British to the Core
The hero of JAKE’S THING (Viking, $10.00), Kingsley Amis’s thirteenth novel, is an undistinguished, fifty-nineyear-old Oxford don named Jacques Richardson who, troubled by dwindling sexual appetite, seeks guidance from an Irish sex therapist named Rosenberg. The chief elements of Jake’s character are misogyny, promiscuity (thrice-married, Jake has had over 100 affairs), and secret buffoonery (Jake talks a lot to himself in voices that parody types he has encountered in books, TV movies, the Army, and the academy). The curve of the action traces the progress of Jake’s treatment (the regimen includes psychological retreats as well as the normal ministrations of sex labs). And the turning point of the story is Jake’s discovery of the essential heartlessness of the experts who are treating him, and his decision to seek other healers.
Like that of a half-dozen earlier Amis novels, the book’s narrative line is cluttered. The therapy enterprise spreads itself to include not only the hero, his mate, a couple with whom they’re friendly, the Irish therapist, and a brutal American “workshop facilitator,” but also a squad of encountergroup loonies. There’s a secondary theater of operations up at Oxford, involving an administrative review of the anti-coeducation stance of Jake’s college. And while the force of Jake’s misogyny links the themes of coeducation and impotence, the stories don’t really mesh, confirming that design isn’t this writer’s forte.
Elsewhere, though, there’s confirmation that, on the right turf, Kingsley Amis remains an extremely funny man. Funny about what? About accents and pronunciation, for openers. About minor sins of greed—those that prompt a person to genius improvisation to avoid sharing an expensive bottle with people who can’t tell Montrachet from Shinola. About dumb undergraduates—the sort convinced that Hamlet was a woman. About the blasted cityscape that afflicts the eye of London bus riders. And, most notably, about the gospel of technological advance as incarnated in the sexology of our own Masters and Johnson. I was amused by Jake’s unsuccessful effort to turn himself ondoctor’s orders—with boughten porn, and by Jake’s arid his wife Brenda’s dutiful participation in sessions of “non-genital sensate massage.”I laughed out loud at Jake’s response to a device called a “nocturnal mensurator,” meant to record the nightly history, erection-wise, of offending members.
And I expect merriment will, for some in the audience, dissolve most problems connected with this book. But there are problems—among them a growing meanness toward the young, a taunting Tory narrowness, and too firm a conviction that no decent address to cases of sexual frustration and torment will ever be possible from outside. I was also bothered by the turning point mentioned earlier—the hero’s discovery of the chilliness of the new sexual witchcraft. It comes off as a totally unexpected eruption of moral seriousness, featuring Jake the staunch exploiter and cynic rounding on his counselors in a manner implying passionate lifelong concern with standards of conduct. (The counselors are berated for cynical invasions of privacy and lack of humane fellow feeling.) Shouldn’t the man’s fineness of sensibility have been visible sooner? Come to think, how could anybody intelligent enough to teach at the University of Oxford link himself up in the first place with this crew of idiot sex savants?
I value the dependable acuity and wit to be found in every Amis book—the perceptiveness about a variety of institutions, not excluding faculty meetings. I admire Amis’s gift for the expression—oddly earnest, light in tone, realistic yet unpretentious—of what might be termed minimal moral truths: “The thing about you and your wife making love was that it made things all right, not often forever but always for a time and always for longer than the actual lovemaking. In that it was unique: adultery could make life more interesting but it couldn’t make things all right in a month of Sundays.” And I concede that the hero of Jake’s Thing isn’t onedimensional. He’s capable of making a caring gesture toward a madwoman, praising himself inwardly for this act, contrasting its good therapeutic effect with the abstract, impersonal care of paid physicians—and then facing up honestly to a snippet of evidence proving that his self-praise is excessive and that abstract paid physicians can’t he put down by the likes of him.
Yet, if it isn’t altogether absurd that Jake Richardson should be sprung upon us as a guide, it is awkward—and of a piece, I’m afraid, with other bits of moral shabbiness (that too gleeful Toryism) in Jake’s Thing. Amis fans will probably place the book well above such recent outings as The Alteration and Ending Up, and it could be mentioned in the same breath with Take a Girl Like You—but not with the imperishable Lucky Jim.
Traces of John Fowles and Vladimir Nabokov appear in John Wain’s THE PARDONER’S TALE (Viking, $10.95), the author’s twelfth volume of fiction. The book begins as an action-filled narrative centering on a missing person, a presumed kidnapping, and a sexual encounter having the flavor of adolescent fantasy; the narrator is a small businessman named Gus who is freshly extricated from a boring marriage and on holiday in Wales, where he downs a good deal of whiskey. Abruptly and ingeniously, after fifty pages or so, we segue to Gus’s creator, Giles Hermitage, novelist, who is at work in London, flogging himself on to finish the novel of which Gus is the hero, and downing a good deal of whiskey in response to the loss of a beloved. The balance of the book shuttles between the “real” and the “invented” stories, following two complicated liaisons—Gus’s with Julia, wife of a TV star, and Giles’s with Dinah, daughter of a mortally ill Hermitage enthusiast who seeks to draw the novelist into her unhappy life. In the sequel both male protagonists get exactly what they want, establishing The Pardoner’s Tale as that rare production, a novel with two happy endings.
Twice in its course the author envisages higher achievement—seems indeed on the verge of transforming his tale from a conventionally competent novelistic performance into something rich and strange. The first intimation of ambition occurs at the abrupt shift from Gus to Giles, wherein the reader discovers that the mystery atmosphere, queer and creaky, of the opening chapter is actually a unique contrivance by John Wain—mimicry of the sound of a novel haltingly composed by a writer leaning on the habit of work to sustain his sanity in a bad hour. The possibility glimpsed at this moment is of a novel that will stand as a work of technical revelation, an intricately playful probe of novelese.
The second intimation of ambition occurs during an interview between the novelist and the dying woman, in which the latter perfervidly states her belief that the former can prevent her from dying “in a fog”—can help her to understand the major events of her life, the deep conundrum of “relationships [that] succeed or fail.” The possibility glimpsed at this moment is of a stern entrance into a meditative rangepatient consideration of the grand issues commonly met in philosophical novels. (The book’s title, with its allusion to the story in The Canterbury Tales that looks closest at the meaning of mortality, reinforces this hope.)
But despite the intimations, no liftoffs take place. The paired narratives impinge less and less upon each other, banishing opportunities for technical explorations. And it emerges that, while the sick lady talks an intense meditative game for a few pages, exerting hypnotic power on Giles Hermitage, her purpose isn’t to seek illumination about last things but instead—in standard novelistic style—to entice Hermitage into an act of unexalted revenge.
A generation ago, John Wain and Kingsley Amis were grouped with a few others as Angry Young Men, protesters against gentility, but they have followed different roads over the decades. Amis has larked about politically, shooting down “leftie” cliches, organizing literary endorsements of the American invasion of Vietnam, and so on. Wain has been a soberer soul, avoiding gags, touching hard subjects now and again (rebellious youth, Russia), winning election to the poetry chair at Oxford, producing celebrations of classic authors (a moving biography of Samuel Johnson) and, on occasion, an elevated, unironic, unself-protective case for Art-in-the-large—a statement to which it’s hard to imagine Amis signing his name. Nevertheless, Wain’s vision of the function of novels is not, I think, all that different from Amis’s. The Pardoner’s Tale, a brisk-paced, noncomic read, is shrewd on the resemblances between old selfishness and new, between self-absorbed literary artists and narcissistic sexually liberated women. But it inhabits roughly the same county of discourse as Jake’s Thing—a miniaturizing sort of place wherein literary forms are shriveled by inferiority complexes and scorn of pretentiousness ranks as the highest good.
There has been much throwing about of critical brains lately on this subject—certain perceived uniformities in current English fiction. And the dialogue on the matter tends to be truculent, either antiAmerican or anti-English in spirit. In the current Paris Review, Joyce Carol Oates, just home from abroad, chides the English for having “ideas of form [that] are rigidly limited,” and praises our American fictionists for being “wilder, more exploratory, more ambitious . . . less easily shamed, less easily discouraged” than the London crowd. And, a while back, the London Evening Standard’s Auberon Waugh, England’s most important book reviewer, denounced Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift—”487 pages of sententious drivel [aimed] not to entertain . . . but to improve”—in a manner suggesting long-suppressed resentment at windy Yankee pomposity. (“I am a citizen of a free country, and this book is going into my wastepaper basket.”)
Considered as critical tools, these vocabularies of abuse—ambition, risk, and instruction vs. their opposites— seem crude. Obviously some fundamental differences of tone exist between novelists such as Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow, as do divergent opinions about the feasibility of improving people and about whether social or moralpsychological interests ought to dominate fiction. Bellow would feel himself obliged to explain—at length, as it says in the Evening Standard— precisely how a sophisticated consciousness like Professor Jacques Richardson in Jake’s Th ing could become entangled in quack therapeutic quandaries. Hundreds of pages are needed to tell why Professor Herzog in Herzog winds up peeping in a bathroom window of another man’s house. And it’s true that in some American quarters Bellow’s habit of thus explaining has helped to shape notions of novelistic seriousness and commitment.
It’s also true that Amis and Wain don’t share those notions, nor do many of their countrymen. The local audience understands that “the new Amis” or “the new Wain” isn’t about the inner realities of a hero’s quest, rise, fall, or whatever, but about (this time around) one of these, y’know, sex clinics, or about Oxford under the coed gun, or about radically liberated women. Cultural observation is the undertaking, not analysis of human motivation—and after the observation comes (maybe) an indictment, which needn’t be too scrupulously examined for its fit with the indicter.
Yet, having acknowledged these differences, I’d be wary of making too much of them—touting them as emblematic of gaps between English and American letters. Some English novelists have in common a loathing of longwindedness (for the record, the Wain and Amis novels each come in at about 300 pages), sententiousness, and wild ideas of form. Others, including America’s favorite serious English fictionists, Iris Murdoch and John Fowles, have in common an interest in formal innovation and a tendency toward bloat.
What’s more, still others abide by conventions of brevity, control, and traditional form without ever sounding like under-reachers. Perhaps the best of these is William Trevor, represented this season by LOVERS OF THEIR TIME (Viking, $10.95), a new collection of stories. (Trevor was born in Ireland but has been London-based for decades.) One sequence of tales in this book aims at nothing less than a recreation of the stunting impact of two world wars on the mind of a rural village. Two stories grapple, at the level of facts of feeling, with the Ulster anguish as endured by Protestants in the South and by Irish Catholics in England. And the book begins by walking unblinkingly up to the Conflict of Generations (an elderly woman and a gang of cosseted louts from a Comprehensive School) and charging it with genuinely fresh meaning.
That story is called “Broken Homes,” and tells about Mrs. Malby, a widow, who is bewildered one morning by some visitors, male and female, who enter her apartment unbidden, carrying paintbrushes, buckets, and ladders, and without explanation commence redecorating her kitchen in hideous shades of yellow and blue. Why doesn’t she instantly throw them out? Habit stifles the impulse—habit and fear. Mrs. Malby loves the privacy and independence of living in an apartment of her own, but she knows this happiness is fragile: the minute her neighbors and protectors perceive her as weakening, she’ll be dispossessed (“ . . . it wasn’t going to be up to her to state that she was senile, or to argue that she wasn’t, when the moment came.”). She’s haunted, in other words, by dread of seeming not to understand. “With all her visitors she was careful, constantly on the alert for signs in their eyes which might mean they were diagnosing her. ... It was for this reason that she listened so intently to all that was said to her, that she concentrated, determined to let nothing slip by. It was for this reason that she smiled and endeavoured to appear agreeable and co-operative at all times.”
The “field experience” of the high school painters is cut short, but not before the gang has ruined the widow’s kitchen, terrified her budgies, spilled paint over her carpets, made love, with transistors blaring (“we needed sex”). And by then the tale is humming with meaning beyond its own frame, fear of senility emerging as a mere special case of the universal anxiety about reaching the young.
Trevor, known in this country for his novels The Old Boys and The Children of Dynmouth, has a quiet voice —modest, reserved, delicately inflected. The recurring gesture in this collection is a smoothing of folds—a movement of mind continually asking recognition of our power (blessed and deluding) of assimilating, domesticating—finally of hiding—the strangeness of human deeds and days. And the most striking achievement is the title story, an almost indescribable romance that’s partly about the Beatles, partly about the mystique of Abroad, partly about the discovery in the sixties that everybody is a wild and crazy guy for whom life really ought to be Fun. In twenty calm pages “Lovers of Their Time” aspires to—and reaches—the condition of music, history, zany domestic comedy, and lyric poetry. (One high-flying lyric image is a bathtub with great golden taps located in a London railway hotel.) But the same low-keyed yet exhilarating sense of fictional possibility that animates this story breathes throughout the book. It’s bold, original, energetically ambitious work, marvelously assured; it’s also British to the core.