Dill felt he knew which way the senator would go. Nevertheless, he gave him some silent advice. Put important men in jail, young sir, and you gain but fleeting fame. Keep important men out of jail, and make sure they know it’s you who’re keeping them out, and you gain immense power.
Dill and Spivey make an extraordinary pair, friends whose infinite and justified suspicion of each other doesn’t cancel out their friendship. Dill likes Spivey in spite of his regrettable past, and Spivey is pleased to see Dill even if his curiosity poses a major threat to the whole scheme of his protected world. This is where the title starts to echo around the book. Spivey is planning to make sure the police chief becomes the mayor of the city. Dill smiles and Spivey says, ‘What I figure I’m really doing is growing my own briarpatch. Grow it high enough and thick enough, there ain’t nobody gonna come poking around in it.’ Later Dill asks him why he came back to the city. ‘It wasn’t just to grow yourself a briarpatch. You could’ve done that anywhere.’ Spivey agrees, and says he probably came back for the same reason Felicity never left. ‘It’s home’. Dill always hated the place, couldn’t wait to leave. But for Spivey it’s the only place where success means anything. ‘I guess home is where I wanted to grow my briarpatch and show how rich poor little Jake Spivey done went and got.’ Later still, Spivey gives another meaning to the term and ostensively defines ‘the ultimate briarpatch’: knowledge so damaging to important people that he ‘won’t even have to think about going to jail’. And it’s when Dill lays his hands on this knowledge that Spivey thinks he is going to have to kill him. It would be easy and safe. His friend the police chief is standing by and he’s not going to cause any trouble. Spivey points the gun at Dill.
As he aimed it, an expression of genuine sorrow spread slowly across his face. Dill wondered whether he would hear the gun fire. The sorrow then left Spivey’s face and regret seemed to replace it. He slowly lowered the automatic and said, ‘Shit, I can’t do it.’
The writing is extremely careful here. Is an expression of genuine sorrow the same as a genuine expression of sorrow? And if regret only seems to replace sorrow what might really be lurking there in its place? In one register Thomas is offering us a moment of high virtue in unlikely circumstances. If Dill earlier chose his friend rather than his government, here Dill’s friend chooses friendship over self-interest, a much tougher call. But the register of doubt, the sense of reading a face rather than knowing what the person feels, suggest something starker and simpler, although still impressive: there are killings that even killers can’t do, whatever the reason for their restraint.
Brer Rabbit’s briarpatch was also his home. He was ‘bred and born’ there, as he says when he taunts the fox. His triumph was to persuade his enemy that the worst thing he could do to him, the most horrible and terrifying of all torments, would be to fling him into a place of perfect safety and familiarity. The story is always rightly taken as showing the victory of brains over force, and of wit over awful odds. But in Thomas’s reading it acquires another dimension. You don’t need to be thrown into the briarpatch, because you’re already there – even though you did make it yourself, it is precisely the riches and grand manner you were not bred and born to. And in another sense you can’t be thrown into the briarpatch because, like the detailed memoir in Twilight at Mac’s Place, it doesn’t exist in actual space. Wherever people throw you will be your briarpatch. It is the name of your security, and a question of your relation with others. It is what you know about them, and it can lose its strength and comfort only if you let it go or use it badly. Here Thomas’s interpretation happily rejoins the traditional one; we are talking about wit after all.
V
The city in the novel is not named, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t know it or that it can’t create questions about knowledge. There are suggestions of Oklahoma City, since the parking meter is said to have been invented there, and is mentioned as a local achievement in the novel. Kansas City is described as ‘up there’ and ‘back east’. There is a ‘rival upstate city’ that might be Tulsa. But then there are streets that seem to belong to Chicago and a bridge that is to be found in Saint Louis, and the William Gatty international airport seems to have been invented. The ‘world’ airport in Oklahoma City is named after Will Rogers; although there is a Wiley Post airport there commemorating the first man to fly solo round the world, and his navigator was called Harold Gatty. It is at about this point that historical detection begins to look like the wrong track. Thomas is quietly suggesting that this city is a real place (within this fiction) and could also be any one of several other real places in the Midwest or Southwest: big enough to matter in all kinds of respects, and far enough from either coast to seem a little out of the way, especially if your chief view is from Washington. The sheer details, street names, old hotels, evocations of neighbourhoods and local legend, create the double effect of a place of memory – Dill’s memory, Spivey’s home – and a sober historical reconstruction. Anything that happens here will seem a little more ordinary than it has any right to be, and the story of the governor who was impeached twice (‘the first time for graft, which he beat by generously bribing three state senators, and the second time for the bribes themselves’) certainly sounds as if it could easily migrate around the region.
Dill’s new friend the lawyer is shocked when he cracks a man across the knee with a revolver to get him to talk. ‘It is an act, isn’t it?’ she says. Dill says ‘Sure’, but he doesn’t know whether it’s an act or not, and a little later we see his genuine ruthlessness in action. Like everyone else in this novel he will do almost anything for information – the ‘almost’ being a moral qualification of some refinement. He needs to get the hard-bitten, hard-drinking journalist Laffter to tell him a thing or two, and threatens him not with violence but a lawsuit for libel. Laffter is sceptical, then recognises that Dill is not bluffing, and that he could lose all his savings to the court. Dill grasps at once that he has won, ‘and almost wished he hadn’t’ – that crucial almost again. Laffter tells Dill what he wants to know, and promptly has a heart attack. This is where Harry the Waiter springs into action, and he and Dill manage to keep Laffter breathing until the paramedics arrive. Later he dies in hospital, another of this novel’s many victims of the quest for knowledge. Of course Dill has not directly killed the old man, but the event tarnishes him, to use Chandler’s word, and reminds us how mean the streets (and the press clubs and the mansions and the hotels and the apartments) are in this emblematic city. We can’t start disliking Dill at this stage, and of course we want to know what he wants to know. We can’t really disapprove of him either – or rather we can but our judgement is neither here nor there. What we do have to do is wonder who he is and where our liking has taken us. We knew that he too had his briarpatch, but perhaps we weren’t ready for the quantity of thorns.
11 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
ROBERT MACFARLANE
The Line of Beauty is that rare thing: a deep novel about shallowness. It concerns the rise and fall during the 1980s of an upper-class English family, the Feddens, whose paterfamilias – the buffoonish Gerald – is a Conservative MP of limited intelligence but boundless ambition. Into the Feddens’ world of mingled wealth, aestheticism and vulgarity comes the carefully named Nick Guest, a lower-middle-class boy from the provinces, and an Oxford friend of the Feddens’ son. Nick has ‘a certain shy polish’ and a ‘gravity’ of manner, and after graduation it is decided that he should become a lodger with the Feddens in their Notting Hill house, while he pursues his doctoral studies into ‘the style of Meredith, Conrad and James’.
Nick finds himself at once repelled and fascinated by the culture to which he has gained unexpected access: repelled by its affluent crudeness and solipsism, fascinated by the moments of aesthetic nonchalance which wealth enables (the Cézanne hung idly on a wall, the Gauguin given diffidently as an anniversary present). The novel follows Nick’s social and erotic fortunes: at its opening,
he has recently accepted his homosexuality, and is eagerly joining the gay world of 1983, a year when neither AIDS nor public tolerance of gayness were plainly in evidence.
As the hint of felony in his first name suggests, Nick is transgressor rather than visitor in the Fedden household. At once acquisitive and innocent, he takes more than he gives back, and is never able to assimilate himself completely into the aristocratic world of his hosts. Among the drivers of this curiously plotless novel, indeed, is the reader’s unease at the impropriety of Nick’s presence in the Fedden’s house. One experiences the nervous awareness of a sustained trespass being committed, and of the exposure and eviction which will surely at some point come.
It is clear that Hollinghurst conceived of his novel as an inquest into the complicated relationship between beauty and goodness as it played itself out at the high noon of Thatcherism. Clear, too, that he trusted his novel not only to investigate but also to censure what one character calls the ‘bloated excess’ of those years. A stylistic difficulty confronted Hollinghurst, however, once he had settled upon these ethical ambitions and upon the brittle milieu of his novel. How was he to gain both a literary and a moral purchase on a venal world? What style would permit him at once to evoke and to indict a culture whose understanding of aestheticism was blighted by greed, and whose ethos was blighted by its understanding of aestheticism? How could he make a deep fathoming of people who were – in Gore Vidal’s unforgettable description of Ronald Reagan – as shallow as spit on a rock? It is no coincidence that the recurring motif of The Line of Beauty is the mirror, for the compelling paradox of a mirror is that it is simultaneously planar and three-dimensional: that it both registers depth and insinuates flatness. Hollinghurst’s novel needed somehow to possess just such a doubleness of aspect.
His solution to the problem – his formal equivalent to the mirror – was the free indirect style. The exceptional potential of the free indirect style to the novelist-moralist is that it permits twin compulsions to be contained within a single utterance: that it allows a character’s consciousness or action to be simultaneously traced and judged. When, for instance, the narrative voice observes that the jacket of Lady Partridge – a grande dame of Wildean comic malevolence – is ‘heavily embroidered with glinting black and silver thread, [and] had a scaly texture, on which finer fabrics might have snagged and laddered’, a sense is instantly conveyed of Lady Partridge’s appearance, but also of her abrasiveness and coarseness, as well of her perniciously serpentine nature. When, at a grand dinner, Gerald Fedden smiles at the person beside him with ‘the fine glaze of preoccupation of someone about to make a speech’, much is learnt about Gerald: his preference for hearing his own voice over that of other people, how his solipsism leads him to mismanage people, and how easily, in him, manners sag into mannerism. Again and again in the novel, Hollinghurst succeeds in both evoking and in pitilessly parsing high Tory society. As a reader, one learns both to admire and to be wary of the velveteen ferocity of his sentences.
Hollinghurst’s scrupulous severity recalls that of Henry James, a comparison which the novel itself repeatedly asks us to make. For James, too, settled upon the free indirect style as the best form with which to suggest and to judge the elegant, moneyed atmospheres in which his novels thrived. There is no other novelist who knows better than James that style’s potentials and perils and, in particular, how it is able to dampen but also to ignite desire in the writer. It was in The Golden Bowl – the novel which The Line of Beauty yearns to resemble – that James’s free indirect style managed most brilliantly its coincident tasks of evoking and judging. In that novel the cast of mind of the wealthy American industrialist Adam Verver is enacted in the proportionally claused and tightly audited free indirect sentences which report him. Sometimes this enactment occurs at the level of a single word; one thinks of the moment in the First Book when Adam realises in a sudden burst of ethical clarity that he might marry Charlotte, and therefore solve the quandary in which the four main characters find themselves. The narrative records that it was at this moment that Verver’s ‘moral lucidity was constituted’. How perfectly that last verb is chosen by James – how it appraises Verver even as it emanates from him. For while Verver thinks that he has settled upon a flexible and egalitarian moral solution to the quandary, the verb ‘constitute’ (a verb we have heard Verver use several times before), with its legalism and implied rigidity, betrays his failure to have done so. The etymology of the verb, too, which enfolds both the word ‘statue’ and the word ‘statute’, also points to two of James’s warnings in his novel: the moral dangers of conceiving of human beings as art objects, or of ethical structures as contractual obligations.
Much else marks Hollinghurst out as James’s contemporary successor or dauphin, beyond a shared affinity for the free indirect style. Like James, he is interested in knowing the ways in which people think of money, and the ways in which having money makes people think. And like James, he is a connoisseur of civil savagery – the little poison darts of the tongue, the put-downs which are handed out as compliments or harmless aperçus, only to writhe on closer examination into aspish life.
There are differences, of course. James’s art is so often the art of omission, of partiality of knowledge, and of the unsaid: the eponymous spoils of Poynton, for instance, the ‘old things’ over which mother and son fight to the death, are never themselves specified. In Hollinghurst’s novels, by contrast, almost nothing is left out. Hollinghurst practises the more ruthless art of the flenser. He works to lay bare the bone of a situation or person. His method is to allow a character to speak a line, make a gesture, or think a thought, and then to pare it mercilessly back. Perhaps, though, this mercilessness is an affinity between the two writers: one remembers J. M. Barrie’s description of the smile that Henry James used to mark time in a conversation while he was searching for the right words with which to deliver a riposte to an interlocutor: ‘They certainly were absolutely the right words, but the smile’s enjoyment while he searched for them was what I was watching. It brought one down like Leatherstocking’s Killdeer.’
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One of the achievements of The Line of Beauty is its commitment to its vision. Nick is the character on whom the free indirect style is focalised throughout; it is his consciousness that we occupy without exeat during the novel. So it is that one understands what it means to see the world exactly as Nick sees it. We perceive with a particularity and prejudice of detail which is compellingly real: we are brought to experience, if not to sympathise with, Nick’s lingering visual appraisals of cock through cloth, his physical disinterest in women, and the little twitches of misogyny which he cannot conceal, and which stir the ethical air of the prose. We feel, too, the tacitly hostile mood of Thatcherite London towards gayness: the faint tone of ‘heterosexual menace’ in the pub where Nick meets Leo, his first lover, the jeer and horn-blast from a passing car as they embrace in the street, and the oppressive presence of the ‘efficiently reproductive species’ from which Nick knows himself to be a dissenter, but which surrounds him socially.
Making Nick the dominant consciousness of the novel also allows Hollinghurst to investigate one of the things about which he writes and thinks best: nostalgia. The characteristic tense of all of Hollinghurst’s novels is the future perfect, the will-have-been. His main characters – William Beckwith in The Swimming-Pool Library, Edward Manners in The Folding Star – love to cast their minds forwards to a point from which they will remember the ongoing present. They enjoy, too, the impossibility of return from that imagined future, the frisson of exclusion from a past that was once lived. As such, they remind us of the exquisite and implicitly erotic nature of nostalgia as frustrated desire. It was precisely this love – this eroticism – that Evelyn Waugh sharpened and formalised into an aesthetic in Brideshead Revisited, where it was shown to be fatal for its infantilising effect and for its corrosion of morality. As with Waugh, one suspects that Hollinghurst is only able to write so well abou
t this particular kind of nostalgia by having been half in love with it as a feeling himself.
Hollinghurst is an aesthetically minded stylist, but not an aesthete: his sentences are always aware of their own beauty, but are not devoted exclusively to its achievement. His care for prose rhythms, his understanding of how feeling can be delayed and relayed through the order and pacing of clauses, is one of the qualities that make him such a fine writer about nostalgia, itself a function of timing. Midway through the novel, having returned to the Midlands market town in which he grew up, and standing in its main square one evening, Nick recalls his ‘long adolescence, its boredom and lust and its aesthetic ecstasies, laid up in amber in the sun-thickened light of the evening square’. The sentence is beautifully made, with the repeated ‘ands’ and ‘ins’ catching the strange, disconnected repetitions of the period of life which he is recalling, and with the image of amber lending its thickness to the already thickened light: a light which implicitly falls both in the moment of recollection and the moment being recollected. Later in the novel, Nick hears a piece of music which reminds him of his Oxford years. The memory, he thinks, ‘confirmed and deepened the regretful longing which seemed now to have been the medium he lived in’. Nostalgia is here, again, concentrated upon nostalgia: Nick experiences regret for the passing of a regret which was once felt. Repeatedly in the novel we encounter such double-distilled nostalgia; a sepian liquid which fills the spaces of Nick’s memory, and tints both his present perceptions and language. When he observes how, at evening time in the city, ‘the street lamps brightened’, we note that he says ‘lamps’ and not ‘lights’, and we understand that he is relishing the Victorianism of the word, the idea of ‘street-lamps’ – with their hints of wrought iron and candled glow – rather than the glaring pragmatism of ‘street-lights’. Near the end of the book, a memory strikes Nick ‘in a flash of acute nostalgia, as though he could never visit that scene of happiness again. He waited a minute longer, in the heightened singleness of someone who has slipped out for a minute from a class, a meeting, ears still ringing, face still solemn, into another world of quiet corridors.’ It is an exquisite sentence, particularly in the way it develops, or is improvised, as it goes along, so that the experience of nostalgia is enacted rather than being only described. Nick is first pained by the nostalgia, but then recalls the strange pleasure of that sensation, and so deliberately protracts the experience (‘a minute longer’), a protraction which allows him to elaborate the sensation into metaphor, thereby enabling the gorgeous languid parataxis of the closing clauses, ending in the ‘world of quiet corridors’.
The Good of the Novel Page 19