This is a short novel. The word “slight” cannot be used of a work in which so much talent is displayed. Miss Rhys tells her story with the miraculous spontaneity of all her writing, and in the tone of one who keeps calm while reporting a catastrophe. One must be glad that educated poverty has taken less annihilating forms since this book was written; otherwise, Quartet is vividly undated, directing our attention to paradoxes and pretensions that have become even more explicit in our present day. The reemergence of this fine novel at a moment when so much fiction tends to be bossy or calculating is in itself a heartening affirmation of what Jean Rhys has to say.
THE LASTING SICKNESS OF NAPLES
Review of Matilde Serao, Il Ventre di Napoli
This new edition of what had become a rare book is a literary by-product of the 1973 cholera outbreak at Naples. Matilde Serao’s impassioned articles, published during the 1884 cholera epidemic in which almost 8,000 Neapolitans died, were first collected in a volume, with epilogue by the author, in 1905. In September 1973, within three weeks of the reappearance of cholera in the city, the book was reissued in the present paperback form, with an up-to-the-minute introduction by Gianni Infusino. The first printing sold out through individual orders before reaching the bookshops; the second was on the stands within days. And its new Neapolitan readers doubtless discovered in it the most knowledgeable and eloquent account of their city’s past, present, and—one fears—future condition.
The book is, however, more—or other—than that. The parallel, an obvious one and frequently drawn, between Zola and Serao is here inevitable and valid. The literary meeting of outraged social conscience with a poetic vitality of image is not only rare but rarely complementary. In this case, an unerring literary instinct takes the work beyond the category of humanitarian appeals, where it would occupy a noble and foremost place, and into the range where all awareness is extended and which must therefore be called “art.” The intensity of the narrative—doubtless subjected, in its time, to the indefatigable male adjective “shrill”—not only deepens urgency and poignancy but animates the whole with unquenchable life.
Matilde Serao was born before the Risorgimento and died after Mussolini came to power. Novelist, essayist, journalist, founder and editor of newspapers, she produced a large body of writings—including a number of novels, of which the singular Il Paese di Cuccagna is probably her masterpiece. Il Ventre di Napoli was the highly informed cri de coeur she addressed to a corrupt and indifferent officialdom, which—having in the 1880s, as in the 1970s, abandoned the city to privation and decrepitude—thundered rhetorically of illusory reforms when catastrophe struck. “Bisogna sventrare Napoli”—“Naples must be disemboweled”—was the official slogan from which Matilde Serao took her title. Her book does not deal with the effects of cholera but with the conditions in which the epidemic originated: the “belly of Naples,” the bowels and entrails of the great city that to Leopardi was both “mistress of mortals”1 and “Rat’s nest”2; which Malaparte considered “a Pompeii that was never buried,” not a town but a fragment of “the ancient pre-Christian world—which has survived intact on the surface of modern times.”3
The book is history, also, and anthropology. A thousand arresting details of popular life and custom appear almost incidentally in its teeming canvas of survival. To say that the author writes feelingly of the torment of separate souls within the purgatory she exposes to us is to mock the fiery humanity of her work. While she condemns the empty sentimentalizing of extremity as “picturesque”—“a diavolo la poesia e il dramma!”—her own writing is a revelation in the authentically picturesque, in the truly poetic and dramatic.4 In this brief book a society is rendered in all its strangeness, its wretchedness, its humiliations, its indomitable human graces. And the author marvels that civilization should have been preserved, mysteriously, in a people whom adversity and vice might have brutalized—but who, instead, love color and form and decoration, whose music is suffused with “invincible nostalgia,” who have retained a sense of nature and of celebration, who, living in the dark, still love the light.5
Ninety years after publication, these chapters assail the reader with their application to present conditions—an ultimate vindication both foreseen and dreaded by the author. From Monte di Dio 10 Quartiere Vicaria, “the great sinful streets,” as Clough called them,6 the putrid alleyways, the very buildings themselves might today be named in almost identical context: the same squalor, the same decomposing glories—bedeviled now by cars, or blasted with the unredressed bombardments of 1943 but astonishingly, incontestably, the same. Unaltered, too, the evils of an administration, now hugely magnified in size, of whose monumental negligence it could already be demanded, almost a century ago: “To what purpose, then, are all these senior and junior employees, this immense bureaucratic machinery that costs us so dear?”7
The concluding third of the book, written twenty years after the epidemic, attacks as farce and fiasco the vaunted risanamento of Naples, when the boulevard of the Rettifilo was driven through a warren of ancient slums, carrying all before it—including the poor, for whom no provision was made in the new, expensive constructions that lined the route, and who reinterred themselves as best they could in the squalor, surviving undisturbed on every intersecting byway. For the symbolic Rettifilo itself—an avenue that no one could now regard as other than a prospect of unalleviated dreariness—Matilde Serao attempts a word of contemporary praise, but her perceptions are too much for her; and against that bleak new monotony, she sounds another warning, which will again go unheeded and will bring another sigh from modern readers who have helplessly watched the postwar inundation of Neapolitan jerry-building and the concomitant decay of an incomparable patrimony of art and antiquities:
Alas, this is an evil common to so many other beautiful Italian cities where, side by side with ancient splendors and the supreme refinements of taste, modern architects have raised monuments to their own utter ignorance and total lack of aesthetic sensibility.8
This is a powerful book, and its author faced the bitter possibility that it might prove completely ineffectual. The weight of sheer official irresponsibility and venality ranged against her, compounded with the fatalism of the afflicted themselves, were understood by Matilde Serao as thoroughly as all the other elements of which she wrote. The reemergence of the book, however, and its phenomenal appositeness, testify to the endurance not only of affliction but of human indignation, also, and of potential remedy. Beyond the multiplicity of specific reforms she advocates, her “solution” (although she would not have employed so immature a term) remains fundamental:
To eradicate material and moral corruption, to restore health and conscience to these poor people, to teach them how to live—they know how to die, as you have witnessed—to convince them that their existence matters to us, it is not enough to disembowel Naples; Naples must virtually be re-created.9
THE NEW NOVEL BY THE NEW NOBEL PRIZE WINNER
Review of Patrick White, The Eye of the Storm
Great literature is like moral leadership: everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead. Contemporary writers who threaten to alter us with knowledge and extend us with pleasure and pain seem to pass through a period of ritual resistance from critics. Reviewers whimper that familiar ground is being reworked, that the latest books are not up to the early works (which they had inadvertently neglected to praise at the time), with the implication that this somehow invalidates the whole. During this interregnum, the writer’s humanity is stigmatized as indulgence, his discernment as embitterment; he is getting soft, or hard, or nowhere. Until we submit, at last, to our own enlargement through the intention, revelation, and particularity of genius.
Of recent years Patrick White has been subjected to all these promising signs, as well as to merited and more agreeable forms of tribute from those who have admired this marvelous writer for decades. Imputing “inspiration” to novelists is as dangerous a
s discoursing on Nature with farmers: but each of White’s novels has been blessed and quickened with a center of narrative power—a large meaning in which the author seeks to create our belief. Without at least some measure of this mysterious ignition, which is utterly distinct from “content,” the most gently wrought book remains stationary and merely professional. White has always been able to command it in abundance: his novels, plays and stories are irradiations from related central themes in which the author participates no less intensely than his characters. All have on them the bloom of a bound humanity.
The Eye of the Storm is on the large scale of White’s productions of the past twenty-five years: The Aunt’s Story, the splendid Voss, The Tree of Man, Riders in the Chariot, The Solid Mandala, and The Vivisector. The matter in hand here is no less than existence: our brief incarnation in a human experience, our efforts to make a coherence of, or retreat from, the improbable combinations of flesh, feeling, vanity, virtue, and reason laid upon us like preposterous puzzles. Elizabeth Hunter is dying at a great age in her ornate house at Sydney. Once a surpassing beauty—who still occasionally has herself bedecked in lilac wig and rose brocade and, with sightless accuracy, fondles rubies and sapphires from her jewel-case—she is now a desiccated shred of former flesh, which nurses and domestics have for years contrived to oil and nourish. Turned on her side she is “like a deck chair upset by the wind” yet there is “some of the former mineral glitter in her almost extinct stare,” and “rare coruscations occurred, in which…this fright of an idol became the goddess hidden inside of life, which you longed for, but hadn’t yet dared embrace; of beauty such as you imagined, but had so far failed to grasp…and finally of death, which hadn’t concerned you, except as something to be tidied away, till now you were faced with the vision of it.”1
It is through Mrs. Hunter and her authority over the fact of being that her household and her son and daughter vicariously face death and, as a result, struggle to give consequence to life.
The realization that we are all living to a deadline cannot do much for Mrs. Hunter’s aging children—the excruciated divorcee Dorothy and posturing Basil, a famous actor—who long since fled their mother’s loveless clutches to nurture their grievances abroad and now return to “put her in a home”—that is, to deprive her of one in order to salvage their diminishing inheritance. Early sufferings have not ennobled this devious and fretful pair, whose stunted emotions are, even so, mainly engaged in panic-stricken efforts to withhold clemency, to ward off the unfathomable threat of grace. Reduced in her mother’s presence to “a mere daughter,” feeling “her nylons turn to lisle,” Dorothy yet flails against her own “guilt, tenderness, desire, lost opportunities. She must never forget Mother is an evil heartless old woman.”2 To her children Elizabeth Hunter is “an enormously enlarged pulse dictating to the lesser, audible valves opening and closing in their own bodies.”3 Dorothy cannot accept her mother’s mortality: “She was too cunning, cruel, to release you from your hatefulness by dying.”4 While Basil’s quandary is to “make death convincing off the stage.”5 In all, a family tableau recalling Titian’s Pope Paul III with His Nephews.
Waste of this kind, the squandering and perversion of qualities and capacities for whose exercise we are allowed so little time, has always preoccupied White, who exposes its pathos and irresolution without reducing its repugnance.
Elizabeth Hunter has lived a predatory life, and her power in part still derives from seeing through people rather than into them. Men and women have “looked up to her as somebody beautiful, brilliant—occasionally inspired”; and she has played dolls with them.6 She herself is still “impressed by the emotional outburst it is in her power to cause,” is still in awful possession of emotions she is “storing up against some possible cataclysm.”7 “Elizabeth Hunter never forgives: she lines you up for more of the same; which can amount to the same thing.”8 Yet she is almost without hypocrisy, is capable of self-knowledge and of a long remorse for the dead and gentle husband from whom she withheld love in life. Age had “forced her to realize she had experienced more than she thought she had at the time…that the splinters of a mind make a whole piece. Sometimes at night your thoughts glitter…. [You] know yourself to be a detail of the greater splintering.”9
Years before, on an island holiday during which she appropriated her daughter’s loutish, sunburned suitor (“she only half-wanted the Norwegian; he was peeling”), Elizabeth Hunter had been abandoned in the path and eye of a cyclone.10 This is the thing itself, “it is the linesman testing for the highest pitch of awfulness the human spirit can endure.”11 She passes through destruction to become, in humble triumph, “a being, or more likely a flaw at the center of this jewel of light.”12 The exaltation of extremity cannot be sustained, but it marks her with knowledge: “Whatever is given you to live, you alone can live, and re-live, and re-live, till it is gasped out of you.”13
Now, in a room that pungently smells of mortality, her handmaidens—the nurses de Santis (who is, literally, goodness itself), Manhood, and Badgery—tend Mrs. Hunter in shifting moods of love, revulsion, and loving revulsion, assisted by a tender lachrymose clown of a housekeeper. Mrs. Hunter can open the filial wound in each of them, but her dying body has come to be almost as their own, their only known fate, and the difficulty is to house their souls somehow there. Her old lawyer Wyburd uneasily fills the role of faithful retainer. Even the aging chaos of Dorothy and Basil, who appall him in their Regan-and-Goneril descents on his chambers, assails Wyburd’s charitable memory “with the attributes he would have liked them to keep: grass-stained, scab-kneed, still a vision of potential good.”14 Wyburd is innocent, unrenowned. And the pretty, promiscuous nurse Flora Manhood wonders, “What makes people grow up decent?…It could be from not wanting anything enough.”15
Basil and Dorothy dodge around their mother’s intolerable presence as around the challenge of compassion—or greatness. They make a pilgrimage to the vast “still shamefaced landscape” of their rural childhood, Basil persuading himself that “at ‘Kudjeri’ perhaps he would rediscover the real thing—if there was enough of him left to fill so large a stage.”16 Their mother’s death brings them scuttling out of the protective custody of a fascinated farmer and his homely wife and back into the carapace of self-pity. Still menaced by their better natures, they take the money and run.
Elizabeth Hunter has died at last—not through a withdrawal of will but by an assertion of it. She leaves some who, having nourished themselves on her essence, cannot live without her; and those who will give themselves to life because of her, passing into comprehension through the eye of the storm.
Echoing the book of Revelation, W. H. Auden decreed that novelists must “…among the Just / Be just, among the Filthy filthy too.”17 Patrick White extends this obligation to its larger dimension, discovering degrees of filth and justice in each existence, becoming his divergent characters with impassioned veracity rather than adapting them to his purpose. It is impossible that so ambitious a concept would be without any flaw of execution; but White’s magnanimity, his logic, his poetry are not incompatible with the spirits he invokes by name—Shakespeare, Stendhal, Redon. Splinterings of James, of Joyce, of other writers male and female, make part of his own “greater splintering.”18 White’s rich, distinctive language, now stately, now mercurial, always borne on the civilizing tide of irony, makes this big book as generous as it is demanding: every passage merits attention and gives satisfaction. In a creation intricate with the nerves and tissue of consciousness, women are predominant, rendered with a rigorous, luminous truth.
One seeks among debased superlatives for words that would convey the grandeur of The Eye of the Storm not in destitute slogans but in tribute to its high intellect, its fidelity to our victories and confusions, its beauty and heroic maturity. In Voss a character laments, “If I could but describe in simple words the immensity of simple knowledge.”19 It is knowledge, beyond all benefits, that this prodigiously gifted writer is co
nferring upon us.
The claim, continually made in American literary circles, that “here is where it’s all happening” can cause the foreigner something of the surprise felt on learning that the World Series is a tournament in which no other nation participates. (Is there not, in any case, something parochial about the very insistence itself? As Jacques Barzun has said, self-assurance cannot be “shown.”) Unless art is to be regarded as a competition, one can only wish “it” to be happening as extensively as possible. All Patrick White’s books have been published here by the Viking Press but have had the minimum of attention in this land whose own fiction is increasingly oppressed by ethnocentricity of reference, range, content, and criticisms. White’s reputation in the United States has been created in the most durable form: almost exclusively between himself and readers. (He has thus largely been spared “interpretation”—though this percussion is soon to break on him and with what clashing of symbols. Perhaps the reprieve has merely assisted him to speak out queer and clear.)
Novels or poems in translation—from Russian, French, Spanish, or Japanese—may more easily find a publisher in America than any new work of quality from Australia. A few Americans have perhaps heard, in the past, of Daisy Bates or Henry Handel Richardson, more recently of Christina Stead and A. D. Hope. Alan Moorehead is known (but not for his fiction), and Thea Astley has been published here. Incuriosity has otherwise been the rule.
We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think Page 9
