by Zadie Smith
Now the Melrose books are suddenly in vogue, and it’s tempting to chalk that up to the tidal wave of poshness presently crashing over England: a royal wedding, a conservative prime minister, a Bullingdon Club Cabinet, Terence Rattigan revivals at the National, Downton Abbey on the telly. But that’s a blue herring. St. Aubyn comes not to praise the upper classes but to bury them—though never completely, and not without some fondness—employing the same ironic, conversational mode in which this set are expert (“‘It’s the hardest addiction of all,’ said Patrick. ‘Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony’”). With their robust sense of entitlement, St. Aubyn’s characters can make his job look easy: less like writing than getting out of the way. They don’t skulk around waiting to be introduced by some workmanlike plodder of an omniscient narrator. They grab the bloody reins themselves, as if to say: For Godssakes, give it to me. Obviously you haven’t the faintest idea what you’re doing. The first lines:
“Surprised to see me?” said Nicholas Pratt, planting his walking stick on the crematorium carpet and fixing Patrick with a look of slightly aimless defiance, a habit no longer useful but too late to change. “I’ve become rather a memorial-creeper. One’s bound to at my age. It’s no use sitting at home guffawing over the ignorant mistakes of juvenile obituarists, or giving in to the rather monotonous pleasure of counting the daily quota of extinct contemporaries. No! One has to ‘celebrate the life’: there goes the school tart. They said he had a good war, but I know better!—that sort of thing, put the whole achievement in perspective. Mind you, I’m not saying it isn’t all very moving. There’s a sort of swelling orchestra effect to these last days. And plenty of horror, of course. Padding about on my daily rounds from hospital bed to memorial pew and back again, I’m reminded of those oil tankers that used to dash themselves on to the rocks every other week and the flocks of birds dying on the beaches with their wings stuck together and their bewildered yellow eyes blinking.”
Blimey. In St. Aubyn’s case, it’s just a bit dull to say the man has a “good ear for dialogue.” Some might protest that there can’t possibly be anyone left on this earth who actually speaks like Nicholas Pratt, but walk into the Garrick any day of the week and you’ll find half a dozen of them, slumped in their wingback chairs, nursing a postprandial brandy. (NB: Don’t try this if you’re not a member. Or not a man.) It may be a tiny demographic, but smaller groups have spawned longer novel cycles (Proust!). Nor does Patrick consider himself superior to the superior community from which he hails; on the contrary, he identifies, recognizing in himself a “man who had tried to talk his way out of everything he had thought and felt.” These novels nail that type and their endless chatter, but what ultimately lingers is a defense of the humble English sentence, its twists and turns, its subtlety and comedy—its control, above all. For whereas the tale of Patrick Melrose appears superficially to be one of excess, the books themselves are structured around the idea that linguistic control is a potent force. In St. Aubyn’s world, whoever controls the retelling controls the event. We might call it, after Lewis Carroll, the Humpty-Dumpty Effect.
Certainly the question of “which is to be master” preoccupies Patrick, who deals with his terrible family by encapsulating them with devastating verbal diagnoses. As he glances across the aisle at his “unhappy aunt” Nancy, who is complaining about the sparse and proletarian turnout at her sister’s funeral (“‘I mean, for example, Mummy only ever had one car accident in her entire life, but even then, when she was hanging upside down in the buckled metal, she had the Infanta of Spain dangling next to her’”), Patrick’s inner monologue perfectly reveals the root of her problem as well as St. Aubyn’s two inches of ivory:
The psychological impact of inherited wealth, the raging desire to get rid of it and the raging desire to hang on to it; the demoralizing effect of already having what almost everyone else was sacrificing their precious lives to acquire; the more or less secret superiority and the more or less secret shame of being rich, generating their characteristic disguises: the philanthropy solution, the alcoholic solution, the mask of eccentricity, the search for salvation in perfect taste; the defeated, the idle, and the frivolous, and their opponents, the standard-bearers, all living in a world that the dense glitter of alternatives make it hard for love and work to penetrate.
Writing reviews, you spend quite a lot of your time typing out the sentences of other people, i.e. quoting. Usually this is dull work; with St. Aubyn, it’s a joy. Oh, the semicolons, the discipline! Those commas so perfectly placed, so rhythmic, creating sentences loaded and blessed, almost o’erbrimmed, and yet sturdy, never in danger of collapse. It’s like fingering a beautiful swatch of brocade. This refusal to submit to the puritan brevity of the American sentence (or, worse, the artificial naivety of an English sentence intended to sound as if it has been translated from the French)—it’s almost enough to make you feel patriotic.
These sentences aren’t merely decorative. They’re important because they enable the comedy: when you create this many compartments in each line, you have space for at least two jokes and one sly dig. And it’s humor of the blackest kind, with Patrick’s parents feeling the brunt of it, even in death. In this final outing we learn more of Eleanor’s “philanthropy solution”—first described in Mother’s Milk—which drove her, in life, to give her attention (and fortune) first to children’s charities (“He had often been left alone with his father while Eleanor went to a committee meeting of the Save the Children Fund”) and then, in her final years, to a commune of new-age phoneys who swiftly relieve her of the house in Saint-Nazaire (setting of Patrick’s childhood misery and marital disaster). And all “without sinking one millimeter into the resistant bedrock of [her] self-knowledge.” Meanwhile, if readers of the earlier books were in any doubt about David Melrose’s psychopathy, an anecdote from his safari days casts new and horrible light on his demented personality: “He walked over to the rabies victim”—a man his hunting party have left writhing in a net normally reserved for pigs—“and shot him in the head.” Returning to the dumbfounded table, he sat down with a “feeling of absolute calm” and said, “‘Much the kindest thing to do.’ Gradually, the word spread around the table: much the kindest thing to do.” In that story, something crystallizes: how telling a tale can be a form of tyranny; how the English—out of politeness, class deference, or just plain fear—too often defend a narrative that is least true and most cruel.
This question of what constitutes the truth—of whose version of events shall rule—starts as a wry query, before building into a debate about the nature of consciousness. To aid this unlikely transition, we’re offered Erasmus Price, a celebrated academic, guest at Eleanor’s funeral and author of None the Wiser: Developments in the Philosophy of Consciousness. Patrick’s ex-wife, Mary (also present), once had an affair with Erasmus, a fact that dawned on Patrick only after he spotted her reading Erasmus’s tome one night in bed:
“You couldn’t be reading that book unless you were having an affair with the author,” he guessed through half-closed eyes.
“Believe me, it’s virtually impossible even then.”
This revelation prompts a relapse: “an ‘absolutely maddening’ period, when Patrick only emerged from his new blackout bedsit in order to lecture or interrogate [Mary] about consciousness studies”:
“Who will rid us of the Explanatory Gap?” he shouted, like Henry II requesting an assassin for his troublesome priest. “And is that gap just a product of our misconstrued discourse?” He ploughed on, “Is reality a consensual hallucination? And is a nervous breakdown in fact a refusal to consent? Go on, don’t be shy, tell me what you think.”
“Why don’t you go back to your flat and pass out there? I don’t want the children seeing you in this state.”
“What state? A state of philosophical inquiry?”
Are the brain and the mind the same? What is the material of consciousness? Is a “person” simpl
y the sum of a series of anecdotes consciousness tells about itself? It’s no surprise that Patrick longs for what Mary calls “a convincing and practical theory of consciousness”: if you’re taking medication for misery, you’re putting all your faith in the “explanatory gap,” in the hope that treating the brain will cure the mind.
The trouble is, Patrick doesn’t experience things as a unified self with a single mind; instead, life is inchoate, almost formless:
Social life had a tendency to press him up against his basic rejection of the proposition that an individual identity was defined by turning experience into an ever more patterned and coherent story. It was in reflection and not in narrative that he found authenticity. The pressure to render his past in anecdote, or indeed to imagine the future in terms of passionate aspirations, made him feel clumsy and false . . . His authentic self was the attentive witness to a variety of inconstant impressions that could not, in themselves, enhance or detract from his sense of identity.
The Melrose novels articulate this basic rejection. No one character, not even Patrick, is privileged; the trilogy ignores neat borders between central and minor characters, instead invading the minds of everybody all the time. What’s revealed is never pretty: a filthy stream of desires, incorrect impressions, strong opinions, self-defense and self-delusion. Structurally, it’s ideal comic material, but it’s also serious, because the central question of the comic novel—How can I know I’m not ridiculous?—has a deep affinity with the central question of the philosophy of consciousness: How can I know what’s real? At the funeral’s afterparty, Fleur, a lunatic acquaintance of his mother, whom Patrick recognizes from rehab, is found walking around asking people if they’ve ever tried the antidepressant she’s on. She reaches Erasmus:
“Have you tried Amitriptyline?” she asked.
“I’ve never heard of him,” said Erasmus. “What’s he written?”
Fleur realized that Erasmus was much more confused than she had originally imagined.
Patrick knows Fleur is mad and we know Fleur is mad, and Erasmus will work it out in a minute—but does Fleur know it? If we saw this funeral through Fleur’s consciousness, and only hers, we would, knowing no better, call it “reality.” Which is preposterous—who in their right mind would rely on the testimony of Fleur? Yet this singular, limited, unreliable access to the real is the fate of everyone on earth.
The most brilliant line in this book is not witty at all, it’s just painfully acute: “He had long regarded [his relationship with his mother] as an effect on his personality rather than a transaction with another person.” Patrick’s is an extreme case, but for all of us locked in repetitive and poisonous relationships with our “loved ones,” the questions of At Last are no joke. Refusing Mary’s invite to come and eat with his children, Patrick hears his son, Thomas, say, “You should change your mind, because that’s what it’s for!” But is a changed mind possible? Is it possible to be free? So long directed by forces apparently beyond his control—trauma, personality, brain chemistry—for Patrick, the idea of living a “voluntary life” is “extravagant”: “What would it mean to be spontaneous, to have an unconditioned response to things—to anything?”
The young Teddy St. Aubyn created novels of dazzling portraiture, not unlike the paintings hanging in the great houses of his ancestors. Perfectly rendered, often cruel, easily admired; but missing some central mystery, that bit of a person that can’t be pinned down by acts of spiky mimesis. Everyone exposed and categorized. At Last confesses the limits of explanation. “It’s very helpful,” Patrick concedes, “to see [my mother] from other points of view than the one I’ve been trapped in.” He is speaking to the new-age guru Annette, during whose speech—120 pages earlier—he had experienced the following:
Oh, please get on with it, thought Patrick. Charles Bronson was having a panic attack in a collapsing tunnel, Alsatians were barking behind the barbed wire, searchlights were weaving over the breached ground, but soon he would be running through the woods, dressed as a German bank clerk and heading for the railway station with some identity papers forged at the expense of Donald Pleasence’s eyesight. It would all be over soon, he just had to keep staring at his knees for a few moments longer.
The slow encroachment of something like sincerity inevitably means the comic integrity suffers, as the acid pleasures of saying-what-you-don’t-mean give way to the therapeutic impulse: saying what you really mean. It’s simply not funny to add, after the subtle quip about Save the Children, the explicit line: “Patrick could not help thinking that this passion for saving all the children of the world was an unconscious admission that she could not save her own child.” And the final sentences of the book would have been improved quite a bit by the removal of the very last (“He picked up the phone and dialed Mary’s number. He was going to change his mind. After all, that’s what Thomas said it was for”). But here and elsewhere, one senses an emotional imperative that means more to the author than matching Evelyn Waugh barb for barb. (Nicholas: “Whatever [David’s] drawbacks as a parent, you must admit that he never lost his sense of humor.” Patrick: “He only saw the funny side of things that didn’t have one. That’s not a sense of humor, just a form of cruelty.”) In this sparkling adult book, a little boy’s cheesy line shouldn’t be dredged up for a closer look. But I can’t help soften toward it when I think of St. Aubyn—who has credited his children with bringing him, at last, some measure of happiness—placing it there like a seal on a love letter.
Despite the stiff-upper-lip contempt for psychiatry common among Patrick’s class (after the funeral, Nicholas keels over dead from a heart attack while delivering a diatribe on the subject: “Polluting the human imagination with murderous babies and incestuous children . . .”), and in spite of his own ironic armor, Patrick appears to have drawn real strength from therapy and rehab, finding himself repeating—to his own amazement—slogans from the Priory that would have made Nicholas foam at the mouth (“Resentment is drinking the poison and hoping someone else will die”). The Beckett-quoting heroin addict “drowned in dreams and burning to be gone” is no more. And, like Krapp, the new Patrick Melrose is someone who no longer needs to be someone—who isn’t even trying to be someone. Words fail him, in a good way. One of the most articulate descriptions of just that kind of inarticulacy is William Empson’s six-line masterpiece “Let It Go.” On the brink of a relapse, in the back of a taxi, Patrick thinks of the poem:
“Back to the Priory?” said the driver, no longer quite as sympathetic to his passenger.
He doesn’t want to know about those of us who have to go back, thought Patrick. He closed his eyes and stretched out in the backseat. “Talk would talk and go so far askance . . . something, something . . . You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.” The whole thing there. The wonderful inarticulacy of it, expanding with threat and contracting with ostensive urgency.
Many writers would do the ellipsis thing there, but it takes St. Aubyn to misquote in such a humble, deliberate way. In novels things are always “coming to mind,” but usually with a gloss and polish that belie real consciousness. With St. Aubyn, madhouse is never very far away.
On Island Life and Mother Love
All across the Jamaican diaspora you can hear versions of this conversation:
First Jamaican: You go back recent?
Second Jamaican: [Sighing] If I go, I don’t tell nobody I come. Me cyaan have no holiday dere. Jamaica change.
Followed by a misty-eyed reminiscence about Jamaica in the seventies, or fifties, or thirties—depending on the age and political persuasion of the participants—and a few envious words about a neighboring island (“You been St. Lucia? St. Lucia nice”). Finally, talk turns to one’s own “yard”—be it in London, Manchester or Miami—where your extended Jamaican clan are usually embroiled in some “vexing” interpersonal drama, which everybody in the family condemns (“Them got no respeck for nutting!”)
but nobody seems able to resolve.
Ian Thomson’s excellent The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica is a 350-page disquisition on the above. Filled with many sympathetic and surprisingly well-transcribed examples of Jamaican conversation (Thomson is a white Scot), the book was, apparently, prompted by a brutal English one: “J. G. Ballard suggested that I go ‘somewhere depressing, like Chechnya—what about Jamaica?’” This revelation is unlikely to endear the book to Jamaicans, who tend toward guarded, wounded pride. (“What are you doing in Jamaica?” a woman asks Thomson at a meeting of the Jamaican Historical Society. “Have you come to stare and make fun?”) On the other hand, nobody knows better than Jamaicans themselves the despair that stalks their island paradise. Thomson’s book goes beyond the oft-recited dysfunctionalities to provide their essential historical context, and his literary sensibility matches the strange beauty of the place: “I stood transfixed by the window as the palm trees, lit up by lightning, banged their heads on the lawn, then whipped back like dry-fly rods.”
Thomson, the author of an equally fine book about Haiti, Bonjour Blanc, finds the Jamaicans he meets early on to be full of warnings, which they convey Jamaicanly: “I had been warned not to go downtown. ‘People are very grudgeful down there,’ uptowners would tell me.” Being grudgeful, in Jamaica, usually means you’re packing heat: “If you didn’t have gun . . . the drug men kill you—if you did have gun, them kill you even worse.” That’s Valerie Salmon, a Kingston housekeeper in her fifties, one of the first Jamaicans to try to explain to Thomson the cycle of envy, self-contempt and poverty that has bestowed upon her country one of the highest murder rates in the world: “All Jamaicans had ‘prejudice’: even the poor in the shack dumps uptown looked down on those in the squatter colonies downtown. ‘I don’t know if it’s a master–slave thing or what,’ Valerie said, ‘but is so life go.’”