If one has read no Mervyn Peake, the first of his books to read surely is Titus Groan, and the second Gormenghast. The third book of the trilogy, Titus Alone, written in the terrible shadow of the illness that killed the author, is not the place to start. Some of the minor pieces and juvenilia in this collection will best please those who already love Peake; but it is full of pleasures, and the unwary dipper-in might well get caught—by Captain Slaughterboard, perhaps, or a lurking Figure of Speech—and emerge only to go in hot search of the trilogy. A great debt of gratitude is owing to Maeve
Gilmore for the hard and delicate task she has performed in gathering these scattered pieces of prose, verse, and drawing from the authors whole life, and to John Watney (author of a fine biography of Peake) for his sensitive introduction. My only disappointment with the book is that it is not a selection from the very best work Peake did. To one who has not read the novels or seen Peake’s magnificent illustrations to Treasure Island, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Alice in Wonderland, the narrative pieces and drawings in this volume will give an idea of his versatility and marvelous originality, but not a full realization of his solid and enduring achievement. But the poetry in Peake’s Progress is another matter.
It has no right—no right at all
To soar above the orchard wall,
With chilblains on its knees.
In this sort of thing Peake belongs firmly to a classifiable tradition—a maverick tradition, of course: English nonsense verse, that maddest flower of Albion. He was a master of nonsense to equal Edward Lear. His play The Wit to Woo, here included, is in verse, which lends its Wildean capers a singular and batty beauty:
PERCY (bursting out of cupboard door):
No, no, no!
I cannot breathe in there—the mothballs, Kite!
Ah, let me gulp a little air again—
A little air—a little of that space
That gentle Einstein curved for our amusement….
Wit, style, humor, daring, are never common qualities; Peake has them all. But the treasure of Peake’s Progress is several serious poems of extraordinary power and brilliance, chief among them the narrative “Rhyme of the Flying Bomb.” A conscious heir of Coleridge and a contemporary of Dylan Thomas wrote this poem; hard to classify he may be, but a critic who ignores Mervyn Peake henceforth may be accused of ignorance. The poem is heartbreakingly and unforgettably illustrated by the man who wrote it—twelve years after, when he could not hold the pen for more than a few moments at a time, and had to be reminded what he was drawing.
In those twenty pages alone the book earns permanence. There is also the strange “Reverie of Bone” and a selection of love poems and war poems. “London, 1941” ends with these lines:
Across a world of sudden fear and firelight
She towers erect, the great stones at her throat,
Her rusted ribs like railings round her heart;
A figure of dry wounds—of winter wounds—
O mother of wounds; half masonry, half pain.
I know no other poem so fit to stand with Henry Moore’s drawings of London in the Blitz.
Peake’s Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings of Mervyn Peake, edited by Maeve Gilmore (London: Overlook Press, 1981).
THE SENTIMENTAL AGENTS
by Doris Lessing
(1983)
Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series has had some queer reviews. Some academic critics, unwilling to recognize experiment in content rather than form, dismiss her greatest experimental venture as “mere science fiction,” not to be taken seriously. But among science-fiction readers and reviewers, where the books might have been greeted with intelligent interest, the attitude seems to be: Lessing is not One of Us, therefore we will not take her seriously. Some feminist critics denounce her for departing from the single issue of feminism. And then there are her adorers, for whom she can do no wrong. None of these reviewers does her novels justice.
Neither will I. I am much too angry at her. But perhaps this review will move a reader to begin or to continue the series, of which The Sentimental Agents is the fifth book—and that’s what I’m after. Doris Lessing deserves to be read! How many novelists are there writing now who can make you really angry? How many refuse triviality, self-imitation, and the safe line, whether it panders to the know-it-all snob or the know-nothing slob? How many novelists take any risks at all? If you are thirsty for the dry taste of courage, try Lessing.
But don’t start with this one. Start with the first of the series, Shikasta, or the second, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (which I think very much the best so far). In this latest one, all the faults and few of the strengths of Lessing’s style survive the ordeal of an effort at satirical playfulness by the most humorless major writer alive. She takes the themes of Orwell’s brief, beautiful Animal Farm and clomps around all over them page after page, so gracelessly and so tastelessly that one ends up cheering for the targets of her satire. She sets up feeble men of straw and knocks them over, braying, “Look! What fools! What knaves!” She loads every die she throws; she propagandizes steadily throughout a novel the intent of which is to satirize propaganda; she preaches against preaching and rants about ranting. The keenest novelistic observer of the political human being since the Koestler of Darkness at Noon, she generalizes marvelously, but as soon as she embodies the idea in a character, she overmanipulates, and all we see is a puppet kicking on strings. She bravely discards verisimilitude and even probability, but she discards compassionate insight along with them, replacing it not with irony but with judgmentalism. We must endure even her judgments on music; on a planet somewhere across the universe, we are informed that Tchaikovsky is a complainer and that the tune of “We Shall Overcome” is dismal. Finally, her confusion of emotion with sentimentality is a moral disaster.
And all this is presented as the wisdom of Canopus. I have not found much wisdom in the apparent heroes of the saga, Johor and the other agents of Canopus. They are arrogant, anthropocentric, authoritarian, forever smiling pityingly, forever talking down to everybody else, bearing the galactic version of the White Man’s Burden with stifled but audible moans of self-pity through a universe populated by lesser breeds without the law…. And they are immortal. They are as self-righteous as the tiresome old Laputans of Robert Heinlein’s novels, though less talkative. In fact, when it comes to real information, they stop talking. They smile pityingly.
Can it be that Lessing is playing her own double agent? Are we meant to dislike these saintly “agents,” meant to distrust their wisdom as they distrust our rhetoric, meant to question the “Necessity” they invoke as they dismiss our inadequate concepts of virtue, freedom, justice, compassion? Are we expected to protest the Orders from Above that everyone in the book obeys unprotesting (or if they don’t they rue the day)? If so, Lessing is risking even more than I thought, and is undercutting her book as she writes it, in a fashion and to an extent that few fancy critics of formal preciosities or auteurs of self-deconstructed anti-novels would dare contemplate. But then she is asking too much of her readers, to carry on so strained a duplicity in book after book.
It’s time the people from Canopus stopped looking down from the heights, all head, no body. Any redneck preacher or hard-line Freudian can spout this stuff about subduing our “animal” nature and the “beast” in us (as if it were animals that made the mess we’re in!). Surely Canopus, or Lessing, can do better than that? We don’t need the soppy pseudo-reassurances of an E.T.—but neither do we need condemnations, preachifyings, and mystifications in the name of Reason. If Canopus knows what it is we do need, in the mess we’ve made, it’s time they spoke. Put up or shut up, Johor!
Doris Lessing, The Sentimental Agents (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).
DIFFICULT LOVES
by Italo Calvino
(1984)
Jorge Luis Borges gets the Nobel Prize in literature, only twenty-five or thirty years overdue, and then the next year they
give it to Italo Calvino…. So much for daydreams. Meanwhile, here’s a selection of Calvino’s short stories from 1945 to 1960, felicitously translated by William Weaver, Archibald Colquhoun, and Peggy Wright.
A kitchen full of wild animals: frogs on the plates, snakes in the saucepans, lizards in the soup, toads on the tiles— A forest full of tame animals: lambs in caves, pigs in bushes, cows in clearings, a chicken here, a guinea pig there— A pastry shop full of thieves, ignoring the cash register to wallow in cream puffs and jelly rolls—A furrier’s shop invaded by a naked old beggar who robes himself in sable, beaver, and lamb’s wool, and appears to a startled shopgirl as “a gigantic human bear with its arms entwined in an astrakhan muff….” Her response is pure Calvino. “How lovely!” she says.
Calvino’s early stories, exact, delicate, kind, dry, crazy, often follow this theme of invasion or interpenetration of animal life and artificial life—a subversion of order by the strange. I can’t come at the distinction more precisely, for it is a complex one, not to be pulled out of the stories as a mere idea. It is a political, a social, and a psychological theme, and a fascinating one. Indeed, Calvino is such an interesting writer intellectually that one tends to forget the powerful gift of narrative that has let him pull off such “anti-narrative” stunts as Invisible Cities or If on a winters night a traveler. In this volume you can see the storyteller pure and simple in “Mine Field,” a paradigm of suspense. Will he get blown up or won’t he? I didn’t know I could hold my breath for seven pages.
The war stories, fearful and/or humorous, are brilliant. A deaf old peasant rides his mule down the mountain to get help for his starving village in 1945:
… he had lived his life with mules, and his ideas were as few and as resigned as theirs; it had always been long and tiring to find his bread, bread for himself and bread for others, and now bread for the whole of Bevera. The world, this silent world which surrounded him, seemed to be trying to speak to him, too, with confused boomings that reached even his sleeping eardrums, and strange disturbances of the earth. He could see banks crumbling, clouds rising from the fields, stones flying, and red flashes appearing and disappearing on the hills; the world was trying to change its old face and show its underbelly of earth and roots. And the silence, the terrible silence of his old age, was ruffled by those distant sounds.
Calvino’s stories from the forties have the mood of the great afterwar films of Rossellini and De Sica, with their strange clarity of feeling, a vernal power springing in release from the dead grip of fascist lying and bullying. These tales are loving and terrible, very tender, never truly hopeful.
The stories from the fifties might make you think of Fellini—the farce, the fantasy, the wit, delight, and vitality, and the marvelous gift of image. Where Fellini errs towards incoherence, Calvino over-controls, erring towards the cerebral—but seldom, and never fatally. He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.
“The Adventure of a Bather” won’t become a myth or byword like Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” because it isn’t quite simplistic enough. The plot is certainly simple: swimming alone at a big beach resort, she loses the bottom half of her swimsuit. Now, how can you make anything out of that but a wink, a snicker, a snigger? Calvino makes it a story worthy of Chekhov, a tiny comedy that touches the great chords. The smartass kid who says the Emperor has no clothes on speaks for the child in us, but Calvino’s swimmer is an adult, and her peculiar problem is an adult problem, in fact you could say that her problem is that she is adult—that she is fully human.
Repeatedly in the later stories the metaphor of happiness is a man’s sexual enjoyment of a woman. I found this tiresome. A male writer may expect a female reader to accept a description of sex from the man’s point of view as a satisfactory representation of human sexual experience, but he can’t ask her to agree that male pleasure defines human bliss. Not these days. Once upon a time “the nude” could stand for “beauty,” but these days she’s likely to be seen as a naked woman painted by a clothed man. There is nothing pornographic in Calvino, of course. His sensuality is free and real, as exact, mysterious, and enjoyable as everything in his writing. But the metaphor, repeated, trivializes. In the last story, a fine restatement of the major theme, the image of inexpressible joy is a woman swimming naked, watched by a man. Wretchedly poor fisherfolk, seen by the same man, represent equally inexpressible despair. The second image, which works, reveals the banality of the first. Very pretty, the nude swimmer, but prettiness isn’t what Calvino is after. And what a bore she is compared to that other swimmer, ridiculous, terrified, respectable, who instead of taking off her bathing suit to please a man, loses it and so wins the heart of anybody reading her story, our story, all of us swimming anxiously around in the Sea of Life getting colder and colder, and not brave enough, not shameless enough, to come ashore alone….
Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves, translated by William Weaver, Archibald Colquhoun, and Peggy Wright (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984).
“FORSAKING KINGDOMS”:
FIVE POETS
(1984)
While painting seems more the business of stockbrokers than of artists, while orchestras endlessly replay old symphonies and let living composers go unheard, poetry flourishes. Living way below the bottom line, unexploitable, it remains as threatened and ubiquitous as the trees and the wild grass. Our very lack of a “great” poet may be a sign of the luxuriant vitality of the art. It’s grand that the Brits had the sense to crown Ted Hughes’s hard head with laurel, but in this wide country too much is going on for anybody to dominate the scene; and anyhow the mood, I think, isn’t favorable to canons, cults, or hierarchies.
Of the five poets here reviewed the youngest is (as yet) the most self-limited, self-domesticated, unwild. A verbal confidence dazzling in itself, wit, control, precision mark Mary Jo Salter’s work. In a Buddhist graveyard,
Reading down,
I felt as though the ashes of someone
whose name ran vertically might lie
differently, somehow, in the earth.
Such a small note seemed everything….
The oldest of the five poets was born in 1902. The early poems in Eve Triem’s retrospective volume are often similarly crisp and controlled, but by the end she is passionate and incautious. Early on, she makes a lovely Taoist print—
moon-rim, a falling wave, a lifted cloud …
—but grown old she is a prophetess, a shaman, incantatory:
The lake-sunk stars were ringing:
“Nine times the nine white heavens
call the things that creep, run, fly.
Come to the fish-meal, eat from the tympani,
drink from the clashing cymbals.”
I looked with all my faces.
The houses rose, shine-drenched,
the wolf ran at my side,
through the Easter light of every morning.
Winner of the 1984 Western States Book Award, New as a Wave is a very readable book, various and lively; there are poems of homage to Morris Graves and to Jimi Hendrix, elegies, carols, songs, regional pieces. Through the deft lines moves a candid, elusive, rich personality, still growing strong at eighty. Her own woman, she shares life with us,
(Not as the dead know—meek, learning by rote
The riddling truths, myths, legends of the grave)
Breathing and choosing in the jeweled world.
Forsaking kingdoms. Becoming kings for love.
May Sarton is a mere septuagenarian, but count her title list with awe. This is a writer, this is what writers do: fourteen volumes of poetry, seventeen of fiction, two books for kids, and seven collections of essays. The newest of the lot, Letters from Maine, is mostly easygoing. The lines flow with facility and the grace of long usage, the rhymes are undemanding, one may be soothed by the conventionality … but look out. Sudden authority rings like sword steel, and the clear old voice says with awful honesty,
The fact is I am w
hole and very well,
Joyful, centered, not to be turned aside,
Full of healing and self-healing.
Only the muse does not bid me cease,
Who does not listen and who cannot care,
Has never said “be quiet,” uttered harm
She, the dark angel and the silent charm,
Is all of hope and nothing of despair,
And in her long withholding is my peace
In those lines is the power that is earned by a lifetime of using power mindfully.
Denise Levertov’s mastery—more than mastery, because she is one of the originators—of contemporary poetic form, informed by a fierce generous intelligence, can be frightening. This is the charged, overloaded poetry of the age, demanding more of the reader than most of us are mostly willing to give, so we don’t read poetry, we read a thriller or something, and oh, what dolts we are, what wasters of our own brief time—to miss this tenderness, this kind companion in hard times, not trying to sell us anything or scare us or fool us, but going along with us,
Dancing at the Edge of the World Page 31
