M. R. James – ‘Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories’

A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself, ‘If I’m not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!’ (p. 255, from the preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary)

For the modern reader, the distinction James makes here is a fine one. The early 1900s are a century behind us, and he writes – as he admits – in a Victorian style which takes him back a further 50 years. Though one is easily drawn into the stories here, and frequently gripped by them, they do not come across as ghostly intrusions into the modern world. Unless you’re a historian or an archaeologist, these cautionary tales do not work as such, and unless you’re an academic, and a bachelor, their milieu will not begin to match your own. I can’t help but think that this double strangeness works to their advantage, though, and that James is being disingenuous claiming the setting as normal. In the stories he is disingenuous all the time, most obviously in his descriptions of ghosts. For example:

Sir Matthew stopped and said:

‘What is that that runs up and down the stem of the ash? It is never a squirrel? They will all be in their nests by now.’

The Vicar looked and saw the moving creature, but he could make nothing of its colour in the moonlight. The sharp outline, however, seen for an instant, was imprinted on his brain, and he could have sworn, he said, though it sounded foolish, that, squirrel or not, it had more than four legs. (p. 40, from ‘The Ash-Tree’)

So much is withheld that only a blur remains in the mind: not a squirrel, moving, indistinct in colour, ‘more than four’ legs (not a precise number, despite the ‘sharp outline’). It is the slipperiness of such descriptions which lend them their power. They create a chasm of apparent uncertainty, suggesting impossible beings with inexplicable powers, pursuing all too rational all too inevitable revenge. ‘Apparent’ uncertainty because, of course, as soon as you come across a passage such as the above, you know very well that this is what the preceding patina of historical records and artefacts has been building towards: this, ladies and gentlemen (but mainly gentlemen), is the ghost.

This kind of moment is similar to what happens in Sherlock Holmes stories when the truth (or some of it) becomes apparent. When a beggar’s twisted lip is washed off with a wet sponge and he is revealed as an un-scarred ex-accountant. It’s what you’ve been looking for all along, and you judge the success of each such moment by how little you saw it coming. ‘Silver Blaze’ was always my favourite for that, ‘Thor Bridge’ not far behind. M. R. James sets up stories in a similar way, always attempting to have it appear as though the evidence in each case is speaking for itself, but palpably working behind the scenes to achieve his effects. In one story (I seem curiously unable to locate it – perhaps it moved) the relation of the supernatural happens on the golf course, but its author is so uninterested in the game that he invites the reader to insert golfing comments as appropriate. This highlights two things: that the author is not necessarily to be trusted, if he’s going to go about his realism in such a sloppy manner; and, more importantly, that however much he may affect to be dispassionate in describing his stories’ situations (and he is usually more careful than in the golfing story), absolutely everything in them is there in order that a ghost may walk in their midst, just as everything in Holmes is there to illustrate the canny solution of a crime.

Usually I’m fantastically snobbish about motives like this: who cares if someone’s head got bashed in, or if they got up and wailed for a hundred years afterwards? I prefer precisely the kind of story which makes me think: ‘If I’m not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!’ – see last week’s awe of Richard Yates. Just occasionally though, a bit of hokum is just fine, and this was pretty fine hokum.

Richard Yates – ‘Collected Stories’

Yesterday on a long train journey with S., after a game of Scrabble which I found tedious and she won by a mile, I was listening to my Walkman and got up to retrieve the train times from my coat pocket, wanting to see exactly how delayed we were. I had my phone in my hand, having earlier sent a text to Dad (who was picking us up) saying we were going to be late, to which he’d just replied. Upon sitting down again, she said, ‘Do you want to use my phone? It’s pre-paid.’

‘No thanks,’ I said, a bit abruptly.
‘Is it because you want to use yours?’
‘Yes.’

I put the left earphone back in, wanting to get back to my music. But of course, it doesn’t work like that. I don’t know about her, but certainly for me, the scene continued: involuntarily, I imagined it escalating: ‘Actually, I wasn’t going to phone anyone. I wasn’t even going to text anyone – I just received a text, and you misread the situation. You thought I’d got my phone from my coat, because your phone’s in your coat, because you’re a girl and don’t have pockets. And OK, if I was going to phone someone it would be useful to do it for free, but I mean texts, what do they cost? 10p? The hassle involved in explaining to the person I may or may not be about to text that this isn’t my phone, not that I’ve run out of credit or anything, but S. has free texts to use up so don’t go replying to this number on a regular basis, just in the next few minutes, if you want, not that I’m telling you what to do, makes it not worth while. Why do you always have to complicate things?’

I’m ashamed to admit that this is how my mind works on occasion. In dramatising this little scene to myself, I also played out S.’s probable reaction, in less detail. Something along the lines of, ‘Are you serious? I’m complicating things? I was trying to be helpful! That’s it, I never want to see you again.’ Then it struck me how similar all this was to the final story in the Richard Yates book, ‘A Convalescent Ego’. In it, a husband takes offense when his overworked wife says in response to a lame offer of help: ‘Oh, no, I don’t think so, Bill. You just – rest, or whatever it is you’re doing.’ This leads to:

Bill settled back on the couch and picked up the magazine again, but the rankling memory of her words made it impossible to read. ‘Rest, or whatever it is you’re doing.’ And what did she expect him to be doing, two weeks out of the hospital? He was on doctor’s orders to rest, wasn’t he? Angrily he shut the magazine and flipped it toward the coffee table. (p. 461)

Then he breaks one of the new cups his wife bought that they couldn’t really afford with him not earning, and he works himself up more and more in defence of his supposedly slighted masculinity. Was that at the back of my own irritation with S.? I’m the man. I may not earn very much but at least would you allow me to pay for my own text messages?

In his introduction to this volume, Richard Russo writes:

Dream big and we’re expected to fail. [...] Dream small, Yates seems to suggest, and we’re expected to succeed. As a result, failure ensures not just disappointment, but humiliation, anguish, and, most dangerous of all, the impulse to dream smaller next time, thereby risking even greater failure. The characters we meet in Yates’s stories are often already the victims of diminished expectation. (pp. xi-xii)

It is true that Yates’ characters frequently suffer bad luck, or find themselves in humiliating circumstances, but I found Russo’s comment tough to square with the vivid stories themselves. They seem so true to life that, almost by definition, they offer hope, if only via an understanding of failure. It is also true on a few occasions that the author appears to revel in the misfortunes he describes. In ‘The Canal’, for instance, one of several WWII stories, the protagonist (Lew Miller) would seem to have enough on his plate running in the dark with his company, under fire, carrying a spool of wire which digs into his hand. Whenever they are fired upon, the whole company throw themselves on the sodden ground, carrying on when the coast is clear. Miller can only find his way by following the man directly in front of him, Shane. This is as far as he can see. When the height of this man changes and Miller realises it’s no longer Shane that he’s following, he realises that he’s lost the wire squad and is suddenly out of place, useless. Yates is interested not so much in the hard conditions of warfare as in the fact that it’s possible to make a fool of yourself even in life threatening circumstances. The screw is turned even tighter by the framing of the story: Miller has been reminded of the incident by a hale and hearty fellow former combatant at a party years later, who wants to compare heroic deeds. In front of their wives. It’s as excruciating as any episode of Extras.

Another war story, ‘Jody Rolled the Bones’, is peculiar in that it is told in first person narration, without the narrator appearing at all. It deals with the training of a platoon (not sure I’ve got the army terminology right here, but – a group of ten, fifteen men) firstly by a proud disciplinarian, Sergeant Reece, then by Ruby, a ‘Good Joe’ who lets them run riot. It is extremely good on group dynamics, and I suppose this is the reason for the narrator’s absence. Groups of this size have leaders, losers, and people in between – the narrator falling, one presumes, into the latter category. He is one of the crowd, he bulks it out, but he doesn’t upset it or alter its course in any way. In other stories about groups, Yates nails the primary classroom (‘Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern’), and the TB ward (‘No Pain Whatsoever’, ‘Out with the Old’, ‘A Clinical Romance’). There are also stories about childhood (‘Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired’, ‘A Glutton for Punishment’), his writing career (‘Builders’) and often sour romances (‘Liars in Love’, ‘Saying Goodbye to Sally’). Autobiographical elements give themselves away by appearing in multiple stories (the sculptor mother, the TB, getting the sack through an inability to write stock exchange prose), but if they didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to detect the join, so good is the behavioural detail. If Gertrude Stein likes to slop words every which way, covering all angles at once and forcing the reader to average out just what it is she’s getting at, Yates brings off detailed miniatures, which are a world weary pleasure to unpack.

A few more prize quotations:

Girls. Would they always drive you crazy? Would their smiles of rejection always drop you into despair and their smiles of welcome lead only into new, worse, more terrible ways of breaking your heart? Were you expected to listen forever to one of them bragging about how paper-thin her womb was, or to another saying, 'We can only stay a little while?' Oh, dear Christ, how in the whole of a lifetime can anybody understand girls? (From 'A Natural Girl')

Finally Blaine turned back. 'All I'm saying,' he began, with the elaborate patience of a man who has pulled himself together, 'is the very simple fact that some persons are endowed with an ability to handle themselves well, and that we call this ability talent, and that it need have nothing whatever to do with accumulated knowledge, and that a vast majority of persons lack this ability. Now, is that clear? (From 'Thieves')

From the same story:

It seemed almost that he couldn't stop, that the talking was a kind of convulsion, a bloodless haemorrhage.

Gertrude Stein – ‘Three Lives’

Somehow Christmas took me over, as it does many people, and all I read this month were a play, half a book on Israel, and Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives. The last book I gave up before the Israel one was a history book, Post War, not because it was bad but because it was long and after a while I noticed that most of it was lists concluding in a clause beginning ‘above all’. The Israel one – a novel – just had too many stories piled in there, and was the wrong place to go for someone who didn’t understand the historical foundation. Maybe I just don’t like serious books. Maybe language is what I’m after, more than content. Language that sends me. And who better to go to for that than Gertrude Stein?

In tender hearted natures, those that mostly never feel strong passion, suffering often comes to make them harder. When these do not know in themselves what it is to suffer, suffering is then very awful to them and they badly want to help everyone who ever has to suffer, and they have a deep reverence for anybody who knows really how to always suffer, they soon begin to lose their fear and tenderness and wonder. Why it isn’t so very much to suffer, when even I can bear to do it. It isn’t very pleasant to be having all the time, to stand it, but they are not so much wiser after all, all the others just because they know how to bear it. (p. 320)

The chances are you can work out from this extract alone whether or not you like Gertrude Stein, because she is all about language like this. Language which discusses in the simplest terms the reasons why people behave as they do, and feel as they do. There is a lot of repetition, because the behaviours and the people described are not consistent, so many fractionally differing truths need to be simply recorded, before the more complex amalgam can emerge. This way, complex language never needs to be used in order to describe it.

Three Lives, like Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, is based on an earlier book, in this case Flaubert’s Three Tales. This time I didn’t read the earlier book first, so I may have missed something, even most things, about the adaptation (if that’s the word for the book of the book). It takes the form of three separate stories, all set in Bridgepoint (based on Baltimore, the introductory essay tells us), and all concerning poor women. The structure is symmetrical, down to the stories’ titles: The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena. Good and gentle Anna and Lena work as maids (which gives them a satisfaction approaching happiness), and their stories are relatively short. Melanctha doesn’t work, or if she does it is not mentioned, and her story is longer than the other two combined. Anna and Lena are German immigrants, Melanctha is black. All three women are unfortunate to some degree. Two are fiercely independent; Lena barely has a mind of her own.

The strongest and also the most frustrating story is ‘Melanctha’. The majority of it consists of conversations between Melanctha and Jeff Campbell, as they to and fro in their love, always trying to ascertain what the other is feeling and why. Since the speech Stein writes is even more babyish than the surrounding prose, this gets wearing in places (I didn’t find that this was a problem in the shorter stories). Here’s Melanctha:

When you want to be seeing how the way a woman is really made of, Jeff, you shouldn’t never be so cruel, never to be thinking how much she can stand, the strong way you always do it, Jeff. (p. 250)

She makes a fair point, and you can hear the panic in her voice. It is scarcely realistic: no-one would speak like that, no matter how sloppy their grammar. Rather, it is another expression of the possibilities present in this situation, the love between Melanctha the spontaneous woman, and Jeff the cautious man. Take the fragment ‘how the way a woman is really made of’. This offers in it three possible statements: ‘how a woman is made’, ‘the way a woman is made’, and ‘what a woman is really made of’. There are only two senses here – the first two mean the same thing. It’s difficult not to think, given Stein’s interest in Cubism and her appearance in Picasso’s famous 1906 portrait (Three Lives came out in 1909), that she is attempting the verbal equivalent: to show many sides of the same situation simultaneously – or as simultaneously as a time-based art form like fiction will allow. She doesn’t do this to show off, but because love is like that: when Jeff gets on his high horse, threatens to leave, puts his arms around her, says he still means all he said, it is inconsistent, but realistic. People have reactions to their own actions, and what they see as the likely consequences. They react based upon one set of circumstances, and change them in doing so, giving them something new to react to. Melanctha and Jeff tie themselves up in knots of loving, doubt, suspicion, understanding, misunderstanding, and ultimately it is all too much: by stages their love comes apart.

(Quotations from the Green Integer edition, 2004)

Eugene O’Neill – ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’

Plays, eh? The last time I went to theatre was to see Sweet Bird of Youth, a month or two ago, and I would have written about it here, but oh man, it was depressing. Suspicious and malicious, characters tearing themselves apart, and nowhere for the audience to invest any sympathy. The thing that gets me is the assumption that bad circumstances and an emotional (or just shouty) rendition of them will produce something of interest. I’ve a friend who, when he first went to University, couldn’t move for people wanting to confide that they were on Prozac: ‘Look at me! I’m fucked up!’ It’s a way of forcing civility, I suppose, and even encouraging a return performance of circumstantial affection. A lot of plays do the same thing. Unlike a novel, which can take its time and wind its way into your heart over the course of a few weeks, a play has two, three hours, so it has to up the histrionics. That’s the negative way of putting it, and when these mundane kind of tensions are apparent from the audience, something has gone wrong. When they are not, the directness of the medium is all in its favour.

Long Day’s Journey into Night reads like it would work. Presumably it has a track record of doing so, but I don’t know anything about that (I picked it up because Kevin Spacey made his new A Moon for the Misbegotten sound tantalising on the radio the other week, and because Kevin Rowland lists Eugene O’Neill in ‘Burn it Down’ in a righteous way). In it, nothing good happens. The lives of the family it dramatises are in what would seem to be a steep and permanent decline. They grumble about each other, they drink to excess, one of them (youngest son Edmund) is dying of TB but drinks large quantities of whiskey regardless (conjuring an anatomically incorrect image of alcohol eating into brittle lungs), and the mother Mary (ha ha) is a morphine addict. The father is disliked by all for being rich but miserly, a fact which is blamed upon his own father’s abandonment of his mother when he was still a small boy, and the poverty which ensued. His children and his wife blame all their ills on this miserliness, which is unnecessary as James Tyrone has become rich as a popular if unfulfilled actor. He flinches when someone leaves a light on unnecessarily, keeps tabs on the level of the whiskey in the bottle, and tries to get Edmund treated as cheaply as possible. He’s as tight as they come, but he’s not entirely a monster.

All the ‘Woe is me’ buttons are pressed, in other words. It should be depressing as hell, but it isn’t. Reading the play, the first thing that strikes you is the length of the stage directions at the beginning of Act One. They are incredibly detailed, not only regarding the layout of the room, but even the layout of the actors’ faces:

Mary is fifty-four, about medium height. She still has a young, graceful figure, a trifle plump, but showing little evidence of middle-aged waist and hips, although she is not tightly corseted. Her face is distinctly Irish in type. It must once have been extremely pretty, and is still striking. It does not match her healthy figure but is thin and pale with the bone structure prominent. Her nose is long and straight, her mouth wide with full, sensitive lips. She uses no rouge or any sort of make-up. Her high forehead is framed by thick, pure white hair. Accentuated by her pallor and white hair, her dark brown eyes appear black. They are unusually large and beautiful, with black brows and long curling lashes. (p. 10)

Are we really to take this as a set of instructions for the producer? It’s as though O’Neill is having a pre-emptive tussle: no corset, no make-up, a face which doesn’t match the body. See if you can stage that. Stage directions are similarly specific throughout, often explaining how dialogue is to be played and leaving little leeway for interpretation. The lack of action in the play is another indicator that what is being attempted here is pure description, and it’s this which gives it its remarkable strength. We see a family which has fucked up. It’s nobody’s fault and everybody’s. James has an excuse for his miserliness, and this miserliness is the catch-all excuse for everyone else’s problems: Mary wouldn’t have ever taken morphine if it hadn’t been for the quack doctor James got in for her after Edmund’s birth; Edmund would stand a better chance of surviving TB if sent to a more expensive clinic; Jamie... well, Jamie’s a drunk and would probably be worse off without his father’s limited patronage, but this doesn’t stop him complaining about it. And complaining about it one minute doesn’t stop him from becoming lucid and affectionate the next. The characters do all care deeply for one another, but they just don’t do each other any good. This is the hook, and I was skewered.

Zadie Smith – ‘On Beauty’

You’ve got to be careful, modelling a new work on an old one. Who liked Gus Van Sant’s Psycho? Who liked Brian Wilson’s re-made Smile? There’s Ulysses, of course, but surely Greek myths are a special case (so old, so well known)? And perhaps that only proves the point: to compete with something which has already endured, you’ve got to create something on a par with the original. You put yourself at an immediate disadvantage attempting it: the first cubist still life was nothing to the first still life (think Brian Sewell said that). As I remarked the other week, Zadie Smith was always going to have a hell of a job keeping step with E. M. Forster’s Howards End. Which is far and away the best book I’ve read since starting this blog, so it’s really no surprise that she doesn’t manage it. What she does manage is a lively, insightful account of the life of academic Howard Belsey and his family. The life, and how it falls apart. The way his wife and kids’ lives intermingle with (or stray from) his own; the way academia prolongs adolescence in its worst sense as well as its best; the way it fails to really connect with anyone outside its own scope (and by scope I mean payroll).

The main problem here is: academia doesn’t equal an artistic sensibility, even if you’re a professor of Art. On Beauty (which shares with Howards End a narrator whose presence is perceptible but who rarely intervenes) is quite aware of this. Again and again Howard is accused of being anti-everything, of having argued himself into a position wherein he can’t like any art (anything representational is right out, yet his research area is Rembrandt). Victoria, the daughter of his rival Monty Kipps (the transplanted Henry Wilcox), characterises the classes at Wellington:

It’s our shorthand for when we say, like, Professor Simeon’s class is ‘the tomato’s nature versus the tomato’s nurture’, and Jane Colman’s class is ‘To properly understand the tomato you must first uncover the tomato’s suppressed Herstory’ – she’s such a silly bitch that woman – [...] But your class – your class is a cult classic. I love your class. Your class is all about never ever saying I like the tomato. (p. 312)

This may be a valid point about academia, but it has little to do with the kind of sensibility needed to appreciate art. Which is what Howards End is all about, and any book which picks up this dialogue really has to take it on: how do life and art work together? And, what does money have to do with this? This tension is what makes it great: the contrast between the Schlegels (who have money and sensibility), the Wilcoxes (money only) and Leonard Bast (sensibility crippled by poverty). The question, so rarely asked, ‘What does it mean to have art in one’s life?’ On Beauty is good on life, but largely forgets about art. It mentions enough of it (an author’s note at the end lists all the paintings and poems mentioned in the text), but never really engages, substituting a soap opera involving academics, which isn’t quite the same thing. Howards End mentions almost no art by name (Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony being the exception), and never goes near a university, but captures exactly the importance of an inquisitiveness about art, and the disconnect this can bring about with more practical minds (or just other minds – it can be an isolating thing).

The two actual artists featured in On Beauty – Carl Thomas (the Leonard Bast character), a rapper, and Claire Thomas, a poet who also teaches creative writing at Wellington – are both given a short opportunity to strut their stuff, on stage and on the page respectively, but again this skirts around the issue: how did they get to the point of performing / writing? How did they live their lives and bring about the song and the poem? We get a little background on Claire, given as she rushes to a lecture, and learn that her early poems (the ones which brought her recognition) were raunchy, and that, now in her 50s, she prefers to write about nature. Carl’s background is murky to say the least, and he lacks Leonard’s crucial lacks: there is no culturally unsympathetic woman holding him back, and although he is poor, this is not a disadvantage for a rapper in the same way that it is for someone who sees culture as something inextricably tied to upper class money. On the contrary, it gives him something to write about: his Mrs Bast appears only in his lyrics, from which we gather that (without Carl’s consent) she had an abortion, and moved on. Up in literary purgatory, Leonard must be kicking himself.