Bamboo

by William Boyd

  Volume three begins in 1762 in Switzerland with Rousseau at the height of his fame and notoriety. The Social Contract had been written, his novel La Nouvelle Héloïse has enjoyed wild success throughout Europe, turning him into a cult figure, and his treatise on the education of children, Emile, has fomented acclaim and hysterical derogation in equal measure. In fact it was the spiralling controversy over Emile that led the French parlement to order the burning of the book and the arrest of the author.

  So Rousseau fled to the land of his birth seeking exile and asylum, but this last phase of his life was to prove as unsettled and disturbing as anything that his earlier career had witnessed. The fifty-year-old Jean-Jacques cut an eccentric figure: still living with his slatternly common-law wife Thérése Levasseur, he was plagued by urinary problems that necessitated use of a catheter and the wearing of an Armenian kaftan to make him more comfortable (he had need of a chamber pot every few minutes, he claimed). He settled in Môtiers in the canton of Berne trying to write his biography and going for long botanizing walks in the mountains. But a quiet life was always to be denied Rousseau, however arduously he tried to create one: he had powerful friends to protect him but also many enemies determined to make his life difficult. Also his renown was such that however reclusive and anonymous he sought to be admirers would beat a path to his door for audiences. One of the most amusing and best detailed of these was with the young James Boswell (who introduced himself as “I am a Scottish laird of ancient lineage”).

  Rousseau was never wholly secure or at ease in Switzerland—the cantonal governments saw him as a dangerous dissident—and his few years there were fraught with vain lobbying to confirm his residential status. Rousseau’s paranoia grew, not unjustifiably, and he saw himself as dogged by malevolent enemies and persecutors. Voltaire, malignity personified, the arch rival, published an anonymous pamphlet recounting the scandal of Rousseau’s children by Thérése, all of whom he had left at the gates of an orphanage. Thus stimulated, local clerics stirred up their congregations with claims of heresy and depravity and Rousseau’s house was stoned by a mob on one memorable and terrifying night. He came to loathe the village and the canaille who inhabited it, longing to find a country where he could be left in peace.

  The philosopher David Hume, then living in Paris, invited him to England and Rousseau reluctantly accepted his offer. Hume, another well-disposed Scot, was a genuine admirer of Rousseau but the history of their relationship ended badly—in typical Rousseauesque fashion. Rousseau was a man of spontaneous impassioned emotion and illogical mood swings. Hume records a moment when Rousseau, in a bad temper, suddenly “rose up and took a turn about the room: but judge of my surprise, when he sat down suddenly on my knee, threw his hands about my neck [and] kissed me with the greatest warmth.” It was not to last. In 1766 Hume accompanied Rousseau to London and a wealthy patron installed him in his house in Derbyshire. Boswell escorted Thérése thither separately from Switzerland, during which journey they had a brief, energetic affair (Boswell noting in his journal “gone to bed very early and had done it once. Thirteen in all”). And all for a while was well until Rousseau got it into his head that Hume was the author of a satirical letter published in the English press (in fact it was by Horace Walpole) and he accused Hume of betrayal and of covertly opening his mail. Rousseau’s affection and gratitude had turned immediately to passionate vilification and disdain. Hume was hurt and baffled and eventually equally outraged at the accusations. So the English period of Rousseau’s life ended on this tone of mutual defamation and aggrieved self-justification. He and Thérése returned to France where, finally, at Ermenonville near Paris, another wealthy patron provided the philosopher with a rural retreat and he passed his last years in some form of comfort and peace, dying of a stroke on 2 July 1778.

  His greatest work, and his lasting monument, was published posthumously. The Confessions is a truly astonishing autobiography, a beguiling mix of total candour, self-abasement, vainglory and special-pleading. Hume had encouraged Rousseau to write his memoirs and Rousseau told him the work was already underway. Rousseau said, “I shall describe myself in such plain colours that henceforth everyone may boast that he knows … Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” Hume commented sagely, “I believe he intends seriously to draw his own picture in its true colours; but I believe at the same time that nobody knows himself less.” This is the key to Rousseau’s abiding fascination in the modern age—he is one of the great characters of history, an absorbing psychological case study, of which we have, mercifully, copious documentation. Rousseau may not have known himself well but, thanks to Maurice Cranston’s exemplary labours, we have in these three volumes of biography (to be read alongside The Confessions, ideally) a chance to make the acquaintance of Jean-Jacques, in all his maddening and endearing complexities, ourselves.

  1997

  Muriel Spark

  (Review of Reality and Dreams)

  “He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams.” Thus begins Muriel Spark’s shortish, beguiling, twentieth novel. The “he” doing the wondering is Tom Richards, a sixty-something film director of some renown, who is recovering from a serious accident—a fall from a crane during the shooting of his latest film, The Hamburger Girl. This is about as profound as Tom gets (he is no great intellectual) and most of his waking moments are given over to thinking about himself—his future projects, his cares and woes, his love affairs and his wife and family.

  The mazy and improbable plot largely centres on Tom’s relationship with his daughter from his second marriage, Marigold. Marigold is plain, difficult and demanding and an air of mutual dislike colours their respective attitudes to each other. Cora, Tom’s daughter from his first marriage, however, is beautiful and can do no wrong. Claire, Marigold’s mother, airily tolerates Tom’s egotism and his regular adultery. The family congregate around Tom after the fall (many broken ribs, a shattered hip), commiserate somewhat and go on their merry ways. Tom’s film is put on hold, retitled, then, after he has recuperated, starts up once more with Tom restored at the helm. Tom has an affair with his leading lady, Rose Woodstock, alienates another dysfunctional actress called Jeanne and presides over the several misfortunes of his daughters and sons-in-law.

  It is all slightly ditsy and eccentric with a La Ronde style of serial infidelities adding a certain spice. Things get serious however when Marigold disappears: rather, things eventually get serious because no one seems to notice she has gone, at first. Finally the alarm is raised, the media are alerted, a search is initiated world wide and eventually Marigold is found disguised as a man living with some New Age travellers. It was all, it turns out, a way of tormenting her horrible father. Except that, mysteriously, a taxi driver companion of Tom (a compliant ear to Tom’s convalescent witterings) has been shot at and nearly killed. Was this Marigold’s doing?

  By way of compensation for his paternal neglect Tom casts manly Marigold as a prescient Celt called Cedric in his latest absurd movie, set in Roman Britain, called Watling Street. Curiously, but then perhaps not, this is the movie business after all, Tom persists in recasting Rose Woodstock and Jeanne in this new film. Jeanne, now druggy and seriously unhinged, becomes a compliant agent for Marigold’s wiles. Marigold, still nurturing murderous thoughts, decides to kill her father by re-enacting the original crane accident, only this time with more fatal efficiency. Jeanne is engaged as saboteur but the plans go tragically awry.

  Such summaries of Muriel Spark’s novels do them a misservice. What delights principally is the tone of voice, so enviably assured, such a distinct signature. In this novel the point of view is omniscient, we visit whichever character’s thoughts suit the Sparkian design. The voice is cool and spare, and in complete disinterested control: “The youth recounted his experience with Marigold but said they had parted shortly afterwards. He did not discount that Marigold was perfectly capable of hiring a hit-man if the plan suited her. The police eventually believed the boy, whose name for the pres
ent purpose is irrelevant, and let him go. Where was Marigold? Nobody knew for sure.”

  The disinterest can also shade into ruthlessness. There has always been a nail-paring objectivity about Muriel Spark’s authorial style (this is what drew Evelyn Waugh to praise her first novel) and it provides delectable pleasures throughout her work, Reality and Dreams included. This aloofness can breed a certain air of cynicism or fatalism and gives rise to the darkness that seems to haunt the story. Tom and his brood are lightweights, people we care little for, whose lives and concerns, from one point of view, seem almost nugatory.

  A conclusion that is perhaps borne out by the novel’s opening sentence, Tom’s ingenuous aperçu. What, indeed, if we are mere figments in one of God’s dreams? Where does that leave us? “As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods”—so Gloucester famously observed in King Lear and Spark’s wise and disturbing fiction often exploits a similar sense of human insubstantiality and unimportance with great subtlety and skill. Of course there is another layer here, apart from the nihilistic, that is readily developed. We can detect a God-like presence hovering over the action of the novel—that of the author: these characters are characters in one of Muriel Spark’s dreams. The dream/reality, art/life theme is further enhanced by the fact that Tom’s films all start from dreams he has had. He then makes these films “real” through the wholly unreal medium of film. Just as the plot slips and slides, and the characters’ various fates chop and change almost at whim so too does our sense of the reality of what we are reading shift and blur. There is, in the end, only one person who can make sense of the whole can of worms—the artist.

  However, in Reality and Dreams the controlling role of Muriel Spark is a little too overt, I feel. Her unique sensibility functions best when the voice is subjective, the point of view confined or in first person, as in her two wonderful late novels A Far Cry from Kensington and Loitering with Intent. This method localizes, and validates, that clear-eyed, unabashedly, brutally honest gaze on the world and its denizens. Omniscient narration has the opposite effect: the mode has its attractions but, in this day and age, it can seem a little too manipulative and knowing. Perhaps in this elderly century (and Spark makes some play with this notion) the predetermined, the ordered, the sense of everything-in-its-place is fundamentally inimical. In our novels, that most controlled of artefacts, we need at least the illusion of uncertainty, of ignorance, of the random.

  Reflecting on his dream notion Tom concedes that, “‘Our dreams, yes, are insubstantial; the dreams of God, no. They are real, frighteningly real. They bulge with flesh, they drip with blood.’ My own dreams, said Tom to himself, are shadows, my arguments—all shadows.” The dreams of Muriel Spark, as we have seen in her exemplary oeuvre, are frighteningly real, also, and bulge and drip to great effect. Reality and Dreams, however, is a little muted, and a certain shadowiness detracts from the real frisson. We may not have, in this latest novel, Muriel Spark in her full symphonic majesty but we can still relish the real pleasures of this work on a smaller scale—a nocturne, say, a suite, a variation on certain themes—as we wait impatiently for the major work to resume.

  1999

  Frederic Manning

  (Introduction to Her Privates We)

  Two brief quotations will serve as the best introduction to this unique and extraordinary novel, the finest novel, in my opinion, to have come out of the First World War. The scene takes place in the reserve lines in the Somme valley in northern France during the late summer of 1916. A corporal is dressing-down the men in his section.

  “You shut your blasted mouth, see!” said the exasperated Corporal Hamley, stooping as he entered the tent, the lift of his head, with chin thrust forward as he stooped, giving him a more desperately aggressive appearance. “An’ you let me ’ear you talkin’ on parade again with an officer present and you’ll be on the bloody mat quick. See? You miserable beggar, you! A bloody cow like you’s sufficient to demoralize a whole muckin’ Army Corps. Got it? Get those buzzers out, and do some bloody work for a change.”

  Nothing too unusual here: standard NCO aggression, an attempt to render the colloquial nature of the speech by dropping the odd consonant, perhaps a hint of a more refined sensibility present in the way Corporal Hamley’s entry into the tent is so precisely described. But now here is the same passage as it was originally written and as it was originally meant to be read.

  “You shut your blasted mouth, see!” said the exasperated Corporal Hamley, stooping as he entered the tent, the lift of his head, with chin thrust forward as he stooped, giving him a more desperately aggressive appearance. “An’ you let me ’ear you talkin’ on parade again with an officer present and you’ll be on the bloody mat, quick. See? You miserable bugger you! A bloody cunt like you’s sufficient to demoralise a whole fuckin’ Army Corps. Got it? Get those buzzers out, and do some bloody work, for a change.”

  It is remarkable the change wrought by the good old Anglo-Saxon demotic of “bugger,” “cunt” and “fuckin’.” What was familiar, stereotypical, almost parodic, becomes suddenly real—the whole situation charged and violent. And in its wider context—the First World War—a whole new resonance emerges. Those monochrome images we know so well—Tommies puffing on their fags, troops marching through French villages, the lunar landscape of no man’s land—suddenly have a different import. Suddenly, a veil is stripped away. These are real men, real soldiers—and all soldiers swear, vilely, constantly. This is a world where corporals call their men “cunts.”

  Her Privates We was not the title chosen for the first, unexpurgated edition of this novel which was privately printed and issued in an impression of some 600 copies, and is what you will read here. Frederic Manning called this version of his book The Middle Parts of Fortune, changing the title for the later, bowdlerized, public version. And, even though we have had the uncensored novel for some three decades now, the book’s fame and reputation have always been associated with the second title. Both titles, in fact, come from Hamlet (Act II, scene 2) when Hamlet indulges in a bit of saucy badinage with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. When Hamlet asks how the “good lads” are, Guildenstern replies: “Happy in that we are not over-happy/On Fortune’s cap we are not the very button.”

  HAMLET: Nor the soles of her shoe?

  ROSENCRANTZ: Neither, my lord.

  HAMLET: Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours.

  GUILDENSTERN: Faith, her privates we.

  HAMLET: In the secret parts of Fortune? O, most true, she is a strumpet. What’s the news?

  I take the allusion in several ways. First, I think Manning acknowledges that the very coarseness of the book is its strongest and most shocking asset. Especially in 1930, when it was published, even the cleaned-up version would have seemed relentlessly profane. Second, it draws attention to the role of luck and blind chance in men’s lives, particularly in a war. And third, it advertises the book’s intellectual seriousness. For although this is a novel about private soldiers, those at the bottom end of the army’s food chain, the authorial brain informing it is rigorously intelligent and clear-eyed. And, as if to ram that point home, every chapter has a Shakespearean epigraph.

  Even when the book was first published, credited pseudonymously to one “Private 19022,” it would be apparent to any reader that the central character, Bourne, is different from the ordinary soldiers around him. The tone of voice, the intellectual nature of the book’s reflection and analysis, the sardonic sensibility, all spoke of a different category of author than a mere private soldier. And when the identity of the author was eventually revealed there was even more of a surprise—but more of that later.

  Her Privates We has little to do with actual combat—most of its action takes place behind the lines, in reserve or in billets as the battalion trains, does fatigues and waits for its turn in the front-line trenches. Bourne is a thoughtful and ruminative man, taciturn, an almost lugubrious presence—an older man, too, educated, but with no desire to e
xploit the privileges that this education, and what was then called “breeding,” would have provided for him in the army. He is friendly with the NCOs—happy to go drinking with the sergeants, and, because he can speak French, is used by the men as an interpreter, and provider of services, with the local population.

  Here again, despite the classically turned prose of the novel, its modernity emerges. While they wait to go into battle, the men’s interests are focused on food, drink, sex and idleness—probably in that order. Bourne observes all this and bears calm and cool witness. The men tolerate rather than respect their officers, they show no military zeal or patriotic fervour, they have no faith in their leaders and no real interest in the war: “… they were now mere derelicts in a wrecked and dilapidated world, with sore and angry nerves sharpening their tempers, or shutting them up in a morose or sullen humour from which it was difficult to move them.” Time and again Bourne’s observations undermine the stereotype of the First World War and in so doing paint a picture of men at war that is—after decades of mythmaking and romance—both bitterly fresh and timeless.