman symbolically named after the sun, Esther Summerson (= summer sun), helping to destroy the inherited gloom surrounding an old estate. I can’t help wondering if Dickens had read The House of the Seven Gables before he set to work.

            As for the antithesis to ancestral curses, Hawthorne presents modernity in the symbolic forms of Holgrave’s daguerrotypes (ultra-modern in 1851) and of the swift railway travel, by means of which Hepzibah and Clifford try to flee from the scene of their inherited woes. Some of my favourite passages in this novel [too long to quote] are Hawthorne’s presentation of Clifford’s clearly manic-depressive temperament. But Clifford gradually emerges as the antithesis of the tradition-haunted Puritan. Consider his manic, visionary chatter to an old gentleman as he flees on a train in Chapter 17. He says:

            “These railroads – could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble and jar got rid of – are positively the greatest blessing that the ages have wrought out for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualise travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can be readily carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere – in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home.”

            In manic, visionary Clifford I think I hear the first authentic American “Beat” poet or biker – “Man, ya gotta move!” – a century avant la lettre.

            So that’s what became of American Puritanism. It went on the road and wrote poems about thorny flowers outside armaments factories and forgot curse-haunted houses that had been poisoned for two centuries.

Irrelevant footnote: For the record, and just because I haven’t mentioned it, I’m aware that the physical house of the seven gables in the novel is based on a real house which apparently belonged to Hawthorne’s married sister, and which is now a Salem museum and tourist attraction. There now. You’ve learnt something that adds not a whit to your appreciation of the novel itself.

Something Thoughtful

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

GOODBYE SOLDIER        

            As you may or may not be aware, I write the material for Reid’s Reader about a fortnight before it appears on-line. The most important thing that has happened in my life in the last month has been the death, by cancer, of my brother Piers (born 27 November 1942; died 2 October 2012). By his express wish, Piers’ funeral in Palmerston North on 8 October was strictly secular. I had the privilege of being nominated by him to write and deliver a eulogy. This is it:

Eulogy for Lieutenant-General Piers Martin Reid, CBE

           

            I am Nicholas, Piers’s youngest brother, and I am here to represent his immediate family, his brothers and sister who are all with us today, Christopher, Bernard, Miriam, Godfrey, and Mary, the widow of our brother Gerard.

            We are here to celebrate the life and mourn the death of Piers Martin Reid who, the month before his 70^th birthday, still had much life to live, still had much to give the world, and still had a circle of loyal friends.

            It’s easy to say things about Piers’ public career. He always wanted to be a soldier. Family legend, which I’m too young to verify, says that when he was seven or eight he was heard by our parents talking in his sleep, and his words were “going round blowing up radar stations”, which became a kind of family catch-phrase. As a boy he was to the fore in organizing the war-games in which the older Reid children were pitted against their sworn next-door-neighbour enemies, the older Holloway children. Even though some of us were very young, we remember him being farewelled from the cramped local parish hall when, as a teenager, he set out to study at Duntroon military college. Among much else, that was the beginning of his life-long love affair with Australia and things Australian. As a soldier he knew active service, when he was a very young officer, in Vietnam; and he saw the direct aftermath of war, when he was a very experienced officer, as one of the observers of the international peace-keeping mission after the civil wars in former Yugoslavia.

            Piers’s career in the army was illustrious. Our mother, usually a very undemonstrative woman, was immensely proud of the fact that, with each promotion, Piers seemed to be the youngest New Zealand army officer holding the rank that he had attained. He served as New Zealand’s military liaison in the Washington embassy. At the time of his retirement he had served as Army Chief-of-Staff, and among much else had reorganized the three separate logistics corps into the new Royal New Zealand Army Logistics Regiment. It was in his time as Chief that the army was officially recognised as Ngati Tumatauenga, the “People of the God of War”, and Piers had the honour and privilege of being the first to wear the chief’s ceremonial cloak.  Although I know Piers was a republican at heart, he was also justifiably proud of having his CBE bestowed personally by the Queen in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

            His retirement from the army did not end his connection with things military. Piers earned his honorary Doctorate of Literature for his part in setting up the Centre for Defence and Strategic Studies at Massey University, where he lectured, especially in advanced tactics, campaign studies, joint service campaigning and command studies.

            The family Piers came from was not and is not noticeably military. Apart from Piers, only Godfrey was part of the forces, doing a long hitch in the RNZAF. Apart from Piers, no member of the family had the ardent love of animals – and especially pet dogs – that Piers had. In fact our family could be seen as over-weighted with pretentious arty and literary types, to whom the profession of arms was totally alien. In loud family debates – especially at Christmas gatherings -  on politics, religion, literature, art or economics, Piers would sometimes back off from intellectual discussion by saying self-deprecatingly “Well, what do I know? I’m only a simple soldier.” This was pure theatre, of course. Piers was far from that. As a graduate of both Australian and American staff colleges and of the Royal College of Defence Studies in London, Piers had a very long string of advanced academic qualifications. He read voraciously, literature in English and French as much as military history and history in general.

            Yes, he did have his pet topics. As an avid student of the American Civil War, he more than once lectured me on why Lee failed at the Battle of Gettysburg and how the disaster of Pickett’s Charge was a foregone conclusion. He speculated on how Franco could have won the Spanish Civil War in about four months if he hadn’t stopped to relieve the Alcazar. He wondered why more New Zealanders had never heard of the Kursk salient and its importance in Hitler’s defeat. The French, he argued, were not mistaken in their strategy at Dien Ben Phu, even if the Vietminh outfought them, but they were let down by military intelligence. Then there was one of his favourites – his firm belief, picking up on the Duke of Wellington’s statement about it being a “damn’d near-run thing”, that Napoleon would certainly have won at Waterloo if he hadn’t been feeling crook that day.

            All this might sound like what you would expect from a well-read army-officer. But the surprising thing is that Piers, in the right mood, was equally enthusiastic about a broad range of literature. I find myself, as an undergraduate in French literature in my early twenties, reading the works of the aviator and novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “Saint-Ex”. Piers comes along, picks up the book I’m reading, and proceeds to give me, extempore, a more cogent lecture on Saint-Ex than the ones I was getting at university. He shares my admiration for the novels of Joseph Conrad. A few weeks ago, contemplating his end, he begins to recite Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard, especially the bit where “the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep”. He carried a library of quotable poetry in his head.

            Some of the things I’ve said so far are on the public record and will be known to Piers’s friends and colleagues.

            Some may not have the same currency.

            There was that quirky and satirical sense of humour. On Saint Patrick’s Day, the twelve-year-old Piers took it into his head to march up and down outside the Panmure pub with a toy wooden rifle over his shoulder. When asked why, he said he was “Guarding the pub from the Irish”. One thing Piers could not do was hold a note or sing. He rejoiced in the fact that once, when he was inveigled into singing, all the customers of a karaoke bar begged him to desist. Nevertheless, as well as liking folk music and country music, he had a good grounding in the patter songs of Gilbert and Sullivan and recalled once walking down a road in Vietnam, in full uniform, cheerfully singing “Three little maids from school are we” to the bemusement and consternation of a passing group of US Marines.

            Six weeks ago, when he knew that cancer had given him a death sentence, Piers sat me down solemnly and told me he wanted me to prepare this eulogy.

            “What do you want me to say?” I said

            “Say whatever you like”, he said.

            So I said “I’ll say that you’re my brother and I admire you”. What I really meant to say was “I’ll say you’re my brother and I love you.” But I knew he wasn’t the man to tolerate such soppy talk, even if his own feelings ran very deep.

            Piers was, apparently, a man well in control of his feelings, well-organized and with his life neatly prioritised. But it didn’t take much to discover that some things moved him profoundly. A real concern for serving soldiers, for example, and an anxiety that their efforts were not as fully recognised in our society as they could be. He spoke with great pride of the efforts of young soldiers in shoring up this city’s civil defences during the Manawatu Flood Event of 2004 (he chaired the committee that produced a report on the floods). He relished a story that Godfrey told of the late Professor M.K.Joseph, novelist, poet and bombardier in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War. A military procession was passing up Queen Street in Auckland and, from one side of the street, it was getting a hard time from a group of youthful hecklers. This was at a time of general anti-war feeling. On the other side of the street quietly stood Mike Joseph, a tall bear of a man, respectfully saluting the young soldiers. He knew, as Piers did, that if you have an issue with a war you take it up with the politicians and the people who elected them, not with the serving troops.

            Piers had a very strong sense of social justice, belying the popular prejudice that military professionals are not concerned with the common good. As a young officer – still a captain, I believe – returned from a stressful time in Vietnam, he wandered down to the Panmure Bridge, just down from the family home in Auckland, looked at all the yachts and pleasure craft anchored in the Tamaki Estuary, and then returned home gasping to our mother “Mum, New Zealand is so rich!” He was amazed and appalled that New Zealanders took their affluence for granted, didn’t realize how much of the world suffered and how impoverished so much of the world was. He knew that in the modern world, military force is pointless if it is not serving democracy, and democracy is pointless if it is not serving the needs of all the people.

            Rudyard Kipling famously said that “single men in barracks don’t grow into plaster saints”. Piers did tell me to tell the truth about him and he wasn’t a plaster saint. His absolute certainty about some things could be terrifying. If you were incompetent at something, he told you so, which wasn’t always a pleasant experience. He became angry – really angry -  at what Americans call “stolen valour”, those charlatans who claim the right to war military medals to which they are not entitled. More than once he lost friends by exposing such frauds, even though he was right. There was a period of some years when he was estranged from his family, despite the best efforts of Miriam and Godfrey and Gerard to keep in touch with him. But one of the great delights of his family in recent years had been to re-establish full contact with him; to share his pride in his daughter Justine and his son James; and to know him as a wise, experienced and mellowed counsellor and friend, as well as a brother. It is also our privilege to acknowledge the good and dedicated people such as Adriane, Max and other friends and colleagues, who rallied around him in his last days.

            The sudden diagnosis of cancer was shocking. Piers only once railed against death and lamented the good times he would be missing with his pet dogs, his friends, colleagues, family and especially children and grandchildren. Then he stopped his tearful railing and put his shoulders back and bore it like a good soldier.

            Of death, he would approve of the words that one of his favourites novelists, Joseph Conrad, made the epigraph to one of his last novels. They are a quotation from Edmund Spenser:

He there does now enjoy eternal rest 
  

And happy ease, which thou dost want and crave, 
  

And further from it daily wanderest: 
  

What if some little pain the passage have, 
  

That makes frail flesh to fear the bitter wave? 
  

Is not short pain well borne, that brings long ease, 
  

And lays the soul to sleep in quiet grave? 
  

Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, 


Ease after war, death after life does greatly please.