Hell and Back

by Tim Parks

  Without recounting the whole story, there remains - as far as the plot is concerned - Seth’s masterstroke to consider, the ploy that allows him to sustain his melancholy medley for the full 382 pages (the book makes much in musical terms of the problems of sustaining notes and intensity). Those awkward first meetings between Michael and Julia are suddenly explained by the fact that our heroine is going deaf, indeed is already on the brink of total soundlessness. Against all odds, she is trying to keep this disability a secret in the hope that she will be able to pursue her career regardless. Aspiring novelists will be able to profit from considering how this desperate response to personal tragedy, together with a great deal of other preparatory stage-setting, allows Seth to get away with the extraordinary coincidence of its being Julia -Julia whose whereabouts, we remember, Michael was unable for ten years to trace - who is suddenly, and without his knowledge, invited to substitute for a sick pianist who was to support the quartet at its crucial performance in of all places Vienna, where the lovers originally met.

  In his author’s note Seth acknowledges help from ‘those who understand the world of the deaf - medically, like the many doctors who have advised me, or educationally, in particular my lip-reading teacher and her class, or from personal experience of deafness’. Fascinating here, and alas typical of so many contemporary novels, is the way the solemn appeal to research and veracity in some specialist field is actually used to mask the failure to engage a more interesting but arduous and less immediately glamorous subject. The idea of a couple with special talents and sensibilities rediscovering each other many years on and finding that their original bond does indeed challenge relationships made since, is most intriguing and immediately presents itself as a vehicle for all kinds of drama, reflection and moral dilemma. What might such a plot have become in the hands of Lawrence, or James, or Moravia, or Elizabeth Bowen? But as soon as we discover that Julia is afflicted with deafness, we have moved into the realm of kitsch. Can the film, we wonder, be far behind those quartet-accompanied readings?

  Now a party to his lover’s terrible secret, Michael is inevitably brought into conflict with his quartet colleagues who will be risking their reputations when they play with Julia in Vienna. The reader grows anxious over the big night. It all works splendidly in terms of narrative tension. We are well manipulated. Some will have to pull out their handkerchiefs. The downside is that it allows Seth to get away without developing the characters of the lovers or the dynamic of their relationship, which, as a result, can very adequately be summed up thus: at best diffident initially, Julia briefly indulges a tediously insistent Michael to the extent of agreeing to a few days together in Venice after the Vienna concert, then sensibly and predictably withdraws, leaving him in much the position we found him at the beginning of the book.

  Of the characters in A Suitable Boy Anita Desai remarked: ‘They come to us extremely well equipped with easily recognisable characteristics.’ The same is true of those in An Equal Music and in particular of Michael’s fellow members in the quartet, though it has to be said that their rehearsals offer by far the best reading in the book. The ever irritable and aggressive, but also gay and vulnerable, first violinist Piers, his winsomely accommodating sister Helen, the overly diligent cellist Billy - eager to pose problems the others haven’t noticed - and Michael himself, pragmatic, gruff, always in danger of distraction: this is a force field that works, and offers welcome relief from the heady monotony of the love affair. It is also the element that comes closest to evoking the uniting power of music, this picture of four people who have no special desire to spend time together nevertheless sharing the transport of the work they are playing, enjoying the pleasure of a communication beyond words, beyond deafness, and to a certain extent beyond the grave. As they perform Bach together, Michael reflects: ‘Our synchronous visions merge, and we are one; with each other, with the world, and with that long-dispersed being whose force we receive through the shape of his annotated vision and the single, swift-flowing syllable of his name.’

  Leaving aside the swiftness or otherwise with which the syllable ‘Bach’ (yes, I know it means ‘stream’) might be said to flow, how seriously are we to take this idea and its latent transcendentalism? Does it convince? There is a determined intertextuality to Seth’s book. ‘Under the arrow of Eros I sit down and weep,’ Michael tells us in Piccadilly Circus having failed to catch up with Julia’s bus. London’s monuments and the protagonist’s desperation are thus fused in an echo of Psalm 137 and its many subsequent literary adaptations. Having been treated to some gruesome Rochdale gossip on deaths, births and divorces, the sensitive Michael’s mental wince is registered in a one-line paragraph: Tor better or worse, unto us a child, ashes to ashes.’ Later, as he faxes Julia in German to bamboozle the husband, Walter Scott is on his mind: ‘It is a tangled web that I am weaving,’ he comments, reminding us of Marmion.

  These frequent echoes, literary or biblical, are invariably deployed at moments of emotional intensity and seek to establish with the reader a community of sensibility similar to that experienced by the musicians as they play. It is a community from which the insensitive - the bank employee who refuses Michael a loan to buy a new violin, his benefactress’s nephew who selfishly seeks to repossess the expensive violin - will necessarily be excluded. Towards the end of the novel, as Michael’s suffering grows more intense, the literary references become more frequent and are now accompanied by a fragmentation of thought in what amounts to a stops-out pastiche of modernism. In the following passage Julia has just ushered her unwelcome ex-lover out of her house with a very decisive goodbye. The little dog mentioned is a reference to the knowing creature in Carpaccio’s St Jerome cycle that the couple saw together in Venice. Shakespeare and Eliot are also present and, who knows, perhaps Mark Twain as well.

  The door opens, closes. I look down from the top steps. Water, full fathom five, flows down Elgin Crescent, down Ladbroke Grove, through the Serpentine to the Thames, and double-deckered red vaporetti sputter like Mississippi steamboats down its length. A small white dog sits on the sneezing prow. Go, then, with the breathing tide, and do not make a scene, and learn the wisdom of the little dog, who visits from elsewhere, and who knows that what is, is, and, O harder knowledge, that what is not is not.

  In John Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace the protagonist becomes aware that the literary project he is engaged in is going badly wrong, it ‘has failed to engage the core of him. There is something misconceived about it, something that does not come from the heart.’ We are thus given to understand that if, on the contrary, Coetzee’s story is electrifying from beginning to end -and it is - then that must be because it is extremely close to its author’s heart (in the same way that, for all kinds of reasons, industrial England was close to Stead’s heart when she wrote Cotter’s England). That there be something at stake in a narrative, something that engages the core of an author’s being, does not of course guarantee that a reader will be convinced, but it does seem to me a sine qua non of such conviction. However eager to entrance us Seth may be, derivative artifice of the kind he is deploying here looks like no more than a tiresome literary exercise. If the subject does matter greatly to him, he has not found a way of expressing it.

  Which brings us at last to the title of the book and to John Donne. Seth seeks to tie together literary reference, musical experience and metaphysical consolation by prefacing his work with a quotation from the great dean and poet:

  And into that gate they shall enter, and in that house they shall dwell, where there shall be no cloud nor sun, no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light, no noise nor silence, but one equal music, no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession, no foes nor friends, but one equal communion and identity, no ends or beginnings, but one equal eternity.

  Modem ears cannot help but wonder at such confident and eloquent declarations of faith. Yet overcoming for a moment our sense of awe, it is interesting to see how the term ‘equal’ emerges here as the result
of Donne’s systematically denying all those tensing polarities - cloud/sun, darkness/dazzle, noise/silence, hope/fear - that make our mortal life what it is. In short, ‘equal becomes a word that we can use to evoke the unimaginable, something beyond tension, beyond life, beyond individuality. This is rather more radical than Michael’s sentimental sense of the presence of others, even the dead, when he plays his violin: ‘The attendant ghosts press down on me … Schubert is here, and Julia’s mother. They attend because of the beauty of what we are re-making.’ All the same, in the last pages of the book, when Michael has gone to hear Julia giving a solo performance of one of the pieces of music that once united them, Seth boldly attempts to clinch all his interconnections thus: ‘There is no forced gravitas in her playing. It is a beauty beyond imagining -clear, lovely, inexorable … the unending “Art of Fugue”. It is an equal music’

  But of course it is not, not in the sense Donne meant it, which is the only sense one can think to ascribe to this odd expression. What else could it mean? Only a moment later, in fact, Seth, himself all too familiar with forced gravitas, is remarking that the human soul ‘could not sustain’ too much of this music, whereas Donne was affirming his belief in a music that will delight the soul for all time. On closer examination, Seth’s ‘beyond imagining’ turns out to be the merest inflation. Here we have a deaf woman playing Bach superbly, and though that may stretch the imagination, a good performance of Bach, wherever it comes from, is far from beyond imagining.

  Once again, then, we have an inappropriate appropriation. Seth needs his vague transcendentalism, his lyricism and literary gesturing, his sense of community in pathos, to sugar this long, but in the end far from hard look at unhappiness. I was thus mistaken when I supposed that this work might mark a radical departure from the previous two books. It is another careful exercise in crowd-pleasing. As such, the sickly music it generates is one with which the ever vigorous, sometimes vicious Donne, the Donne for whom so much, in love and in religion, was always at stake, would have had nothing whatsoever to do.

  A Chorus of Cruelty,

  [Giovanni Verga]

  ‘Cruelty,’ wrote Emil Cioran, “is a sign of election, at least in literature. The more talented a writer is, the more ingeniously he puts his characters in situations from which there is no escape; he persecutes them, he tyrannizes them, he traps them in dead ends, he forces them to run the whole gamut of their agony.

  Of no writer could this provocative intuition be more true than the great Sicilian novelist Giovanni Verga. Yet eighty years after his death the author of the ‘Cavalleria rusticana’ continues to be presented to the public as first and foremost a humanist worthily celebrating the passions of the ordinary man and drawing attention to his difficult lot through well-documented description of changing social conditions. G.H. McWilliam concludes the introduction to his new translation of Verga’s Sicilian novellas thus:

  Verga’s great merit lies in his ability to arouse compassion whilst avoiding completely all traces of sentimentality, and this is because he presents life as it is, free from the distortions of idealistic perspectives. His narratives are an unfailing source of interest, not only to those who care about good literature, but also to the historian, for whom his novels and short stories provide an invaluable record of social conditions at a critical stage of modern Italian history.

  Reading such reassuring words one is bound to ask whether there mightn’t be some taboo that prevents us from saying what it really is that draws us so powerfully to this man’s violent and irretrievably pessimistic stories.

  Yet if much of the literature on Verga is at best uneasily half true, the author himself is always the first to set us on the wrong track. Rarely has a great writer’s work been so unwittingly uneven, his long and earnest reflections on his various endeavours so mysteriously distant from their impact on the reader. Sensing, at some deep level, perhaps, that the impulses driving his writing were such that they would require considerable disguise before they could be allowed to circulate in polite society, Verga’s critical efforts seem to have been largely, if unconsciously, devoted to developing that disguise, not only for the world, but for himself too.

  That he never managed to settle on any particular cover, ducking in the space of a long creative life from the elegant society novel, through various forms of worthy social realism, and finally to a formulation that anticipates absurdism, suggests that the real inspiration lay he knew not where. He poured his genius into many bottles, haphazardly it sometimes seems. Only in the one he initially most despised, the short and shamelessly regional novella, did it yield its full and explosive flavour. Only there, albeit with all the insipid decanting of translation, can it still produce its decidedly intoxicating effect outside the Italian language.

  Born in 1840 into a family of impoverished gentry in the Sicilian city of Catania, Verga learned early about the importance of maintaining a certain reputation, the difficulty of doing so when resources are scarce. Wealthy Uncle Salvatore had inherited all the family estates on condition that he remain unmarried and use the income to assist his younger brothers and sisters. Life, Giovanni would have realised, is a tangled web and contracts are often notoriously different in letter and in spirit. Few people are naturally generous. Money was not forthcoming. His two spinster aunts, miserly beyond belief, became known as ‘the mummies’.

  Still, things can sometimes work out in the most unexpected ways. By the time Giovanni’s elder brother Mario married Uncle Salvatore’s illegitimate daughter Lidda, differences had been resolved. And this was just as well, since money doesn’t serve only to keep up appearances. In 1854 a cholera epidemic forced Giovanni’s parents to flee Catania to the safety of the family’s country estates. Others of course were not so lucky. Years later Verga’s writing would be full of figures fighting tooth and nail for the good opinion of others - their very identity depends on it -only to be defeated by illness, drought or, worse still, some irresistible passion that destroys them from within. Beneath it all runs a ferocious sense of outrage. But about what exactly?

  In 1860 Garibaldi arrived in Catania. The Bourbon regime was collapsing; the state of Italy was born. Verga, who had already written a novel with the heady title Amove e patria joined the new Guardia Nazionale and started a political weekly under the slogan, ‘Roma degli Italiani’. But far from a glorious struggle for national unity, the young novelist found himself involved in the repression of popular revolt. The harrowing story ‘Liberia’ tells how the people in a small village on the slopes of Etna, misunderstanding the meaning of the liberty’ the Piedmontese state was bringing them, butchered the local nobles and began to fight over who should get what land. A few days later Garibaldi’s troops arrived to restore order and butchered the villagers. In a fascinating article written in 1970, Leonardo Sciascia reveals how even Verga, the least squeamish of novelists, played down the cruelty of the soldiers of unification.

  In any event, by 1865, and availing himself of another of money’s advantages, Verga had bought himself out of the National Guard and sailed to Florence, then capital of Italy. D.H. Lawrence, who first discovered Verga for the English-speaking world and gave us the earliest translations, speaks of him leaving Sicily “to work at literature’. Like everything else in Lawrence’s brief introduction to Little Novels of Sicily the words are wonderfully apt. Verga was a worker. Avid, anxious, for money and fame, he laboured at his literature, as so many of his characters would labour doggedly in field or quarry or fishing boat. All the same, it would be many years before he found the form that could most successfully channel his remarkable energies.

  Verga later disparagingly described his early novels as tales of ‘elegance and adultery. ‘Real Italian novels,’ Lawrence generously calls them, ‘a little tiresome, but with their own depth’. Casting about for something more satisfactory, Verga even had a shot at the Gothic. But in the middle of the ‘Castello di Trezza’ a hopelessly complex story of betrayal, multiple murder and ghosts who may
not be ghosts, the second wife of the cruel baron, on hearing of the tragic death of her predecessor, finally addresses these prophetic remarks to her terrified maid: ‘Even if you took away the ghosts, the clock striking midnight, the storm that slams open doors and windows, the creaking weathercocks, this would still be a terrifying story.’ Whether or not the illumination came to Verga when he wrote that snippet of dialogue, his project from now on would be to strip the ‘terrifying story’ that was ever inside him of its melodramatic mechanics and give it to us straight.

  Published in a fashion magazine in 1870 ‘Storia di una capinera’ (‘Story of a Blackcap’) was halfway there. We have the underlying play of forces, but not the milieu. Briefly: the young Maria is taken out of her convent school to escape a cholera epidemic and goes to join her family in the country. Her mother died young. Her weak father remarried a rich woman who will be interested only in the fate of her own daughter. There is no money for Maria’s dowry. She must take the veil. But during this brief stay in the country she falls in love with rich neighbour Nino and he with her. Needless to say Nino is intended for the sister with the dowry.

  Presented as a one-way epistolary novel, Maria writes to a convent friend of her awakening to love, then her brutal segregation after the romance is discovered. Heartbreaking chapters have her shut in her room listening to merry-making down the passageway. In one brief, breathless appearance at Maria’s window, the handsome Nino lets us know that he understands the cruel injustice of it all. But he does nothing to break the social ties so efficiently woven around him. Maria herself sees her love as an indulgence and a sin against her fate. Later, when she has taken the veil, she will be granted a view through the cloister grating of Nino and her half-sister who have come to announce their engagement. A final letter from an older nun tells of Maria’s sickness, insanity and death.