Bamboo

by William Boyd

  This dilemma summarizes what I take to be the essence of this complicated and thoughtful novel. In a typically Kunderan manner, these questions emerge from a disjointed and rambling blend of wry philosophical speculation and fiction. Kundera himself discourses on and redefines a variety of subjects and categories (including vertigo, dreaming, nudity, betrayal, noses, abroad and WCs, among others) while, fictionally, the choices are dramatized in the lives of a pair of couples—Tomas and Tereza and Franz and Sabina—each of whom represents, in varying degrees, one or other aspect of the polarity of lightness and weight. Franz and Sabina have their roles to play in the enacting of ideas, but the central couple is Tomas and Tereza.

  Tomas is a successful surgeon and philanderer who, by a series of chances, ends up one day in a provincial hotel where he attracts, inadvertently, the love of a waitress—Tereza. On impulse Tereza follows him to Prague where they become lovers and soon fall in love. Even after they are married, however, Tomas continues to sleep around, but his life has changed more than domestically with the arrival of Tereza, for Tereza is afflicted with “weight”—a sense of the unbearable responsibility of being. And Tomas, one might expect, is lightness personified. But soon he finds—like it or not—that his soaring irresponsibility begins to be tethered: he gains—metaphysically speaking—weight.

  He renounces a prosperous career as a surgeon in Zurich to follow Tereza back to Prague after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. There, his career charts a steep decline owing to an ill-timed political article he has written. From top surgeon he descends to local GP, and from there to window cleaner. Ultimately, Tereza persuades him to leave the city and they go to work on a farm in the country where, before they die in a car smash, they find their own brand of happiness and Tomas—or so I take it—shoulders the burdens of responsibility and contentedly renounces “lightness.”

  “Weight,” as Kundera defines it, is to do with love, compassion and a true sense of the absurd dictates of chance and contingency. “Lightness” is to do with sex, frivolity and irresponsibility. In the novel Kundera debates and counterposes the reasons for and the consequences of choosing one or the other. The dialectic is urbanely, wittily and cleverly orchestrated. One senses too—and Kundera encourages us to think so—that the conflict is a highly individual one (“The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities”) born out of his own personality and his experience at the hands of the malign and bizarre forces of recent European history.

  In a significant sense, then, The Unbearable Lightness of Being can be described as an intensely moral book which, for all its superficial postmodernist totems (paraded fictiveness, blatant authorial intervention, disdain of basic narrative convention), would satisfy the most stringent and traditional imperatives of Leavisite “relevance” and “value.” For, in the novel, Kundera is really attempting to answer the key questions of how we should live our lives, given the sordid, perplexed and fraught nature of the human condition, and of the place of Love in a world seemingly compromised by corruption, self-delusion and evil.

  His answer is dramatized—most movingly—in the death from cancer of Tomas and Tereza’s dog Karenin (the name is no accident). The animal’s slow, puzzled, wracked demise becomes a focus for all those traditional verities—compassion, understanding, disinterested love—so opposed to “lightness” and all it stands for. On the penultimate page of the novel Tereza apologizes for the way she has literally and metaphorically brought him down. “Haven’t you noticed I’ve been happy here?” Tomas says.

  The Unbearable Heaviness of Being is of course a far more complex notion than this review can convey. It’s not, for example, to be confused with earnestness or commitment, and has nothing to do with political ideology (an elaborate disquisition on the phenomenon of “kitsch” denies weight to the passionate idealists of both East and West, Left and Right). It seems to be, to simplify once again, a steadfastly ironic facing up to all the sadness of the human condition, coupled with an awareness of the value of the modest and fleeting moments of happiness it can also provide (Tomas’s declaration occurs on the last night of his and Tereza’s life). The modish succés fou of this book does it a huge disservice: this is a clever, thoughtful, intellectually stimulating, occasionally flawed novel, but its central concerns are perennially valuable and humane.

  1984

  Evelyn Waugh (1)

  (Introduction to Labels)

  Evelyn Waugh was not fond of Labels, his fourth published book. In an interview given later in his life he referred to it dismissively as “a collection of essays bundled together.” In 1946, when he edited all his travel writing for the compilation When the Going Was Good only fifty of Labels’ 200 pages were included. Indeed, superficially, there does not appear much to recommend the book. An account of a cruise in the Mediterranean is hardly exotic. A few weeks on a luxury liner would not qualify one as an intrepid traveller. Also, the assignment was undertaken solely for money (although I realize that this does not imply, a priori, that the work will be bad) and was written up at speed over a period of two months in early 1930. And yet, in my opinion, this, the first of Waugh’s many travel books, is his best and most fascinating, and, for reasons which we will discover, it is a highly significant document with an important bearing on the development of Waugh’s oeuvre and is a vital clue as to why Waugh’s personality took the abrasive, complex and troubled course it did.

  In 1929, when the trip that was to provide the raw material for Labels was undertaken, Waugh was twenty-six years old. He had just published his first novel, Decline and Fall, to tremendous critical and popular acclaim. He was a “fashionable” young writer, a self-appointed spokesman for Modern Youth and made regular appearances in the gossip columns. Life had finally taken a dramatic turn for the better. For, after the pleasant distractions and rowdy hedonism of Oxford, Waugh’s fortunes had reached a low ebb. He attempted vainly to become an artist and illustrator but lack of money drove him to badly paid jobs in remote preparatory schools. While his Oxford contemporaries were establishing reputations for themselves Waugh was miserably unhappy. He wanted to be an artist, he wanted to move easily in English high society, he wanted to be wealthy and he wanted to be in love. In the disappointing years following his university career it looked very unlikely that he would ever achieve any of these ambitions. But then the publication of Decline and Fall (1928) changed everything. He was now a novelist (albeit a reluctant one), celebrated, wined and dined, had made some money and there was now the prospect of making more, and he was married. Waugh had married (just prior to the publication of Decline and Fall) a pretty girl called Evelyn Gardner. They were known to their friends as “he-Evelyn” and “she-Evelyn.” Evelyn Gardner was “modern” (her blonde hair was cut in a short bob), wanted to write herself, and was well bred—she was the daughter of Lord Burghclere. Everything seemed to be perfect. They were both very happy and they lived in a small flat in London in Canonbury Square.

  In the winter of 1928 “she-Evelyn” fell ill with a bad attack of German measles. To help her convalesce and to allow Waugh to write a travel book (while he gathered material for his next novel) a Mediterranean cruise was planned. Waugh’s agent managed to negotiate the Waughs’ free passage on the MY Stella Polaris in return for favourable mentions of the ship in Labels. In the gossip column of the Daily Sketch their departure was reported thus: the Waughs

  were about to spend the proceeds of Decline and Fall in a tour of Southeastern Europe and the Levant… in the most luxurious boat in the whole Mediterranean… Mr Waugh is going to write a travel diary about the trip… But there is more to come: “I am really going to concentrate on drawing during the voyage … I hope I can bring back enough sketches to hold an exhibition in June, and, if it is successful, abandon writing for painting.”

  We can see how the idea of earning his living from the pen was still essentially uncongenial to Waugh.

  But the voyage was not a success. The couple caught a train to Monte
Carlo, where they were to board the Stella Polaris, but on the journey south she-Evelyn fell ill once more with a high fever. She was ill throughout the first portion of the cruise—Naples, Haifa, Port Said—with what was later diagnosed as pneumonia. She-Evelyn was moved to hospital in Port Said and the Stella Polaris sailed on without the Waughs. When she-Evelyn was feeling better they moved to a large hotel near Cairo. For the first time the two of them actually began to feel they were on holiday.

  From Egypt they sailed to Malta where they managed to rejoin the Stella Polaris for the rest of her voyage—Crete, Constantinople, Venice, Ragusa and Barcelona were among the places they visited. The enforced delay in Port Said and Cairo and the medical bills that ensued there meant that Waugh had spent far more than he had planned on the cruise. On the way home to England he wrote as many newspaper articles as he reasonably could in an attempt to defray his expenses.

  The trip had been something of a disaster, but none of this appears in Labels. The itinerary is the same but the circumstances of the voyage are altered beyond recognition—to the extent that a pronounced fictional element enters the narrative. The single, simple reason for this is that shortly after their return to London the Waughs’ marriage collapsed irretrievably.

  This process had been accelerated by the now pressing financial reasons for Waugh to write his second novel (which was to be Vile Bodies). In order for him to do this quickly he had to be alone and away from the social distractions of London. Waugh went to stay in a pub near Oxford—the Abingdon Arms in the village of Beckley—and immediately set to work on his novel. She-Evelyn remained in London, now fully recovered and determined to enjoy the social round after the enervating problems of her two-month cruise.

  This is not the place to analyse the reasons for the breakdown of Evelyn Waugh’s marriage. To put it simply, she-Evelyn met another man with whom she fell in love. She told Waugh this and he abandoned his novel and returned home in an attempt to win her back. She-Evelyn promised never to see her lover again but their reunion proved to be an unhappy time together. After two miserable weeks they decided to get divorced.

  Waugh was devastated by the failure of his marriage and by what he saw as his public humiliation. I do not believe that it is an overstatement to say that his divorce and his wife’s betrayal affected him for the rest of his life. It brought about a profound change in the way he saw the world and in the way he presented himself to others. It was a major reason for him embracing the Catholic faith a few years later and its reverberations can be detected in almost all his subsequent fiction.

  In the months following the separation Waugh wrote Vile Bodies. Much of that novel’s remorseless clear-eyed cynicism is a product of Waugh’s bitter and misanthropic mental state at the time.

  Labels, which he had to begin almost immediately after, must have seemed like the most thankless of tasks: to relive in prose the two difficult months preceding his wife’s betrayal. Waugh set about it with professional purpose. The book is based on detailed diaries (which he later destroyed) which he had kept throughout the trip, but she-Evelyn is expunged from the record. Waugh presents himself as a bachelor, travelling alone, a reserved and supercilious presence observing his fellow voyagers with a neutral, objective gaze. Amongst his travelling companions is a young couple, Geoffrey and Juliet, who are on their honeymoon:

  a rather sweet-looking young English couple—presumably, from the endearments of their conversation and marked solicitude for each other’s comfort, on their honeymoon, or at any rate recently married. The young man was small and pleasantly dressed and wore a slight curly moustache; he was reading a particularly good detective story with apparent intelligence. His wife was huddled in a fur coat in the corner, clearly far from well.

  Geoffrey and Juliet: he-Evelyn and she-Evelyn.

  In this curious, schizoid way Waugh contemplates himself and his ex-wife. Indirectly, from time to time we learn of Geoffrey and Juliet’s difficult voyage, of Juliet’s illness and hospitalization, of Geoffrey’s deep concern and worry. From time to time, too, Geoffrey and Waugh go out together and visit the sights of Port Said. It is not putting too fine a point on it, I think, to see in Labels Waugh bidding farewell to his former self. An altogether tougher, more self-sufficient and, it has to be said, unpleasant persona emerged.

  “The young man was small and pleasantly dressed and wore a slight curly moustache.” Waugh was blond and only five foot five inches tall. He was a small, fair, boisterous young man. “Faunlike” and “childlike” are adjectives contemporaries used to describe him in the Twenties. It is worth recalling this—and his diminutive size—especially in the face of the image of Waugh that has survived (in Britain at least) after his death. Waugh is remembered as an aggressive man, a snob and of reactionary tastes and political opinions. Fat and choleric, playing out a role—very deliberately—of a testy colonel or outraged Tory squire; dressed in loud-check tweeds and brandishing an ear-trumpet, the image of the elder Waugh is calculated to give offence. It was an ideal mask to hide behind. The great value of Labels, once one knows its history, is that we can see the first steps in the construction of that mask which, with various adornments, was to serve him well throughout the rest of his life. Only in his fiction was it allowed to drop; only there can we see, to employ T. S. Eliot’s dichotomy, the “man who suffers” behind the “mind which creates.” And this honesty is what redeems Waugh the artist in the end, no matter how repugnant we find the man he forced himself to be.

  This too explains much about Labels. The book is by a man at his most vulnerable, writing about a period in his recent history which must have been, thanks to the cruel ironies of hindsight, almost unbearably painful. This must go a long way to explain the hauteur in the tone of voice, the mandarin pomposities that surface occasionally in the style and the disdain and xenophobia that are apparent in the content.

  These were not new attitudes. Even as a schoolboy Waugh understood how to be superior. But in Labels we see the fashioning of a creed, and aesthetic, that was to see Waugh through until his death. I do not think that anybody reading the book “blind,” as it were, would guess its author’s age to be twenty-seven. The voice has the confidence of a man almost twice that age; of a man unlikely to be persuaded that there are other points of view with equal validity.

  In this sense it is also a very English book, and manifests a very English sense of its own essential superiority and worth in comparison to all the other races of the world. It is an Englishman who contemplates other cultures and civilizations armed with

  a vague knowledge of History, Literature and Art, an amateurish interest in architecture and costume, of social, religious, and political institutions, of drama, of the biographies of the chief characters of each century, of a few anecdotes and jokes, scraps of diaries and correspondence and family history … fused together … so that the cultured Englishman has a sense of the past, in a continuous series of clear and pretty tableaux vivants.

  As it happens this is still a pretty good definition of the “cultured Englishman,” and it represents the point of view of the sort of man Waugh aspired to be. But such a man would be unlikely to admire Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. And here again we come to the complexity and contradiction that underlie all of Waugh’s work. He was a deeply sensitive man who behaved like a boor; an aesthete with precise refined tastes who dressed like a bookmaker … a long list of such antitheses can be compiled. And it is in these conflicting impulses that we find, I believe, the key to the many and varied pleasures his books provide, and Labels is no exception. We experience a frisson of outrage at some racial slight, recoil at opinions of absurdly dogmatic cast and yet at the same time are challenged and intrigued by observations and judgements of genuine originality and acuity. In the end Waugh’s brilliance—one might say his particular genius—is to defeat all easy categorizations. For, whatever Labels’ fascinating autobiographical pertinence, it is also a tremendously fresh, funny and stimulating book. But there is no denying
that a knowledge of the circumstances in which it was written adds considerably to its overall impact. It is ultimately a sad book; it is the fruit of sad and chastening experience, and no one acquainted with Waugh’s own personal grief, and understanding the poignancy of his hurt and disillusion, can dismiss the book’s final lines as merely the product of a precocious or affected sagacity:

  Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.

  1988

  Raymond Carver

  (Review of “Where I’m Calling From,” The Selected Stories)

  “The style is the man,” Buffon said, and one wonders what he would make of a man who wrote like this:

  This friend of mine from work, Bud, he asked Fran and me to supper. I didn’t know his wife and he didn’t know Fran. That made us even. But Bud and I were friends. And I knew there was a little baby at Bud’s house. That baby must have been eight months old when Bud asked us to supper. Where’d those eight months go?

  These are the opening lines of a short story called “Feathers” and in them we are presented with what one might call stereotypical Raymond Carver: the demotic first person voice, the short sentences, the reduced vocabulary, the pointed unliterariness (the ugly repetitions of “know” and “Bud”). A few more sentences and the picture is complete: Bud and the narrator are blue-collar workers, the context is parochial—white, working class, middle America—and the events of the story, its narrative, minimal in the extreme.