Reading Style

by Jenny Davidson

  He was reading Henry James’s memoir of his childhood, A Small Boy and Others, and feeling crazily horny, after three days without as much as a peck from Wani. It was a hopeless combination. The book showed James at his most elderly and elusive, and demanded a pure commitment unlikely in a reader who was worrying excitedly about his boyfriend and semi-spying, through dark glasses, on another boy who was showing off in front of him and clearly trying to excite him. From time to time the book tilted and wobbled in his lap, and the weight of the deckle-edged pages pressed on his erection through the sleek black nylon. He noted droll phrases for later use: “an oblong farinaceous compound” was James’s euphemism for a waffle—compound was sublime in its clinching vagueness. (273)

  The contrast between Nick’s sexual arousal and his reading of James is shocking, but it is partially domesticated by the extent to which the juxtaposition is managed by Nick himself for maximum titillation, with the phrase “deckle-edged pages” itself suggesting a certain level of self-mockery (deckle edges are the rough and uneven trim on books from an era when the pages still had to be cut with a knife, though they continue to appear on mass-produced books to tastelessly ornamental ends).

  It is almost clinical, the dispassion with which the narrator notes Nick’s slightly embarrassing mining of James’s pages for witty remarks of the sort we have already seen him using with his coworkers in the office. Nick’s only sincerity lies in his love of beautiful things, but his reliance on that love is shaken or swayed by the temptations of adult life. The narrator observes, of the market hall in the town where Nick grew up (it is also Gerald’s constituency, and Nick has returned for the election):

  It had been the pride of Nick’s childhood, he had done a project about it at school with measured plans and elevations, at the age of twelve it had ranked with the Taj Mahal and the Parliament Building in Ottawa in his private architectural heaven. The moment of accepting that it was not by Wren had been as bleak and exciting as puberty. (249)

  The distance between young Nick and older Nick is painful; young Nick’s unselfconscious love for architecture (the fact that he has such a thing as a private architectural heaven, and the appealing nerdiness of the triumvirate of buildings Hollinghurst selects for it) endears him to us, but only at the risk of mild ridicule, and the simile of the second sentence highlights the grotesque aspect of this strong identification rather than its seductive one. Most people (though not, presumably, most people who like Hollinghurst’s novels) would find it ludicrous to compare the passing into knowledge that represents giving up the fantasy of one’s local favorite building having been designed by the great architect to whom it is commonly attributed with the transfigurations of puberty, described here with a pair of adjectives that is lovely precisely because the words’ mating is so deeply unexpected.

  Nick’s love for beautiful things is associated here with his sexuality; the novel plays around with the idea that all male aesthetes must be gay (witness Nick’s earlier speculations about the man who owns Madame de Pompadour’s escritoire), and it is observed of Toby’s sandwich-making that “it was a bit of a mess, a mishmash, lots of dressing was sploshed in—it was almost as though he was saying to Nick, who had once had a job in a sandwich shop, ‘I’m not a poof, I haven’t got style, I can’t help it’” (280). Part 2 of the novel culminates in the celebratory party at the Fedden house at which Margaret Thatcher (referred to here only as “the Lady”) makes her appearance. Nick, in a haze of cocaine-induced confidence, is the only man bold enough to present himself as a partner:

  He gazed delightedly at the Prime Minister’s face, at her whole head, beaked and crowned, which he saw was a fine if improbable fusion of the Vorticist and the Baroque. She smiled back with a certain animal quickness, a bright blue challenge. There was the soft glare of the flash—twice—three times—a gleaming sense of occasion, the gleam floating in the eye as a blot of shadow, his heart running fast with no particular need of courage as he grinned and said, “Prime Minister, would you like to dance?” (335)

  It is almost one of Nick’s Jamesisms, this affected but sharp analysis of Thatcher’s appearance as “a fine if improbable fusion of the Vorticist and the Baroque” (we feel Nick’s own enjoyment in the sharp unexpectedness of the insight and the pungency of his own phrasing), and the tableau is one of the most vivid scenes in the book.

  Despite the pseudo-sophistication of this Nick, there is a terrible naïveté in the pleasure he takes in his new world of money and cocaine and unlimited sex. Indeed, he is still considerably less worldly-wise than he understands himself to be, a fact revealed by his shock at the discovery of an affair between Gerald Fedden and his secretary, Penny. One way of describing the central drama of the book as a whole—certainly of its last section—is to say that it asks whether art can really be the repository of morality in the way that Nick would like to believe, or whether it will prove insufficient to the burdens of ethics and politics. That final section is considerably shorter than the two preceding ones and quite different in tone; it takes an unexpected swerve, and calls much of what we have come to take for granted about the novel’s aestheticism into question. We learn that Leo has died of AIDS, and Wani will soon do so (his beauty has been devastated—“He commanded attention now by pity and respect as he once had by beauty and charm…. Nick thought he still looked wonderful in a way, though to admit it was to make an unbearable comparison. He was twenty-five years old” [376]). The precedent of Henry James looms very large still here, but Nick’s adherence to a Jamesian style has come to seem increasingly irrelevant—almost self-delusional—in the context of Wani’s illness, Leo’s death and the scandal that’s about to break when news of Gerald’s affair gets out.

  As I mentioned earlier, one aspect of James’s “late” style, those long winding sentences of infinite syntactical complexity, is commonly attributed to James’s having adopted the habit of dictating rather than writing by hand; Nick, too, dictates letters to his secretary, and finds himself like James “able to improvise long supple sentences rich in suggestions and syntactic shock,” all “old-fashioned periods and perplexing semi-colons” (346). This is “periods” in the sense of oratorical periods, those sentences structured with a Ciceronian balance redolent of the eighteenth century (“I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son”). But the power of aestheticism to ward off the sordid has worn very thin, and an objective correlative for the sorts of moral decay expressed in political and sexual corruption can be found in the formerly lovely desk in Wani’s house: “The Georgian desk was marked with drink stains and razor etchings that even the optimistic Don Guest would have found it hard to disguise. ‘That’s beyond cosmetic repair, old boy,’ Don would say. Nick fingered at the little abrasions and found himself gasping and whooping with grief” (357).

  It is the news of Leo’s death that has exposed the tawdriness and pretension of Wani’s flat to Nick, so that he can express his emotional wretchedness only by mourning (on the face of it) the destruction of a beautiful object, an object no less thoroughly ruined by the excesses of the previous years than Leo and Wani have both been. But it is in this scene that Nick finds some measure of redemption, the return to a simpler aestheticism (or at any rate a form of emotion still experienced primarily through objects but not necessarily culpable just because it represents a displacement from the human) that gives him at least the first inklings of ethical awareness. It is “an anxious refinement of tact” that makes him uncomfortable even mentioning Leo’s death in the condolence letter he writes to Leo’s mother:

  “Your sad news,” “recent sad events”…: “Leo’s death” was brutal. Then he worried that “I was so terribly sorry” might sound like gush to her, like calling her wonderful. He knew his own forms of truth could look like insincerity to others. He was frightened of her, as a grieving woman, and uncertain what feelings to attribute to her. It seemed she had taken it all in her own way, perhaps even with a touch of zealous cheerfulness. He could see her being impres
sed by his educated form of words and best handwriting. Then he saw her looking mistrustfully at what he’d written. He felt the limits of connoisseurship of tone. It was what he was working on, and yet…. He stared out of the window, and after a minute found Henry James’s phrase about the death of Poe peering back at him. What was it? The extremity of personal absence had just overtaken him. The words, which once sounded arch and even facetious, were suddenly terrible to him, capacious, wise, and hard. He understood for the first time that they’d been written by someone whose life had been walked through, time and again, by death. And then he saw himself, in six months’ time perhaps, sitting down to write a similar letter to the denizens of Lowndes Square. (358)

  The denizens of Lowndes Square are Wani’s family members, and the revelation that hits Nick here is like something out of a Greek tragedy.

  His encounter with the physical artifact of the magazine, its first and only issue, which arrives in a bundle from the printers near the end of the novel casts another light on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics:

  Strange teetering mood of culmination. Five minutes later he wished he had it to read through fresh again; but that could never happen. He took a copy upstairs to the flat, and opened it at random several times—to find that its splendour had a glint to it, a glassy malignity. No, it was very good. It was lustrous. The lustre was perfected and intense—it was the shine of marble and varnish. It was the gleam of something that was over. (428)

  This is one of a cluster of passages that reflect on the relationship between beauty, style and the emotions, as in the scene where Nick (the revelation of his scandalous activities during his time as a lodger at the Feddens having lost him his place there) realizes he must tell Gerald that he will leave the house:

  Nick went up to his room, and stood looking at the window sill. Late-morning, late-October sunlight dimmed and brightened indifferently over it. He was lost in thought, but it was thought without words, pure abstraction, luminous and sad. Then a simple form of words appeared, almost as if written. It would have been best in a letter, where it could have been done beautifully, with complete control. Spoken, it risked tremors and deflections. He went downstairs to see Gerald. (415)

  The temptation to avoid the risk of being seen to be moved by emotion is presented here with immense humanity and tolerance, even as writing is shown to be a coward’s recourse for dodging the “tremors and deflections” of the personal encounter.

  10

  The Bind of Literature and the Bind of Life

  Voices from Chernobyl, Thomas Bernhard, Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Loss has prompted some of the most lovely writing in the literary tradition (think of the lines in the Iliad where Priam petitions for the return of Hector’s body), but it is surely the desire not to commemorate but to ward off emotional pain, in a world approaching modernity, that partly precipitated the rise of free indirect style in the early nineteenth century. This claim will risk sounding dandyish, overstated, but how else to explain the role of the impersonal in style as two centuries of novelists have conceived it? It is impossible to ascribe intimate properties to third-person narrators whose voices are highly distinctive and yet altogether lacking the sorts of “traits” possessed by actual people. The distance of an Austenian or a Flaubertian narrator remains compatible, though, with the evocation and expression of a range of strong emotions: embarrassment, shame, self-revelation in the case of Austen, say, a savage sorrow and a kind of disgust at humanity in the case of Madame Bovary, self-pity and envy in The Line of Beauty. James’s fictions often feature the framing or displacement of emotions: The Golden Bowl is a story in which nothing much happens except for one thing that is almost incomprehensibly painful (indeed, indescribably so) for the two women most directly concerned in it. In the tradition that runs through Roland Barthes to Susan Sontag and Wayne Koestenbaum, we see a heightened intensity or awareness of perception that has some kind of charge to it (often an almost erotic charge) but that deliberately downplays, too, the personal in the sense of the full range of human personality.

  In her book Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art, Marina Van Zuylen suggests that artists like Mondrian and Flaubert, obsessed with

  the relationship of their straight line or perfect phrase to a sense of ontological security,…are splitting the world between the rigid (with its connotations of self-discipline, rigor, and control) and the arabesque, the overly lyrical I—all things that might well lead them out of their invulnerable worlds…. Do not show your passion, but sublimate it into style. We are reminded of Hobbes’s proclamation: madness is a matter of “too much appearing passion.” It is not the actual emotion itself that is unsettling to Flaubert, but the temptation to be dragged down by it and the sickly need to exhibit it to others. The heart must never speak and the artist must assume a god-like self-sufficiency; it is the only way he will be protected from the danger of others. The same detachment that Flaubert requires of his narrators, he mercilessly exacts from himself. He is willing to renounce all human contact for the price of peace of mind.1

  Van Zuylen goes on to show that what she calls the “monomaniacal imagination” very consistently displays this “simultaneous cowering from and craving for the void”: “Movement, while it fends off the demons of introspection and provides temporary relief from anxiety, does not satisfy the soul’s craving for a higher order; it is a mere temporary solution. Idleness, however, richer in existential possibilities, can breed an intolerable sense of dread.”

  Much of Perec’s writing is motivated by precisely this sort of tension. I think for instance of a passage I have always loved, in Perec’s early novella A Man Asleep:

  It is not that you hate men, why would you hate them? Why would you hate yourself? If only membership of the human race were not accompanied by this insufferable din, if only these few pathetic steps taken into the animal kingdom did not have to be bought at the cost of this perpetual, nauseous dyspepsia of words, projects, great departures! But it is too high a price to pay for opposable thumbs, an erect stature, the incomplete rotation of the head on the shoulders: this cauldron, this furnace, this grill which is life, these thousands of summonses, incitements, warnings, thrills, depressions, this enveloping atmosphere of obligations, this eternal machine for producing, crushing, swallowing up, overcoming obstacles, starting afresh and without respite, this insidious terror which seeks to control every day, every hour of your meagre existence!2

  If Sebald cries out against the destruction wreaked by both sides in World War II and Hollinghurst against the destruction wreaked by AIDS and by Thatcherism, Perec’s outcry (like Lear’s) protests the fact of the human condition itself. There is nothing sentimental about these sentences, but they are capable of bringing tears to my eyes. The passage might be said to perform something at odds with what it proclaims, by which I mean to say that the sentences are passionate even as they foreswear passion: the wild piling-on of “this cauldron, this furnace, this grill which is life, these thousands…” is a litany that becomes perversely almost celebratory even as it damningly outlines the contours of modern despair.

  Prose styles might be placed along some imaginary axis from the most baroque or lush to the most stringent or self-denying; my own tastes run more to the latter to the former, though there are always exceptions. Three novels I particularly admire but that would strike many readers as overly bleak, in terms of both content and prose style, are Jenny Diski’s Nothing Natural, Heather Lewis’s House Rules and Stephen Elliott’s Happy Baby. Beautifully written novels are infinitely less likely to be joyful than despairing; Angela Carter’s Wise Children might be a rare exception, though I suppose the novels of Barbara Trapido (like Wise Children, inflected by the rhythms of Shakespearean comedy) might fall under this rubric as well.

  Language can do much, but it cannot do everything. Svetlana Alexievich makes an unusual observation in the introduction to her staggering nonfiction book Voices from Chernobyl:
The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster:

  I used to think I could understand everything and express everything. Or almost everything. I remember when I was writing my book about the war in Afghanistan, Zinky Boys, I went to Afghanistan and they showed me some of the foreign weapons that had been captured from the Afghan fighters. I was amazed at how perfect their forms were, how perfectly a human thought had been expressed. There was an officer standing next to me and he said, “If someone were to step on this Italian mine that you say is so pretty it looks like a Christmas decoration, there would be nothing left of them but a bucket of meat. You’d have to scrape them off the ground with a spoon.” When I sat down to write this, it was the first time I thought, “Is this something I should say?” I had been raised on great Russian literature, I thought you could go very very far, and so I wrote about that meat. But the Zone—it’s a separate world, a world within the rest of the world—and it’s more powerful than anything literature has to say.3

  This statement cedes everything to testimony, acts of witnessing, and suggests that the writer’s role is to facilitate the production and recording of that testimony rather than to create sentences whose beauty and precision might do justice to the perfection of human ingenuity in a machine that brings death. The degradation of human beings into meat poses an unanswerable challenge to style, even for one raised (as Alexievich suggests) on great literature.

  There are a number of ways for artists and critics to respond to that despairing lurking awareness that we are just meat puppets. One is to turn to what Jonathan Lethem, in an essay titled “The Beards” (it was first published in the New Yorker and later included in Lethem’s collection The Disappointment Artist), calls “dripless, squeakless art.”4 As a child, Lethem asks his mother why there are drips on his father’s paintings, and she offers the analogy that the paint drips are like the squeak of acoustic guitar strings audible in folksingers’ recordings. As an adolescent in the grip of unbearable feelings, and in the years beyond adolescence, Lethem asks works of art “to be both safer than life and fuller, a better family,” then plumbs them so deeply that “many perfectly sufficient works of art would become thin, anemic”: