Yet none of this assertiveness would count for much, of course, without the collateral gratifications of style. Victorine’s most important claim on us is finally the stylistic one. Like it or not—and some definitely may not—Maude Hutchins can write with perverse and often disquieting power. Granted, she can also veer wildly out of control, especially when trying to put over some intellectual flourish. Witness the following rumination on Allison and her husband:
What kind of sinner was Allison? Had she made herself a graven image? And if so, how deep into neolithic slime, primordial mud, how high on a golden holy bough, did she bury or display a big blond phallus? Of Homer, her man? Was that is? Is it a religious frenzy that heightens the colour in her cheeks and are the stabbing pains in her loins the aftermath of a woodland orgy, continuous intercourse with a god, unbearable pleasure in a leafy glen, with leopards’ eyes for lanterns to light them, perhaps? Allison’s sex life is anybody’s guess and her sin conjectural.
The novelist’s “sin” is hardly so conjectural: it’s Golden-Bough-on-the-Brain.
Yet so palpable are the moments of genuine felicity, one is inclined to forgive the writer her excesses. Elsewhere, for example, merely by deploying a few extraordinary images, Hutchins manages to characterize Allison in a manner at once poetic, doom-laden, and precise. On her wedding night, we learn, Allison reminded her new husband of a dead child, “her lips full and turned up at the corners, her skin moist and soft, her hair sticking to her temples, wet, like a drowned girl.” Later, as a tremulous wife, she had eyes “dark as lawn mushrooms underneath and as big and as infinitely divisible into segments as their softly breathing gills are.” And now twenty years on, pampered and supine and dimly perusing her copy of the Heptameron, she is pitifully unaware of the marital catastrophe “building up like giant cumulus along the horizon.” No big blond phalluses here: just tact and beauty and the shards of authentic emotion.
When not vamping, Hutchins can also be droll—winningly so—in a dry, oblique, old-money “Yankee” way. That bosomy female menace, Lydia Van Zandt, cracking her gum and mad in pursuit of Costello, supplies some of Victorine’s most risible (and Cheeverish) moments, as when she plants herself atop the piano in the L’Hommedieu living room (“like a third bunch of chrysanthemums”) and tries to entice him to her by tinkling on the instrument with her toes:
“Costello, look, I’m just using the black notes.”
Nimbly her strong bare toes picked out the notes of a strange little tune that she was making up as she went along. She just managed to reach the keyboard by arching her feet like a dancer’s and her calves rippled with the effort. She had pulled her jeans up over her knees and her legs were still brown from the summer on the beach, with short gold hairs that caught the sunlight from the window, too. But Costello had no interest in Lydia at all, he did not look up from his book. . . . “Meany,” she said, “I hate you.”
Closeted with little Victorine later on, Lydia affirms her passion—comically enough—in the absurd tough-girl lingo of the Hollywood gangster moll: “he’s my man . . . I like to chase him, and I’ll catch him too, there’s no hurry.” In the novel’s last pages, when Lydia does catch him, at least for the time being, one is glad for her.
Yet sometimes Hutchins is plain old weird—and great. She is never afraid to unload a freakish image or metaphor. When Costello first encounters Millie, for example, and helps her restart her broken-down car—her eyes seem “painted on with luminous paint like the instruments on the [dash] panel.” Speculating (inaccurately) about the sex life of the newly arrived Magda, sundry villagers indulge in the “space-ship talk of the slightly over middle-aged.” After Costello has been initiated by Magda, Costello’s virginity is “as obsolete as his slingshot.” And later, mourning her departure, he looks like “an angel guarding someone’s tomb.”
Elsewhere Hutchins piles on the clauses—at the risk of a grammatical train wreck—yet somehow manages to triumph. When Victorine returns from church in Chapter II, giddy from her “holy cocktail at the Lord’s table,” she is disgusted to find the family hen and rooster mating in the yard. Hutchins begins by mocking her—with the funkiest of subjunctives—then launches into some run-on sibylline wisdom:
Poor Victorine, it looked as if her whole Sunday was used up preparing her for a sexual act and it had taken place in the barnyard, played by very minor stage-hands. Well, the greedy ardour and the final mounting disgust can surely be described as merely physical like too much lobster, and no harm done by the extraneous to her soul. A good and dreamless sleep in which she plays no part at all, the sleep of the young and the good and the exhausted, will purify her heart and give her strength for other daylight nightmares—the big exaggeration of real life that does seem to the very young like a king-sized, out-of-drawing and hypnagogic bad dream, as if the lenses in their eyes were borrowed from colts and fillies, and the very size of the extravaganza, the enormity of it, implied hostility.
Nothing in the zany, unfurling last sentence should work, but it does. Yes, the “hypnagogic bad dream” is unfortunate—Hutchins being silly again—but by the time we have worked through the amazing gothic-surreal image that follows, of terrorized “colts and fillies” who lend Victorine their own distorting “lenses,” the emotional situation has become luminous and arresting. (Had Hutchins, one wonders, seen Fuseli’s famous allegorical painting The Nightmare?) Subjectivity can indeed be a nightmare, Hutchins intimates; syntax itself can barely contain it. Better to acknowledge the “enormity” of “real life” and attempt to understand, as sympathetically as possible, the heroine’s quixotic responses.
And how, in the end, to understand Maude Hutchins? We need, again, to know a great deal more about her—how she evolved, indeed, into the eccentric yet gifted artist Victorine shows her to have been. Reading her, I confess, I sometimes feel like one of those comical babies in Chapter XIII, who, when Magda first notices Costello among the children at the public tennis court, lie immobilized in their perambulators nearby, “waiting patiently to grow up.” Despite the warmth, the sunshine, the deceptively Nabokovian locale, I can’t quite see enough of the surrounding scenery to make sense of it. What is going to happen to Victorine and Costello at novel’s end? What recompense for Magda? And why that crazy name: L’Hommedieu? Hutchins leaves us out there in our prams—unmoored and mostly untutored, even as we struggle to place both novel and novelist in some familiar or stabilizing context.
And yet in another way both novel and novelist do give us enough—enough to be getting on with. For all of her fugues and vagaries, we sense in Hutchins—as also perhaps in her heroine—a sort of underlying psychic viability. “Without appearing to pay attention,” Hutchins says of Victorine, “seemingly lost in dreams, well, her mind made a recording of essential stuff.” The assertion is reassuring. Hutchins too can appear “lost in dreams”—elsewhere, out of it, like someone with an idée fixe. The dreams are usually embarrassing too: just like real dreams. In her more prurient moments, reading Hutchins can indeed be fairly mortifying: when she goes off on one of her semi-pornographic riffs, you don’t know if you are blushing more for her or for yourself. All you know is she gets into bed inside your head and wants to make love with you.
And yet in the end something essential has been recorded. It has everything to do with arousal and stimulation—the sublimity of not sublimating. There are no real recordings or recording devices mentioned in Victorine: no one listens to an LP (available in the United States after 1948); no one watches a flickering, clattering, fifties-style “home movie”; nobody’s father—certainly not Homer L’Hommedieu—gets hold of one of those behemoth reel-to-reel tape machines first marketed in the fifties to enterprising male audiophiles. True, at the very end of the novel Lydia Van Zandt is singing snatches from the Rodgers and Hart song “Spring Is Here” (popularized by the 1948 Mickey Rooney–Judy Garland film Words and Music), suggesting that new forms of recording and playback are in fact part of the novel’s contemporary
social context. But Hutchins mostly avoids technological references, opting instead for a more rusticated, Norman-Rockwell-like, seemingly timeless fictional atmosphere.
Yet Hutchins is clearly obsessed with the power of “recording”—literary, artistic, musical—to transfer feeling from one person to another. What excited her about writing novels, one suspects, was the way language could be used, quite literally, to induce in others those visceral sensations otherwise internal to the self. This process of registering, articulating, and retransmitting feeling—the creative process—was no doubt a largely narcissistic activity for her, part of a psychic compulsion to keep the intimate sense-world of the self “alive,”at times outrageously, in the face of rejection and ongoing personal frustration. Yet as Costello L’Hommedieu discovers with Magda Smith, such narcissistic pleasure-seeking can also give intense pleasure to others. To judge by Victorine, Maude Hutchins was apparently so accomplished a narcissist—so good, alas, at playing with herself—it may be time to start playing back.
—TERRY CASTLE
VICTORINE
Chapter I
The Myth of Childhood
Victorine felt a lovely thrill in her very bones, a sweet taste in her mouth and along the edges of her teeth, and her thighs felt soft and warm and pneumatic to the touch of her palms, even through her gloves, as she walked to church alone. “Please, oh, please, oh, please, I want to go alone,” and They had let her.
“O ye nights and days, bless ye the Lord: praise and exalt him above all forever,” sang Victorine inside her mind, “O ye mountains and little hills, bless ye the Lord: praise and exalt him above all forever. O ye fountains, bless ye the Lord . . . O ye dews and storms of snow . . . O ye light and darkness, bless ye the Lord: praise and exalt him above all forever. O ye ice and cold, bless ye the Lord, O ye seas and rivers, O ye whales, O ye beasts and cattle, bless ye the Lord: praise and exalt him above all forever. O ye children of men, O ye priests of the Lord, O ye servants, O ye spirits and souls of the righteous, O Ananias, Azarias, and Misael, bless ye the Lord: praise and exalt him above all forever.”
Victorine’s heart beat out the rhythm of the song of the three holy children out of the third chapter of Daniel as she almost skipped to her holy assignation at eleven o’clock in Trinity Church on the Green.
The beginning of her skippy walk was alone and sweet and she cherished it, but soon after turning out of the back driveway behind the garage and climbing two fences and crossing the field, she came to the macadam road that curved a little up in the middle, and the sidewalk, just a dirt path, along it, was being followed by a few others going to church. She waited inside the second fence to let two, three, four of them pass, and then, looking both ways and seeing no one either coming or going, she began to sing inside herself again, the secret mystical words, “O ye sun and moon, O every shower and dew, O all ye things that grow on the earth, O all ye winds, bless ye the Lord: praise and exalt him above all forever.”
“Good morning, Victorine, how is your mother?”
“Quite well, thank you,” said Victorine politely.
“Good morning, Victorine, a lovely day.”
“Yes, Mrs. Adams.”
“Good morning, Victorine, how well you look.”
“Thank you, Miss Taylor.”
“Oh, Victor, wait up!”
Victorine turned on Louisa Johnson, “Leave me alone!” she hissed. The very plain and very well bred on occasion Louisa stepped back. “Excuse me!” she said and rejoined her parents. Victorine saw them glance at her. A dark word came into her consciousness. The big oak doors of Trinity Church were open wide and she passed through them, dilating her nostrils to smell the inner smell of the sweet, exciting, private closet that she came to pray in, to feel mystical in, to be one in. She bent her head and knelt on the small round red plush stool; the sound of the organ, its deep and thunderous tone, its smaller notes tickling her senses and curling her hair, its gigantic chords lifting her up and cradling her on a tide of green ocean-like waves made her almost sick with emotion, “Enough!” her little soul pleaded and the organ ceased.
“Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid, cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may . . .”
Victorine raised her head as if an electric current had been shut off and she no longer vibrated, and appraisingly gazed at the Reverend Fulton-Peate. Her lip curled. “The fool,” she said to herself. She noted a small red gash on his dimpled chin where he had cut himself shaving.
“Thou shalt do no murder,” he said.
“Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law,” she crooned.
“Thou shalt not commit adultery.”
She stared at his face, it was red with white blotches on the forehead. Three flies circled meaninglessly in one of the many tiny iridescent searchlights that filtered through the saints’ eyes in the great windows of the church. The minute particles of dust in the air were motionless, lit up, too, by the fingers of light; they shimmered.
“Thou shalt not steal,” he said. The horn of a passing Sunday bus gave a blatant peal and he frowned. The people raised their voices and sang, “. . . and incline our hearts to keep this law.”
Victorine loved inclining her heart; it was so lovely, she saw her heart shaped like a pear leaning ever so gently towards Jesus, “. . . and incline my heart . . .” she sang with the others. She peeked at him again, torn between the musical response, accompanied daintily by the organ in touching syncopation, and a curious feeling of repugnance and of spying on the Reverend Fulton-Peate in the flesh.
“Thou shalt not covet,” he said brazenly, and between the fat layers of his eyelids his pallid little eyes shot out an anaemic glint as he looked over the heads of his congregation, “thy neighbour’s house,” he went on, “thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife”; he hesitated, “nor his servant . . .” Again the horn sounded and an old man in the second pew began to cough, a strangling piteous cough; he gasped.
“Nor his maid,” said the Reverend Fulton-Peate sadly.
The old man was struggling with the evil cough: arrummph—ahrumph eeeee-uh!
“Nor his ox,” the minister said loudly, “nor his ASS . . .”
“How can he, the brute!” thought Victorine as the old man was led down the aisle, vanquished by the scolding, torn to pieces by the cough.
“Nor anything that is his,” the Reverend Fulton-Peate insisted lamely, the battle over, and the little congregation and Victorine, sickened by the vocal flagellation of the covetous old man, hung their heads, rested their cheeks on their hands and caroled, “Lord have mercy upon us, and write all these thy laws in our hearts, we beseech thee.”
“We beseech thee,” sang Victorine imploringly.
“Lord have mercy upon us,” the Reverend Fulton-Peate said, singsong.
“Christ have mercy upon us,” murmured the congregation.
“Lord have mercy upon us.” The Reverend Fulton-Peate stifled a yawn; Victorine saw it.
The rosy dust particles hung motionless in the slowly swinging to the east of the fingerling rays, marking the infinitesimal passage of time within the pink dome of Trinity Church and fatigue pressed down gently but surely on the kneeling congregation like a heavy fog. In the thin air they yawned and their pulses fluttered. Hunger and languor attacked them. Ennui struck. But they struggled to their feet for the Gospel (Praise be to thee, O Christ) and the Apostles’ Creed (Amen).
Victorine watched now in fascination the preparations of the Reverend Fulton-Peate for communion itself.
“Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts, Heaven and earth are full of Thy Glory: Glory be to Thee, O Lord, most High.” “Amen,” everybody said with returning enthusiasm.
“. . . Take, eat, this is my Body . . .” muttered the Reverend Fulton-Peate, crunching a wafer in his big red hands.
“. . . Drink ye all of this; for this is my Blood,” h
e said and Victorine saw him tip the big silver cup to his lips. “The cannibal,” she said to herself. “How disgusting!” The Reverend Fulton-Peate secretly wiped his lips with a flowing immaculate sleeve.
“The body of our Lord Jesus Christ,” he repeated, as, when it came Victorine’s turn, he slipped a wafer into her mouth, and, “The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ which was shed for thee,” as he tilted the cup towards her expectant eager lips. The cup was deep but the wine slid towards her and she took a big swallow before the Reverend Fulton-Peate could tip it backward, having barely touched her lips, like last time and the time before. It slid down her throat like fire and she felt the colour hit her cheeks and her insides respond to Jesus’ blood at the same time. She felt it like a hot thread exploring her intestines. The wafer had tasted merely like a piece of cotton cloth and she brushed the tiny crumbs from her blue skirt absently, but the blood of Jesus Christ brought tears to her eyes. Through her spangled lashes she saw the little pile of leftover wafers and the shining cup with a tablespoon of golden wine in the bottom placed upon the Lord’s table and she watched what remained of the consecrated elements covered with a fair linen cloth.
The fine heavy marching rhythm of the organ accompanied her down the aisle and the fresh November air came up against her like a wall. She leaned against it, made her way through it; it steadied her and balanced her and she breathed it in deeply as if she were sleeping in her room at home with all the windows open, and in a dreamless sleep, too, it seemed, she passed through her friends and acquaintances, her mother’s cousins and her father’s mistresses, her brother’s infatuated girl friends, Squire Johnson’s liveried chauffeur holding the door of the town car aside for the Squire himself, his big Dane on the cushions inside who had come to meet his master, his pink tongue hanging down like a quilt on the line. Old Sadie Lovejoy stared at Victorine through her lorgnette and noted her long legs and fine dark hair, her pretty throat, her “county looks,” the old lady called them. What a little beauty, too, and the old lady sighed. Victorine walked right through the best people, the queer people, the gigantic people and the dwarfs, mystically supported, it seemed, by the fiery armature of Jesus’ blood. The nightmare of reality and Sunday and the inexplicably jerky movements of humanity, the too bright colours of Fall, the shocking noises and calls and cries all stood away, it appears, from her bed, one might say, and she slept, dreamless, as it were. It was a talent, God-given almost, it protected her like a thin and pliable armour from tip to toe, it was invisible and fastened by magic transparent zippers. At night in a peopleless sleep, the vacant sleep of the very young, she had no need of it, but the daytime hours lasted from morning till night and the thing was priceless. Her consciousness was not involved, however, and her mind and senses were in the clear like two little spires sticking up and out of a ground fog.
Victorine Page 3
