Hell and Back

by Tim Parks

  In this scenario, what is the marvellous fizz of shenanigans that makes up the bulk of the novel, if not a heroic attempt to keep death at bay? It’s a situation where the abilities to flirt, to preen and to start pernicious rumours are not qualities to be lightly dismissed. Other writers, Green seems to be telling us, have not given these achievements their due. The conversation must go on. We must not be obliged to think. For at every misunderstanding, every ‘strangling silence’, every hiccup in the conversation (and with the amount these people can afford to drink the slip-ups will be many), it’s as if the fog had made a further advance into the hotel, creeping into booze-befuddled heads and threatening to have them crashing into a beam to drop down damp and lifeless. Fortunately our party are well trained. The finishing schools have not been in vain. Here is Amabel listening to Alex relaying some hot gossip through a closed door while she has her bath:

  When Alex came to an end she had not properly heard what he had been saying so she said something almost under her breath, or so low that he in his turn should not catch what she had said, but so that it would be enough to tell him she was listening.

  Never, not even in Beckett’s Endgame, has there been a greater communal complicity in that vital game of keeping the ball rolling.

  An atmosphere of mockery hangs over Party Going, seeps into its every nook and cranny. It is the fog. It is the grey matter of the artist’s mind. Both have a peculiarly corrosive quality that dissolves identity, disconnects things, above all, puts everything on the same level - people, objects, images, different parts of speech, political readings, symbolic readings - as if in some primeval soup, something far older (and if Green is dated, as some complain, the date goes back many thousands of years) than any empire or class distinction. The oddly compelling rhythms of the prose with its elimination of weak stresses and frequent use of demonstratives, reproduce the dismembering effect at the auditory level. Everything is fragmented, displaced.

  She bent down and took a wing then entered a tunnel in front of her, and this had DEPARTURES lit up over it, carrying her dead pigeon.

  Departures indeed! It’s a state of decomposition that cannot help but remind us of our mortal precariousness. Yet at the same time it is also the warm and fertile sea from which all life once crept. No wonder we felt we were far from home! Everything interrupted, sense perceptions blocked, the ancient archetypes are free to rise up quite naturally like dreams in a Jungian sleep. So Alex, driven through dense fog in a taxi, is transported far away from central London:

  Streets he went through were wet as though that fog twenty foot up had deposited water, and reflections which lights slapped over the roadways suggested to him he might be a Zulu, in the Zulu’s hell of ice, seated in his taxi in the part of Umslopogaas with his axe, skin beating over the hole in his temple.

  All Green’s work is inspired by his perception of a complicity between composition and decomposition, between the creative and corrosive powers of the mind, or again by the way a disability, a misunderstanding, can unleash powerful and vital forces, or a dying auntie have the most astonishing hallucinations. He left us but one precious hint of the method this perception led him to. It comes in almost the only interview this very private man ever gave and is disguised in a sly remark that has been more often quoted than understood.

  INTERVIEWER: I’ve heard it remarked that your work is ‘too sophisticated’ for American readers, in that if offers no scenes of violence - and ‘too subtle’, in that its message is somewhat veiled. What do you say?

  GREEN: Unlike the wilds of Texas, there is very little violence over here. A bit of child-killing of course, but no straight shootin’ …

  INTERVIEWER: And how about ‘subtle’?

  GREEN: I don’t follow. Suttee, as I understand it, is the suicide - now forbidden - of a Hindu wife on her husband’s flaming bier. I don’t want my wife to do that when my time comes -and with great respect, as I know her, she won’t …

  INTERVIEWER: I’m sorry, you misheard me, I said ‘subtle’ - that the message was too subtle.

  GREEN: Oh, subtle. How dull!

  Subtle it was! Deaf in one ear though he may have been, Green could not have imagined that his interviewer, Terry Southern, was talking about ‘suttee’. Indeed Southern’s notes suggest that parts of the interview was as much written as spoken. In any event, Green uses the exchange to show, with typical playfulness, how from a misunderstanding, a moment of mental limbo, an ancient religion with its terrible ritual may suddenly flare up again, and immediately we are thinking of our own death and simultaneously trying to forget it with the wonderfully wry remark about the wife. After which we can safely return to the duller world of literary discussion.

  It will be pointless, then, to ask what this or that image in Party Going means, or how this or that conversation might be interpreted. Quite simply, these are the things that people say to each other, and these are the images the mind has ever produced. You can’t help recognising them. So it is that Green, unlike Waugh or Wodehouse or Wilde, can allow even the most witless characters moments of extraordinary and completely convincing beauty. Here, to close, are the incorrigibly faithless Max and Amabel nodding off to sleep together after what may or may not have been a reconciliation. As always with Green, beauty has to do with birds, with dissolution, and with death.

  Lying in his arms, her long eyelashes down along her cheeks, her hair tumbled and waved, her hands drifted to rest like white doves drowned on peat water, he marvelled again he should ever dream of leaving her who seemed to him then his reason for living as he made himself breathe with her breathing as he always did when she was in his arms to try and be more with her.

  It was so luxurious he nodded, perhaps it was also what she had put on her hair, very likely it may have been her sleep reaching out over him, but anyway he felt so right he slipped into it too and dropped off on those outspread wings into her sleep with his, like two soft evenings meeting.

  The Enchanted Fort

  [Dino Buzzati]

  ‘Now a book lives,’ wrote D.H. Lawrence, ‘as long as it is unfathomed. Once it is fathomed … once it is known and its meaning is fixed or established, it is dead.’ He uses the remark to launch an attack on allegory, indeed on all stories that offer a neat equivalence between their characters or settings and abstract qualities. ‘A man is more than a Christian, he protests, ‘a rider on a white horse must be more than mere faithfulness and truth.

  Written in 1938, The Tartar Steppe is the story of a young officer dispatched to do service in a remote mountain garrison overlooking a vast northern desert. At first desperate to escape and return to the pleasures of normal life, he nevertheless falls under the spell of the place to the point that he will spend the next thirty years there, sustained only by the vain hope that one day an enemy attack will offer a moment of glory and fulfilment. Buzzati commented: ‘The idea of the novel came out of the monotonous night shift I was working at Corriere délia Sera in those days. It often occurred to me that that routine would never end and so would eat up my whole life quite pointlessly. It’s a common enough feeling, I think, for most people, especially when you find yourself slotted into the time-tabled existence of a big town. Transposing that experience into a fantastical military world was an almost instinctive decision.’

  Is the book, then, a mere allegory of equivalences? Buzzati had originally called his story ‘The Fort and the tide was only changed on the insistence of the publishers who were keen to avoid allusions to the sensitive military situation in Europe. One Italian critic remarked: ‘The “desert” of the novel is thus the story of life in the “fort” of the newspaper which promises the wonders of a solitude that is both habit and vocation.’ You can already hear Lawrence muttering, ‘Fathomed and dead!’

  But if it’s a commonplace that something explained is very largely explained away, it is also true that faced with any phenomenon the mind instinctively sets out to construct an explanation. Here is an irony Lawrence doesn’t
follow up. Confronted with a story, any story, we immediately seek to fathom it out, to know it, even though we realise that if we succeed it will no longer be interesting, it will die. Oddly, then, the greatest pleasure we can get from a story only comes when the smaller satisfaction of having explained it away is thwarted. The mind discards, as it were, the chaff of the explicable to find real repose, or real excitement, in a kernel of enigma.

  The Tartar Steppe is one of those precious novels that take the enormous risk of throwing down a gauntlet to the reasoning mind. Explain me if you can or dare, it says. Fathom me out. Provocative and frightening as the book is, we feel we must accept this challenge, put this disturbing story behind us. Who is this man who tosses away his life for a chimera, why does he seem so recognisable? Fortunately, the extraordinary clarity of the narrative, its elegant structure and straightforward execution, persuade us that it is that manner of thing for which explanation is surely available, a puzzle we can solve. Yet in the end, twisting and turning this way and that, mocking and infinitely ironic, Buzzati’s story somehow denies us what we always felt was within our grasp. No, on putting the book down we cannot honestly say that we know what it meant. Quite the contrary. In this way it succeeds in evoking in its reader the central experience of its main character: in every sense life, not only his own but the whole of life, eludes his grasp.

  One September morning, Giovanni Drogo, being newly commissioned, set out from the city for Fort Bastiani; it was his first posting.

  And his last… There is a ruthless dispatch to these opening lines which is typical of the way Buzzati works. Already he knows exactly what he is doing. In a way the whole novel will be written on the first page. Given no details of his past life, no sense of geographical or cultural location, Drogo is immediately and inevitably Everyman. He has waited for this day, this departure, the beginning of his ‘real life’, ‘for years’, but looking in the mirror now he doesn’t ‘find there the expected joy’. His early youth is gone, tediously consumed in books and study, but fortunately adulthood promises new satisfactions, new hopes. For the next two hundred pages, Buzzati will show us how resourcefully and how cruelly such hopes will ever sprout from the interminable erosion of Drogo’s wasted days, their punctual disappointments. The wonder is that a writer should display such merciless control in elaborating a scenario of frustration and impotence.

  Far from resembling the editing room of a big city newspaper, Fort Bastiani is located on the highest and most inaccessible of mountain terrains. This is Buzzati’s masterstroke, the decision that more than any other will give the book its rich elusiveness. How can we not think of a medieval knight embarking on a spiritual quest as we watch Drogo urge his horse up winding paths beneath rock face and waterfall, lie down for the night wrapped in his cloak, emerge the following morning at an altitude immeasurably higher than anything he expected, onto a narrow plateau where the yellow walls of the fort rise in the cleft between towering peaks? The scene is set for some apocalyptic trial. We are anxious that our hero perform well.

  But no trial presents itself, or at least none of the variety we expect. Drogo is not going to war. Nor is there a grail to recover. He will never meet the enemy, let alone be given a chance to slay an ogre or a giant. Only in routine regimental rituals will his sabre be bared, only at the endless changing of a meaningless guard will the stirring trumpet sound. This is a story of drama deferred, catharsis denied. To compensate, there are the mountains.

  It is important here to say a word on what the mountains meant for Buzzati, and indeed on the place they occupy in the collective imagination of Italy in general, northern Italy in particular. Brought up in Belluno at the confluence of the Ardo and Piave rivers immediately below the majestic Dolomites, Buzzati was ten years old when Italy joined the First World War and became involved in the one military campaign of modern times that Italians will still refer to as glorious. Defending a line that ran across the very peaks of the Alps from the Swiss border to the Adriatic, the Italian troops hacked trenches in stone and snow, lived in caves and igloos at frightening altitudes, attacked machine guns in terrain where the only grave was a heap of shards. Finally routed at Caporetto in the east with the loss of half a million men, they nevertheless fought a desperate rearguard action to hold a line behind the Piave, a river north of Venice, whence the tide was eventually turned and the enemy chased north again. For an Italian the northern mountains are the locus par excellence of military glory.

  And so much more than that of course. In his early teens Buzzati began to climb in the Dolomites. It would be a lifelong passion. A competent artist, he drew and painted the mountains. He never tired of it. His first literary effort, at fourteen, was called ‘La canzone délie montagne, (‘The Song of the Mountains’). In his first novel, Barnabus of the Mountains the Dolomites were already assuming a role at least as important as that of the people in the book. So while the initial inspiration for The Tartar Steppe may indeed have come out of the fear that a mindless office routine was eating up his life, Buzzati nevertheless chose to set that routine in a landscape that was his chief recreation, and also something he was clearly in thrall to, a limit-experience for him, a drug almost, an endless source of exhilaration. The effect is double-edged. Against the vast backdrop of pink peaks and dark gorges, dazzling ice fields and dizzying gulfs, the rigid routine of the garrison in the puny human geometry of the fort becomes more meaningless than ever. But it also takes on a borrowed sublimity. The mountains are that place where the sheer extravagance of nature’s waste and emptiness becomes sublime. And there is something sublime about the way a group of soldiers can waste their whole lives observing the severest of rules as they wait for an enemy who never materialises. Inexplicably, in the night, snow slips from a roof, a landslide alters the shape of a crag, freezing water splits a rock. There is an obscure complicity between this alpine erosion and the web of wrinkles spreading across the stony faces of the guards as they gaze out across the desolate steppe to the north. The mountains, we discover, offer a marvellous view of the void.

  To read The Tartar Steppe is to be asked to take the idea of enchantment seriously. Young Drogo knows that he must not stay in the fort. It is isolated, futile. No sooner has he arrived than he is asking to leave. He understands perfectly that there is no hope of ordinary human fulfilment here, or military glory for that matter. Reassured by the smiles and blandishments of older officials - he doesn’t want to let the side down - he agrees to stay a few months, at least until the first medical when he will be pronounced, they promise him, unsuitable for service at high altitude. Immediately we are terribly anxious for him. He slips into the routine. We feel it happening. The narrator will even insist that it is this cosy, easy, empty existence that will persuade Drogo not to leave when the medical comes along and the doctor gives him his chance. A moral failing, we are told. But we know it isn’t so. Or it isn’t just that. Drogo is enchanted. It is a spell that has something to do with the meeting of human vanities and mountain landscape, a fatal complicity between aspiration and emptiness. As the doctor who could send him back home speaks, our hero cannot even bring himself to listen, intent as he is on the view from the window: “And it was then that he seemed to see the yellow walls of the fortress courtyard soar up toward the crystal sky, while, above them and beyond, higher and ever higher, snow-topped bulwarks rose obliquely to solitary towers, tiny redoubts and airy fortifications he had never noticed before.’

  Drogo cannot tear himself away. He is doomed, seduced by this hubristic and fantastical vision of some vast engagement between man and mountain. At bottom it is an aesthetic enchantment, the terrible sorcery of the magnificent gesture. Once, when there were real enemies, bloody battles to be fought, such magnificent posturing could serve a social purpose. The glorious endeavour - swords brandished over the dramatic landscape, fortifications built with tremendous sacrifice - was still connected with the more mundane life down in the city. The military hero protected that life. Now the gest
ure is entirely cut off from any other reality, it lives only in the mind, entirely absurd, and paradoxically all the grander and more seductive for being so.

  A pitiless psychology drives the development of the novel from this point on. Again and again, in his dealings with his fellow soldiers, with the mountains, the desert and with time itself, Drogo is outflanked, outwitted and fantastically ingenuous. Again and again he fails to understand either the manoeuvrings of those around him or the changes in his own body and psyche. There are moments when we can’t help wishing that this blindness, this cruelty would stop. Yet everything that happens, every trick played by comrades, nature and fate, is entirely believable, even normal. Never do we feel that Drogo has been singled out for special punishment. At one level we even suspect that he is not entirely unhappy with his unhappy destiny. This is the book’s perplexing core.

  Much, far too much, has been made of Buzzati’s debt to Kafka. True, he flirts with symbolism and surrealism; true, his writing is suffused with a sense of life’s absurdity (“a most stupid landscape’, the major assures Drogo on his arrival at the fort), but the same is true of so many of his contemporaries, Calvino, Beckett and Thomas Mann to name but three, all writers whose stories achieve verisimilitude precisely in their refusal to grant the drama we crave. What Buzzati does not share is the all-pervading paranoia that characterises Kafka’s writing; as a result the horror and humour that Buzzati evokes is one, I suspect, that will prove more recognisable to the general reader than Kafka’s, closer to the grain of common experience.