by John Updike
It is “the pink dimple left by his shirtstud” that seems miraculously recovered. Here is how a recruitment speech sounded in 1914. Colonel Bickerton, the local squire, eases himself to his feet after a patriotic slide show climaxed by “an absurd goggle-eyed visage with crows’ wings on its upper lip and a whole golden eagle on its helmet”—the Kaiser—and orates:
“When this war is over, there will be two classes of persons in this country. There will be those who were qualified to join the Armed Forces and refrained from doing so, and there will be those who were so qualified and came forward to do their duty to their King, their country … and their womenfolk. The last-mentioned class, I need not add, will be the aristocracy of this country—indeed, the only true aristocracy of this country—who, in the evening of their days, will have the consolation of knowing that they have done what England expects of every man: namely, to do his duty.”
We learn that the hall—the Congregation Hall of the Rhulen Chapel—is heated by a coke stove, that the squire’s daughter wears a hat bearing a “grey-pink glycerined ostrich plume,” and that there is considerable resistance on the part of the Welsh to fighting in behalf of the English, whom they still see, after centuries, as enemies and occupiers. Mr. Chatwin tells us what this bygone world is made of: the oilcloth hoods of the horse cabs, the reek of Jeyes Fluid in the Town Hall committee room, the sable coat Queen Mary wears onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace on the “drizzly November morning” of Armistice Day. So, too, persuasively and solidly enough, are rendered the accents, the sermons, the festivities, the gossip, the types of conflict and satisfaction in a Radnorshire whose “leafy lanes [were] unchanged since the time of Queen Elizabeth.” To be sure, one is reminded of Hardy. As if to placate the spectre of his mighty predecessor, Mr. Chatwin has Mary Jones read Hardy: “How well she knew the life he described—the smell of Tess’s milkingparlour; Tess’s torments, in bed and in the beetfield. She, too, could whittle hurdles, plant pine saplings or thatch a hayrick—and if the old unmechanized ways were gone from Wessex, time had stood still, here, on the Radnor Hills.” And if Radnorshire out-Hardys Wessex, a long scene of the Rhulen peace celebrations seems self-consciously to out-Flaubert, for satire and counterpoint, the agricultural fair in Madame Bovary. Yet by and large Mr. Chatwin re-creates the past out of what seem not paper souvenirs but living memories, with an understated mastery of period detail and a loving empathy into the inner lives such detail adorned.
To what purpose? Why undergo what Henry James, in a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett in 1901, referred to as the “inordinate” difficulty, the “humbug” of the “ ‘historic’ novel”? Mr. Chatwin might answer, “In order to display at full length the lives of my heroes, my magical twins.” The Jones twins are his centerpiece, and the mysterious, infrangible connection between them somehow his moral. From toddlerhood on, they share the same sensations, and Lewis, the older and stronger, feels the pain that mishaps inflict upon Benjamin. Their earliest memories are identical, and even in old age they can dream the same dream. When Benjamin is at Hereford Detention Barracks and Lewis is still at The Vision, “from the ache in his coccyx, Lewis knew when the N.C.O.s were frog-marching Benjamin round the parade-ground.… One morning, Lewis’s nose began to bleed and went on bleeding till sundown: that was the day when they stood Benjamin in a boxing ring and slammed straight-lefts into his face.” Whenever Lewis, who likes girls, ventures into sexual experience, Benjamin telepathically feels it, and hates it, and does what he can to discourage the attachment. He succeeds; Lewis remains single, and after their mother’s death the two sleep together in their parents’ bed as they had slept together when children.
Now, Mr. Chatwin, a demon researcher, must have a basis for these supernatural connections that the twins enjoy and suffer; but this tale of what Michel Tournier has called “the super-flesh of twins” feels allegorical, and strains belief. Their twinship is in fact a homosexual marriage, with Benjamin the feminine partner and Lewis the masculine. Benjamin’s love is painted plain: “On days when he was too sick for school he would lie on Lewis’s half of the mattress, laying his head on the imprint left by Lewis on the pillow.” “Benjamin loved his mother and his brother, and he did not like girls. Whenever Lewis left the room, his eyes would linger in the doorway, and his irises cloud to a denser shade of grey: when Lewis came back, his pupils glistened.” “At nights, he would reach out to touch his brother, but his hand came to rest on a cold unrumpled pillow. He gave up washing for fear of reminding himself that—at that same moment—Lewis might be sharing someone else’s towel.” Lewis’s feelings about towel sharing are less clear, and Mr. Chatwin’s ingenuity at posing obstacles and long blank intervals is fully needed to suppress our wonder that a robust and prosperous male goes eighty years with no more than a few scratchy and aborted romances. Stranger still is the mother’s role in this celibacy:
As Amos’s widow, Mary wanted at least one daughter-in-law and a brood of grandchildren.… There were times when she chided Benjamin. “What is all this nonsense about not going out? Why can’t you find a nice young lady?” But Benjamin’s mouth would tighten, his lower lids quiver, and she knew he would never get married. At other times, wilfully displaying the perverse side of her character, she took Lewis by the elbow and made him promise never, never to marry unless Benjamin married too.
“I promise,” he said, slumping his head like a man receiving a prison sentence; for he wanted a woman badly.
Since Mary has been portrayed as as happily heterosexual as one could be with a sometimes brutal husband, and her character in no way perverse but instead kind, lively, patient, and perfect, the devil that possesses her in regard to Lewis’s mating may be an imp called in to enforce a fundamentally implausible conceit.
Nevertheless, the apparition of the linked twins chimes with much else that is slightly fabulous in their Welsh surround; we seem to see through them into a hilly, antique landscape drenched in flowers—dozens and dozens of botanical allusions are woven into the text—and overshadowed by dramatic clouds. There are many paragraphs as vividly atmospheric as this, at the moment when the twins’ birth begins:
On the 8th of August the weather broke. Stacks of smoky, silver-lidded clouds piled up behind the hill. At six in the evening, Amos and Dai Morgan were scything the last of the oats. All the birds were silent in the stillness that precedes a storm. Thistledown floated upwards, and a shriek tore out across the valley.
Though weather and growth pursue timeless cycles, culture and history irrevocably unroll, and this novel begins in the era of the horse and ends with the “electronic warbling” of a computer game in a pub and the sight of men hang-gliding from a Welsh precipice: “A stream of tiny pin-men, airborne on coloured wings, swooping, soaring in the upthrust, and then spiralling like ash-keys to the ground.” A sense has been conveyed—and this only a novel to some degree “historic” can do—of the immensity of time a human life spans, a span itself dwarfed by the perspectives of history. Proust piled up his volumes toward this abysmal sensation, this visceral realization of the abstractly known, and Lampedusa achieved it in The Leopard, and Anne Tyler last year in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. It is a measure of Mr. Chatwin’s compression that On the Black Hill achieves it in less than two hundred and fifty pages. His studied style—with something in it of Hemingway’s determined simplicity, and something of Lawrence’s inspired swiftness—encompasses worlds.
Seeking Connections in an Insecure Country
THE RADIANT WAY, by Margaret Drabble. 406 pp. Knopf, 1987.
This novel forms a panorama, in its glancing way, of life in England from 1980 to 1985. Beneath its many personal incidents we feel not so much the triumph of Thatcherism as that dubious triumph’s underside, the decline of the Labour Party—the ebb and fall of an idealistic socialism that for generations of British intellectuals and workers served as a quasi-religious faith. The Radiant Way titles not only the novel but a television series produced by one of its charact
ers, Charles Headleand, way back in 1965—a “series on education … that demonstrated, eloquently, movingly, the evils that flow from a divisive class system, from early selection, from Britain’s unfortunate heritage of public schools and philistinism. The Radiant Way was its ironic title, taken from the primer from which Charles had learned at the age of four to read at his mother’s knee.” At the novel’s revelatory climax, there materializes an actual copy of the primer called The Radiant Way, discovered by Charles’s ex-wife, Liz, on her mother’s shelves—“She had no recollection of it, at first sight. She gazed intently at its jacket: two children, a boy and a girl, running gaily down (not up) a hill, against a background of radiant thirties sunburst.” The children running down the hill, while “behind them burned forever that great dark dull sun,” symbolize not only the mortality of each individual life but some innocent educational hope left behind by the nation. Education, both the enforcer and surmounter of the English class system, lies at the novel’s heart: the novel’s three heroines—Liz Headleand, Alix Bowen, Esther Breuer—all met at Cambridge, as bright scholarship girls, and in adult life Alix teaches English to young women in prison, Esther lectures on Italian art, and Liz is a psychiatrist, dispensing self-knowledge.
Though Liz, of the three, bulks largest in her complicated vitality, and in the closeness with which the author renders her thoughts and tears and panic and lust, Alix most plainly bears the novel’s political burden, moving from an undoubting Socialist activism to a political despair that finds comfort in sifting through the papers of an old avant-garde poet, a friend of Joyce and Pound, Duchamp and Man Ray. “It is, like all her jobs, a dead-end job, but at least it is not socially useful; in that, at least, it is a new departure, and she takes some pleasure in this. She has had enough, for the time being, of trying to serve the community.… There is no hope, in the present social system, of putting anything right.” She is the child of old-fashioned Socialists—“not left-wing political extremists, not loony vegetarians (though they were vegetarians), but harmless, mild, Labour-voting, CND-supporting, Fabian-pamphlet-reading intellectuals.” Her father, called Dotty Doddridge, taught French at a Yorkshire boarding school whose history traces a revolution in reverse:
It had offered a liberal, secularized, healthy coeducation, and had on its foundation in the 1860s set out to attract the children of vegetarians, Quakers, free-thinkers, pacifists, Unitarians, reformers. Its academic success had been such that it had become progressively less progressive, its original zeal swamped by the fee-paying prosperous solid northern conservatism of parents and offspring: it had become a bastion of respectability, its one-time principles upheld by stray survivors like Doddridge, who appeared blithely not to notice that at election time the entire school, with one or two flamboyant exceptions, howled its enthusiasm for the Tory party.
Alix’s first husband died young, and in her widowhood, in Islington, she got to know the London poor: “She discovered the art of sinking. She sank. Not very deep, but she sank.” She began to teach, moving from private tutorials to courses at a College for Further Education and a prison called Garfield Centre. Her second husband, Brian, is from the industrial city of Northam, “that figurative northern city,” where his father worked as a circular-saw polisher and his grandfather as a furnace-man in the mills. Brian once apprenticed at the plant and would have followed his father into saw polishing but for the Army, which discovered his intellectual aptitude and sponsored his education; now he teaches English literature at an Adult Education College in London. “Alix Bowen is a sentimentalist about class, it has been alleged.… Lying in your arms, Alix said once, not very seriously, to Brian, I am in the process of healing the wounds in my own body and in the body politic.” His working-class solidity and “firm grasp of the material world” warm her body; she thinks she is happy. But as the union strikes of the early Eighties grow more savage and desperate, Brian’s hard Labour line and emotional attachment to the bygone machine age begin to alienate Alix; a friend, the émigré Otto Werner, becomes a founding member of the new, middle-of-the-road political party, the Social Democrats, and Alix finds herself drawn to Otto’s thinking, and to Otto as a man. Coming back on the bus from a romantic lunch with Otto, she sees her husband on a corner of Oxford and Bond Streets soliciting money, holding a yellow plastic bucket and a handwritten sign reading “HELP THE WIVES AND FAMILIES OF THE MINERS”:
He stood stolidly, cheerfully, smiling when anyone threw in a coin. The brotherhood of man. Most people smiled at Brian, even the hardbitten shoppers of Bond Street and Oxford Street smiled. But Alix did not smile. Brian and his bucket were more than she could bear. She bowed her head and took out her handkerchief, and all the way to Wandsworth Bridge she wept.
But England—the boy and girl running downhill, the reduction of Fabian visions to a yellow begging bucket on a hardbitten shopping street—is the site and background of The Radiant Way and not its essential theme. Miss Drabble is ever less a political theorist than an anthropologist, and the sprawling, dazzling pluralism of her novel is meant to illustrate the glimmering interconnectedness of all humanity. Alix “had been encouraged (in theory at least) by her education and by her reading to believe in the individual self, the individual soul, but as she grew older she increasingly questioned these concepts—seeing people perhaps more as flickering impermanent points of light irradiating stretches, intersections, threads, of a vast web, a vast network, which was humanity itself; a web of which much remained dark, apparently but not necessarily unpeopled; peopled by the dark, the unlit, the dim spirits, as yet unknown, the past and the future, the dead, the unborn.… We are all but a part of a whole which has its own, its distinct, its other meaning; we are not ourselves, we are crossroads, meeting places, points on a curve, we cannot exist independently for we are nothing but signs, conjunctions, aggregations.” The novel abounds with subtle connections, with names that recur after many pages, with coincidental meetings after many years, with semi-hidden threads between the South of England and the North, between the upper and the lower classes, between the public and the private realms, between individual lives and the great archaic rhythm of the national holidays. On New Year’s Eve, “all over Northam, all over Britain, ill-remembered, confused, shadowy vestigial rites were performed, rites with origins lost in antiquity; Celtic, Pict, Roman, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Elizabethan, Hanoverian, Judaic rites.” An old custom in Northam calls for a lump of coal to be brought into the house at midnight, so Steve Harper, a haulage contractor, “taking with him a jar of Marmite in a garden trowel as a substitute for coal in a shovel … stood outside alone for a grateful crisp smokeless moment of silence, and when they opened the door to him a strange shadow of the night sidled in with him from prehistory.… Something was absent, yet something was present. The shadow filled the corners of the broad bright hallway.”
Esther Breuer, petite and Jewish and Berlin-born, is the least English of the three central women, and the one about whom the most mystical lights glimmer in the vast human web. Her scholarship consists of flipping back and forth between books pursuing stray connections—e.g., “a connection between the nature of quattrocento pigmentation, and lichenology as a method of dating the antiquity of landscape”—and her lectures are known for “making startling, brilliant connections, for illuminating odd corners, for introducing implausible snippets of erudition.” Esther claims that “all knowledge must always be omnipresent in all things.” Her life as it develops bears witness to a connection between the Harrow Road Murders and the quiet young man above her flat in Ladbroke Grove, and to a link between her long-standing love for a married Italian anthropologist, Claudio Volpe, and the faltering vitality of a potted palm he has entrusted to her. Claudio, too, believes in a web, in an overarching world of spirit, in a hidden league of demonic powers: “He spoke … of the spiritus mundi, the anima, the stella marina, the deus absconditus … of Gorgon and the Medusa and Géricault and Demogorgon and Salome and the Bessi of Thrace.” He belie
ves that Esther has powers she does not recognize, and, uncannily, on an airplane, she meets and befriends a handsome wild Dutchman with whom Liz, long ago, had sexual intercourse on a North Sea crossing, in a Force 9 gale. Esther is the spookiest of the three heroines, the most detached and exotic, the least heterosexual and, to this reader, real. She is a lovingly assembled bundle of bohemian costumes and odd facts about Italian painting but her charm is more ascribed than conveyed.
It is not easy to dramatize the comforting fascination that some women have for each other. The increasingly frequent novels about the friendship between three or four or five women (for instance, this year’s Hot Flashes, by Barbara Raskin) tend to be thin where thickness is alleged; the women, and the female author, keep saying how intense and meaningful the companionship is, but few actions actually illustrate it. The contacts are intermittent, giddy, and chatty, and leave each woman, in the end, alone with her life—her love life and her family life. On the very morning in which I tentatively type out this male impression, the Boston Globe quotes Marlo Thomas, the wife of the talk-show host Phil Donahue, as proclaiming, “Women have … started trusting each other and they have found a mutuality and community.” That is good news; but novelists bent on illustrating it with a multiple heroine commit themselves to an effortful program of keeping a number of independent life-stories going, and of summing up the high moments of mutuality and community with word pictures like “They [Liz, Alix, and Esther] would eat, drink, and talk. They exchanged ideas” and “They eat, drink, talk, lie there in the sunshine.”
Another triangle of women exists in The Radiant Way: Liz Headleand; her sister, Shirley Harper; and their mother, Rita Ablewhite. Interest, psychological and narrative, so naturally gathers about this blood-related threesome that one suspects that Miss Drabble’s youthful instinct in her joyous, prattling first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, was sound when she placed her sisters in the center of the narrative and let the female friendships be peripheral. In The Radiant Way, the unbreakable kinship between Liz and Shirley serves to connect the two Englands—the thriving, entrepreneurial south and the depressed, working-class north. Liz, the older sister, slaved at her schoolbooks, got a scholarship to Cambridge, and escaped to London and her radiant big house on Harley Street; Shirley, the more rebellious as a girl, “trusted sex,” seduced a boy and married him, and stayed in Northam, becoming “a middle-aged housewife, mother of three … with nothing before her but old age.” Yet Shirley, in the very constriction of her life, is somehow more vivid and sympathetic than Liz, who is half lost in her larger but more amorphous and shallow world; the London scenes are full of chatter asserted to be delightful, while the scenes of Northam have that stony authenticity of something loved in spite of itself. To Shirley, the rebellious child, has entirely fallen the task of caring for their peculiar mother, who for as long as the girls can remember almost never ventured out of her house in Northam, fed her daughters on stale bread and fish paste, and perpetrated a fictitious tale about their absent father. This father, of whom Liz, throughout most of the novel, has no conscious memory, and the strange round silver object, in the front room, engraved with the monogram SHO, are mysteries—connections not yet uncovered. They make Rita Ablewhite, lying in her bed and listening to the radio and cutting up her newspapers, the most fascinating character in the book, the keeper of its secret.
