Hell and Back

by Tim Parks

  The conclusion to Letty Fox: Her Luek is at once mockingly traditional and strikingly new. It is, I believe, one of the first novels to offer what we might call catharsis through exhaustion. Like many modern writers - Verga, Lawrence, Kafka, Faulkner, Beckett - Stead faced the problem: if our vision of the world is that it is perpetual struggle, if there is no state of harmony and propriety to which we can be returned after the disturbing events of our story (for however necessary she might have believed it was for herself or her characters, Stead never viewed marriage as such a state), then how is a novel supposed to end? Where can it leave us? Her answer, like Thomas Bernhard’s after her, is to bring characters and reader to such a state of plenitude, or weariness with events, that the thing simply has to stop.

  Letty moves from job to job, man to man. She is getting nowhere. A fiancé goes off to be a war correspondent, writes to say he has married somebody else. Another suitor backs out during the crucial discussion with her parents. She goes on vacation for a ‘trial honeymoon’ with the perfect American, Wicklow; it lasts five days. Men promise to leave their wives. Out of curiosity, she seduces the elderly professor her sister is in love with. But she is getting tired of it. She throws some extraordinary tantrums. She is more and more manic, more frequently depressed. She is appalled by herself Without a husband ‘a woman as strong as I am can also be strongly, wickedly lazy, and for ever’.

  But finally she, like her author, does get her one piece of luck. In the summer of 1945 she meets an old lover as tired of the game as she is herself, as tired as Europe then was with its interminable war. Everybody is quite quite worn out. King the wedding bells. It is not a Jane Austen ending. ‘Will this last?’ Letty asks. And she muses: ‘It is a question of getting through life, which is quite a siege, with some self-respect. Before I was married I had none.’ At last pregnant, she concludes: ‘The principal thing is, I got a start in life; and it’s from now on. I have a freight, I cast off, the journey has begun.’ Are these closing words sardonic? Are they romantic? Or simply practical? Or has Stead somehow managed to make them all three? Rather than merely ambiguous, the novel contrives to go beyond any possible resolution. It constantly invites the act of discrimination, but only to repel it, to humiliate the critical faculty. At the end of the day Letty is both a romantic girl and a promiscuous opportunist, a happily married mother-to-be and a left-wing militant.

  However we are meant to take them, Letty’s final words must have echoed in their author’s mind with increasing poignancy over the coming years. All too soon after the publication of the novel, Stead too would be embarking on a journey, casting off from New York’s docks, but without her heroine’s long-desired ‘freight’. In the early days with Bill Stead had twice aborted. While writing Letty she had suffered a miscarriage. Now, with the war in Europe over, the Cold War had begun. America was no place for people of their political faith. She and Bill were under investigation by Hoover’s FBI. They had heard that the heroine of Stead’s latest novel was a young communist. Evidently they didn’t stop to read too many pages.

  It was hard now to find either work or publishers. Sliding into poverty the couple moved back and forth between Belgium, Switzerland, England and France. They were outcasts. Afflicted as ever by erotic yearnings, Stead sought to seduce Bill’s friends, largely without result. She was humiliated. Critical acclaim had brought little cash. Letty was banned in Australia. Bill wrote some historical novels which sold well in East Germany. It was impossible to get the money out. When, twenty-six years after they had become lovers, the couple were finally able to marry, they were living in slum conditions and Stead was advertising for work in the local papers. She did not mention the ceremony in letters to friends.

  Stead, Rowley tells us in her biography, ‘had a knack of arousing hostility’. Even in the days of first love when Blech did everything for her, she was uneasy with the situation. She was too used to the battle of life. She needed to make the brutal gesture, to assume the extremist position. Certainly, when Blech lay dying she was not kind to him. She was scathing of his suffering. He wasn’t really sick. Afterwards she regretted it. Living exclusively on steak and alcohol, she defended his political opinions, now far beyond the pale, with renewed vigour. But she couldn’t work, she considered her life over: “my life was for that, wasn’t it? To live with Bill. I didn’t know that was it, but it was.’ Needless to say, all this complicated her eventual admission to the literary canon. Novels as fine as those published by any contemporary Nobel - Cotter’s England, Miss Herbert and A Little Tea, A Little Chat - were admired but not celebrated.

  It is no surprise that Stead was a very poor essayist and even poorer public speaker, unless, that is, we are to take her novels themselves as vast inconclusive essays, Letty Fox as the speech of someone endlessly changing her mind. The problem was that Stead could never isolate any particular message she had to get across. She wanted to seduce, but also to provoke, or rather, to seduce through provocation, the provocation that any single message was unconvincing. The best writing, she claimed, was driven by an ‘intelligent ferocity’ that would be able to speak all the contradictions that could not be spoken in any essay, friendship, or political movement, all the experience that risked driving a person mad if it was left unsaid, and risked driving a reader mad when it was. We must love her, in short, for telling us things we do not want to hear.

  In none of Stead’s novels does this formula work quite as splendidly as in Letty Fox, if only because Letty herself is the incarnation of this drive. Never are her men, or the reader for that matter, more enamoured of Letty than when she is unfaithful and bitchy. After her failed honeymoon with the ideal Wicklow, after her refusing even to talk to him on the return train to New York, he nevertheless comes back to her: ‘I scolded Wicklow when he came to see me, she says. “He grinned, sat down on a stool, took off his hat, and remarked, “You’re more fascinating as a termagant, Letty, than a sweet little wife.’“

  As a writer, Stead is a termagant to whom one is always happy to return. I would advise a more comfortable seat than a stool. The gesture of removing the hat, do please note, is obligatory.

  Writerly Rancour

  We resent everybody who has ‘chosen’ to live in the same epoch as ourselves, those who run at our side, who hamper our stride or leave us behind. To put it more bluntly: all contemporaries are odious.

  Emil Cioran, History and Utopia

  On this occasion annoyance was my inspiration and never did richer music flow from my pen.

  Rousseau, The Confessions

  That artists are often animated by an intense and even rancorous spirit of rivalry is a commonplace. That the nature of writing, as opposed to painting or music, makes it possible for that rivalry to emerge explicitly in the work itself is no more than a logical consequence of certain givens. But what do we actually think about writerly rivalry and rancour? Is it merely a foible, the stuff of gossip columns - Lawrence versus Joyce, Amis versus Barnes, seconds away for round thirteen of Rushdie versus Le Carré? Can we take Pope’s Duneiad, or Shelley’s Peter Bell the Third, or even Paul Theroux’s recent demolition of V.S. Naipaul, with an indulgent pinch of salt as no more than unhappy by-products of more instructive performances, the sort of caprices understandable in those of great talent and ambition? Or could it be, rather, that such rancour as these works exhibit is intimately bound up with the creative process itself, that there is fizz of contradiction, of aspiration and frustration, at the very heart of the writing endeavour that inevitably leads to the harbouring of resentment and bitterness? Seen as an occupational hazard rather than an unpleasant character trait, writerly rancour may have more to tell us than we imagined.

  When Samuel Beckett’s Molloy goes to the seaside he lays in a store of ‘sucking stones’. ‘They were pebbles,’ he says, ‘but I call them stones.’ Sixteen to be precise. He wants to suck them in order, ‘turn and turn about’, as he puts it. For order gives him pleasure. It’s a combination of physical and
mental gratification that Beckett is describing here, as when Rousseau in The Confessions gives us his eulogy to the delicate and logistically demanding pleasures of reading while eating. But if he is to have this gratification - sucking the stones in order - Molloy has to keep track of them, distinguishing one from the other as he passes them from pocket to mouth, from mouth to pocket, the two pockets of his greatcoat, the two pockets of his filthy old trousers. It’s a complicated proposition for a muddled vagrant and in the end he comes to the conclusion that in order to suck all sixteen stones one after the other, rather than finding himself sucking some twice or even three times and others never, he will have to ‘sacrifice the principle of trim’, have to keep all the unsucked stones on one side, shifting them over to the other one by one after sucking. This puts him off balance for considerable periods and he feels ‘the weight of the stones dragging me now to one side, now to the other’. And this is uncomfortable. ‘Here then,’ concludes Molloy gloomily, ‘were two incompatible bodily needs at loggerheads. Such things happen.’

  Beckett’s story offers a hilarious exposition of conflicting impulses: the search at once for complete control and complete comfort. As the project is repeatedly frustrated, the suspicion grows that ultimately the one can only be achieved by sacrificing the other, and above all by sacrificing symmetry, the which, we should remember - and perhaps this was inevitable for a man so fascinated by Dante - often serves in Beckett’s work as a metaphor for a world that has meaning, or even a surrogate for such a world. Symmetry is the territory of the Divina Commedia where everything is in the place God put it and nothing out of line; hence its sacrifice is no small thing.

  In any event, at the end of an immensely long rigmarole Molloy suddenly gives up the farce, the hubristic endeavour if we like, of trying to reconcile incompatibles, and does so in a typical display of rancour and disdain:

  But deep down, I didn’t give a tinker’s curse about being off my balance, dragged to the right hand and the left, backwards and forwards. And deep down it was all the same to me whether I sucked a different stone each time or always the same stone until the end of time … And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed.

  Beckett’s work is full of such scenes: somebody embarks on a delicate and improbable project involving the reconciliation of irreconcilables, then gives up in a flurry of anger. This in itself might be eloquent enough of the artistic endeavour, which has often been described as a process of reconciling opposites. But there is more to the passage than that.

  Let us imagine the writer at work as being subject to two dominant impulses ‘at loggerheads’: the impulse for comfort, and the impulse for truth. All of us will recognise the impulse to comfort: as one sets out to establish a vision of the world -something inevitable in the writing of narrative - one trusts it will be of a variety one can feel comfortable with. I don’t mean by that that one seeks to portray the world as a nice place to be - the opposite might be the case - but that our vision of ‘how the world is’ be something that enhances our own sense of self, that keeps us content, or at least not unhappily unhappy: in short, we hope it will be something we can live with. In this sense, Pope’s vision in The Dunciad of a world stifled by the dullness of his contemporaries is a vision he no doubt feels, as the one beacon of consciousness revealing that gloom, not entirely uncomfortable with. Others will find self-esteem in exposing degradation and awfulness from a presumed moral high ground; it affords the delirium that one is being educational, even useful. Others again find that there is a certain consolatory pleasure to be had from insisting in one’s writing on the fragility and perhaps even impossibility of happiness. Whatever. Psychology has plenty of words for describing the psyche’s habit of interpreting events in such a way as to feel less uncomfortable with them. It is a process necessary for sanity, and we all do this, for the most part unconsciously.

  But the writer more than others is elected, or condemned, to deal simultaneously with that other impulse, the impulse for truth. Indeed, the less journalistic a writer’s work, the more he invents, so the more concerned he becomes with truthfulness. For a journalist to find and then tell a truth, in the sense of a demonstrable fact, may sometimes be difficult, but is not impossible, if only because limited to this or that event or statistic. The creative writer, on the other hand, is seeking to create verisimilitude, of one form or another, across the board, has to give the whole truth. Indeed, the claim to have understood, represented, demonstrated or even decided (‘legislated’ Shelley claimed) how things truly are is part of the writer’s hubristic enterprise.

  Precisely, however, as he aspires to such verisimilitude, the writer will simultaneously be aware of the urge to cheat - usually in response to the impulse for comfort. Witness Dickens as he considers the decision: does Little Nell die or not? It would be more comfortable if she lived. The book would also be more welcome to his public who have made it very clear they don’t want her dead. Dickens had a very intimate relationship with his public. And Dickens likes Little Nell. So his sorrow as he prepares to dispatch her must be that he knows that for a full and truthful picture of how the world is within the frame he has set up, the girl must die. Fortunately, Dickens has the ultimate comfort of a Christian Paradise hovering in the wings to cover his back. Little Nell has flown to Paradise. How often, pre-twentieth century, the Christian solution has been wheeled in at the end to offset, indeed to make possible a despairing vision of how things truly are. One thinks of Troilus’s rancour and despair suddenly resolved as Chaucer has his eternal soul float up into the celestial spheres. Sadly, this particular shift is no longer available to many of us.

  The compulsion to truth is present, of course, in all art forms: all of them one way or another have to generate recognition and conviction in their public. But the particular problem for those dealing with words is the way they bear, aspire to bear, defined meaning. Hence the challenge with any extended piece of writing is that meanings accumulate, and like it or not a world view, even a philosophical position, can be extrapolated, discussed and criticised within the very medium - language - in which the work was generated. The protagonist of Robert Walser’s story ‘The Painter’ sets out to write a light-hearted, thoughtless diary to take his mind off his painting, but to his surprise the medium doesn’t allow this: ‘I don’t know why,’ he says, ‘but the more I write things down, the more I am gripped by an irresistible sense of responsibility for what I write.’ ‘Irresistible* would seem to be the key word. It is not what the protagonist wanted. It has to do with the medium. Some of the things he writes down are painful to him. Pleasure and honesty are at loggerheads. The writing process forces the writer to become aware of that in the same way that Molloy’s struggles with his sucking stones bring him to the sad truth that fundamental needs may well prove incompatible.

  Of course the collision between comfort and truth can occur in any sphere of life. One of the most famous examples might be Darwin’s immense unhappiness when his discovery of the principles of evolution destroyed his crudely fundamentalist Christian faith. How rancorously then he complained of religion not being true! How grimly he proceeded to elaborate the principle that had destroyed his spiritual comfort. Equally troubled, the hitherto successful naturalist, Phillip Henry Gosse, made a heroic attempt to reconcile comfort and truth by elaborating a theory that God had indeed created the world in seven days, but had done so in such a way that it appeared to have been the result of evolution over many millions of years. Here was creativity! The critic’s objection - why would God wish to deceive us thus - was too much for Gosse. As a naturalist he was a discredited and broken man. But he kept his religion. Darwin lost his hope but kept his troubled fame and his sense of having been entirely logical.

  But if others must occasionally suffer from such incompatibility, it is absolutely endemic to the writer’s a
spiration to create a world at once convincing and pleasurable. As he seeks to do that, and particularly as he grows older and is less easily subject to illusion, more conscious of his own motives, the impulse to truth, or simply this enhanced consciousness, makes him irritatingly aware of the inadequacy of his world, or creation of it, of the fact, in short, that he is not God (anybody who feels that I am being extravagant here has simply not understood the Promethean nature of the artist’s aspirations).

  But what further rankles is the reflection - reflection, as Hamlet once and for all demonstrated, has a way of rankling -that it is precisely this awareness of shortcomings, this seeing through one’s own work, that confers on the writer a sense of superiority and encourages him to struggle to achieve more, to deepen his vision. That is, the writer would not actually have it any other way, but is not entirely happy with the way it is. He has thus attached his identity to a process which cannot bring serenity. Indeed, he fears serenity as something that would detract from his capacity for creativity. Walser’s painter turned diarist acknowledges: ‘What is happiness: to be always at ease, I think! But artists never, or only rarely, feel at ease.’

  Necessarily, the conflict between impulse to comfort and impulse to truth goes beyond the confines of the work itself, to the way it is received. For not only does the author want to be happy with his vision, and have others recognise its appropriateness, but he does this chiefly because he also wishes to be recognised himself.

  Here, the word ‘recognition’ requires some clarification, for I do not just mean praise. Praise is wonderful, but not the same as recognition. To be praised one might run a hundred metres faster than anyone else, or one might write a genre novel of the exact variety you suspect everybody wants. Or one might condemn multinationals. Or Zeus, to shift the context - for who is more obsessed with recognition than the gods - might simply help men by adjusting the weather in their favour. But that would mean stooping to their vision of things. It would mean pandering to their requirements. No it is recognition one is after, recognition of what one really is, what one really can do. There is an existential anxiety here that if it doesn’t go beyond vanity - does anything? - certainly represents its acme.