by Martin Amis
Gemma is the chief puppeteer. She is also the chief monologist in this generally rather voluble novel, punctuating the manoeuvres with a detailed account of her formative years. (You feel, during these speeches, that Weldon is writing flat-out for Gemma: they certainly share a taste for didacticism and the epic simile.) Gemma’s history is directed at the long-suffering ear of Elsa, whose socio-sexual prospects it is clearly meant to allegorize and, ultimately, to define. Yes, the Weldon woman still carries the same albatross: the Weldon man. He will either be a solvent cuckold (who will at least look after you, and defray your infidelities) or an arty maverick (who will awaken you, then break your heart and very possibly your back too). ‘Sex’, says Weldon, who has plainly mused thoroughly on this topic, ‘is not for procreation; it is for the sharing out of privilege.’
What, then, has privilege done to Miss Weldon’s world? Most obviously, it has stylized it. Miss Weldon has never been much of a socially ‘concerned’ writer, and although her eye for the hardware of status remains unblinking, she is not particularly interested in the moral meaning of wealth. Rather, she sees the moneyed life as being suspended. It is, as they say, no accident that the most naturalistic scene in the book is a glimpse of Victor’s abandoned wife, chugging enjoyably along in middle-class obliviousness – a milieu much closer, one suspects, to Miss Weldon’s natural habitat. As a result of this spry distancing, anyway, Words of Advice is a raffish, open-ended novel, in which all kinds of cockeyed notions, crooked parallels and unassimilated themes can be harmlessly let out to play. The impression is abetted by the tricky disjunction of the book’s layout, though in this innovation Miss Weldon has unluckily failed to secure the full co-operation of her typesetters.
Stylization, however, inevitably puts style under the limelight, and Weldon’s prose – normally a crisp and functional performer – makes a somewhat bashful leading lady. As she aspires more and more identifiably to the wise, otherworldly manner of Muriel Spark, it becomes clear that Miss Weldon’s intention is to let language reflect the dutifully trite ponderings of her characters. But whose clichés are they? Love, for instance, strikes ‘like a shaft of sudden light from heaven’, reassembling the ‘very roots’ (or alternatively, seventeen pages later, the ‘very particles’) of ‘your being’; the sexual act, in addition, makes you ‘cry out aloud from fear and joy, pain and pleasure mixed’. Naive people often have naive thoughts – but aren’t they often vividly naïve? I suppose Miss Weldon should know, since she is ever-ready to dispense timely adages whenever the action pauses to catch its breath: ‘The good we do lives after us … what are good times without the bad?… from generation to generation … back and back through generations … So men have spoken to women from the beginning … Sexual passion requited invigorates the parties concerned …’ – though with a bit of pain and pleasure mixed, perhaps. These strides towards the lectern are curiously out of place among Miss Weldon’s devil-may-care ironies, and point to larger flaws.
Cliché spreads inwards from the language of the book to its heart. Cliché always does. Miss Weldon may have climbed the social scale, but she now seems absurdly remote from its lowlier representatives. Even when it is your intention to show people pathetically conditioned by their experience, you can’t have dumb secretaries saying things like ‘I’ll look it up under “superstitions” in Occult Weekly’ and ‘Everything can be filed. It said so in Lesson Six, Office Routine.’ Unsurprisingly, when Miss Weldon chooses to gouge some ‘real’ emotion out of these mock-ups, she starkly announces that this is what she is doing – we get ‘real sorrow’ and ‘real affection’ within a few lines. Similarly, in a novel where the heroine is a psychosomatic cripple (all she has to do is ‘want’ to talk, etc.) the last thing you expect, outside pulp fiction, is that she will actually get up and walk. But that’s what Gemma actually does – in an attempt to join Elsa in the customary dash from the men-folk which supplies Miss Weldon with her codas. ‘ “Run!” cries Gemma … “You must! You must run for me and all of us.” ’ Social mobility should, of course, be available to all; but, as we’ve seen, it remains a risky business.
New York Times Book Review October 1977
Mantissa by John Fowles
It would be inaccurate to say that John Fowles is a middlebrow writer who sometimes hopes he is a highbrow: it has never occurred to him to believe otherwise. There is a difference, morally.
Mantissa gives us certain scenes from a marriage – the marriage between the author and his muse. It is set inside the author’s head. The muse, who is called Erato, turns up in various guises and goes through various routines with the author, who is called Miles. They have lots of rows and sex. Both wield supernatural powers: hers are mythical, his authorial, so they even out in the end. Thus the novel seeks to explore the nature of reality and creativity, the alienations of art, the evolution of literature to its present self-conscious phase, the relationship between men and women, and much more.
But never mind about all that for now. Let us swim back to the surface and inspect the quality of the performance on offer. Seldom in his fiction has Fowles played host to humour, gaiety or brio. Here, alas, he lets his hair down. Mantissa is serious all right, but it permits itself to be ‘deliciously irreverent’ too. There are conundrums for the erudite, but there is also honey for the bears.
Most of the book is in dialogue. The dialogue is terrible. ‘I’m not just an idiot pair of nymphs in some fancy Frog poet’s afternoon off,’ warns Erato. ‘You may be quite a good-looking goddess as goddesses go. Or go-go,’ cracks Miles. Or again: ‘I don’t think you’d recognise an olive-branch if you were sitting in a whole orchard of the things.’ No room for improvement there? Not even ‘grove’ instead of ‘orchard’, to begin at the very beginning? But the surrounding prose features many a line, and many a witticism, in comparably poor shape.
‘He glares up at her, with all the revulsion of a lifelong teetotaller being offered a magnum of malt whisky.’ Now, would the teetotaller be that revolted? How revolted, exactly, is he meant to be? Would it be funny if Fowles had piled it on even thicker – say, ‘a whole case of 100-year-old Highland malt whisky’? No. The sentence just lies there, pining for another visit to the drawing-board.
Apart from a few set-pieces (one or two of them not bad either), the prose has no other function but to pad the dialogue. In one scene, Miles is getting dressed as he talks. He is tying his tie. We become surer and surer about this:
He stands, and picks up the tie from the back of the chair. He leaves the tie hanging untied round his neck … He starts tying his tie … He ties his tie … He realizes something has gone wrong with the tying of his tie; and rather irritatedly pulls it apart, then starts tying again … [He] gives the better knot of the second tying a last little tightening.
How fervently the reader hopes that the second tying will be the last!
Such are the dazzling word-tapestries that Fowles the magician spins! ‘That’s a perfect example of your asinine female logic.’ ‘Look, I’m not going to pursue this totally irrelevant red herring.’ It has a familiar ring, doesn’t it? ‘He managed a wan smile.’ She gives him a sarcastic little smile, and looks away.’ God you’re so naïve.’ Take away the quotes from Descartes, Marivaux and Lemprière, the embarrassing jive-talk about Aristophanes and Mnemosyne, subtract the patina of learning, the callow pedantry, and you are left with a writer toiling away with the materials of substandard art – what Fowles might call the low-mimetic mode: farces, sitcoms, buxom novels.
Although Mantissa is Fowles’s first work of fiction for several years, in another sense it is hardly a bolt out of the blue. The first half of The Collector is excellent; quite a lot of The French Lieutenant’s Woman is interesting. The other novels and stories are Georgian, silver-age efforts; and they are crammed with clichés. Fowles’s success, particularly in America, has something to do with making culture palatable – with giving people the impression that culture is what they are getting. He sweetens the pi
ll: but the pill was saccharine all along.
A writer cannot do this cynically, in bad faith. Fowles is genuine, and Mantissa remains a genuine curiosity. Stripped of the usual scaffolding (Fowles’s considerable gifts as a middlebrow story-teller, the protective glaze of his pedagogy), such talent as survives stands there naked and trembling in the cold. Few writers have ever blown the whistle on themselves so piercingly.
Observer October 1982
The D.M. Thomas Phenomenon
Ararat by D.M. Thomas
It looked like the perfect success story – and still does, in many ways. Already it has acquired the tranquil glow of fairy tale. D.M. Thomas was once an unregarded novelist and a steady, unexceptional, mildly insouciant poet. He was a Cornishman (a specific thing to be, like a balladeering hillbilly – but with Celtic, messianic associations), exiled to humble Hereford, in the marshlands of England, where he taught at a rude and lowly training college. His most recent novel, a little offering called The White Hotel, had tiptoed through the review pages of the London press and had sold the usual 500 copies. In America, Thomas’s publisher seemed to have higher hopes for the book. Perhaps Thomas might even buy himself a new typewriter, or take the family off for a weekend in Anglesey.
The rest we know. The American reviews maintained a note of tearful, inconsolable gratitude; the book started to sell like Garp T-shirts. When Thomas’s agent called him in Hereford and rattled off the polysyllables of the paperback sale, Thomas was still so poor that he had to celebrate with a bottle of cooking sherry. In England, embarrassed reviewers began to take a second look. The White Hotel became a bestseller in the Cornishman’s native land. He was runner-up for the Booker Prize. Glamorously, he went AWOL while being lionized at an American university. In the gossip columns, his name was linked – however erroneously, however excitably – with that of the popular novelist and official reviser of the Oxford Companion to English Literature, Margaret Drabble … It may not sound like much; but for a Brit these things definitely count.
And everyone was pleased – or ‘genuinely’ pleased, as they say. Thomas was working in such a depopulated area (not Hereford, but the genre of the sexual surreal) that even his fellow writers were only mildly distressed. There was also the consoling thought that The White Hotel had gained its American lift-off for peculiarly American reasons. In a country so obsessed by the Holocaust that even a flapping, gobbling, squawking turkey like William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (that thesaurus of florid commonplaces) enjoyed universal acclaim, The White Hotel had a lot going for it. Styron offered sex and the Final Solution; Thomas had all this and psychoanalysis too – the full triumvirate of national fixations. Finally, though, and more important, Thomas had written an interesting novel; overrated, perhaps, but fresh, freakish, and solitary.
The predictable undertow that followed the book’s success did at least take a surprising form. Vigilant readers discovered that the Babi Yar section of The White Hotel had been laboriously transcribed from Babi Yar, by Anatoli Kuznetsov. True, the copyright page acknowledged ‘use of material’ from Kuznetsov, and in his apologia Thomas persuasively stressed the need for the impersonal voice of history, of testimony, at this stage in the narrative. Analogous accusations then greeted The Bronze Horseman, his verse translations of Pushkin. Thomas’s counter-argument was forceful and immediate: case dismissed. The borrowings from Babi Yar, however, remained an anomaly. It wasn’t a case of plagiarism; but it was clearly a case of something. When the reviewers spoke of the transports and crackups they weathered as they checked out of The White Hotel CI walked out into the garden and could not speak’, and so on), it was Babi Yar that had assailed them. The testimony is unbearably powerful; it is the climax of the novel; it is, in plain terms, the best bit – and Thomas didn’t write it.
In publishing, success creates a centrifugal process: the big book spins off spinoffs. The popularity of The White Hotel ironically gave rise to a reissue of Babi Yar. It also gave rise to a reissue – in England, recently – of Birthstone, Thomas’s long-remaindered second novel. Now just how ironic is this?
I didn’t know which to be most shocked by – the violation, the sadism, the kleptomania or the exhibitionism. As if suspicion of terrorism wasn’t enough. I could be in the dock for shop-lifting and indecency. I had a picture of me haemorrhaging on to a rubber sheet while two policemen took statements.
Birthstone has many things in common with The White Hotel, including frequent descents to a flat, tinkertoy, children’s-book prose style. In addition, they both feature androgynism, meteoric disturbances, Freudian scatology, dreams, poems, and a rampant sexuality. The sex is particularly hard to get away from. It is like pornography in that it escalates fantastically with new permutations and perversities. It is unlike pornography in that its concerns are dourly anti-erotic – except for readers who harbour very specialized tastes: rubber, enemas, gerontophilia, and a denunciatory attitude towards pantyhose. Birthstone is an embarrassment; it spreads unease; it makes you wonder whether the author’s effects – murky, cosy, risible, banal – are the result of calculation or of a fanatical tastelessness. The Flute-Player, Thomas’s first novel, might help to clarify the matter; no doubt it awaits its own vampiric resuscitation.
So, with all kinds of disquiet, one opens Ararat. There are signs of authorial disquiet also. The text is preceded by half a page of acknowledgments and disclaimers: ‘the author’s invention … translated by the author … from the Armenian poet Nareg … principal source … factual details.’ We confront the prologue and the slinky decadence of its opening: ‘Sergei Rozanov had made an unnecessary journey from Moscow to Gorky, simply in order to sleep with a young blind woman.’ On the third page, one brief paragraph contains, by my count, five exuberant clichés: ‘through to the bitter end’; ‘the oblivion of sleep’; ‘torrential rain lashed the window’; ‘the autumn trees stripped bare’; ‘make the most of every moment’. We creep on. The poet Rozanov sleeps with the blind woman. ‘Olga’s love-making was acrobatic but lacking in finesse.’ Olga asks Rozanov to tell her a story. The first section, ‘Night’, begins. ‘Why are you so obsessed with sex?’ the woman doctor asks Surkov, another poet. The reader leans forward. No answer. They sleep together; there is a further attack on pantyhose, an ubi sunt lament for stockings and garter-belts. Surkov takes an ocean cruise on his doctor’s advice. He sleeps with a virgin gymnast. An old fellow passenger, Finn (a superb comic-sinister creation), turns out to be a multiple war-criminal. Within a few pages we encounter the Armenian genocide, Babi Yar, the ‘Devouring’ of the Gypsies, the purge of the kulaks, the Gulag Archipelago, Yezhov, Beria, Stalin, and Hitler. It seems to be Thomas’s world: poems, dreams, a supercharged and eroticized landscape – sex and violence, on the cosmic scale.
And so the book proceeds, by turns fascinating, repellent, funny; owlish, ingenious, and shallow. Ararat is a novel of five poets, from Pushkin to Yevtushenko; it is a novel about Russianness. It is a series of improvisations on the theme of improvisation – its very method, sentence by sentence, is improvisatory, as all dreams are, as all fantasy is. Thomas can often sustain a note of charming inconsequentiality, of free-fall, an intoxicating liberty from the world of cause and effect. During these moments one may gain much slothful pleasure from following the skittish fantasist, who has no imperative other than to seem striking.
Thomas’s use of cliché is so insistent, and so remote from his poetry and discursive prose, that it can only be aiming at a kind of back-door subtlety – a Tolstoyan transparency, perhaps, or a Pushkinian purity. Chekhov and Nabokov used cliché, particularly in interior monologue, to suggest the reduced and bounded lives of their characters. In Solzhenitsyn, the cliché expresses a hearty stoicism. D.M. Thomas, who is thoroughly Russian in many of his predilections – ‘making strange’, the delights of decadence and vulgarity, the alienations of the ‘superfluous’ man – is clearly in pursuit of an artful simplicity. But the style has its dangers. Take the descriptions of formal w
omanly beauty:
… the golden coils of her hair, her full lips, her voluptuous figure, her lustrous eyes … her face, with its high cheekbones, was a perfect oval. Her black eyes flashed provocation … Her red lips were inviting – full and exquisitely curved. Her bosom swelled over the décolletage of her white dress …
Reading this, you fear that the writer’s face is about to flop on to the typewriter keys; the sentences conjure nothing but an exhausted imagination. Similarly, much of the verse incorporated into the story is so ‘free’ that it is scandalized by its own line breaks: ‘Turning in bed / restlessly, you urge me / not to smoke so much, / recalling someone dear / to you who died / of lung cancer …’ For long stretches Thomas seems to do no more than wallow in stock response. Elsewhere, he achieves a weird weightlessness, an effect perfectly attuned to the marshlight of this misty romance.
Quite possibly, Ararat will reproduce the success, if not the succès, of The White Hotel. That success is inordinate, of course, by definition, but I don’t think Thomas will be distracted by its unreality. (He will be distracted by further controversy, however: the version of Pushkin’s Egyptian Nights that he incorporates – supposedly ‘a translation by the author’ – uses chunks of a translation by Gillon R. Aitken, word for word.) But for all his reputation as a magpie, he is an original; to my knowledge, the only novelist whom he even remotely resembles is the underrated J.G. Ballard Although Ballard is more of a stylist than Thomas, their prose has the same glassy fragility and dazzle, and the same susceptibility to quirkiness and excess. To appraise his achievement in the most generous terms, Thomas may be the first writer who has been able to translate the poet’s world (with all its chaotic, shadowy, and fugitive elements) to the more accessible arena of the novel. Nowadays the great literary successes are nearly always democratizing in tendency. The converts are honoured and flattered by their invitation to the pantheon – or, more appropriately in Thomas’s case, their summons to the pandemonium.
