The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  Does it matter, finally, whether Milton was a good man? Wilson finds a great deal of helpless self-revelation in the verse (‘Samson’, for instance, ‘is in exactly the position of Milton at the time of the Restoration’), and this perhaps inclines him to seek a moral identity of the work and the man. He may also have spiritual imperatives not fully disclosed here. Yet the major poets are not an especially scrupulous or affable band. Nor are the minor ones. Milton produced the central English poem; it is of great interest, though of no great moment, to calculate the human cost of writing it.

  Observer January 1983

  The Darker Dickens

  The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’ Imagination by John Carey

  While assured of his status as a great writer, Dickens is still uncertain of his status as a serious one. He insists on being romantic, melodramatic, unrepresentational (like his trashier contemporaries) and will not be adult, introspective, mimetic (like the major Victorians). Criticism is traditionally nervous about such discrepancies and, accordingly, most of the recent work on Dickens has urged him back into what we invidiously imagine to be ‘the tradition’ – i.e., the social-realist tradition. Robert Garis’s The Dickens Theatre, stressing Dickens’s gift for ‘social prophecy’, explained that he’s unrealistic because he is shrewdly deploying theatrical conventions. John Lucas’s The Melancholy Man, stressing Dickens’s social criticism and symbolic structures, explained that he’s unrealistic because society is too. The Leavises’ Dickens the Novelist, stressing Dickens’s moral intelligence, erudition, and likenesses to James, Conrad and George Eliot, explained that he’s realistic. When asked about the large stretches of implausibility, mawkishness and exaggeration to be found throughout his work, these critics tend to reply that Dickens put them in to beguile his Victorian public.

  John Carey is equally willing to chuck out something like half of Dickens, but it is not quite the same half. With no fuss at all the frowning reflective Dickens is dispatched and the comic, ebullient Dickens as cheerfully embraced. The heavier critics usually start in earnest at Dombey and Son and salvage what they can from its successors; Dr Carey is more interested in local effects, in ‘imaginative habits’, and so can afford to give more space to The Old Curiosity Shop, the current whipping-boy, than to Little Dorrit, the current front-runner. For ‘we could scrap all the solemn parts of Dickens’s novels without impairing his status as a writer’. And scrap them Dr Carey does. Not surprisingly, The Violent Effigy is a splendid jeu d’esprit, a brilliant tour de force; not surprisingly, too, it is wildly over-corrective.

  Right then. Out goes Dickens the social thinker, the visionary. As Dr Carey eagerly reminds us, Dickens was a champion of capital punishment, applauded the cannonballing of mutinous sepoys, thought Negro suffrage preposterous, recommended imprisonment for bad language, and flogging for bigamy, and was a convinced and passionate sexist. In the novels themselves, Dr Carey finds most of the social criticism either laughably inconsistent, weakly argued or pallidly retrospective. Dickens ‘did not want to provoke … reform so much as to retain a large and lucrative audience’. Perhaps a salute to Orwell isn’t a bad thing at this stage, but how easily we could have done without its concomitant, a string of tweedy egalitarianisms whenever Dickens offends the modern liberal taste: the working-class Toodle children in Dombey are smilingly presented so that ‘the middle classes may sleep soundly in their beds’; Gamfield, the chimney-boy in Oliver Twist, ‘suddenly’ gets less funny once the author has researched the plight of the Victorian sweep – and so on. First, as Dr Carey well knows, Dickens is not unegalitarian or anti-egalitarian, but pre-egalitarian, at least in the way we understand it. Second, as Dr Carey well knows (and elsewhere demonstrates), nothing is immune from humour: in the Preface to Joseph Andrews Fielding says that ‘The only source of the true Ridiculous … is affectation’, and twelve pages into the text he has us sniggering about Mrs Slipslop’s club foot. Third, as it suits Dr Carey to forget, social issues should have only a conditional bearing on what we generally regard as works of the fancy.

  Next, out goes Dickens the symbol-tout. Critics devoted to the unearthing of these commodities, says Dr Carey, seldom come up with anything more than a hackneyed adage or dispensable catchphrase; they boil down Little Dorrit to ‘the world’s a prison’, or Our Mutual Friend to ‘money is dust’. ‘Why’, Dr Carey asks, ‘should one want to read a novel, to enter into possession of something so trite?’ Nor is this merely a case of critics’ excitability – Dickens can be found ‘endorsing similar trite formulations himself’, as when Carker gloats over his Edith Dombey-surrogate caged bird, or when Louisa Gradgrind, cuffing her bosom, so tellingly exclaims: ‘O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here!’ Dr Carey’s firm preference is for the recurring emblems and images that loom into significance without depending on any facile equation: the reechy atmospheres, the crumbling buildings, the effigies and cadavers, the ramshackle furniture of his urban landscape. Again Dr Carey underestimates his enemy (is the ‘money-equals-excrement’ idea, for instance, really so over Dickens’s head when one considers the symbolic names of Merdle and Murdstone?), but this is one of his more salutary chapters; if nothing else it should put a few PhD theses quietly out of their misery.

  With particular alacrity, out goes Dickens the humanist sage, the mature investigator of relationships and personalities. His heroes and heroines are faceless, indeed bodiless, automatons. His villains, all either improbably converted or cornily punished, are without moral significance. Excepting David Copperfield and Pip, his children are mini-adults designed to solace the oldsters, dwarves who ‘have close affinities with the modern garden gnome’. His women are frumps, haughty termagants or simpering little housewives. The plots are all creaking lumber. Dickens was prepared to sermonize, patronize, sentimentalize; ‘with his eye on sales’, he embraced every possible opportunity to write nonsense. And yet, somehow, ‘the triumphs of his art stick out like islands, and there is no difficulty about distinguishing them’. What Dr Carey finally distinguishes in Dickens is a talented fool and a collection of good passages.

  In his wittily subversive book on Milton, Dr Carey concluded: ‘a study of how Milton uses words makes him look more of a poet than what he uses them for. He is, massively, a moral phenomenon.’ In his wittily subversive essay on ‘D.H. Lawrence’s Doctrine’, Dr Carey concluded: ‘the final paradox of Lawrence’s thought is that, separated from his … wonderfully articulate being, it becomes the philosophy of any thug or moron’. A similar last-minute rescue-job is attempted on Dickens (his ‘imagination transforms the world; his laughter controls it’ – the two being interdependent), but only a streakily vivid humorist remains. Given the adaptability of Dr Carey’s critical predilections it is disappointing that sympathy is so determinedly withdrawn from Dickens, who gets a much more effective initial response from Dr Carey than Milton or Lawrence ever could. As a result The Violent Effigy is always pointing beyond itself without ever seeming to want to get to where it points; one goes through the book much as Dr Carey goes through Dickens, with periodic delight and a strong sense of futility.

  Although Dr Carey doesn’t appear to have read Northrop Frye’s essay ‘Dickens and the Comedy of Humours’, a good deal of his book reads like an annotation of its insights, only without Frye’s accompanying sense of their coherence. Briefly, Frye sees the structure of a Dickens novel as a conflict between two social groups, the family-orientated ‘congenial’ society (normally based round a quite young, and quite boring, couple) and the institutionalized ‘obstructing’ society (normally old, hide-bound and corrupt). True to the Plautus–Terence New Comedy tradition, grotesque implausibility is considered a small price to pay for bringing about the triumph of youth and the inevitable festive conclusion. The congenial society, apart from the odd fool or wag, is mostly featureless and uniform; the obstructing society is far more exuberantly imagined, peopled not so much by caricatures
as by humours – of hypocrisy, parasitism, pedantry. Up to Jane Austen the structure is used fairly conventionally but becomes steadily debased (its chief modern representative is the Disney cartoon, with its plastic goodies, vivaciously absurd or sinister baddies, semi-magical twists, etc.). In the more vulgarly romantic context of Dickens the opposed societies taper off into hidden, elemental worlds of Good and Bad, or rhetoric and melodrama, dream and death, placidity and obsession, cosy arcadias and chaotic hinterlands, where nice girls become angels and nasty men become puppet-like demons. According to Frye, the unique energy of Dickens derives from these extremes; although one can protest all one wants about their stiltedness and unreality, it is doubtful whether there would be much left of Dickens without them.

  Like a lot of Frye’s criticism the placing of Dickens is both rather schematized and rather woolly. Nevertheless, alone among critiques of Dickens, it manages to see him all at once, unhampered by a desire to square him with the modern and the commonsensical. Dr Carey also responds to the black and anarchical area of Dickens, an area which embarrasses more austere critics, and his book is a consistently enjoyable counter to those who wish to clean Dickens up. But the other side of Dickens, the unctuous fairytale side, won’t go away either, for all our twentieth-century fastidiousness. It is just as closely connected to his ‘intransigence’, his refusal, in Dr Carey’s phrase, to accept ‘that what’s normally thought to be seen is what he sees’.

  New Statesman November 1973

  Donne the Apostate

  John Donne: Life, Mind and Art by John Carey

  To begin with, it looks as though John Donne is going to be given a pretty rough ride by John Carey. Dr Donne had his faults, after all, and Professor Carey – stern enough as an essayist and reviewer – is always particularly hard on the authors he elects to write whole books about. Quite what Carey has against these characters isn’t entirely clear. For all its brilliance of address, Carey’s criticism is unusually vehement, idiosyncratic and low on charity. His Milton presented us with a deluded and humourless tyrant, his Dickens with a retarded sentimentalist, his Thackeray with a smug and venal philistine.

  True, Carey’s hostility towards his chosen writers is amused and sardonic in tone, and doesn’t decisively prejudice him against their work. You sense that he is simply too levelheaded, too modern and liberal to have much sympathy for the essential messiness of the creative temperament. It seems that Carey can’t get over feeling cleverer and above all more practical than those chaotic charlatans, who are thrashing about in history and their own disordered lives, while laying their claims to enduring art.

  So how will Carey hit it off with Jack Donne, the Dean of St Paul’s, the Monarch of Wit? None too well, one suspects – though there are surprises in store. ‘The first thing to remember about Donne is that he was a Catholic,’ Carey begins; ‘the second, that he betrayed his faith.’ Descended on his mother’s side from Sir Thomas More, Donne was born into the pre-Armada, anti-Catholic terror of the 1570s. His mother was active in the recusant underworld; his brother was an unwilling martyr, dying of plague after a spell in prison for harbouring a priest … The main spur behind Donne’s apostasy, Carey tells us, was worldly ambition. He could not prosper as a Catholic, so in his mid-twenties he changed camps, becoming a vocal and militant Anglican, ‘willing to abuse, in public’, as Carey notes, ‘those valiant Catholics who had gone to the scaffold for their Faith’.

  Donne then threw himself into the humiliating business of sponging a living from the Anglican bigwigs of the day. Presenting himself as a ‘poore worme’ and ‘clodd of clay’, he toadied to the ‘rabble of idlers, confidence men and pederasts’ at court, accumulating patrons with begging letters and written-to-order verse epistles. He attracted the attention of the Earl of Essex, whose ‘gallantry, youth and courage’, in Carey’s novelettish formulation, ‘dazzled all eyes’, and joined him on a couple of expeditions to Spain and the Azores.

  In 1601 Donne secretly contracted what he hoped was a brilliant marriage to the daughter of a Surrey landowner. He was instantly disgraced. For years the embittered courtier lived in a damp cottage in Mitcham, where his wife churned out children so monotonously that when one of the daughters died, Donne ‘did not stoop to give details’ in letters to friends. By this time he was back to his fawning ways. When James I became entangled in the controversy about the Oath of Allegiance, Donne put together an anti-Catholic treatise and ‘hurried down to Royston, where the King was staying, expressly to present him with a copy’. In the end the ploy backfired: it was under direct regal pressure that Donne was ordained in 1615, reluctantly abandoning the court for the Church.

  Carey clicks his tongue here and there, as the quotations show, but for the most part he is unwontedly generous, even forgiving about Donne’s throughgoing frailty. It seems that Carey senses a rare congruence between Donne’s life and his poetry which retroactively cleanses Donne of his worldly sins. The two main themes of his career, spiritual guilt and secular frustration, are held to be triumphantly nutritious to his verse. Neatly, Donne’s ‘spiritual life’ is ‘preserved for us in the “Holy Sonnets” ’, while the songs and satires ‘may be seen as a reaction against the constriction and dependence that actuality imposed’.

  Although one searches Carey’s work in vain for any consistent literary theory, it appears that the art he likes best is the art that corresponds most faithfully to life. This at any rate is how he repeatedly signals his preferences. Exceptionally responsive to Donne’s poems, Carey is obliged to claim that they bear ‘the stamp of self more deeply than those of any other English poet’. This desperate remark – unverifiable, and anyway meaningless – frees Carey to treat the poems as if they were confidential memos to Donne’s confessor or marriage-counsellor, or to some spectral Jacobean psychiatrist. He talks of Donne ‘relapsing’ into his fixations; he detects ‘an almost confessional relevance’ in one poem and identifies the ‘motives’ that ‘underlie’ another.

  The analysis of Holy Sonnet XVII (‘Since she whom I lov’d hath payd her last debt’) is fairly typical of his method. The sestet, Carey says, ‘sounds like someone making a superhuman effort to put a brave face on things’. But ‘after the sixth line, the effort collapses, and Donne’s distressed feelings come pouring out’. We imagine the grim-faced poet heroically completing the sestet, then cracking up on line seven, until the final couplet comes ‘pouring out’ through his sobs. Or, rather, we don’t imagine it; instead we remember the old distinction between real sincerity and literary sincerity: when told of his wife’s death, the poet can burst into tears, but he cannot burst into song. ‘S. Lucies Day’, which rhymes and scans, is described as ‘suicidal’. Suicides write notes, not elegies.

  The New Critics, who already seem a bit old-fashioned, like to regard all poems as contemporary and anonymous-hermetic, in a word. Carey’s method, here and elsewhere, is to feel his way outwards from the details and imaginative habits of a writer’s work, and see them in terms of his life, time and thought. Often, of course, it comes off. Lively and learned in equal measure, Carey produces many stirring commentaries on Donne’s evasive, sophistical and entangling verse. However, his sympathy for Donne the man intensifies but also confuses his receptivity to Donne the poet, with odd results for his book. Carey is moved to narrow the gap between life and art. Such proximity, though, is undercut by the very fact of literary form. Life doesn’t scan, after all, and the poet must get his weeping done with before he goes in search of his rhymes.

  Observer May 1981

  Waugh’s Mag. Op.; Wodehouse’s Sunset

  Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

  This busty new paperback of Brideshead Revisited recommends itself on the cover as Evelyn Waugh’s best-loved novel. The claim may be accurate; but Brideshead is Waugh’s most hated novel too. Equally enthralling and distasteful, it is a problem comedy, like Mansfield Park – worrying, inordinate, self-conscious, a book that steps out of genre and never really looks at ho
me with its putative author. Snobbery is the charge most often levelled against Brideshead; and, at first glance, it is also the least damaging. Modern critics have by now accused practically every pre-modern novelist of pacifism, or collaboration, in the class war. Such objections are often simply anachronistic, telling us more about present-day liberal anxieties than about anything else. But this line won’t quite work for Brideshead, which squarely identifies egalitarianism as its foe and proceeds to rubbish it accordingly.

  Of course, the modern world, ‘the age of Hooper’, has now arrived, and even the most well-adjusted vandal – the most helpless product of junk food, adult videos and mangled cityscapes – must find plenty that is cheerless in his new surroundings. Yet the present age will be lamented in its turn, like the last. The good is gone, the bad is all to come: this theme is as old as literature. What a writer does with it is simply a matter of style and tone.

  The novel is littered with countless, often laughable asides on the Great Falling-Off. One thinks of such moments as the passage on the decline of the English bathroom (where the chrome tap? where the carpet?); the escape from Lady Marchmain’s cluttered parlour into the main rooms of Brideshead and ‘the august, masculine atmosphere of a better age’, under ‘that high and insolent dome’; the painful meal with know-all, know-nothing Rex Mottram in Paris, where ‘the burgundy seemed a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his’. Ryder must be a simple soul, by God, to be so elaborately solaced by a glass of wine.