critic, interrupted

James Wood – The Fun Stuff

Ex cathedra pronouncements on the state of literature are gratingly at odds with the democratic spirit of modern Western culture. An Arnold or a Leavis would find themselves on the back foot, in a climate in which the Canon has been disparaged and dismantled by the academic soixante-huitards, and to contend for the intrinsic elitism of art is to confess to one's political bias. A fuzzy left-liberal consensus has made the expression of value-judgements somehow, at best, suspect; a matter of reactionary tendencies and ill-concealed disdain for the popular accessibility of the arts, creeping unbidden into neutral debate. As if to argue that some works will inevitably be better than others amounts to a self-betrayal, letting slip clues to a High Toryism of the spirit. (No coincidence that this wholesale enfranchisement of literary culture has portended the non-appearance of another Lionel Trilling, say.)

James Wood emerged as precisely the kind of heir-presumptive to F.R. Leavis at precisely the moment when the distrust of the critic-as-aesthete had become so rooted in cultural discourse, that he seemed almost wilfully retrograde. Marxisant scholars like Raymond Williams and politically engaged savants of the sort best exemplified by Edward Said had among them contrived to make any discussion of culture that wasn't au fond political appear faintly absurd. Criticism was to be a perilous negotiation with power structures, a demarche in the extra-literary sphere. Whereas 'traditional' criticism - hidebound, reactionary - was reduced to a mazurka of mendacities. Said, for one, could elucidate the rhetorical and narratological strategies of Conrad as deftly as Lionel Trilling; but this was in the service of a broader political vision. A critical reading uninflected by some form of political emergency was fluff. Moralism of the Leavisian stripe - involved in an examination of what constituted a good life well-lived - yielded to a more expansive theory of literature, founded on principles drawn from the radicalism of the sixties, progressive, disaggregrative, angry.

A refusal of this fundamental orientation seemed perverse, ideologically unsound. But James Wood wrote out of the rejected mode. The Broken Estate, his first collection of essays, was written under the sign not of political activism, but was theological in its complexion. Its seriousness gestured not towards a horizon of revolutionary violence - or even Comtean social melioration - but towards an idea of literary fiction as the disjecta membra of a universe from which God had been summarily evicted.

That fiction at its highest pitch could reinstate the meaningfulness and purposiveness of the human enterprise - when such an earnest had been forsaken with the death of God - was the ground-bass to Wood's critical arias. His concept of Realism was given point by a curiously secular faith: there was something 'miraculous' in the capacity of a writer to convey intelligibly the hazards of experience, in the artful contrivance of recognitions. The novel could plausibly tack between antinomies - and gently teased the reader into a state of 'belief' that rehearsed or shadowed the belief of the religious adherent. Its manoeuvres were those that drew on the same psychic attitudes adopted by the believer. Fiction - because it doesn't commit us to the doctrinaire, can say 'Yes, but..', can aid us in spanning contrary experiences of life (meaning modulated with meaninglessness) - is the preeminent art-form: a complex fugue of granite and rainbow. Wood read, in The Broken Estate, through the mesh of a reluctant agnosticism - like a phantom limb, the religious impulse is still obscurely preserved in us; we still turn heliotropically to a vanished source of light. There could be no doubt that Wood wished to be taken au serieux - these essays are gristly with earnestness. They invited us into the cathedral hush, the contemplative stillness that serious art requires of us. In The Broken Estate much of Wood's energies are given over to illustrating, as with Virginia Woolf, that the "novel acts religiously but performs sceptically." (This from the Introduction to the collection: possibly a post hoc rationalisation - as, arguably, the succeeding essays don't quite fulfil it.)

Contra the po-mo theorists and practitioners, for Wood it remains an article of faith that the novel can lead us back to reality. We've grown so accustomed to the conventions of the novel - plot and character chief among them - that we need to be reminded that something essentially uncanny is at work when we offer ourselves to the virtual staging-ground of the novel. The attentive reader moves silently through a tenement of occupied rooms, a spectral guest, in a kind of espionage; the novelist having brokered this delicate relation between the woman reading and those peopling the work. 'Ensouling shadows', Hilary Mantel called it somewhere. And when fiction too obviously displays its pneumatics - as in the immaculately crafted but sterile work of Ian McEwan - James Wood will flag up the failure of the effect. The novelist, 'that free servant of life', must steal a march on the hardening of literary form into convention, as Wood reminds us in How Fiction Works, must be latitudinarian in her use of the familiar toys of the craft, and always be primed to swerve away into 'lifeness'.

Wood's militancy - a severity that occasionally calls to mind Leavis - has drawn fire from various quarters. His negative manifesto 'Hysterical Realism' strafed the literary practice of a group of writers for whom energy and a hurtling headlong Tiggerishness was the prize; and Wood found this all so much indiscipline, self-indulgence, a scouting of the responsibilities of the art. Rather, patience and considered judgement must invest the novelist's endeavours, a steady authoritative attending to the sometimes near-illegible signatures of motive and action. Wood was coming to seem Master of the Rolls, inhabiting the pages of the tonier literary magazines: as Salman Rushdie sniped from his memoir Joseph Anton, Wood was a Procrustes, mutilating the novels he criticised the better for them to fit his preconceptions of what the form should be.

Both The Broken Estate and its successor The Irresponsible Self were assemblies of book reviews published elsewhere. Few reviewers carry sufficient heft - in terms of the unity of their concerns or stylistically - to justify such consecration: most are vaguely in hock to publishers' PR machinery, and the copy itself is a spumante of critical cliches. One hopes that Wood has a book-length critical study in him; but his collections are distinguished by a binding coherence and common interpretative emphases, marbling these pieces with what we might gingerly term a metaphysical patina. Characterisation in the novel bears a decided share in this, for Wood. Those moments in fiction when a character suddenly slithers from under the net of authorial control, when the representation of self to the self locks into brilliant focus; agency depicted as richly and fluidly as we ourselves experience it; and an Emma Woodhouse emerges as a self-reflective being, in all her contrariety - those moments are the dividend of cleaving to literary realism. Wood identifies Shakespeare as the great innovator here, casting aside the stiff brocade of stage-rhetoric and permitting his personae the full dignity of self-awareness; such that we meet them as autonomous selves, by turns opaque and translucent, clean-edged and blurred, governed by discernible motives and bafflingly motiveless. The realist novel took instruction from Shakespeare, grasping that within its scope should come the portrayal of persons as ragged hives of impulses. The 'irresponsibility' that Wood talks about - prompted by his reading of Coleridge's reading of Shakespeare - announces itself in the 'drift' of a literary character into her own kind of self-appropriation: not as the mannequin of the novelist, nor as a cipher of the novel's overt concerns; but as an entity imbued with something close to awareness - crucially, though, to which the reader is privy. Technically, the most effective device for this eavesdropping is free indirect style, in which the character's perceptions and the stipple of thought are rendered, so lightly as not to mar the image. It permits a moment of unflawed communion with the character, possibly one whose strangeness might be rebarbative. Here the ethical implications of Wood's critical stance are at their most emphatic. In the literary parlour game of briefly "inhabiting the wilderness of another's soul", we're tutored in the often taxing business of empathy. We must give the otherness of others its due, however it may unsettle our own self-regard.

Other readers of his new collection The Fun Stuff have detected a slackening or lowering of pressure. But the title of the book - which may have given rise to this supposition - is more a wistful acknowledgement of Wood's own limitations; more about what he cannot do, and where he cannot go, than programme notes for the book at large. "For me, this playing [Keith Moon's exuberant drumming] is like an ideal sentence of prose, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never quite had the confidence to: a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but dishevelled, careful and lawless, right and wrong." To be less buttoned-up, less diffident, and to attempt something riskier, creatively: but the musician in his ecstasy of self-forgetting remains for Wood the figure from a daydream. The critical beadle is back on duty in these essays, not quite so unforgiving, but with his accustomed sharpness of eye and the glinting panache of his prose. Odd that Wood should write of lacking confidence, when he can collar Cormac McCarthy for a tricksy dalliance with theodicy that never quite comes off, never convinces. Or can mildly chide Alan Hollinghurst for slipping into the register of a cheap novelette. Indeed, the essay on Keith Moon that opens the book – where you might take it as a keynote to the rest – seems not, in fact, to orient the reader toward the themes of the remainder at all.

pentimento

Sifting his thoughts, idly, as if he had all the time in the world. The uninsistent English rain spattered the window. Dove-grey light disclosed a woman stepping briskly over the pavement, holding up an umbrella as freely and naturally as if it were her own hand that had bloomed, fingers lengthening to spokes, the webbing swelled to a fat dome held above her cropped head. Elementalist. The private garden on the other side of this residential road – bounded by a speared wrought-iron fence – was brilliant, bejewelled in its greenery, shining in the fresh wet. The woman crossed over, lightly, as on tiptoe. She carried her head high, with unemphatic elegance. The rain intensified a touch, and he could hear it through the glass, like cloth tearing.

She sidestepped a slow-crawling car, made the other side, continued. The sun was shy behind a grey swagged cloud. Larissa moved pantherishly, commandingly, it seemed to him – something flamed in the pit of his belly as he watched her approach. He realised his coffee cup he still held was empty, and placed it on the whatnot.

His whole week had been funnelling down to this moment. The succession of days were only a kind of vestibule, and waiting seemed the dominant activity, even if he'd been doing things. Even if his body had, filling up space, moving through rooms, among people. Meetings at vast deal tables under the gaze of ancient magnates hung on the oak panelling. Hurried discussions in stairwells. Lunches in pubs. And now, with Thomas Tallis issuing from the sound system in this Bayswater flat, everything else just fell away. A week of irrelevance. Absence as a hook in the viscera. Larissa drew parallel to his ground floor window, striding by, shot a brief wave at him in passing. Then she was at the door.

“You haven't been waiting all morning for me?”

He shrugged, smiling. Spem in alium flowed out of its material envelope and resolved into silence. He stood looking at her, as if her every feature hadn't been imprinted on his mind, giving a bias and tilt to his thoughts. She wore a light summer jacket and pencil skirt, her erect slenderness making the ensemble neat and practical. She had always this quizzing air, of being on the point of asking a question from which universes of meaning would rush. The slight cleft chin delicately pushed forward, the nimble provisionality of her attention. She folded up her umbrella and lay it against his desk.

“You've got me for an hour,” she said, and he could only nod idiotically. Unfussy, smartly shedding her jacket, Larissa crossed the floor, the carpet with its worn nap and wine stains; sliding by the work-table with its coppice of papers and books. She was before him, and straightening the open collar of his shirt. His breath came levelly, unfaltering, yet his heart swelled with delight.

The sunlight in its generosity lent highlights to her temple, her cheek, her jawline – her left eye caught and held it, the iris glowing green. Her boyishness – that gamine slightness mildly undercut by the discreet never-neutral contours of her hips and breasts – made all the keener the charm and charge of her physical presence in this musty room. He should offer her something, a coffee. But he really should drop to his knees and praise her. But he stood there, simply. She waited for him to speak. Reality split and branched, and multiple shards of possibility sprayed outwards from this still centre. A refuse collection truck nosed along the road outside; the brutish and uncontainable thrum of its machinery filling its sheer tonnage transmitted itself to the room. He felt the flicks and dabs of her appraising gaze on his face – he never could bear such close examination, but it was an intelligent scrutiny tendered in simple honesty, and he allowed it, when with anyone else he'd have turned his face away. The image thrown back by a mirror always appalled him. The haggard, care-worn face – that time had gouged and pitted - thus presented seemed not to be his, more the rude carven mask of a witch doctor, features a primitive daub, scabbed, cracked, awful! He wanted to – but could not – tell her how great was the gift of his not turning away, an intimate benison that resisted speech. (But wasn't the obligation in the circumstances to tell everything?) The faintest allusion of a smile browsed her lips. He marvelled at the steadiness of her gaze. In the card-shuffle of those seconds, he was the young man of twenty-five years ago – the blithe seducer, assured that to want was to have. Did she have an inkling, that she had this restorative power? Or was that the ultimate surety of her charisma, being unaware?

A London hour. Pigeons capered on the low garden wall, scruffy loiterers. The vast unending slipstream of urban life pressed invisibly against the glass.

She said, “Let's have something a bit more appropriate.” - and bent to where the sound system crouched. Brittle clatter of CD cases. Ruminative humming and muttering. The pricked bubble of an 'Oh!' And the soundless This! declaring she'd made her choice. Larissa popped the disc into the player, raised herself in a touching knock-kneed way and turned to him once more. She flattened her skirt with deft hands, brightly challenging his immobility with a broad smile that enhanced that naiad quality of hers. “Now,” she said, “we've got to get you to loosen up!” Those hands were cool and dry in his. Willow wands. The music came from the speaker like an animal emerging from a brake, quiet, a dainty tremor at first. Waltz time. (Even as she moved to embrace him, Larissa was widening the floor space with the toe of her court shoe – her natural economy of grace.) These preliminaries gave him the time to reflect a little – not 'think' as such, but a wordless medley of impressions and unformed notions, held in suspension yet gently drifting – on the conspiracies of chance that had brought them together. An autumn day, the livery of reds and browns and yellows edging the urban streets, sodden yet somehow grand, as the year gathered the last days within itself – dashes through the rain from one doorway to another – Coldplay on a taxi radio – a stray dog, its fur daggled and dripping, with such a candid sorrow in its shining eyes that he had to let it in... (She shook his hand when they met, he remembered – and it still had that lightness.) Our minds seek to engineer these fables of consequence, where seeming randomness is retrofitted to serve our deeper instinctual need for a narrative line, for alembicated meaning. That life should feel plotted in a shapely way, is a universal prepossession: we need it to be so. He mourned for lost time, sitting alone, a paperback neglected on his knee, gazing out. Hours, days, weeks, irrecoverably gone – and they'd barely touched on his awareness; their value known only afterwards. He understood why people craved .. what was the term? .. 'peak experiences', happenings as blazonry. And, in these terminal days, Larissa brought with her the promise that the memory of these hours would be impressed deeply in his mind. A dancer resetting time with her movements, the fullness of it could make you weep...

“Tread on my toes,” Larissa was saying, “and you lose points.”

“I'll try my best not to,” he said with a twisted grin that closed his eyes. Said with a grainy tongue. “I found a shop dummy in a skip the other day. Almost – almost – picked it up and took it home. As a practice partner.” She chucked him under the chin.

“Would've been just as good as me.”

“Rubbish.”

Revolving slowly on the spot, their bodies as close as lovers' but girdled by that chaste compact that understands that nothing more is intended, nothing more will result from this physical nearness, than the bodily expression of sexless pleasure. And he did tread on her toes from time to time – she'd yip with mock distress, and he'd apologise and pause. His clumsiness had become vaguely ritualised, and her adoption of the tutor's role – with its happy blend of hope and exasperation – suited her queerly – as did her unemphatic acceptance of power between them. He turned at her prompting like an ancient, barnacled sea vessel, with Larissa as the gently urgent wind.

These moments are their own guarantee.

The room had darkened as the afternoon wore on. Indeed, the light had lost that charmed translucence of earlier, a bleakening that vaguely plucked at his gut, as if to remind him that the hour would end and she'd leave. Still he made his ungainly revolutions within the pivot of their standing. And her bright boyish face pressed its encouragements on him.

Music fused them bodily and made an improvised grace. Larissa beamed at him when, for a few magical moments, their accord was perfected, and it felt like dancing. Corseted by his clumsiness as he passed through the workaday world, now he issued a snub to gravity. It was good, it was right – it lengthened his bones and turned his skull into an origami cube, aerated. But the worm was in the bud. Larissa's face had taken on an pixellated indistinctness, though it was never so close to his. Earlier he could see each eyelash, and the gold flecking in her iris. Now her eyes were watercolour daubs, runny and grey-black. Her mouth smeared by a thumb. Her face – formerly a dainty heart-shape – fattened and rippled, the chin like a pendulous ooze of melted tallow... Frosty creepers stole up his spine. The space behind her head became a Gerhard Richter frieze, horizons of undetailed colour. “How … more … turning … able?” - She spoke as from the depths of the sea.

Poliakoff released her, letting his hands drop like hung game to his sides. His chest felt cased in tacky soap, and he could feel his pulse ticking in his neck. She was there, whole, a sweet signature of puzzlement on her face. He stepped back from her, shaking his head. “Too.. too much..” - words as wood shavings, dry, curling to the floor. She recoiled in those brittle seconds, from the pain on his face. From the howl that was ribboning then ballooning from his mouth.

decline and fall

Martin Amis – Lionel Asbo

Is Martin Amis a prose stylist too heavily mortgaged to his own style? It occurs to you, reading his new novel Lionel Asbo, that the trade-mark melopeia of his language really isn't equal to the celebrutality of modern England, its grotty decadence – too mannered, too prone to devolving on itself lyric finesse; well-tooled, when so much that it wants to describe is shabby, rough-edged and maladroit. Dickens could ascend to the High Style when the fit was on him, but his style was, au fond, born of low-slung journalese, siphoning its energies from the vernacular. Amis – reaching for a Dickensian amplitude and gusto – seems instinctively to revert to a miniaturist precision, a delicacy of registrement, that is almost, yes, Austenesque. And somehow wanly apolitical. The lovely mellowness of his previous novel The Pregnant Widow owed itself in large part to the four-ply style, a pitch and poise in the line, balance in each perfectly chased sentence. What a state-of-England novel needs – and Lionel Asbo doesn't have, regrettably – is a kind of in-built preparedness to destroy itself, a cannibal language, self-consuming, rabid as society is rabid. A rhetorical stave like this one might or might not be an effective bit of writing, but it's unassigned écriture– where is 'the world of the manifest', as Amis calls it?:

In Diston – in Diston everything hated everything else, and everything else, in return, hated everything back. Everything soft hated everything hard, and vice versa, cold fought heat, heat fought cold, everything honked and yelled and swore at everything, and all was weightless, and all hated weight.

British culture in the main is an anti-poem, a consumerist Cloaca Maxima, an unholy orgy of money-grubbing, vulgarity and bottomless hypocrisy. The literary – capital 'L', as Amis would understand it, as a value-system among other things – has been all but extinguished. Every novel must be its own valediction. No more Dunciads. Now get out of that.

whisper music

Craig Raine – T.S. Eliot

There were hints and mutterings of his prejudices; but with Anthony Julius's T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, the charge was set forth aggressively. Eliot's sovereign standing had gone unchallenged for a generation or two, his pronunciamenti acquiring the weight of orthodoxy in the literary world. His poetry of negation spoke to a shared spiritual rudderlessness, as he searched painfully for meaning in a desacralised universe: Eliot, ..”a poet of apocalypse, of the last days and the renovation, the destruction of the earthly city as a chastisement of human presumption, but also of empire.”

      So Frank Kermode, in his Sense of an Ending. “He had his demonic host, too,” Kermode adds; “the word 'Jew' remained in lower case through all the editions of the poems until the last of his lifetime, the seventy-fifth birthday edition of 1963.” Julius levelled against Eliot the gravest of accusations. Insisting that the anti-Semitic insults weren't merely blemishes on the poetry, but actually somehow nourished it, he argued that Eliot's work was enhanced by malignity: hatred was its lymph. The boldness of Julius's position still might give us pause. But it convinces only insofar as we accept anti-Semitism as something more than just a regrettable psychic kink. Julius wants to impress on us that in Eliot it was programmatic. (James Wood described Julius's study as “..an unstable book about an unstable subject; reading it is like watching a maniac trying to calm a hysteric.”)

 

Over a decade later the intensity of the controversy has waned, and it's a nice question as to how damaged by it Eliot's reputation finally was. As the poetry of Philip Larkin can no longer be read quite innocently – the same covey of critical shrikes as have set upon Eliot saw to that - so are we obliged to make certain readerly concessions, greater or lesser, as we examine Eliot's work. Craig Raine has defended Eliot from the kick-off, holding that the documentary evidence for his anti-Semitism is inconclusive, that his poetics militate against mere self-expression, and that we cannot uncomplicatedly infer the personal from the subtle play of the poetry's language – which, after all, works with involutes of word, tone and image that require careful parsing.

      Reading the poems as encoded autobiography is fraught with difficulties, anyway – especially with so continent a man as Eliot appears to have been. Hints and guesses are all we have to go on, if we follow that tack. Raine detects in the body of work a theme which does lend itself to critical scrutiny, however. (The alleged anti-Semitism is reserved for an appendix.) He traces 'the figure in the carpet', the unifying strain of thought that pulses faintly through the poetry, a poetry haunted by the 'failure to live', vital spirits throttled and the seedless diversion of emotional energy: more prosaically, “the cautious circumspection of our sluggish hearts.” From the strange études of the earlier work to the visionary hymnody of 'Ash Wednesday' to the chamber music of Four Quartets, via the penumbral jazz of Sweeney Agonistes, Eliot contends with the inertial drag of matter, the grotesquerie of the body and the wager on transcendence – all refracted through an obscure personal vision, and Raine's account is by no means the full picture.

      Matthew Arnold's poem 'The Buried Life' is the crib-sheet by means of which Eliot grasped this elusive theme. But Raine asserts rather than argues for its importance to Eliot. The poem itself is an reflection on spiritual blockage and the impossibility of true intimate contact: “And long we try in vain to speak and act/Our hidden self, and what we say and do/Is eloquent, is well – but 'tis not true!” - to which Eliot's answering cry redounds: “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' is a poem 'about' a soul hamstrung by convention, by caution; and its goading awareness that life, for others perhaps, is yet brightly unconstrained – something fuller, richer in reserve for others. (It evokes, as Hugh Kenner has it, “..a nervous system snubbed by the Absolute without committing [itself] as to whether that Absolute is the moral rigour of an implacable Creator or the systemized social discomfort of a Boston tea-party.”) Raine's key insight, the 'animating idea', is that this psychic deadening haunts the oeuvre. “In the early poetry,” he says, “the idea is animated by all of Eliot's young man's savagery, all his militant hatred of sentimentality, all his aggressive insistence on what we really feel – how unpleasant that can be, and frequently how meagre.” True, we find in Eliot's work a whispering gallery of unmoored selves, all more or less unfinished and subject to a variety of suppressions. But it's a flimsy, trivial notion of Raine's, creating the illusion of some mystery brought to light while doing nothing of the sort. With equal justice could you claim that the buried life was Larkin's master-theme. There is more to Eliot than this.

      'Unpleasantness' is something Raine responds to with a wry delicatesse. He warms in Eliot to the poet's willingness to acknowledge the ill-favoured and the damaged – the conventionally unpoetic: the quatrain poems are doodles of disgust, and 'Hysteria' registers the speaker's fear and loathing of female sexuality with a stiff-necked deadpan: “I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.” (If the critic seeks a common thread uniting the poetry, he might do worse than examine the instances in Eliot's work of such rejection of our creaturely selves, mired as we are in the gnarl of imperfect matter.)

      But a close reading by Raine is really a crabwise apology for his own practice as a poet. His criticism - interpretative frottage, really - gloats over the verbal detail in Eliot's poetry, skimping on a dimension which places it in a very particular socio-historical 'spot of time'. (Tom Paulin, by contrast, has suggested that 'The Waste Land' is a 'Keynesian epic', shaped in part by Eliot's engagement with J.M. Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace; and Eliot was a writer “..impelled by the currents and extremities of the social moment, pushed and pulled by history.” The 'corporate raider of English poetry', as Paulin has it, “...also expresses despair and anger, courage and idealism in what is really the greatest poem of the First World War.”) The peculiarity of its address, its unforgettable cadencing, the micro-transactions at the level of the line between the seedy actual and the exalted: all this somehow contributes to the enduring mystery of Eliot's poetry, and why it should still affect us.

overlord of the spaces and the silences

 

Hilary Mantel – Bring up the Bodies

One of Mantel's minor characters, the courtier Thomas Wriothesley voices what we may take to be an epitome of this novel and its predecessor Wolf Hall:

All our labours, our sophistry, all our learning both acquired or pretended; the stratagems of state, the lawyers' decrees, the churchmen's curses, and the grave resolutions of judges, sacred and secular: all and each can be defeated by a woman's body, can they not? God should have made their bellies transparent, and saved us the hope and fear. But perhaps what grows in there has to grow in the dark.

Mantel's Cromwell novels depict an extraordinary moment in English history – when the birth of the nation-state was bound up with the fortunes of two women, one discarded and damned, the other bearing in her belly the hopes of the succession. Katherine, the queen that was, is under house arrest, sequestered in a moated grange; Queen Anne, having given birth to the Princess Elizabeth, awaits the arrival of a male heir – while King Henry and his stewards contrive finally to assert the sovereignty of England, effecting the decisive break with Rome, and forging the modern nation almost by a kind of inadvertence. Indeed, if there is a subtext to these novels humming beneath their narratives of courtly intrigue, it's that of the advent of the Modern, a political settlement recognisable to us today:

But chivalry's day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys.

Thomas Cromwell is the ultimate arriviste: a blacksmith's son, a roaring boy from Putney, schooled in the violence of the underclass; all of which left him formidably resourceful, proof against the buffets of circumstance. He emerges in these novels as peculiarly 'modern' – in the matter of his political realism, his pragmatism and his tactician's genius. But Mantel purposely departs from the conventional portrait of Cromwell as the ruthless enforcer, and by means of the free indirect style, ushers the reader into the moment-by-moment of his conscious awareness. You're Cromwell's secret sharer in these pages. Placed among the contending voices of the privy counsellors, the court hirelings and ladies-in-waiting, Cromwell can instantly assay the charge of implication in any given encounter. He misses scarcely anything, is perhaps almost a novelist in the Jamesian sense – one on whom nothing is lost. Mantel shows us his household at Austin Friars, full of devoted retainers and promising young wards, Italian merchants and fugitive scholars. (He can recall the position of the pieces in a chess game abandoned years ago.) Yet he was capable of hounding Thomas More to death; and would do yet worse to those men unfortunate enough to have been snared in Queen Anne's adulteries.

Bring Up the Bodies follows on immediately from the close of Wolf Hall. (The first sentence comes with a strange visionary flourish - “His children are falling from the sky.” - enacting the doubleness with which we are to view much of what occurs later, both at the stylistic level and on the plane of plot and character: a stark surreality that, very briefly afterwards, accords nicely with the novel's covenanted realism.) Mantel brilliantly evokes the fevered conveyancing of information among the principal actors – all are spies in this 'dripping web of court patronage', where a throwaway remark can later carry huge significance. The royal entourage is a brocaded cavalcade of mannered politicking and whispers behind-doors. Intelligencers all, the various figures who haunt the king's presence are each engaged in a decorous negotium. Cromwell, 'the overlord of spaces and the silences', is alert to the vulnerability of truth to corruption, and comes to use it to his advantage:

What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

Mantel explores the idea that law-court truth and imaginative truth are irreconcilably at odds. The chancery-truth of the diplomatists and the lawyers is a chill abstract of 'the poet's truth' exemplified by Thomas Wyatt, whom Cromwell admires as his antitype: “A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.” As the novel progresses Mantel enlarges this theme – suggesting why Cromwell spared Wyatt from the king's wrath. The novel's language shivers exquisitely between a disciplined plain style (the historic present is used quite disarmingly to effect the palpable immediacy of the unfolding action) and subtle dabs of lyricism. Mantel has contrived a style at once lightsome and precise – the innovation of Wolf Hall was in the rendering of progression d'effet with economy and vital movement. The prose is charged with a fleet effervescence that makes it compulsive without showiness, richly appointed but not clagged with 'local colour'. Not the language of historical fiction as we've come to know it, with its clumsy heritage ventriloquism; but a pliable instrument that permits Mantel to eavesdrop on Cromwell's inner life. Bring Up the Bodies is a fine novel, with its dramatic torque and cold-eyed meditation on power – and Mantel's Cromwell one of the most arresting central characters in recent fiction.

homo homini lupus - i

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (2009) was signally more than just a venture into historical fiction by one of our most gifted novelists – it was a piece of elegant necromancy. Peopled by vitally shifting dramatis personae, it triumphed in at once giving us a shrewd image of its central figure, Thomas Cromwell, and at the same time hedging that image with a corona of indeterminacy and volatility that made good the 'lifeness' that the critic James Wood prizes in the very best novels. Mantel's Cromwell is an electrifying figure, and she confers on him the dignity of a fully-realised human being: “He is the inconsolable Master Cromwell: the unknowable, the inconstruable, the probably indefeasible Master Cromwell.” He deploys his statecraft with genius, yet frets that he may have the face of a murderer. He is directly complicit in engineering the execution of Sir Thomas More, yet jibs at the unflattering portrait Hans Holbein has made of him.

The suppleness of Mantel's prose ensures that she never sacrifices the reader's patience by depositing gobbets of historical detail at your feet, like a truffle hound. Henry VIII's bid to disentangle himself from his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the bitter contention with the Papacy, and, latterly, the unavailing efforts of Cromwell to have More swear an oath of recantation and accede to the Act of Supremacy – all this was dynamically, thrillingly portrayed. Yet Cromwell's domestic life was rendered with a sweetness and compassion, an almost eerie acuity. It's in according Cromwell the ultimate privacies – he seems fully ensouled, dense with mystery, in all his power and vulnerability – that Mantel has performed the rarest of feats. Like the spiritualist Alison in her Beyond Black, she conjures the dead, bodies forth phantoms..

throughother

Love's Bonfire – Tom Paulin

Tom Paulin's last collection, The Road to Inver (2004), showed a kind of thrawn fidelity to its source material, its Lowellian appropriations. The signature prickliness was there, as was the crackling boogaloo lexis. And, where Lowell's seigneurial grip on his material betrayed something violent, overinsistent – the poet as imperator – Paulin's repurposing of the poetry of Baudelaire, Montale, Simon Dach, all the rest, had more of a creative bienséance to it, as though Paulin found in these poems something out of which he might profitably invest his own restive energies (“You find the poem's title/but not the poem..” - 'Une Rue Solitaire'.) 

      Among the roster of better-known foreign poets (and how many more 'versions' of Montale's 'L'Anguilla' do we need at this late hour of the world?), one had been quietly installed, one seldom translated in the West and still less read: the Palestinian poet Walid Khazendar is represented in The Road to Inver by three poems

                                                 ..I could hear you trapped in your own voice

                                                   as we made sleaked talk – worse and worse

                                                   by a well that since we were kids

                                                   no one'd drawn a bucket from ever...

                                                                                             ('A Single Weather')

..and twelve more stand as the copestone and centre of Love's Bonfire, Paulin's new volume. It's harder to judge how burked by his own voice are these mintings of Khazendar's poetry: you'll seek in vain for English language translations. But they have a shorn, denuded unfussiness that's characteristic of all these new poems; the same unemphatic plain style that Paulin has settled into in the past eight years. A further access of language dismantled, after the (by his standards) flamboyant point-devices of a book like The Wind Dog, for example, with its allusive gusto, its use of the cento. More enterprise in going naked?

 

          The same fixation on the grungy, the soiled, the disreputable – but palled by a kind of ashen weariness, these new poems. The old combativeness, too, seems to have retired to a wan thought-taking, as Paulin's language has lost its mica glitter. The political covenant is still detectable; but less aggressively, with less of its former urgency. And still the patented Paulin voice – the 'derisive caw' (as Larkin described Bob Dylan's vocal delivery), the pawky Ulster vernacular in tension with literary inkhornisms. But Love's Bonfire doesn't represent an equivalent to Seamus Heaney's late clean-edged classicism. What Paulin has elsewhere termed 'political anxiety' has dulled to something dimly plaintive, if not baffled. A poetry harder to lay hands on. Paulin's earlier work intimated that it could be sensible of its own procedures – Paulin the critic was at the shoulder of Paulin the poet, assaying a poem's techne even as it flowed from his pen – a sort of live auto-criticism. In 'A Noticed Thing', Paulin returns to a favourite image of his, the windsock:

                                                 I happen on it this hot humid Friday

                                                 like the way you find a symbol

                                                 in a poem or novel

                                                 – something that's over- or predetermined

                                                 – something like that

                                                                          …

                                                 let me remind you

                                                 I was your image at one time

                                                 for the whole world

                                                 for everything-that-is-the-case

                                                 plus the wind rushing through it

                                                 or gulshing through it if you like

                                                 but perhaps you've moved on?

It recognises, now, its own provisionality. Paulin won't second-guess himself now. And, indeed, he is no longer quite the ambitious bricoleur he once was in Walking a Line, say, or, triumphantly, in The Invasion Handbook. Nor is his poetry the glorious noisy thunderbox it once had been – imagery and allusion and verbal promiscuity have been reined in; the vaunting historical ironies have gone, and the politics has lost its vinegar; and there isn't that nimbling spastic intelligence to it now. The bare lyricism still stirs in this collection – those jerky phrasings threaded by rhyme – but Paulin's short line feels less apt to spin off in unexpected directions, less aleatory music than a pared-down recitative, smaller, quieter, uncertain of itself. 'And Be No More Seen' packs in an entire aesthetic, ending with the poet's off-hand correction of a kind of ontic disfigurement:

 

                                               The oilcloth on the kitchen table

                                               an olive green thing – retro surface

                                               japped with little bits of water

                                               or if you like like with bits 'v watter

                                               and so throughother – itchy uncomfortable

                                               is what you call this kind of mess

                                               the ever so slight chaos of matter

                                               where what you want is tightness order

                                              - though having just said this

                                                it's like I've wiped the oilcloth clean

The occasions of this poetry – Montale's 'Le occasioni' – remained personal, sometimes wholly obscured, making them an altogether trickier proposition to interpret.

a note on christopher hitchens

No bright reversion in the sky for Christopher Hitchens – he'd have none of that ethereal humbug (even if the phrase was Alexander Pope's). But our pre-eminent essayist is gone, the political flyting never to resume, and the work with its elegancies and asperities summarily rounded out. His friend Ian McEwan tells how, in his very last days, Hitchens was completing a review of the new Chesterton biography, each sentence a torment to produce. But when it appears, we can be certain that it will have his signature graces: stylistic panache and intellectual rigour. Hitchens never permitted false quantities to mar his prose, and if he was a good hater of the Hazlittean stripe, he could articulate his loves with unsurpassed passion and cogency.

His political trajectory will be picked over and debated in the days to come – his 'apostasy' from the radical Left evidently still rankles in some quarters – but it might be worth reminding ourselves that Hitchens was also a brilliant literary critic, possessed by the conviction that literature still matters, as the great benefice of the ironic mind - even when imperilled by the tohu-bohu of an uglified, celebrity-blighted culture on the one hand, and the enormity of political tyranny on the other.  (Hitchens described the cultural landscape of the former as 'a tundra of pulverizing boredom' which could be applied to the former with equal justice.)

even supposing

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst – Becoming Dickens

It's doubtless to John Carey's The Violent Effigy that we owe our deepened, richer, less complacently knowing sense of Dickens the novelist. Carey tartly sandbagged the sociological Dickens, the jacobinical Dickens, the Dickens that Friedrich Engels would have acknowledged as a fellow traveller – the Dickens who somehow became associated with the Condition of England novel, and for whom each book was a polemical Tract for the Times: in short, the public Dickens. Carey drew our attention instead to the riptides of imaginative energy that surged beneath the surface of the text, the obsessive fondling of certain images, the unruly, contrary instability of Dickens's creative practice – the 'maelstrom of oddity', as John Bayley has it. Certainly the young Dickens was a brilliant improviser, assembling his skits and sketches with a harum-scarum energy. He was compelled to forge a style on the wing. (The critic James Wood recently complained that the “..big contemporary novel is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, and these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion.” Wood also decries 'the pursuit of vitality at all costs': but isn't this a just account of Dickens's writing, and the earliest work a fortiori?) 
          The poetry of his fiction – language vigorously destabilised, unresting and impossible to corral; the way Dickens's mind repeatedly returns to its fund of pictures and scenes and 'stage properties': Carey privileged an aspect of his work seldom attended to by more sober-sided critics. Indeed he freed us to think of Dickens as less Mr Popular Sentiment (in Thackeray's jaundiced formulation) than as a writer who – at certain moments and in certain moods – was possessed by almost a Beckettian tournure d'esprit. A kind of unholy violence seizes his work, something demonic in its antinomian pitch. Clubbable, genial Dickens conceals within himself a murderous vagabond, and Carey presented this new perspective in his slim, pointed critical study. G.K. Chesterton and Humphrey House became yesterday's men, critically speaking, at a stroke. (“Dickens,” Carey says at the outset, “is infinitely greater than his critics.”)

Doubtless, too, that Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has been a great gainer from Carey's influence. (There are faint chimes, deliberate or no, at sentence-level - “The fragmented vision results in both nightmare and farce. Naturally enough since farce is only nightmare of which we are no longer afraid.” (Carey) “Getting laughs out of childhood poverty allowed him to transform his hidden fears into nightmare's comic alternative: farce.” (Douglas-Fairhurst).) The critical donnée established by Carey – that Dickens's imagination took flight under the impetus of things seen and felt, that biography subvents creativity to an unremitting degree – is one Douglas-Fairhurst subscribes to. Becoming Dickens essays a close-reading of the period in Dickens's life when art and circumstance settled on a decisive course, and the young clerk succeeded in transforming himself into the celebrated novelist. Douglas-Fairhurst bases his study on the conceit that things could very much have been otherwise, that it was at this point that – if you wish to put it this way – the quantum multiverse split and branched into one stream of possibility, ghosted nonetheless by the alternatives: “Footfalls echo in the memory/Down the passage which we did not take.” Counter-lives throng Dickens fiction. One of his deep themes is the question of the vast complex of event that brings us to where we are, to what we are – and the insistent speculation that goes with it: how precarious our current fortunes, if so little depended on our choices and our determined will. Dickens's rise, of course, was a marvel of creative and professional entrepreneurialism. He was borne along by extraordinary energy and audacity. But he was sharply conscious also that his success had an alarming element of hazard about it – and his fiction often features elaborations of those aborted selves, some of whom remained impoverished copy-clerks or orphaned children. (David Copperfield might be read as a refracted autobiography, for instance: Dickens experimentally massaging and modifying his own life history – the net effect comes perilously close to naked self-aggrandisement.)

          In the course of a decade Dickens was engaged in a rigorous project of self-fashioning. Here, the young man of indeterminate social status – his family always seemed distinctly degringolade, always on the verge of tumbling another rung down the scale – husbanded his considerable resources and undertook to break onto the metropolitan literary scene. Douglas-Fairhurst examines the early magazine work with a scrupulous care seldom devoted to it and normally reserved for the major novels and stories. And he shrewdly cautions us: “Of course, reading Dickens's early sketches as windows that open onto his future risks falling into a form of critical doublethink, in which the early writing is praised as promising, but only because we know that its promise was subsequently fulfilled.” The sketch-writing and parliamentary reporting was elaborated – in an astonishing brief period of time – into the narrative bricolage of Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers, works whose governing principle was one of insuperable forward motion, the format of monthly instalments imposing on Dickens the need to respond with each number to the fluctuations of his readership's mood. Douglas-Fairhurst seizes throughout this study on 'biographical tipping points', where Dickens's life could have taken any of a number of different paths. One such moment was the suicide of Robert Seymour, an illustrator and caricaturist of a peculiarly neurasthentic disposition. Dickens had been commissioned to add text to an album of Seymour's satirical sketches of sporting life – a subordinate role for the fledgeling writer. But Dickens's rambunctious egoism prompted him to make criticisms of Seymour's work that – and no one can be quite sure what the causal link might have been – radically undermined the man, leading him to take his own life with his 'fowling-piece'. This allowed Dickens to wrest control of the project, out of which grew The Pickwick Papers and the onset of literary fame. And again: it was only the invention of Sam Weller in the fourth instalment that secured the ultimate critical and commercial success of the venture. Another 'tipping point', another crux at which things could have been very different. As Pip observes in Great Expectations:

That was a memorable day for me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

It's Douglas-Fairhurst's contention that Dickens was throughout his career hag-ridden by this sense of alterity, of other possible lives that might have been his had chance not interposed itself. (Henry James's late tale 'The Jolly Corner' is a reprise of the theme – the narrator is haunted literally by a version of himself who hadn't fled America, and had grown monstrous and degenerate.) Fiction became for Dickens an occult form of self-mastery, by which he dragooned the multiplicity of selves, real and virtual, that inhabited him. The singular merit of Douglas-Fairhurst's critical biography is that – not being a cradle-to-grave narrative – the contracted timeframe affords him the scope to concentrate in greater depth on largely neglected work that, scrutinised in a certain slant of light, further enhances our understanding of this formative period

the buried life

Alan Hollinghurst – The Stranger's Child

In the first of her Richard Ellmann memorial lectures delivered at Emory University in 1999 (published in On Histories and Stories), A.S. Byatt reflects that “[o]ne very powerful impulse towards the writing of historical novels has been the political desire to write the histories of the marginalised, the forgotten, the unrecorded..”; and this observation assonates with one of the principal themes of Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Stranger's Child – its solicitude for the buried life, the generations of men who were compelled to conceal or deny their sexuality, the unrecapturability of historical truth.

          The minor poet Cecil Valance spends a weekend at the family home of his friend George Sawle. Valance composes a poem based on the visit – 'Two Acres' – a fairly mediocre pastoral elegy which will become an anthology staple (inscribing it in the autograph album of George's sister Daphne). The two undergraduates covertly engage in sexual by-play, while Daphne, sixteen and starstruck, nourishes an infatuation for the poet. The Sawles are a touch déclassé, and Valance descends on them with all the condescension and mystique afforded by his own aristocratic background. He appears only in this first section of the book: slain in the Great War, his literary immortality is assured – and it's the after-life of his reputation that forms the motor of the novel. His life and work become a site of contention, for those who knew him and those – biographers and scholars – who didn't. The visions and revisions of the successor generation (the 'stranger's child' of Tennyson's In Memoriam – unknown inheritors) run athwart the mute ravening of time. And – challengingly, frustratingly – the novel's structure enacts these displacements: divided into five sections, its plot doesn't proceed in smooth linear fashion; rather, each part sets us at a point perhaps many years later, where it often isn't clear what has occurred to the characters in the interim. (Between Parts One and Two, for example, Valance has been killed; between Two and Three, the Sawle children have grown into late middle age, their lives in the meantime only faintly hinted at.)

          Latterly we follow the attempts of Paul Bryant, a young bank clerk, to piece together Valance's biography; braided with his erotic dalliance with a schoolmaster Peter Rowe, someone else with a concern in Valance's posthumous fame. Characters earlier introduced rematerialise, but diminished, somehow: and it's this unaccountable reluctance on Hollinghurst's part to give them their narrative due that hobbles The Stranger's Child. Scenes from the childhood of the Valance children – Corinna and Wilkins – are drawn with brilliant intensity, lit from within: but, when both reappear decades later, they are soured, broken and barren: with Hollinghurst offering no clue as to why they might have been alloted this fate. (It makes no sense humanly speaking; nor formally and creatively.) Paul Bryant is tiresome and priggish – but occupies a significant stretch of the novel's middle passage – we spend time with him in the reasonable expectation of some pay-off, of one of the conventional deliverances of narrative fiction. Yet he too slips below the story's horizon, and we glimpse him once more, in the final chapters, after a furlough, a bluff, bloated beneficiary of the Valance legacy, where he stands betrayed as an exploitative cynic for his own careerist ends. For a novel that stakes its authority and fidelity on the tender, patient delicate restoration of lost lives, it seems perverse that its characters should be so carelessly deposited in the landscape of the novel. Hollinghurst writes exquisite, lambent sentences with Jamesian finesse: and this evidently licenses him to feel that he can press his characters into the service of prose style alone; as if secretly he longed to dispense with the heavy obligations of the classic realist novel, yet feared – given the emotional reserve he so prizes, the controlled rage for order – the lawlessness of the experimental.