by William Boyd
W. War
The visible memory of war lives on in France more than it does in Britain. I’m talking about the First World War. You see the memorials—the rifle-toting poilu, the angel, the marble obelisk—in every tiny village. The few dozen names inscribed there testify to the human price France paid in the First World War. Our local village still has a population of little more than a hundred yet its small memorial records over twenty names of young men who died in 1914-18. It’s impossible to imagine, as you look round at the chateau, the church, the few clustered houses, what such a death toll must have done to the community.
Memorials of the Second World War also linger more prevalently than across the Channel. On the Atlantic beaches the winter storms slowly slide Hitler’s vast blockhouses out to sea. Each year these monstrous concrete gun emplacements creep further down the dunes as the coast erodes. And here and there on remote country lanes you will come across a plaque or a headstone marking some frantic ambush of the Resistance movement, a list of the names fusillés par les Allemands and the date of the fatal encounter.
X. Xavier Rolland
Is the name of a young farmer who lives near our house. He works his farm alone, milking his 150 goats, ploughing and harvesting his few hectares of fields with corn, sunflowers and maize. He is possibly the hardest working person I have ever encountered. The demands of the unending routine of his daily round—despite the advantages of machinery—make the quality of his life closer to a nineteenth-century counterpart than a modern farmer. The precariousness of his existence is shaped and controlled by the exigencies of the Common Agricultural Policy of the EEC. He ploughs his fields to the very edge of the roads. He obliterates hedgerows and ancient ditches and cuts down trees and woods to gain a few extra square metres to increase his subsidy. He takes two days off a year to visit the agricultural fair in Paris. He is “close to the land” but his relationship with nature seems more like that of a tenant with a rapacious and demanding landlord. There seems no love of the countryside: the size of the field, its harvest and the compensation he receives from Brussels seem to blind him to the beauty of the place he lives and works. He’s a young man—the decades stretch ahead. I wonder what will become of him.
Y. Youth
Last year I went back to Nice and revisited the places I used to frequent as a nineteen-year-old. In 1971 I rented a room in an old lady’s flat in the rue Dante. In 2003 I stood at the door to the stairway and told myself that, thirty-two years ago, I had stood on this exact spot, this very spot. I had a beer in the cafe I used to visit every night. The decor was the same but the kindly patron had long since retired. I took a photograph of the small hotel I had stayed in on my first night. I walked around the quartier that I had known so well but could summon up no ghostly version of my younger self—I experienced no Proustian shiver. Yet my few months in Nice in 1971 were wholly formative for me. It was in Nice that I learned to speak French and where, for the first time, I lived alone and found myself. It comes as no surprise to me that France called me back.
Z. Zone
“Le Zone,” to give it its full name, is the name of a small beach bar on the Atlantic coast near Arcachon that I frequent from time to time. I love the ocean and the beach but I don’t like being in the sun: “Le Zone” provides the perfect solution. I sit in the shade of a wide umbrella with a cold beer and a book and watch the comings and goings of the beach, the breakers creaming in, the sound of surf in my ears.
In a dark and rainy London in the middle of the Second World War, the writer and critic Cyril Connolly drew a circle on a map of south-west France and indulged in a little wishful thinking, dreaming of peace. Wish number one: a yellow manor farm inside this magic circle…” A golden classical house, three storeys high with oeil de boeuf attic windows looking out over water… a terrace for winter, a great tree for summer and a lawn for games, a wooded hill behind and a river below …” and so on. Connolly was articulating a dream of pleasure and escape that we all indulge in from time to time. I understand its power and I have responded to its siren call. I realize how lucky I am to have this double life, this Anglo/Franco existence. And, though we live in a house with some of the components Connolly requires, I find that it’s on this Atlantic beach that I feel most at one with my adopted country.
I think this has something to do with the inherent democracy of a beach in summer. Beach clothing, the essential idleness and contentment of beach life, erase society’s divisions and stresses in the same way as a tan homogenizes complexions. In this beach bar we are all anonymous. Most of the time as I sit here and read my book (and make notes) the people around me are French adolescents. I might as well be invisible. I sit and listen to their conversations, I watch their manoeuvrings, their games and ploys. These urgent, bright, lithe girls and boys pay no attention to me, a middle-aged man with a beer, a book and a pen in hand. In this beach bar on the edge of the Atlantic on the west coast of France I feel I have been accepted. I am in my magic circle. My magic French circle. Anglo/Franco coalesce and commingle, become one.
I have found my zone.
2004
Literature
While I was at university (1971-5), studying English Literature, my taste was shaped not so much by the syllabus of the courses I was following or the academic criticism I read for my essays but by the books pages of the Sunday Times and the New Statesman. In the Sunday Times I went—unfailingly, immediately—to Cyril Connolly’s weekly review, and in the back half of the New Statesman I read everything that was on offer.
The seduction of Connolly’s hedonistic, unscholarly, romantic enthusiasms is easily explained. I have read, over the years, almost every word he has written and he figures frequently in these pages. The New Statesman had an altogether more acerbic, influential effect. In the early 1970s I waited each week for its arrival with a hungry expectation that has never been repeated with any other publication. The literary editors in those years were Claire Tomalin and Martin Amis and when you draw up a roster of its contributors at that time some of its allure can be explained: Julian Barnes, Craig Raine, Blake Morrison, James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Conrad, Jeremy Treglown to name a few. The house style was mordant, knowing, witty and took no prisoners. It shaped my own reviewing practice and my early reviews, including one for the Statesman itself that I present here for sentiment’s sake, were an effort to achieve a similar cool, intellectual stringency. As a result I have to admit that, while I hope I was never ruthlessly or maliciously savage, I was often very harsh as a reviewer in my early days—something I take care to recall when I receive the odd critical spanking myself.
Later, in the early 1980s I became a regular reviewer of novels in the Sunday Times. This is perhaps the most thankless form of reviewing available, but a good apprenticeship for the tyro critic. To be given four novels and, say, 800 words in which to summarize and review them—amusingly, cleverly, accurately—is a taxing and demanding subclass of critical writing whose particular merits are very hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t attempted it. However, as you are at the bottom of the contributors’ food chain, your copy is also the first to be cut if space is required. This happened regularly and the corresponding terseness has not made the reviews wear all that well. Consequently, only a few of my Sunday Times reviews make it into this volume.
My first novel, A Good Man in Africa, was published in 1981 and as I published more books myself and gave up my teaching at Oxford (I was a college lecturer there, at St Hilda’s College, from 1980-83) to move to London and write full-time I was happy to give up the three-weekly review. It’s hard work; you burn out. I carried on reviewing but I felt I’d paid my dues in the salt-mines of critical writing.
The organizing principle in this section has been to present the reviews as I wrote them, starting in 1978 and moving on, rather than arrange them under any thematic or geographical scheme. This is what came across my desk as the years went by. As time has progressed the space provided in which to write
has steadily grown. It is a welcome corollary: the luxury of having a few more pages in which to expound your opinions is all the sweeter because of that earlier discipline.
Patrick Kavanagh
(Review of By Night Unstarred)
Patrick Kavanagh repudiated his early and best-known book The Green Fool as “Stage-Irish autobiography,” and in one sense his so-called “autobiographical novel” By Night Unstarred looks like an attempt to reclaim Irish rural life from the lush romanticism and sometimes strained folksiness that marred the earlier venture. Tarry Flynn, Kavanagh’s only other major fictional work, also has its roots in his formative years and like The Green Fool concerns itself with the growth of the poet against the background of the Irish countryside. Although Kavanagh was much more pleased with Tarry Flynn — modestly finding it “uproariously funny”—both it and The Green Fool are damaged by Kavanagh’s semi-mystical love of nature and a certain platitudinous idealism that occurs whenever the subject of the poet’s privileged insight and depth of feeling is raised.
By Night Unstarred on the whole avoids these pitfalls; largely, I suspect, because the main portion of it has nothing to do with poets or poetry. Although claiming to be a “novel,” the book really consists of an unfinished short novel and a short story that would have been far better left unjoined. Peter Kavanagh, the author’s brother and the editor, has sought to produce a unified work of fiction by labelling the two disparate stories parts 1 and 2, and by supplying an apologetic explanatory interjection that in the end only exposes the artifice of the link.
Part 1 is far and away the most successful of the two, and, not surprisingly, the least autobiographical. Set in the parish of Ballyrush near Dundalk at the beginning of the century it charts the remorseless rise to prosperity of a weaselly Irish peasant called Peter Devine. Initially an impoverished farm labourer, he impregnates the local half-wit Rosie and has to flee the wrath of her family and the censure of the parish. He returns seven years later an obsessed and oddly motivated man. Maniacally set on becoming the richest man in the county, he courts the bulky daughter of the wealthiest farm-owner in the district and enlists the help of various colourful local characters to this end. By sly manipulation and unscrupulous use of the village gossips a myth grows up about his eligibility and fairly soon he is accepted as a suitor. Devine’s sole interest is in wealth and his romantic yearnings are wholly subservient to this drive (“When he noticed her wobbling breasts beneath the loose blouse he dreamt of the field before the door with the deep hollow in the middle”). Ultimately his dedication proves highly successful, and in material terms Peter Devine triumphs in everything he does from siring children to planting potatoes. The end of part 1 sees him poised on the edge of bourgeois prosperity—a rich mill owner and county councillor—with his financial horizons beginning to broaden: “The priest had smoked three cigarettes since coming into the room: a bit of money in a cigarette factory would be no dead loss, he thought.”
The strength and vigour of Kavanagh’s portrayal of the villagers of Ballyrush are due to the constancy of his ironic gaze; a steadfastness of viewpoint that The Green Fool and Tarry Flynn sadly lacked. Kavanagh sees all too clearly that country people are as pusillanimous, bitchy and determinedly mercenary as the rest of us, if not more so: “The misfortune of a neighbour provided nearly all the best delights of that part of the country.” And Peter Devine, who dominates part 1, is explicitly alluded to as a personification of “the slime-stuck peasant unconscious of cities, of cultures, of everything but the power of money.” There is a sharp Flaubertian cynicism in evidence, free from any romanticism or fond simplicity, which makes Ballyrush as mordant a picture of a rural community as Yonville in Madame Bovary.
Part 2 jolts uneasily some decades ahead and the central figure now becomes “Patrick Kavanagh” (in an Isherwoodian third-person return to his younger self) fruitlessly searching for a job in Dublin. The Devines have resurfaced as the De Vines, now, thanks to Peter’s acumen, a large, vastly wealthy and powerful Dublin family with an interest in the arts. Patrick’s attempts to advance himself—and thereby to marry the girl he loves—are continually thwarted by his refusal, or inability, to ingratiate himself with the monolithic De Vine family. The cynicism of part 2 is of a more embittered and personal sort. Kavanagh’s skilful, distanced irony turns to shrill vituperation and the personal venom is all too apparent in the vignettes of literary and middle-class poseurs.
This is where the autobiography obtrudes and once again Kavanagh returns to the question of the poet’s role and function in society which, with the weight of personal invective behind it, inevitably damages the fiction. By all accounts the first fifty years of Kavanagh’s life were remarkably unpleasant and frustrating, and it seems he had every justification for bitterness and self-pity. And it’s the self-pity in the end that emerges and weakens this section of the novel and which makes “Patrick Kavanagh” such a hard character to sympathize with.
1978
Katherine Mansfield
(Review of Katherine Mansfield: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers)
Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis on 9 January 1922 at Gurdjieff’s Institute, the Prieuré, near Fontainebleau. D. H. Lawrence commented that it was “a rotten, false, self-conscious place of people playing a sickly stunt” and, having earlier accused her of “stewing” in her illness, he must have seen a singular aptness in her dying there. For in one sense, as this biography makes clear, most of Katherine Mansfield’s life had been composed of sickly stunts of one sort or another.
Born into a prosperous New Zealand family in 1888, she spent her childhood and early adolescence hankering for release, already thinking of herself, according to Meyers, as “an artist who lived in a world of her own.” She felt stifled by the bourgeois philistinism of life in the colonies and left to go to school in London at the age of fourteen. The abandoned country soon became transformed in her imagination—as is common with most exiles—into a land of beauty and innocent childhood pleasure. She returned there briefly in 1907 but from 1908 onward lived in England and Europe. It was a notably unhappy existence too, spent in a succession of drab rented properties and hotels and featuring, among other mishaps, a temporary addiction to Veronal, an abortion, a one-day marriage, lesbian relationships, continual ill-health and, most unfortunately perhaps, marriage to Middleton Murry.
At the centre of any biography of Katherine Mansfield lies her relationship with Middleton Murry, who was at one point, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, “the most hated man of English Letters in the country,” and who described himself as “part snob, part coward, part sentimentalist.” It was a highly unsatisfactory liaison from the start, with Katherine Mansfield having to coax a reluctant Murry into her bed, and its unpropitious beginnings heralded a succession of bitter rows, partings and brief reconciliations. Murry’s subsequent idolization of his dead wife has tended to obscure the picture but Meyers’s careful delineation of the facts makes the nature of the relationship clear. Where Murry is most condemned is not so much in the see-sawing marital strife but in his lukewarm and even callous response to her progressively worsening illness. He was often absent from her during her long periods of attempted convalescence on the Continent and provided skimpy financial support. However, it has to be said that she was not averse to employing her fragile condition to its full dramatic effect. One visitor to the Murry household had this to say:
Katherine was “draped” on a couch (it was one of her not-so-good days) … People stood around, adoring her, talking quietly to her. I was not prepared for this adoration and the whole picture, to my provincial, down-to-earth view, was utterly artificial, all affectation.
One can imagine that after a while the impact and concern the disease aroused in Murry began inevitably to lessen. A similar suspicion of histrionics and melodrama is also evident in her edgy friendships with Virginia Woolf (who once described her, with characteristic acerbity, as “a civet cat got up for street-walking�
�) and D. H. Lawrence. There were few interludes of contentment in the Murry/Mansfield relationship, which is scarcely surprising considering it was made up of two people with more than their fair share of intense self-absorption and weakness. Lawrence referred to them in a letter as “Two mud worms … playing into each others long mud bellies.”
Meyers places most of the blame on Murry, and it is true that his appalling behaviour after his wife’s death cannot be excused, but they both share an equal guilt for their unhappiness while she was alive. There is an inescapable air of acute self-consciousness about their lives, an artistic pomposity and pretentiousness that allowed Katherine Mansfield quite openly to compare herself with Keats and Chekhov as fellow tuberculosis sufferers, but also, one suspects, thereby elevating herself by association into this select company. This might just be acceptable if the literary output justified it, but the slightness and ephemerality of her talent cannot live up to the role-playing. The narrow restricted worlds of her stories, the absence of plot, the factitious reliance on mood and atmosphere to give brief inconsequential episodes more weight and timelessness, are only partially compensated for by a certain directness of language and sharpness of observation. The mystique surrounding her life and the adulation she has received in countries like France have boosted the reputation of her stories and given them a literary importance far beyond their real merit. The effect has been remarkable. The English short story today still labours under her vapourish influence.
Meyers’s biography goes some way to correct this. It is balanced and thorough and, despite his annoying tendency to ascribe rather glib psychological motives, his assessment is on the whole careful and unemotional. One senses little affection but some pity for his subject, which, overall, seems to have been the reaction of most of the people she encountered in her short and frustrated life.