by William Boyd
This selection of thirty-seven stories was made by Carver himself before his premature death in 1988 at the age of fifty. The consistency of tone, style, setting and mood of the stories is remarkable, and, with a few variations, they roughly conform to the stereotype outlined above. Occasionally the protagonists become more affluent (or less) and occasionally the pronoun shifts to the third person, but it is clear that Carver had found his two inches of ivory and was prepared to work it as doggedly as he could.
And there is nothing wrong with this. The only danger is that by confining your focus and by making your voice so insistently individual and unchanging an element of self-parody unwittingly creeps in, and the writer becomes a victim of his own success. There may be a rough rule of thumb here that needn’t only apply to writers, namely: the easier it is to parody an artist’s style, the sooner the artist ought to change it. Something similar happened to Hemingway, a writer with whom Carver can stand some comparison. The style of Hemingway’s early stories was as terse, uncompromising and idiosyncratic as Carver’s and it made a similar impact. Each man, it seemed, had found a fully formed and distinct voice that was perfectly attuned to their particular vision of the world and that harmoniousness lent the prose an unmistakable authority and literary heft. But it was not sustainable; or rather it was, but a price had to be paid when every Eng. Lit. undergraduate could soon turn in a passable Hemingway parody with no trouble at all. And something of the same law of diminishing returns applies to Carver’s stories, even though, as he himself claimed, he made efforts in his last collection to broaden his canvas and enrich his palette. In a late story such as “Blackbird Pie” where the narrator appears to be an academic, the voice is educated and peppered with literary allusions but it seems epicene, uncarveresque. We want a misanthropic redneck in a trailer park musing on how awful life is.
This phenomenon, this double bind, occurs in various art forms but bears particularly on short story writers and painters. Throughout the ups and many downs of his career Scott Fitzgerald was constantly asked to reprise his tales of ditsy flappers in the Twenties, and Picasso’s reputation is still haunted by the enormous popularity of his “Blue period” paintings. Any number of other examples come to mind but the “problem” remains the same: what is first acclaimed as powerful and original soon becomes confining and restricting. The artist wants to develop and advance but does so at the risk of losing what has drawn the public to the artist in the first place.
Thirty-seven short stories may seem a smallish oeuvre upon which to build a significant reputation yet there is no doubt that Carver’s achievement is considerable and that he deserves his place in the pantheon of American letters. The down-and-out, the hobo, the underachievers of American life have all had their chroniclers (from Damon Runyon to John Fante to Charles Bukowski) but Carver’s bleak but fundamentally humane point of view has a distinct late twentieth-century feel to it, if only because it is so resolutely low-key, the prose studiedly refusing to indulge in sentimentality, sensationalism or bathos. In spite of all the despair and waste, the hardship and relentless grind, Carver’s stories do somehow seem to celebrate some lasting aspects of the human condition, however minimal, conjuring up something marginally positive, a quality of fellow feeling that may amount to nothing more than a recognition that—at the end of the day—we are all in this mess together, but which gives the stories a compelling dry-eyed poignancy, a bitter but intensely moving authenticity.
1993
Michael Ondaatje
(Review of The English Patient)
In a semi-ruined villa somewhere in the north of Italy in the final year of World War Two a young Canadian nurse called Hana—numbed by the horrors of war—cares for a hideously burned aviator who has no name. He is the English patient, his brittle, cauterized skin the colour of aubergine. He is alone in the villa, the nurse his sole company, left behind to die, one assumes, by the field hospital that once occupied the building. The nurse bathes him, reads to him, listens to him and injects him with morphine to mask the agony of his terrifying burns.
This is the opening of Michael Ondaatje’s new novel, and it is hard to imagine a better and more disturbing mise en scène, combining as it does all manner of romantic, gothic and mysterious elements: a young and beautiful woman tending to a terminally disfigured man in an antique and classical landscape ravaged by war. What secrets lie here, what explanations, what undercurrents of feeling, of emotion? Guilt and loss, pain and redemption, endurance and love… The book is gravid with the potential to move and beguile.
And Ondaatje does not disappoint. A poet turned novelist, his interest in his characters and their situation leans heavily towards their symbolic and elegiac aspects. And indeed, this curious conjunction of nurse and patient could have occurred in any war in any place in almost any time. A reader expecting the conventions of a realistic novel such as Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (another juxtaposition of nurse and patient in an Italian war) will be frustrated. Ondaatje eschews the nuts and bolts of period detail, the roughage of authentic fact, for the trenchant reverberation of metaphor and image. And in so doing the book sets entirely its own tone and its own conventions. To ask a question of it along the lines of: would the senior staff of a World War Two army field hospital really abandon a traumatized young nurse and one of its badly burned patients in a bomb-damaged villa while it moved on to safer and more secure quarters? is redundant, not to say pedantic. Ondaatje’s novel is hermetic and self-sufficient, its conventions and its final reality—and its strange power—belong to it alone.
In the event the nurse, Hana, and her patient are not left to each other’s company for long. They are joined by a man named David Car-avaggio, a friend of Hana’s late father. Caravaggio, a former cat-burglar from Toronto, has spent the war in intelligence and is himself recovering from wounds, only this time wounds inflicted by torture—his thumbs have been amputated. He claims to be concerned for Hana’s health and safety but it soon becomes clear that his real interest is in the English patient. Soon the trio is augmented by a fourth figure—a young Sikh bomb disposal expert, called Kip, who billets himself in the villa grounds while he tries to defuse the multiplicity of booby traps that the retreating Germans have set in the Tuscan countryside.
Slowly, steadily, the histories of these four emerge as they converse. We learn of Caravaggio’s capture and torture, of Kip’s training in England and his mastering of the precise and delicate art of bomb disposal, of Hana’s experience of the suffering and agonies of the dressing stations—the endless stream of broken and dying young men she tried to tend and comfort. And slowly too we begin to learn more about the English patient. A history begins to take shape, piecemeal, of his life before the war. We discover he was an Arabist and explorer in the Sahara, a scholar-soldier on the T. E. Lawrence model. We are told also of a doomed love affair with an Englishwoman, Katherine Clifton, the wife of a colleague, and its ultimate tragedy, and of his own final crash and rescue from his burning aeroplane by the Bedouin.
Ondaatje’s method and approach in the relating of these contrasting histories are both unusual and admirable. The narrative point of view is omniscient—we enter and quit the minds and experience of the other characters at will. Stylistically too the tone is fluid and changing. Tenses move from the present to the past and back again. Dialogue is presented with and without quotation marks. We transfer easily from meditation to monologue, from reverie to orthodox description. Anecdotes and digressions blend and recur: there is a disquisition on winds, on the fusing of bombs; key texts are referred to repeatedly—Kipling’s Kim and Herodotus’ great History. The language is lucid and vivid, certain moments, certain images, held and rendered with a clarity that gives them the lyric force of an epiphany:
They found my body and made me a boat of sticks and dragged me across the desert. We were in the Sand Sea, now and then crossing dry riverbeds. Nomads, you see. Bedouin. I flew down and the sand itself caught fire. They saw me stand up naked out o
f it. The leather helmet on my head in flames. They strapped me onto a cradle, a carcass boat, and feet thudded along as they ran with me. I had broken the spareness of the desert.
Back at the villa, Hana and Kip enter into an intense but platonic affair and Caravaggio’s inquisition of the English patient becomes more suspect and thorough. Dosing the patient with morphine to make him more garrulous, Caravaggio begins to dig for the truth. We learn more about events in the Sahara just preceding the war. Caravaggio suspects that the patient is in fact a man called Ladislau Almasy, a Hungarian explorer who, when the war came, flew with the Afrika Corps and guided German spies across the desert behind British lines. Bit by bit, under Caravaggio’s prompting, the identification of Almasy and the English patient becomes more plausible and the events that led to his blazing fall from the air and hellish disfiguration are revealed as a bizarre and tragic confluence of his love affair with Katherine Clifton and an episode of espionage skulduggery and double bluff that went disastrously wrong.
It would be unjust to spell this out in any more detail. The truth about the English patient is revealed by degrees, teased out from the warp and woof of the narrative in a manner that is both bold and confident. Ondaatje diverts and muddles the linear flow of the novel most skilfully here: the structure of the story circles, recoils, coagulates, pauses and digresses while moving us inexorably forward (as it must—one can only tamper and meddle with linearity: the novel will have its way in the end). From time to time—for my taste, at least—the romantic elements grow a little too heady and the moody atmospherics of the cast and their situation veer dangerously towards cliché and self-parody. This is particularly true of the English patient’s love for Katherine Clifton, who emerges as an improbable cross between Virginia Woolf and Mary Astor. One night in the desert she recites some poetry: “I am a man who did not enjoy poetry until I heard a woman recite it to us. And in that desert she dragged her university days into our midst to describe the stars—the way Adam tenderly taught a woman with gracious metaphors … That night I fell in love with a voice. Only a voice. I got up and walked away.”
But these are rare lapses. Normally the rigour of the language effectively counterposes the pitfalls of sentiment and bathos with commendable skill and The English Patient — through the intelligence and originality of its structure and the passion and potency of its telling—marks a significant advance in Michael Ondaatje’s growing reputation.
1998
Albert Camus
(Review of Albert Camus: A Life by Olivier Todd)
I would wager that, of all post-war French writers, the best known in Britain, the most widely read and the most cherished is Albert Camus. I use the word “cherished” advisedly because Camus is one of those writers who, as our reading matures, introduces us to the world of literature. Or, to put it another way, Camus is one of those writers who produced one of those books that marks a reader’s life indelibly. I refer of course to L’Etranger. It is like Catcher in the Rye or Catch-22, like Lucky Jim or Brideshead Revisited (and a handful of others)—one remembers vividly the actual reading of the book itself, the sense of unfolding revelation afforded, however modest, of doors being opened, the power of one writer’s imagination impinging irrevocably on your own.
In Camus’s case a reading of L’Etranger was invariably followed by The Myth of Sisyphus, then The Plague, The Fall and so on—the urge to consume the entire oeuvre was a vital part of this writer’s allure. And yet one knew very little about Camus himself, other than he was Algerian, liked soccer, had won the Nobel Prize and died young (he was forty-six) in a car crash.
Which was why the publication of Olivier Todd’s superb biography of the man was so welcome: clear-eyed, compendious, with full access to the Camus’s archive, it fulfilled every expectation and its publication in France last year was a cultural event. It is rare and gratifying to have an English “version” (more of that later) so swiftly.
Camus was born in 1913. Ten months after his birth his father was dead, a conscripted soldier, an early victim of the Battle of the Marne, a tragedy that condemned the surviving members of his family—a wife and two sons—to a life of near abject poverty. Camus, like James Joyce, never forgot the genuine privations of his early life and, also like Joyce, he saw his intellect as a source of escape. He was bright, ambitious and, one senses, remarkably sure of his destiny. As a young man in 1930s Algeria he joined the Communist party (and was expelled), plunged himself into the world of theatre—acting, producing, directing—married and divorced (his first wife was a morphine addict) but all the while nurtured dreams of becoming a writer.
Camus was also tubercular, gravely so, and his life from the age of seventeen was dogged with bouts of ill-health and the enervating pre-antibiotics treatments of his lesioned lungs. In Algeria, in the years before the start of the Second World War, the young Camus established a formidable reputation as a campaigning journalist, a left-wing intellectual with a fully developed social conscience and, it has to be noted, a compulsive womanizer. It was only the outbreak of war that took him to Paris (he was too unwell to be called up) where he began writing L’Etranger in 1940.
The novel was published in 1942, followed shortly after by the philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus, remarkably, was only twenty-eight years old. By the time of the liberation of France he was already acclaimed in intellectual circles and his trenchant journalism in the resistance newspaper Combat added to his renown.
Indeed, Camus often thought that fame came too early to him: in the late 1940s he was an internationally bestselling author, his name (to his constant irritation) was for ever linked with Sartre as a founder of Existentialism and his life subsequently became that of the classic Left-Bank intello moving in all the right socio-cultural circles. He worked for his publishers, Gallimard, he travelled, he had many love affairs, he hobnobbed in the fashionable cafes and brasseries but he always remained, it is clear from Todd’s account, something of an outsider. This may simply have been a matter of temperament, or it may have been the ever-present proximity of death (the severity of Camus’s tuberculosis is one of the book’s key illuminations), or it may have been the fact that he was a pied-noir, an Algerian, never feeling truly at home in France.
In the event, he quarrelled bitterly with Sartre and after the start of the Algerian war in 1955 found himself even more isolated by his refusal both to support the FLN freedom fighters and to condemn France’s colonial oppression. Ironically, it was at this stage, in 1957 aged forty-four, that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and his elevation to the pantheon was assured.
And then he was killed, on 4 January 1960, in a car crash, being driven back to Paris from his new home in Provence and the legend, and the disputes about his greatness, or lack of it, began.
Todd’s biography is both remarkably thorough and candid, and will prove indispensable to all those interested in Camus’s life. However this English translation falls short on several counts. First it has been severely abridged: “some material not of sufficient interest to the British and American general reader has been omitted,” so runs the translator Benjamin Ivry’s introduction. This is disingenuous—only the economics of publishing could explain such significant cutting. Much has gone: notwithstanding the natural brevity of English, Todd’s 767 pages of French text somehow become 420 English ones. Furthermore, in Todd’s concluding chapter in the French edition he makes a profound and highly important comparison between Camus and George Orwell as exemplary figures of the heterodox left. This is mysteriously omitted in the English edition—but surely this would be “of sufficient interest” to the anglophone general reader? Further comparisons between the two texts throw up other anomalies. For example: a chapter entitled “Un regard myope” becomes in English “Algerian Grief.” The harmless adjective “foutu” (“done for” in my dictionary) is a coarse “fucked-up” in the English text (Ivry tends to inflame the mildest profanities). “Je n’ai plus un sou” is rendered as “I
don’t have a dime” (what could be wrong with “I don’t have a sou”?). Certain infelicities of style draw attention to themselves: “His palling around deepened into friendships, as Albert became more choosy.” The French is: “Des copains deviennent des amis. Albert cloisonne.” Todd’s own style is punchy and terse and written in the present tense—which one would have thought would have favoured the English version, but here all present tenses have routinely been made past.
Still, despite these nagging worries and a sense of disquiet at being served up something indubitably boiled down, this biography remains completely fascinating for the portrait of Camus that emerges and, incidentally, for its depiction of the snake-pit of post-war French intellectual and political life. The debate over Camus’s status still rages across the Channel (interestingly, it is far more secure here) but Todd, I think, establishes the nature of Camus’s appeal and importance with great insight and skill. Its essence is contained in Camus’s own modestly couched ambition: “What interests me is knowing how we should behave, and more precisely, knowing how to behave when one does not believe in God or reason.” These are, in the end, interests we all possess, and answers we all seek. This is what provides the universal element in Camus’s work and this is what will make it endure.
1997
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(Review of The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity by Maurice Cranston)
This is volume three of the late Maurice Cranston’s magisterial and definitive biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Volume one appeared in 1983, volume two in 1991 and now the grand project is completed. Alas, Maurice Cranston did not live to see the final volume published but those of us who have been impatiently reading and waiting over the last fourteen years will not be disappointed. All of Cranston’s scholarly and writerly credentials are on full display: the vast learning, quietly incorporated, the feel for the eighteenth century in all its social, cultural and intellectual aspects and, most importantly for the non-academic reader, a prose of limpid readability, a dry and worldly sense of humour and the ability to fix a character or a place or a moment with apparently effortless skill.