by John Updike
If I suggest that an art dealer, with whom I have for some time been acquainted, is exceptional even among his coevals, I might, if I named him here, be thought basely to seek to curry favor with him.
In flirting with clichés, he does not always avoid being seduced by them:
He is particularly knowledgeable about, and on the best of terms with some of those commanding and seminal figures whose names hang, in the world of art, upon every lip.
… not without a substratum of truth to which I at least subscribe.
And, from this same unfortunate pair of pages (the first two in the book, and we never quite trust him again), a specimen of the clarifying that stupefies:
His later life was spent in endlessly seeking to penetrate the barrier and establish the spatial and human dimensions of those few personages whom experience had taught him he could grope truly to perceive when face to face with one.
More than a matter of an occasional careless or windy sentence, it is an error of tone, this trivializing fussiness of diction. In contrast, Borges (whom Mr. Ayrton several times names, as if defying an invidious comparison), though equally recondite in his matter, maintains a directness and simplicity of prose that carry us into the heart of his shadows and bestow upon his fabrications—his Ficciones and Labyrinths—the nobility of monoliths.
Nor are Mr. Ayrton’s fancies uniformly pretty. It is one thing to bring Dionysus to modern America in search of devotees (“Cool it, man” is the greeting he receives) and another to have Kierkegaard watch the progress of Abraham and Isaac up Mount Moriah in an episode of a television Western. The former impossibility has a certain pith; given the existence of gods, this is how they might behave. The latter is merely impossible; given the existence of television, it could not have been turned on in 1843. The incongruity seems wantonly—even, with the attendant gibes at the Dane’s theology, spitefully—produced. Mr. Ayrton takes too lightly his own dreadful freedom to invent what he pleases. Some of his fabrications—“The Minocorn,” “Dr. A. R. Broga”—are feeble japes, if not family jokes; others—“A Gesture of the Hand,” “The Vanishing Point”—are so graphic in conception that they are too difficult, even with illustrations, to “picture.” The illustrations, some of them indispensable, are not very snugly married to the text, or very sharply engraved. Indeed, and alas, the book as a whole is not very well produced. Unlikely to reach a large audience, it should have been exquisitely aimed, as a fine fabrication, at the few who would relish its dry learning and delicate mirror play. But the American publisher has imported the English edition, with its strong savor of thrift. The pages have slender upper and outside margins, matched with disproportionately wide lower and inside margins; these large margins make it possible to add illustrations here and there without the expensive trouble of resetting type around them, but they look mistaken on the pages (two out of three) that carry no illustrations or footnotes. And I have never seen a book contain, for its size, so many widows. A widow (a short line, especially one ending a paragraph, that turns up at the top of a page, where it looks bereft) can usually be avoided, either by tampering with the text or by adjusting the pagination; it is elementary book-production manners to do so. Of the first thirty-one pages in Fabrications that could be possibly headed by widows, seven are; a deliberate widow-maker could scarcely have contrived more. What would Daedalus have said? Daedalan strictures will seem picayune to writers of a Dionysian persuasion; and of course no story or poem is purely constructed, or purely inspired, any more than the event of sailing can be all sail or all wind. This time out, Mr. Ayrton’s intricate rigging creaks, in puffs of erratic breeze.
The Mastery of Miss Warner
SWANS ON AN AUTUMN RIVER, by Sylvia Townsend Warner. 200 pp. Viking, 1966.
The stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner stick up from The New Yorker’s fluent fiction-stream with a certain stony air of mastery. They are granular and adamant and irregular in shape. The prose has a much-worked yet abrasive texture of minute juxtaposition and compounded accuracies. Candles are lit in an antique shop, and “The polished surfaces reflected the little flames with an intensification of their various colors—amber in satinwood, audit ale in mahogany, dragon’s blood in tortoise shell.” Two old ladies reminisce: “They talked untiringly about their girlhood—about the winters when they went skating, the summers when they went boating, the period when they were so very pious, the period when they were pious no longer and sent a valentine to the curate: the curate blushed, a crack rang out like a pistol shot and Hector Gillespie went through the ice, the fox terriers fought under old Mrs. Bulliver’s chair, the laundry ruined the blue voile, the dentist cut his throat in Century Wood, Claude Hopkins came back from Cambridge with a motorcar and drove it at thirty miles an hour with flames shooting out behind, Addie Carew was married with a wasp under her veil.” Though Miss Warner can be trivial in her effects and vague in her intentions, she rarely lacks concreteness. On every page there is something to be seen or smelled or felt.
In Repetition, Kierkegaard, who had considerable fabling powers, interrupted his narrative to write: “If I were to pursue in detail the moods of the young man as I learned to know them, not to speak of including in a poetical manner a multitude of irrelevant matters—salons, wearing apparel, beautiful scenery, relatives and friends—this story might be drawn out to yard lengths. That, however, I have no inclination to do. I eat lettuce, it is true, but I eat only the heart; the leaves, in my opinion, are fit for swine.” Contrariwise, Miss Warner’s appetite for the leaves of circumstance is excellent. One story in this collection (“An Act of Reparation”) is basically a recipe for oxtail stew; several others (“Happiness,” “The View of Rome”) are like architectural drawings of houses with people sketched in for scale. The furniture in her fiction is always vivacious and in her stories about Mr. Edom’s antique-shop, not included in this collection, objets dominate. The grit of factuality scintillates for her, and she inhales the world’s rank melancholy as if it were ambrosial perfume. Churches especially arouse her olfactory relish:
Candles were burning, some before this image, some before that. They gave a sort of top-dressing of warmth to the building, but basically it was as cold as river mud, and under a glazing of incense it smelt of poverty.
In another church, the preserved corpse of a local saint is wonderingly detailed:
What extraordinary gloves—so thin that the nails, long and rather dirty, showed through.… She looked at the face. It had blue glass eyes, to match the blue dress. One of them projected from the face, squeezed out by the shrivelling socket into which it had been fitted. It seemed to stare at her with alarm. The other eye was still in place, and placid.
The story containing this placid glass eye, “Fenella,” and others such as “Healthy Landscape with Dormouse” and “Total Loss” pursue a steadily deepening drabness with a remorseless exhilaration. The septuagenarian Miss Warner’s continued health as a writer of fiction is a testimonial to her iron diet. She has the spiritual digestion of a goat, and a ravenous eye for unpleasantness.
Between her firm particulars and the overbrooding Olympian forbearance of tone there is, sometimes, an unexpected vacuum. Her sense of form, of direction, is erratic, which is to say she has no prejudices about her material. Her endings are often weak—abrupt and enigmatic (“A Stranger with a Bag,” “Their Quiet Lives”), sentimental (“Happiness”), crowded and vague (“Johnnie Brewer”). Here, where an author normally gathers his matter to a point in a final phrase or word, a dominant that will reverberate backward, Miss Warner wanders off in the middle of the measure, or goes on a measure too long, or comes down hard on a note so wrong we doubt our ears. As I read these bound stories I had the impression that some were better when I first read them in The New Yorker. A little research proved it to be so.
“The View of Rome” is a generally charming story about an old engraver recovering from a nearly fatal illness. He is very anxious to return to his home and in order to secure earl
y release from the hospital pretends that his cat, Hattie, is a stepniece coming from the Isle of Wight to nurse him. Though rather lightweight, the story gathers substance from the many sharp small touches (“The clock, with its light hopping gait, like a robin’s, ticked on”), the persuasive portrait of a gentle old bachelor (Miss Warner makes herself quite at home in male minds), and its articulation of a kind of joy, the joy of domestic possession, not often dramatized. I enjoyed rereading it until the last sentences, which went: “God is an Oriental potentate, unaffectedly lavish and sumptuous. He would not think it extravagant to heap up all these apples into a cenotaph for a Rural Dean. Here was no need for jam pots. They could stay in the attic.” The apples, we know, are lying all about, and making jam of them has preoccupied the hero in the hospital, and we have been told of the Dean who died of a wasp sting incurred at a Harvest Festival. But those last two sentences, besides choppily cutting across the preceding grand strophes about God as an Oriental potentate, bring some unlooked-for words to the fore. Jam pots? Attic? The house’s attic has not been previously mentioned, and abruptly occupies the position of a keystone. It is bewildering, and dulling. The New Yorker version, in place of these last two sentences, has: “There was no call for jam pots here.” Surely this is better: “call” for “need,” “here” for “attic,” and the simpler phrasing permits the potentate-lavish-extravagant-cenotaph conceit to sound the conclusive chord in this wry fugue of mortality and gratitude.
Miss Warner thought well enough of “Swans on an Autumn River” to name her collection after it. It tells of Norman Repton, overweight and sixty-nine, attending a congress of sanitary engineers in Dublin. He has never been in Ireland, though when he was young it had represented romance to him. He sightsees confusedly, overeats in a restaurant, and, while feeding bread to some swans on a river and angrily fending off hungry seagulls, dies of a heart attack. Some women waiting for a bus and a garda directing traffic witness his death. The book version ends with the paragraph:
The garda, who had left his place amid the traffic, now came up to where Norman Repton lay motionless. After a momentary hesitation, as though he were hastily summoning up something he had learned, he knelt beside him. The women drew closer together, and one of them pulled her coat about her, as though she had suddenly become conscious of the cold. Presently the garda looked up. “Will one of you ladies go across to the hotel,” he said, “and ask them to telephone for the ambulance?” Two women detached themselves from the group and hurried across the road, arguing in whispers.
The New Yorker version is the same, until:
Presently, the garda got up from his knees. Looking gravely down at the figure on the pavement, he pulled off his cap and crossed himself. The action unloosed a flutter of hands, a murmur of sound, among those waiting for the bus, as though it had stirred a dovecote.
Now, this at least gives us a vivid image in which Ireland, an exotic Catholic land, and birds, whose aloof beauty and sordid hunger have lured the hero to his death, intersect. The ending Miss Warner has chosen to preserve in her book is totally centrifugal, a burst of irrelevancies. Of what significance is the mechanical request for an ambulance? Who are the two women who go to telephone, and what if they argue “in whispers”? Whispers have nothing to do with Norman Repton, and though neither ending is quite satisfactory, it is Miss Warner’s that confirms our suspicion that this story is aimless. It is an insistently ugly story whose ugliness has not been shaped to any purpose. We do not know enough about Repton to feel his terminal fight with the seagulls as anything more than the irritable fit of a choleric man. The editorial process that brought two endings into being is not at issue; either The New Yorker version is the original one, later revised, or it is a revision prompted by the magazine and finally discarded. In either case, Miss Warner has expressed her old-fashioned preference for events over gestures. The two women walking across the road to the telephone, however flat and irrelevant as an image, are, as an event, more world-engaging and, as it were, negotiable. In an artistic age of credit manipulation, Miss Warner deals in quaintly hard cash.
Her stories tend to convince us in process and baffle us in conclusion; they are not rounded with meaning but lift jaggedly toward new, unseen, developments. “Healthy Landscape with Dormouse” presents with unblinking clairvoyance a miserably married and (therefore) unrepentantly mischievous young woman, Belinda. The story’s locale is Belinda’s consciousness, but instead of ending there the story leaps out of her head and concludes on a village street. Some suddenly introduced bus passengers have seen Belinda and her husband fight and jump into a car: “They ran to the car, leaped in, drove away. Several quick-witted voices exclaimed, ‘Take the number! Take the number!’ But the car went so fast, there wasn’t time.” It suggests a Mack Sennett comedy; it suggests furthermore an almost compulsive need, in Miss Warner’s work, for witnesses. Her world is thoroughly social, like those rings of Hades where the sinners, frozen into eternal postures, must stare at each other. “A Stranger with a Bag” and “A Long Night” make the act of onlooking centrally dramatic; and the excellent “A Jump Ahead” ends with the narrator understanding what he has seen: his ex-wife preparing to die of leukemia.
The very best story in the book, thirty pages that feel as spacious as a novel, is “A Love Match.” It too is a story of witnessing: a brother and sister, Justin and Celia, live incestuously in a small English town and finally, killed by a stray bomb while in bed together, are discovered. The witnesses, the men who find their bodies, agree upon a fiction:
Then young Foe spoke out. “He must have come in to comfort her. That’s my opinion.” The others concurred.
This tale, with its congenial mixture of the Gothic and the pedestrian, excites the author’s prose to a fine vividness:
The rescue workers … followed the trail of bricks and rubble upstairs and into a bedroom whose door slanted from its hinges. A cold air met them; looking up, they saw the sky. The floor was deep in rubble; bits of broken masonry, clots of brickwork, stood up from it like rocks on a beach. A dark bulk crouched on the hearth, and was part of the chimney stack, and a torrent of slates had fallen on the bed, crushing the two bodies that lay there.
The first act of love, the initial violation of this most sacred taboo, is beautifully described and justified as an incident within the horror and fatalism and hysteria of the First World War. Their quiet life and smoldering secret allegorize England between the wars. Twenty years of truce pass in terms of private social strategies and public social movements. Justin arranges the dusty items of a dead eccentric’s military collection; Celia interests herself in the poor, in Communism. They make a few friends and sometimes attend church.
There was a nice, stuffy pitch-pine St. Cuthbert’s near by, and at judicious intervals they went there for evensong—thereby renewing another bond of childhood: the pleasure of hurrying home on a cold evening to eat baked potatoes hot from the oven.
The odors and occupations of inter-bella England, evoking Miss Warner’s full vocabulary of flowers and foods and architectures, are suffused with the blameless decadence of the central situation. The cozy sibling idyll of Victorian mythology has gone mad. Incest has become the civilized person’s ultimate recourse:
Loving each other criminally and sincerely, they took pains to live together happily and to safeguard their happiness from injuries of their own infliction or from outside.
Of course, no touch of implied condemnation, or of undue compassion, intrudes upon the perfect sympathy with which this scandalous marriage is chronicled. Miss Warner’s genius is an uncannily equable openness to human data, and beneath her refined witchery lies a strange freshness one can only call, in praise, primitive.
A Sere Life; or, Sprigge’s Ivy
THE LIFE OF IVY COMPTON-BURNETT, by Elizabeth Sprigge. 191 pp. Braziller, 1973.
In a time of outsize literary biographies, Elizabeth Sprigge has written a pleasantly compact and understated life of Ivy Compton-Burnett, ca
lled just that. Miss Sprigge writes, her foreword tells us, “as a friend,” and her book enjoys the privileged insights of close acquaintanceship, and suffers just slightly from the tactful reticence that friendship imposes. How nice it would be if, of Shakespeare, we knew details such as these of Miss Compton-Burnett: that she kept her work-in-progress stacked on one end of her living-room sofa; that when she acquired a refrigerator she “played with the new possession like a little girl with a doll’s house, delighted that each time she opened it a light came on”; that she loved fires, flowers, and fruit; that the walls of her flat held almost no pictures and all the floors were covered in linoleum; that when, in the Second World War, oranges became scarce and other adults let children have their share, she kept on eating hers, saying, “My need is greater than theirs. They have that nasty yellow bottled stuff at school.” Miss Sprigge shows something of her subject’s mastery of indirection, for, without ever dropping her affectionate tone, she manages to let us know that Ivy Compton-Burnett was a curiously hardened specimen of humanity: forbidding in manner, fascinated by money, blind to painting, deaf to music, fierce on etiquette, and, like so many of her characters, tyrannical. Miss Sprigge sketches unendearing traits as if they were endearing:
If a conversation took a turn alien to her, Ivy would bring it to heel. For example, one day at a friend’s tea-party a number of people began discussing a Russian icon hanging on the wall. Ivy listened for a few moments abstractedly, then observed decisively, “I do like a laburnum.”
