Who wouldn’t enjoy playing this kind of game? And in Pure Pleasure Professor Carey, with his academic certainties and his deft journalist’s touch, plays it cleverly and at times instructively. The Great Gatsby’s “tight little plot, simple as a Greek tragedy, radiates doubts like artificial rainbows around a fountain.” The Secret Agent is “packed round with the ice of Conrad’s irony.” “If a cat could write novels, they would be like Muriel Spark’s.” But occasional felicities and a generally sound response to text can’t disguise the superficial nature of most of these short takes—you only have to compare them to what V. S. Pritchett achieved in the same vein to realize how far literary journalism in England has lowered its sights.
And then there’s the almost bizarre parochialism of Carey’s choices. Is England really this narrowly self-regarding, or is he an isolated case? Of the fifty books on offer as pleasure-providers, thirty are English and several others are from the Commonwealth. France scores twice (Gide and Sartre), Russia twice (both memoirs), and Germany twice (Mann and Grass). No doubt America should be flattered with its five nominations, but what a weird selection: Gatsby, Eliot’s Prufrock poems, Updike’s Rabbit trilogy (word of the fourth volume has apparently not reached Oxford), Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (!), and S. J. Perelman’s The Road to Miltown (by no means Perelman’s best work, as it happens).
As it also happens, only five women have given the professor pure pleasure, all English or Commonwealth: Spark, Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Katherine Mansfield. No Colette, say, or—keeping to the safe side of the Channel—no Woolf (it will become clear later why). Forget Edith Wharton (American), forget Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (French), for that matter forget Gone with the Wind.
But then Gone with the Wind fails another significant test: length. Apart from the Rabbit trilogy, The Old Wives’ Tale, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, and one or two others, the chosen fifty are conspicuously short. Size apparently does matter, but not in the usual way. Joyce is represented by the Portrait, not Ulysses; V. S. Naipaul by The Mystic Masseur, not A House for Mr. Biswas. Does Carey’s reading pleasure really diminish the longer a book gets, or is this a nod to the presumed impatience of the Sunday Times readership? He does tell us that he’s avoided “the thumping masterpieces” and “books which I do not like, or have never been able to finish”—Faulkner and Proust. (I assume that it’s Faulkner he doesn’t like and Proust who’s just too goshdarn long.) “If you cry up unreadable books, just because they have been highly thought of in the past, you may deceive the young and innocent into trying them—and put them off reading for life.” And here I’ve been snobbishly boosting Proust all these years, without realizing that I was endangering the future of reading!
The repetition of certain words or locutions reveals the professor’s strongest feelings. Pure Pleasure is a not-very-covert attack on the highbrow, the literati, the intellectual. No, it’s not Faulkner or Proust (or Nabokov or James or Svevo) who truly delights us, but such staunch storytellers as Arnold Bennett and Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesterton. “If one of his highbrow contemporaries had written [The Hound of the Baskervilles], the Grimpen Mire would have been stuffed with symbolism.… In Doyle it is … just a marsh, not an excuse for pretentious abstractions.” “From the view point of the highbrows of his day [Arnold Bennett] committed two unforgivable sins. He came from the north of England and he made money by his writing.” “The literati used to scorn Kipling for his imperialism.” (What literati? Kipling has been passionately championed by T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, Lincoln Kirstein, Angus Wilson, Craig Raine, et al.) “There is no denying that [Edward Thomas] is a poet of Englishness, and this has earned him the contempt of intellectuals.” Katherine Mansfield “knew what it was to be cold-shouldered by the literati.” Carey’s anti-intellectualism masquerading as anti-snobbism is so acute, so personal, that one can only wonder whether he himself comes from the north of England and has been attacked for making money by writing.
This posture is partially justified by Carey’s brilliant earlier book The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. It’s true that once again we encounter a parochialism surprising in so educated a commentator: “The leading poets writing in English in the second half of the twentieth century, Larkin, Hughes, and Heaney”—so much for all American poetry. An allusion in Virginia Woolf to the servant problem is “quite in keeping with … Bloomsbury and modernism as a whole.” I don’t remember those notorious modernists Picasso, Balanchine, Joyce, and Stravinsky being caught up in the servant problem, but for Carey only what’s English is truly real. And his need to pursue an argument to extremes backs him into treacherous corners. After praising Ulysses for showing “that mass man matters, that he has an inner life as complex as an intellectual’s,” he goes on to complain that mass man Leopold Bloom himself “would never and could never have read Ulysses or a book like Ulysses.… This means that there is a duplicity in Joyce’s masterpiece.” By this standard, we would condemn Lassie Come-Home because Lassie couldn’t appreciate it.
But The Intellectuals and the Masses advances a convincing argument that prevails over all such polemical excess by identifying a line of thinking that runs from Nietzsche through the eugenicists and early fascists of Europe and the upper-class intellectuals and writers of England—Woolf, Forster, Huxley, Waugh, Greene, Clive Bell, the Irish Yeats—to the extreme reactionary ideas of Wyndham Lewis and from there, by a short step, to Mein Kampf. For Carey, modernism—which he equates with obscurity—was the visceral recoil of intellectuals from the threatening growth of a literate lower-middle class that represented all those things the “elite” found disgusting: suburbanism, the popular press, the “clerks,” even tinned food. By inventing a literature (and a music and an art) that these poor sods couldn’t decipher, the “natural aristocrats” could ward off the invasion of their culture by the masses. That this is a reductive argument is clear, and the author acknowledges that it can be carried too far (though that doesn’t prevent him from doing so), but the evidence he compiles through analysis and the deadly use of quotation supports his thesis and forces one to reconsider the English writers of the past century. One example will do, an excerpt from a 1941 entry in Virginia Woolf’s journal: She has observed, in a restaurant, “a fat, smart woman, in red hunting cap, pearls, check skirt, consuming rich cakes. Her shabby dependent also stuffing. They ate and ate. Something scented, shoddy, parasitic about them. Where does the money come to feed these fat white slugs?” This is the violence of snobbery that lies beneath the surface of a Mrs. Dalloway.
Of course, England being Carey’s arena, the America of Sister Carrie, McTeague, and Main Street doesn’t occur to him as a counterbalance to the attitudes he deplores. Which is why he’s left with Arnold Bennett and Conan Doyle as his heroes. Well, they’re admirable, if less exalted than he makes them out to be, and his close readings of Bennett, George Gissing, and (another hero) H. G. Wells are a valuable contribution to our grasp of who they were and what they accomplished. Here the depth of attention makes up for the narrowness of vision. When, however, the focused argument of The Intellectual and the Masses is reduced to the self-indulgent potshots of Pure Pleasure, one loses confidence in the author’s objectivity and judgment.
Even so, the enthusiasms of the latter book urge you back to many works you already know and forward into new territory—in my case, Bulgakov’s A Country Doctor’s Notebook, Sartre’s The Words, and Edward Thomas’s poems. In return, let me tip Carey off to such novels as Junichirō Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. True, one of them is Japanese, one is Indian, and the third is Latin American, and they’re definitely long. But all of them—take it from me, Professor—provide pure pleasure.
The New York Observer
2001
In the Mood for Love
ROMANCE NOVELS TODAY
HE: SIMON ARTHUR HENRY FITZRANULPH BASSET, Earl Clyvedon, Duke of Hastings, whose face “put all of Michelangelo’s statues to shame”—“the perfect specimen of English manhood,” whose “opinion on any number of topics” is sought after by men and at whose feet “women swooned,” yet whose tragic childhood has left him determined never to marry and, above all, never to father a child who might suffer as he had.
She: Lady Daphne Bridgerton, daughter of a viscount, beautiful, witty, sympathetic, bored by her conventional suitors, and yearning to have children—she’s one of a happy brood of eight.
They: Meet at a ball, banter, begin to fall in love. Yet so many things keep them apart! Will he be able to conquer his demons? Will she be able to help him to? You’ll have to read Julia Quinn’s The Duke and I to find out. I can reveal this much, however: The sex is great, he “squirming with desire,” she “writhing with delight.”
He: Carver is a top FBI agent, determined to protect the woman he loves from a killer who’s stalking her.
She: Zoe is an ex–New York cop, fed up with the corruption of the police force and now a successful private eye, not at all happy at being protected. “I don’t need you to take care of me.”
They: Are caught up in a spiraling thriller, danger from a psychopathic killer looming everywhere. Will she survive? More important: Will she let Carver back into her life? Go straight to Cheris Hodges’s Deadly Rumors to find out. But, once again, the sex is great: “He licked, sucked and nibbled at her throbbing bud until she screamed his name as she came over and over again,” and her “knees quivered and shook as if she were on the San Andreas Fault in the middle of an earthquake.” Zoe and Carver are African Americans—you can tell from the cover.
They: Are young Cameron, a single father, and young Kirstin, who works like a dog on the family ranch. We’re in Montana, where we often are in books like these, unless we’re in Wyoming or Colorado. Clearly, Cam and Kirstin are made for each other, and we’re not kept in suspense over their fate. The real romance is between Cam’s mother, Maddie, a famous detective-story writer who’s just come through a successful bout with chemo, and Kirstin’s cantankerous, aggressive, and overprotective father, Sam. She’s sixty-seven, he’s sixty-eight, but who’s counting? Not much suspense here either, but lots of comfortable detail about food. Rugged Cam “loved to create different dishes from scratch and had an uncanny sense of what flavors complemented others.” In fact, the first time Kirstin tastes his cucumber salsa she exclaims: “Recipe, please.… It would be great as a veggie dip.” Everyone’s problems are resolved at the big holiday dinners they all share. This cozy romance is called The Christmas Room and is by the popular Catherine Anderson. Her pleasingly written books have sweetly pretty covers, and this one has an extra added attraction: the author’s recipe for Russian tea cookies.
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THE SCORES OF ROMANCE NOVELS—perhaps hundreds, if you include the self-published ones that constitute their own phenomenon—just published or due to appear in the next few months essentially fall into two categories. There are the Regency romances (descended from the captivating Georgette Heyer, whose first one, Regency Buck, appeared in 1935). And there are the contemporary young-woman-finding-her-way stories that are the successors to the working-girl novels that for decades provided comfort and (mild) titillation to millions of young women who dreamed of marrying the boss. This formula reached its apogee in 1958 with Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything, whose publishing-house heroines find either (a) business success at the price of stunted love, (b) true love and wifey bliss, or (c) death. But sixty years have gone by since the virgins of The Best of Everything hit the Big Apple, and real life has had its impact not only on modern romance but—as we shall see—on modern Romance.
The Regencys, however, have barely altered their formula. You may be Georgette Darrington—of Bridget Barton’s A Governess for the Brooding Duke—who’s left penniless by her improvident father and perforce becomes governess to the adorable wards of the taciturn, unfeeling Duke of Draycott, suffering such humiliations as being served burnt toast by the antagonistic upper servants.…
Or Lady Honora Parker, who’s struggled for years to wrest autonomy from her father (“the eighth Earl of Stratton and a bunch of lesser titles not worth repeating at the moment”) and is the heroine of Joanna Shupe’s A Daring Arrangement, set in the late nineteenth century, though Regency in all but chronology. Honora takes New York by storm, entering into an agreement with the notorious rakish financier Julius Hatcher to pretend to be engaged—his entrée into top society, her strategy in her war with the earl.…
Or Emma Gladstone, a vicar’s penniless daughter in The Duchess Deal, by Tessa Dare, author of Romancing the Duke, Any Duchess Will Do, One Dance with a Duke, and Say Yes to the Marquess. (Not everyone can be a duke.) The young Duke of Ashbury is traumatized by the terrible scarring that one side of his face has suffered in battle. He doesn’t want love, he doesn’t want a real wife, he wants an heir. Emma is working as a seamstress (though every inch a gentlewoman), and when the duke proposes at their very first meeting, what choice does she have? “She would be a fool to refuse any duke, even if he were a bedridden septuagenarian with poor hygiene. This particular duke was none of those things. Despite his many, many faults, Ashbury was strong, in the prime of life, and he smelled divine.” And—a bonus—it turns out that “bringing a woman to orgasm had always been a particular pleasure for him.” …
Or Wilhelmina Ffynche, the most beautiful girl in London, who has rejected fourteen proposals of marriage and has no intention of being “won.” But when she encounters Lord Alaric Wilde, second son of a duke, who’s just back in England after becoming a Byronic legend through his fabulously successful books about his adventures around the world, she agrees to rescue him from the crazed attentions of female fans. She’s funny, she’s sexy, and as the funny and sexy (at least on the page, and for all I know in real life) Eloisa James, author of Wilde in Love, puts it, “In the last half decade, he’d seen an enormous white whale, the Great Wall of China and the aurora borealis. And now he’d seen Miss Willa Ffynche.” Robust sex and amusing plotting follow, as we would expect from a writer who in her other life is the daughter of the poet Robert Bly and a professor of English literature at Fordham.
Whichever of these heroines you may be, you are guaranteed to end up in marital (often ducal) heaven, after dealing with one or another of the ingenious obstacles that create whatever suspense the genre can generate. As has often been noted, the Regency romance is a cross between Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre: Either the lovers discover their true affinity through their intelligence and humor or, as mousy Jane does with fierce Mr. Rochester, the heroine tames her man by helping cure him of his anger, depression, self-loathing, trauma. Or both. The only new element in the genre these post-Heyer days is the relentless application of highly specific sex scenes featuring his “hardened rod” and her orgasm that “went on for what felt like hours but was probably only a minute or two.” Bodices no longer need to be ripped—your bosom happily meets his abs halfway. Twenty years ago, a Regency would not have ended, as The Duchess Deal does, on this rapturous note: “They reached a toothache-sweet climax together, as if simultaneous bliss wasn’t a rarity but the most natural thing in the world. The sun rises; the wind blows; orgasms arrive in tandem.” Now that’s Romance.
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NO ORGASM, SOLO OR IN TANDEM, we should note, graces the pages of the most prolific and successful romance queen of all time, Barbara Cartland, step-grandmother of Princess Diana and author of 723 novels, 160 of them unpublished at her death (just before her ninety-ninth birthday) in 2000. Her son is still doling these out, one a month, as The Pink Collection, and they are without benefit of sex. The formidable Barbara knew where her readers wanted the line drawn: No Cartland heroine ever came into contact with a hardened rod.
Cartland’s successor as Queen of Romance is America’s Nora Roberts. And she deserves to be. Roberts is
not only extraordinarily industrious—215 or so novels, including close to fifty futuristic police procedurals under the pseudonym J. D. Robb, also big best sellers—but her books are sensibly written and on the whole as plausible as genre novels can be. I remember being struck some years ago by her common sense about what women want, need, and deserve. Unlike her leading competitors’ heroines, for whom the ultimate goal remained scoring the ideal mate, a Nora Roberts heroine was encouraged not only to score him but also to score a satisfying career: It wasn’t either/or, it was both—and he’d better adjust to it!
Today, indeed, a plot limited to catching a man would seem an anomaly. Not only do young heroines work hard and well, they may even be the boss. Consider Maggie and Owen—both bosses—who grew up together in adjoining mansions on the Jersey shore in Caridad Pineiro’s One Summer Night. The famous retail chain that Maggie and her father run together is faltering, and real estate tycoon Owen has reappeared in her life—they’ve drifted apart since that one magical summer night on the beach when they were kids. (Standing in the way of their mutual attraction was the mortal enmity between their fathers, New Jersey’s Lords Montague and Capulet.) Owen has all the standard appurtenances—he’s “the epitome of male perfection—raven-black hair, a sexy gleam in his charcoal-gray eyes, broad shoulders and not an ounce of fat on him”—plus the sensitivity today’s heroines demand in their men: He wants to help Maggie, not dominate her. Even so, it’s not Owen but his equally sexy and macho brother, Jonathan, who’s taken some cooking lessons in Italy and makes them all dinner, the pasta “deliciously al dente while creamy at the same time.” The sex between Maggie and Owen is equally delicious: “When he danced his tongue across perfect white teeth, she playfully chased it and then lightly bit his lower lip, jerking a groan from him,” shortly before he’s caressing “the swollen nub.” Maggie also has the support of today’s de rigueur group of women friends, wise in the ways of romance. (I’m absolutely certain that lawyer Connie is going to end up with Jonathan of the Bolognese.)
Near-Death Experiences_And Others Page 14
