by Kirsty Gunn
However, exist it does, thanks to his friend Emily Stuart’s faithful rendition of conversations had, questions asked and answers given, of transcriptions made, of Evan’s rough schoolboyish handwriting and long sections of unadulterated musings that seem to count, on his part, for ‘poetry’. Thanks to Stuart’s role, in short, as ‘amanuensis’, does the basic story line play out and express itself on the page.
Throughout the proceedings, however, the writer continues to worry at the edges of her process. Is what she is doing ‘real’ writing? Is it ‘interesting’ at all? Is it ‘going’ anywhere? She finds herself inserting sections of this sort of reflexive self-interrogating prose into the straightforward ‘story’ of Evan Gordonston and his life in Richmond.
There was no training in or background for this kind of approach to prose writing. Stuart is discovering, as she goes along, the responsibilities of the narrator and her subject, or what the writer and critic Gabriel Josipovici in a recently published collection of essays described in his title of the same as ‘The Teller and the Tale’.
Working Method
As noted already, Evan Gordonston from the beginning of the project had vast unchecked ideas about the nature of the writing he was embarking upon with his friend Emily ‘Nin’ Stuart. While she is sure to question him and query his terms at all stages of the proceedings, Gordonston himself seems intent on ploughing ahead with the most expansive expressions of his creative ambition. So ‘novel’ becomes interchangeable in his mind with, at some places, ‘poetry’, and, we read on p. 33, dangerously, ‘myth’.
Part of the reason for this, of course, is his background in and familiarity with the world of finance and international banking law. What should such an individual know of the difference between literary genres, of the kind of hubris being called up from the classical depths of western thought and creative and cultural empathy and understanding when he has been schooled in nothing but the capitalist ethos of Wall Street and the Dow Jones index, for most of his adult life? No doubt, some of the early years in Twickenham pertain – even as he gave himself over entirely to the machinations of sub-prime mortgages and national debt – and bear some kind of hold in his memory, of interchanges between his household and the one next door, of his father’s love for Alastair Stuart and his encyclopedic knowledge of modern history, of his mother’s pottery and artistic pursuits, her early feminist discussions about the ‘self’ with Margaret Stuart, not to mention a challenging and always imaginatively charged friendship with his best friend next door … These facts are part of Evan Gordonston as well, of course. He, after all, did draw that tomato vine mural with Stuart on the walls of his parents’ conservatory and delicately fill in with watercolour the exact hues of the fruit and its leaves at all stages of its maturity. It’s not as if he doesn’t have a sense of art and culture and meaning, Evan Gordonston, it’s just that he tended toward the extreme when describing the project that was to become Caroline’s Bikini and had to be curbed by Emily Stuart, somewhat. ‘Because all I could manage, at that moment,’ as she writes, referring to her shock, rather, that Gordonston might think that the story he was putting together had the stature of ‘myth’, ‘after he’d spoken, was that “OK”.’
Further Definitions of ‘Alternative Narrative’
In addition to the kinds of themes and ideas left unexplored in the text of this novel, there are a number of occasions in the story when a further fabulation could well occur, the reader senses, the narrator imputes, though this is left sitting, somewhat, referred to but never detailed. There are many examples of this, mostly referring to the wider social set that is detailed somewhat in ‘Personal History’, but a clear instance of the same might also be seen on p. 44, referring now to David Beresford, and the nature and circumstances of that man: ‘Poor David Beresford …’ Stuart writes, ‘as though to describe something that was straitened about him, confident and handsome as he was …’
These moments, and there are many of them in the text, as mentioned before, reach out towards a different kind of novel, one established in the nineteenth-century tradition of the English realist novel that was never of much interest to the Scottish writer at any stage in the development of the genre in that country; the reason for which such moments are not taken any further than but to remark on them in these notes, here. For they were never to be included as part of the story, or explanation, or background, or context, or to provide a defence of Caroline’s Bikini.
Caroline’s Bikini, the work of a Stuart about a Gordonston, arranged by a Gunn … was never to be a prose work belonging to anything other than the Scottish and modernist project, with roots in the early Renaissance tradition of Petrarchan love poetry by way of a long-standing debt to writing by Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. As Emily Stuart says, ‘The contemporary realist novel, for the most part, can “go hang”.’
Pubs
The various pubs and bars that feature heavily in the story that is Caroline’s Bikini and could make up an entire story of their own are listed throughout with a degree of accuracy and judgement.
Altogether, the establishments are situated in the West London area, beginning, in the first section of the novel, in ‘Ready’, with a range of hostelries that are located around the Brook Green and Hammersmith environs, and move outwards in ‘Steady’ to the chic backwaters of Chelsea and South Kensington, taking up a position in the further reaches of Acton and the seedy underpass of the Talgarth Road in ‘Go!’, and finally coming to rest on the sunlit expanses of what is known as the Riverside Promenade, that pedestrian pleasureway stretching from the sailing and rowing clubhouses of Chiswick down through the lawns and gardens set about restaurants such as The River Cafe and, in this novel, the remarkable The Remarkable.
Their appearance might be recorded in order as follows:
‘Ready’
The Cork and Bottle
The Elm Tree
The Walker’s Friend
The Gin Whistle
‘Steady’
The Gin Whistle
Grapes of Wrath
A Tulip’s Edge
The Kilted Pig
The Swan and Seed
Child o’ Mine
The Pincushion (and Thistle)
In addition there also features a range of Mayfair
establishments, such as The Cask and The Vault
‘Go!’
The Pincushion (and Thistle)
Ripeness Is All
Last Stand
The Empty Barrel
‘Finishing Lines’
The Remarkable
It is worth taking note of the various kinds of decor and ambience created in the various establishments frequented by Stuart and Gordonston. On the whole, it appears that food was not served in any of these, apart from the usual bar snacks of crisps and nuts that were presented in various ways. However, the narrative does make reference, on one occasion, to a certain kind of lunch – known more in the past than it is nowadays – as ‘A Ploughman’s’, consisting of bread and cheese and some kind of pickle, often with a salad or crisps garnish. These were most popular back in the seventies and eighties of the last century, and are less apparent as a bar menu option in contemporary food and drink outlets.
Gin
When the materials for this story were being collated and organised, neither the writer, subject nor editor of Caroline’s Bikini had any idea that gin had reached such designer status and import in the world of spirits’ consumption and its advertisement. At the time of writing, it was regarded by the narrator as nothing more than a convenient and pleasurable spirit to order at any time of the day or night in one’s local, a drink that might enable a sense of leisure, frank and companionable conversation, and the possibility, always, of ‘another round’.
Now, of course, any reader will be familiar with the bottles lined up against the back wall of any bar or restaurant, all marked ‘Gin’ somewhere on the label, amongst rich typographic illustration, recipes for serving
, historical details and notes, and epigraphs, salutations or dedications.
‘To be served with: a cranberry, slice of pink grapefruit, peppercorns, chilli, chocolate square, a strip of cucumber …’ Such are the instructions accompanying the production and description of a glass of the beverage nowadays. Nothing is as simple as ‘A gin and tonic, please, with ice’ as instruction in a local pub. For any number of accessories and serving suggestions now accompany the simple pouring of that standard and much-loved British spirit, along with its companion, the bottle of tonic water.
It’s become ‘fancy’, gin. It has become something one may order, as Emily Stuart notes in the early pages of Caroline’s Bikini, in the American fashion of ordering by brand rather than product. So ‘Tanqueray and tonic’, as this writer first came upon, in New York, in the mid eighties, was heard at bars and restaurants, never just ‘gin and tonic’ as she knew it at home. Now it’s a case of a ‘Slow River and Fever Tree, please’ with a rosemary swizzle stick and hold the ice.
Gins ordered in Caroline’s Bikini, in narrative order:
Gordon’s
Bombay
Tanqueray
Sipsmith
The ‘kind of gin you didn’t ask the price of’ in The Gin Whistle
Dark Town
Fallen Branch
Various unnamed ‘artisan’ and ‘designer’ and ‘terroir’ gins
Portobello Road – served with a ‘Citrus Gesture’
The Kilted Pig own brand
Dalreavoch Waltz – served with Wild Thyme tonic water
Triple-strength unbranded gin
A final ‘Remarkable’ ice gin and tonic
Reprise
In the end, in spirit and sensibility, courtly love is defined as the ‘pure love’ described in 1184 by Andreas Capellanus in De amore libri tres, still regarded by scholars as the fundamental text upon which all other narratives – including this one – are fashioned:
It is the pure love which binds together the hearts of two lovers with every feeling of delight. This kind consists in the contemplation of the mind and the affection of the heart; it goes as far as the kiss and the embrace and the modest contact with the lover, omitting the final solace, for that is not permitted for those who wish to love purely …
This is the aesthetic at work in the literature that is constantly referred to throughout this project, i.e. the sonnet sequence that is the Canzoniere that so influences and underwrites everything that appears in these pages. Without Petrarch, where would we be?
Closing remarks, given especially within the terms and narrative construction of Caroline’s Bikini – careful readers will note the development of the so-called ‘plot’ of that novel in accordance with the paradigm set out below that describes a different story, from another age, reflecting another kind of sensibility – might end with some poems by Petrarch and the nine stages of courtly love indicated in order:
Attraction to the lady, usually via eyes/glance
Worship of the lady from afar
Declaration of passionate devotion
Virtuous rejection by the lady
Renewed wooing with oaths of virtue and eternal fealty
Moans of approaching death from unsatisfied desire (and other physical manifestations of lovesickness)
Heroic deeds of valour which win the lady’s heart (less applicable in this novel)
Consummation of the secret love (careful readers take note of how this may not, or indeed may, in a different sort of way, play out in Caroline’s Bikini)
Final scenes as described in the literature and accompanying art work (for this, see use of notes and additional material as a way of continuing or extending – adapting? – the original story of Caroline’s Bikini)
A small but lovely reference:
A sonnet by Philip Sidney, the final line of which is remembered by Emily Stuart in the final pages of Caroline’s Bikini.
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain, –
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain, –
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;
Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn’d brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting invention’s stay;
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows;
And others’ feet still seem’d but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write.’
And finally … a selection of poems from the Canzoniere.
The following sample of work relates to a number of themes and ideas also played out within the construction of this book. A close reading will render the similarities and influences in ways that open up Caroline’s Bikini to fresh insights and perhaps a revisiting by the reader of the swimming pool we meet at the beginning of this book.
From Part One
No. 140
Love, who within my heart still lives and reigns
and in my heart keeps his chief residence,
sometimes into my brow makes armed advance,
there plants his banner, there his camp maintains.
But she who teaches us both love and pain
and wills that burning hope, desire intense,
be checked by reason, shame and reverence,
dismisses our desire with disdain.
Then fearful Love turns to the heart in flight,
leaving his enterprise, to weep and cower;
and there he hides and dare not venture forth.
What can I do, seeing my master’s fright,
Except stay with him to the final hour?
To die for love: there is no lovelier death.
No. 90
Upon the breeze she spread her golden hair
that in a thousand gentle knots was turned,
and the sweet light beyond all measure burned
in eyes where now that radiance is rare;
and in her face there seemed to come an air
of pity, true or false, that I discerned:
I had love’s tinder in my breast unburned,
Was it a wonder if it kindled there?
She moved not like a mortal, but as though
she bore an angel’s form, her words had then
a sound that simple human voices lack;
a heavenly spirit, a living sun
was what saw; now, if it is not so,
the wound’s not healed because the bough grows slack.
No. 192
Love, let us stay, our glory to behold,
things passing nature, wonderful and rare:
see how much sweetness rains upon her there,
see the pure light of heaven on earth revealed,
see how art decks with scarlet, pearls and gold
the chosen habit never seen elsewhere,
giving the feet and eyes their motion rare
through this dim cloister which the hills enfold.
Blooms of a thousand colours, grasses green,
under the ancient blackened oak now pray
her foot may press or touch them where they rise;
and the sky, radiant with a glittering sheen,
kindles around, and visibly is gay
to be made cloudless by such lovely eyes.
From Part Two
No. 336
She comes to mind – indeed, she’s always there
whom Lethe could not bring me to forget,
as in her flowering years when first we met,
illumined by the rays of her own star.
No sooner does she c
ome, so chaste and fair,
So rapt and set apart, than I cry out:
‘It must be her, and she is living yet’,
and beg the gift of some sweet words from her.
Sometimes she answers, sometimes she is mute.
Like one whose reason wakes him from a dream,
I tell my mind: ‘Believe not what you see:
‘you know in thirteen hundred and forty-eight,
the sixth of April, at the hour of prime,
the body let that blessed soul go free.’
This final extract, from Part One, can be read as a most relevant summary of the project of Caroline’s Bikini and is worth keeping in mind when considering the work as a whole:
No. 74
I am already weary of the thought
of how my thought in you unwearied lies
and how, to flee the burden of my sighs,
my heavy life has still not taken flight;
and how, in speaking of the face so bright,
ever discoursing of the hair and eyes,
there lacks not yet the tongue, the voice that cries,
calling upon your name by day and night;
and how, upon your track, I still travail
to follow you with firm untired feet,
wasting so many steps to no avail;
and whence comes ink, and whence comes all the sheets
I fill with you: if doing so I fail,
Love is to blame, there is no fault of art.
* With thanks to Professor Anthony Mortimer who graciously allowed me to quote from his translations, here and elsewhere, in the Penguin Classics edition of the Canzoniere.