The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  Many years later, after Henry has installed himself at Lamb House, Holmes comes to visit him. Minny had chosen Gray over Holmes; in any case, she died before she married. Holmes has changed a little: he has become a public man and can ‘be pompous and intimidating’ when he pleases. After dinner, Holmes brings up that summer after the war, during which they had shared, as Minny called it, ‘the famous bed’. Holmes’s fearlessness, it turns out, was really only a kind of death: he had lost a part of himself in battle. ‘I felt sometimes as if I were under water, seeing things only in vague outline and desperately trying to come up for air.’ The time they had spent together grew clear only in his memory, but it inspired him nonetheless to ‘drink up the life that was offered to us then as those wonderful sisters did. I longed to be alive, just as I long for it now, and the time passing has helped me, helped me to live.’ Henry is conscious of having been matched, in the kind of honesty he prized; conscious, too, of the fact that he has ‘no confession of his own. His war had been private, within his family and deep within himself … He lived, at times, he felt, as if his life belonged to someone else, a story that had not yet been written, a character who had not been fully imagined.’

  The comparison suggests James’s famous remark about the origin of his stories, from his preface to The Portrait of a Lady:

  I have always fondly remembered a remark that I heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan Turgenieff in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were. He saw them in that fashion, as disponibles, saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would bring them out.

  James, then, in Tóibín’s words, feels like someone who has yet to be ‘brought out’. What’s interesting about James’s remark is that it glosses over the distinction between ‘the complications of existence’ and the ‘right relations’. Nor is it clear whether the phrase ‘just as they were and by what they were’ describes these ‘fictive’ supplicants before they had been subject to the chances of life, or after. The difference is significant. What’s at stake is the possibility that a character can have an essence, a real existence independent of those complications and relations – if it can exist entirely for itself. This, at least, is the possibility that James, in Tóibín’s novel, has pursued.

  Holmes hasn’t finished, and before he retires to bed, brings up The Portrait of a Lady, which he calls a ‘great monument’ to Minny, though he did not care for the ending. ‘I wish she were alive now so that I could find out what she thought of me.’ Henry’s response is simple and faintly ironic. ‘Yes, indeed.’ Holmes refuses to be put off. ‘Do you ever regret not taking her to Italy when she was ill? … Gray says she asked you several times.’ Henry still evades him – ‘I don’t think ask is the word … She was very ill then. Gray is misinformed’ – until Holmes is forced to make his reproach insultingly clear:

  ‘When finally she knew no one would help her she turned her face to the wall. She was very much alone then and she fixed on the idea. You were her cousin and could have travelled with her. You were free, in fact you were already in Rome. It would have cost you nothing.’

  In fact, the real James, after her death, responded more coldly still. He wrote in a letter to his brother William: ‘You will all have felt by this time the novel delight of thinking of Minny without that lurking impulse of fond regret and uneasy conjecture so familiar to the minds of her friends.’ The choice of ‘novel’ in this context is unlikely to be accidental. And he continues: ‘The more I think of her the more perfectly satisfied I am to have her translated from this changing realm of fact to the steady realm of thought.’ Death has provided for her exactly the right relation, and he uses it, too, if not in The Portrait of a Lady, then in The Wings of the Dove.

  Tóibín, in his novel, has chosen not to make use of this material, but the upshot of their little confrontation does depend, in the book, on letters and on a kind of literary question. What had Minny written? ‘He was aware that Gray had kept her letters, and he too in his apartment in London had stored away those letters which Minny had written to him in the last year of her life. He knew that she had accused him of nothing, but he now wished to know what terms she had used all those years before in her expressed desire to go to Rome.’ The letters begin to obsess him, and he stops writing and travels to London to examine them. For the first time since the disaster of his play, he feels that the ‘equilibrium he had worked so intensely to achieve has disappeared’. Henry has been used to observing the biases of others, including Holmes, from his own superior detachment. ‘Tell me something that you are sure is true,’ Minny had said, and James has devoted himself to living the kind of life, independent, uncompromised, unimplicated, that might enable him to. His own detachment, it turns out, has involved him in a form of bias, too:

  He put the letters aside and sat with his head in his hands. He did not help her or encourage her, and she was careful never to ask outright. If she had insisted on coming, he forced himself to complete this thought now, he would have stood aside or kept his distance or actively prevented her coming, whatever was necessary. He had himself, in that year, escaped into the bright old world he had longed for. He was writing stories …

  James, in real life, was equal to the same acknowledgment: ‘While I sit spinning my sentences she is dead: and I suppose it is partly to defend myself from too direct a sense of her death that I indulge in this fruitless attempt to transmute it from a hard fact into a soft idea.’ There is a difference, of course, between Tóibín’s James, who sits with his head in his hands and privately ‘completes’ a thought, and the other James, the real one, who turned his own literary predations into an object of curiosity, and polished it into a confession for his brother. A significant difference: between a gossipy, fluent and charming socialite, and a passive, introverted observer of the scene. It isn’t always clear how much that difference matters, whether the novel depends on anything like biographical accuracy. Not much, I suspect. It’s a novel, after all, though one of the interesting games that Tóibín plays in it involves gesturing at the gaps that history can supply. Edmund Gosse is introduced mostly as Edmund Gosse or Gosse, as if he were real, which, of course, he was. If we wanted to, we could look up his biography. But Tóibín has taken this line before. Katherine Proctor’s friend, and occasional lover, in The South is always referred to as Michael Graves – as if he, too, were real.

  Still, the history matters, if only because Henry, as a character, is the author of the books that the real James wrote. This makes a certain amount of correlation between the two necessary, and Tóibín, in this novel, comes closer to writing in the style of his protagonist than he ever has before.

  Holmes began by believing that Minny did not like Gray, which pleased him, and then became aware with flashes of alarm that Gray was winning. Holmes’s alarm made a sound that Minny and her sisters and Gray were too distracted to hear, but which Henry picked up easily and stored and thought about when he was alone.

  He has teased out, from the word ‘alarm’, its metaphorical content, and casually reinstated its poetic power. A typically Jamesian move, the reinvigoration of idiom, though this example suggests the earlier and simpler James style, and even then he might not have permitted himself the slightly awkward transition from a ‘flash’ of alarm to a ‘sound’. The directness, the plainness of the last half-sentence is pure Tóibín, and it’s worth remembering that The Master tells the story of the late James, of the internal evolutions that produced his grandest and most assured complexities of style.

  There is a great gap between those flashes and alarms, and this, taken almost at random from The Golden Bowl. James is comparing the character of Adam Verver, and its internal wor
kings, to a church with a light in it:

  This establishment, mysterious and almost anonymous, the windows of which, at hours of highest pressure, never seemed, for starers and wonderers, perceptibly to glow, must in fact have been during certain years the scene of an unprecedented, a miraculous white-heat, the receipt for producing which it was practically felt that the master of the forge could not have communicated even with the best intentions.

  It would be impossible, of course, to ‘do’ late James; even if you could, the likely effect would be satirical rather than serious. But the question remains, how can you get James right, as a character, without getting right his own inimitable style of thought? I don’t know that I can answer it, except by saying that Tóibín’s James consciously and repeatedly resists being ‘got right’. He refuses to enter into any relation that might ‘bring’ out his character. And ‘for the sake of something hidden within his own soul’ he abandons, when he is most needed, the friends who love him. Wandering through the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, by the grave of one of these friends, James decides that ‘the state of not-knowing and not-feeling which belonged to the dead’ is ‘closer to resolved happiness than he had ever imagined possible’. Happiness, in his mind, is related to being unknowable. Tóibín even permits his hero a humorous little dig at himself, at his own careful attempt to make sense, after James’s death, of his character, when Henry declares, to fend off one of his brother’s suggestions, that ‘the historical novel’ is ‘tainted by a fatal cheapness’.

  All of which threatens to expose both Henrys, historical and fictional, to a charge of hypocrisy, for he continued to write and to invade. Unless, that is, you consider the evolution of his late style as a response to this problem, the problem of privacy. James found a way of exploring the subtleties of character without giving them away. The passage from The Golden Bowl, quoted above, describes in effect the operation of such privacy, in terms that preserve it behind a decent veil of metaphor, extended and draped upon itself, in hesitations and double negatives. Part of the point of the passage, in fact, is to declare that the real truth, about character, remains impenetrable to assaults both from without and within: to the starers and wonderers who fail to perceive its glow, and to Adam Verver himself, who cannot, with his best intentions, account for it by any ‘receipt’. James’s stories turn often on concealed communications and ambiguous facts, burnt papers and letters and uncertain flaws, so that, even at the level of plot, crucial pieces of information are denied us. One of the odd things about him is that he is enormously adept at describing inarticulate characters, at capturing the Maisies and the Miss Tina Bordereaus – in part because he is so good at giving a definite shape and outline to the things we cannot know about others.

  This, I think, is what Tóibín owes to James: a respect for the fact that characters appear most forcefully and truthfully when they remain decently concealed. Tóibín makes simplicity do the work of James’s complexity. His descriptions, clear and direct, sometimes have the effect of statements under oath. Not that they don’t seem true; rather, we suspect that behind them a great many other truths, of various kinds, have been held back. Their styles approach each other most closely in the use of dialogue, in which the strangeness of other people, their surprisingness, can be developed. And in the setting of scenes: the extent to which they let physical dispositions, arrangements, stand for emotional ones. Henry in The Master watches a young girl listening in on a conversation between two lovers. ‘He realized now that this was something he had described in his books over and over, figures seen from a window or a doorway, a small gesture standing for a much larger relationship, something hidden suddenly revealed.’ Tóibín might equally be talking about his own work here, but it is important (for both of them) always to complicate such ‘revelations’: ‘He had written it, but just now he had seen it come alive, and yet he was not sure what it meant.’ It is the job of the novel to tell us what it is like to be someone else – and that involves conveying a sense of a character’s ability to elude us.

  13 John McGahern,

  That They May Face the Rising Sun

  RAY RYAN

  Little happens in John McGahern’s last novel. There are no chapter divisions, no structural breaks in the narrative, there is no plot, minimal theme and no character or incident is dominant. There is no access to any one’s rich interior life and the narrator is no help either, offering almost no analysis of what happens. Within a mostly uneventful year in a remote, self-enclosed rural community near the border with Northern Ireland, some time after the 1987 Enniskillen bombing, the novel’s only dated political event, the overall tone is serene, often subdued, frequently still.

  No character in this sparsely populated region seems that memorable either. After many years in England, Joe and Kate Ruttledge, a childless middle-aged couple, have returned to tend a small farm by the lake. He is a part-time copy-writer, she a sometime artist. The lake touches every life: the life of the Shah, Joe’s entrepreneurial uncle, Patrick Ryan, an odd-job man, John Quinn, a sexual predator and first-class crank, Bill Evans, an emotionally maimed peasant, ‘like something out of a Russian novel’. And principally Jamesie and Mary, the Ruttledges’ nearest neighbours, the couple through whom the Ruttledges maintain contact with their community.

  From an initial 18,000 (eighteen thousand) manuscript pages, McGahern chiselled an acclaimed, international best-seller, a drama-less novel about a resolutely provincial townland. Reviews compared the work to Chekhov while McGahern was anointed a member of the apostolic succession of Irish literary greats: for John Sutherland in The New York Times, ‘McGahern ranks with the greatest Irish writers.’ Twelve years in the making, it is perplexingly hard to summarise because so little happens to summarise. The narrative barely retains the structure of a novel, being by turns anthropological and, like some richly textured memoir, a loving evocation of a beleaguered community facing the challenge of passing time and time passing. It often resembles a series of short stories, forensically examining the particles of individual lives in the percussive roll of singular moments onto one another. Time, Death and Nature are certainly central concerns. So too is the price of cattle, the swarm of bees that ‘ate the arse’ off Patrick Ryan, drink – McGahern’s seasoned descriptions (‘the dark whiskey had a slight taste of port from the cask and looked beautiful in the clear glass of the unlabelled bottle’) are memorable sorties against the dangers of temperance – harvests, conversation, emigration, the grammar of hospitality, the building of a shed, the laying of a table, the preparation and burial and the resurrection of the dead.

  What inspires these delicate, miniature, arable portraits is the overwhelming fact that time passes and must, somehow, be remembered in mostly fixed lives lived each day knowing that what happens is, mostly, repetition. That when all is said and done, what can be said and done about those left behind? How does one live with the knowledge that each day passes? From the paring or purging of that 18,000-page script, McGahern’s technique is to impose on key words this impossible existential freight. In a novel about the overwhelming and the ordinary, life becomes a sentence, and the style of each sentence is a calibrated mix of the aesthetic and the ethical. The good of this novel derives from the goodness it contains.

  One fundamental distinction scores this world: Meaning is always secondary to Being. Life around the lake is not explained or unpacked or shown in cultural dialogue with something besides itself. This is part of its defiant provincialism. Instead of interpretation, the novel offers the chance to imaginatively participate in the daily experience of its unfolding seasonal rhythms. The only marker of social change imposed from without is at the novel’s end, when telegraph poles begin to dot the landscape. All narrative is an imposition, so McGahern wants to present a world that has in some sense already narrated itself. Plot is absent because plot is a vehicle for theme and theme is imposed, by some dominant shaping consciousness that determines meaning for everyone in the world it creates. Here the
gently rolling narrative structure forbids any determined attempt to understand life round the lake as meaning something other than itself. From within the world it chronicles, this subdued novel about a tiny, uneventful, isolated rural community emerged to rapture. Published near the height of Ireland’s economic boom, a novel which could belong to the 1950s, 70s or 90s, and which fondly recounts the rituals of the rural poor, became a national phenomenon and a word-of-mouth global success. Shortly after publication RTE organised a free public reading and interview. Nearly 1,000 people attended, waiting till 11 p.m. to give McGahern a standing ovation. ‘I think he was amazed by the reception he got,’ said one journalist. ‘He was like a rock star.’ It is all a bit of a puzzle.