Book report: Anthony Powell's "Venusberg"

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There’s a certain kind of novel that was produced in great quantity by British writers in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s and 1950s.  They are usually brief, and set in Asia, or Eastern Europe, or Africa.  The characters are almost entirely expatriates – not only British, but Canadians, Americans, exiled Russians, and are often diplomats, or con men, or spies.  The atmosphere is usually light, until something oddly serious happens: an assassination, a declaration of war, some tragic event. 

 

 

These novels were (I think) a response to the British Empire’s expansion through the world.  There were enormous numbers of British people working in countries all over the world, living in unfamiliar environments, clinging to one another (and to other English-speakers and Europeans) for a sense of community.

 

 

Think of Kipling’s “Kim” as a progenitor of the genre.  Think of Graham Greene, with his African and Asian and Caribbean comedy/dramas like “A Burnt-Out Case” and “The Quiet American” and “The Comedians” and “Our Man in Havana.”  Think of Olivia Manning’s “Balkan Trilogy” (did I ever tell you that I knew someone who knew her?).  Think of Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet.”  Think of Doris Lessing’s “Children of Violence” series.  Think of Muriel Spark’s first story, “The Seraph and the Zambezi,” and her novella “The Go-Away Bird.” Think of Rose Macaulay’s wonderful “The Towers of Trebizond."

 

 

I recently discovered a prime example of the genre: Anthony Powell’s “Venusberg.”

 

 

It’s a simple story: a British journalist, Lushington, goes to an unnamed Baltic country on assignment.  Lushington is in love with a Englishwoman who is, in turn, hopelessly in love with the local British attaché, who (perversely and carelessly) doesn’t care about her at all. 

 

 

Whom do we meet in our unnamed Baltic country? Not one but two displaced Russian counts, one melancholy and doomed, the other probably a fake.  A local woman who’s only too eager to have an affair with Lushington.  Her husband, a clueless eminent local professor.  An American embassy worker who rattles on endlessly about virtue and progress and the future, while pronouncing himself a man of few words.  A local military officer named Waldemar, who is very pleasant and sincere, and who is trying very hard to learn how to be a true European.

 

 

We never discover the name of the country we’re in.  Everyone is speaking English most of the time, with a little bad French thrown in.  Now and then we’re told that someone speaks “in an unknown language”; the joke is that it’s probably the local language, which few of the main characters speak.

 

 

Love affairs happen.  Death happens.  Lushington goes back to England.

 

 

All in one hundred and sixty pages.

 

 

Here is Powell’s epigraph for the novel, which explains the title:

 

 

“Here, according to popular tradition, is situated the grotto of Venus, into which she enticed the knight Tannhauser; fine view from the top.”

 

 

From the sublime to the absurd: from the airy beauty of folklore and mythology to the flat pronouncements of a travel guide.

 

 

"Venusberg" is sad and funny and lovely, and gave me a few hours of pleasure, and it will stay with me.

 

 

Try it, if you can find it in your dusty old public library.  You may like it.

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Book report: "The Driver's Seat," by Muriel Spark

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The folks at New Directions, Krishna bless them, have put out a new series called “Bibelots”: small books, nicely designed, that pack a large punch. A couple of them are Muriel Spark's shorter novels, and one of those is her 1970 novel “The Driver's Seat.”

 

 

Yow.

 

 

In college, I wrote a paper on Muriel's novels. I read a few of them thoroughly, and a few of them very quickly. I only glanced at “The Driver's Seat.” It's only now, thirty-five years later, that I've actually read it carefully.

 

 

It is like acid in the face.

 

 

It is the story (told in the perpetual present tense, like several of her other novels) of a woman who intends to be a murder victim. (Or somehow she knows she will be a murder victim. Whichever. It makes no difference.) She takes a “vacation” from (probably) Denmark to (probably) Italy. She buys brightly-colored clothes and such, and makes a fuss along the way, so that everyone she meets will remember her. And she keeps looking for the man who's “her type.”

 

 

Which is to say: the man who will murder her.

 

 

And she meets him, and – horribly – everything happens right on schedule.

 

 

I first knew Muriel Spark through “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” Yes, the movie is lovely, and Maggie Smith is amazing as Jean Brodie. But the novel is ten times more amazing. It zigzags back and forth in time; it gives us Sandy Stranger, the student responsible for Jean Brodie's fall from grace, as a nun, struggling with what she's done years later.

 

 

Another of my favorite Spark novels has always been “The Abbess of Crewe,” a novelization of the American Watergate scandal, set in an Anglican convent, with lots of classic English poetry and prose thrown in. Dry, perfect, funny, beautiful. “Be still, be watchful.”

 

 

And there are her short stories, and her poems.

 

 

A beautiful craftswoman, and strange, and very perfect.

 

 

You will perhaps hear more from me on this subject.

 

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Mr. Williams writes a novel

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A few years ago, while up in the Berkshires, Partner and I went to Mass MOCA, a huge spectacular modern-art museum hidden in the hills of western Massachusetts. I was browsing the gift shop, and I came across a book called “No Plot? No Problem!”

 

 

I skimmed the blurbs and the first few pages, and I bought it on the spot.

 

 

You see, there's this group of people – determined to be writers, as aren't we all? - who resolve to write a novel in a single month (usually November).

 

 

The book contains detailed instructions and a lot of tips, some of which are actually valuable. Here's the most important: Just write! Stop worrying about what you're writing and just write!

 

 

The idea was irresistible. Within days – while still on the vacation, in fact – I went out and bought a nice fresh clean notebook, and began writing.

 

 

The first novel (“novel,” in terms of this program, is a fictional narrative of at least 50,000 words) took me a little more than two months; the second took a little less.

 

 

It's great fun. More than that, it's very fulfilling, and it tells you a lot about yourself.

 

 

Haven't we all promised ourselves that We Will Write A Novel Someday? Well, now I've written a couple. The apartment is fairly littered with them now. (I think, counting a couple of abortive things I spawned in my college days, my total is up to four. And I'm only fifty-four years old! I have lots more time!) And I will tell you, if you've never done it: it's a wonderful feeling.

 

 

Now: go back and read what you've written.

 

 

Surprisingly, for me, this was not completely painful. Sections of them are actually bearable, and sometimes funny and / or interesting. I'm not bad with dialogue. I'm good with brief asides, and small glimpses of backstories.

 

 

 

However: I can't structure a plot. I can't make things happen. I know what I want the ending to be: generally I want everything to be okay, and everyone to be happy. But once you've thrown everybody in the story off-balance – what do you do?

 

 

So Speed Novel #1 has two huge craters in it: the main character's backstory, which I was never tough enough to elaborate completely, and the actual conclusion, which required something to happen – and I couldn't quite figure out what.

 

 

Speed Novel #2 – which I actually wrote almost by accident – is much more coherent. But it has a ridiculous premise.

 

 

Those are pretty serious flaws.

 

 

Rewrite!

 

 

Maybe by the time I'm seventy, I'll have written something worth reading . . .

 

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Book report: "Esther," by Henry Adams

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When I bought my Nook a few months ago, I discovered that there's lots of free public-domain content – which means that you can download pretty much any nineteenth-century novel you can think of.

 

 

I thought immediately of Henry Adams's “Democracy,” which I began some years ago and never finished. I finished it this time, and found it pretty good after all.

 

 

I then discovered another forgotten Adams novel: “Esther.” I just finished it the other day.

 

 

Well.

 

 

It starts out as traditional nineteenth-century fare, in that it's a whom-shall-I-marry? story. Lovely intelligent talented rich Esther Dudley is an aspiring artist in 1880s New York City. She is a free-thinker, like her cousin George Strong, a paleontologist. Now let us add three more people to the mix: Mr. Hazard, a charming and persuasive clergyman; Mr. Wharton, a wild but sentimental (and, unlike Esther, successful) artist; and Catherine, Esther's Colorado cousin, who is always described as “fresh as a prairie breeze.”

 

 

Esther and Mr. Hazard become a couple; so do Catherine and Mr. Wharton. The latter relationship falls apart early when it turns out Mr. Wharton is already married – to a French madwoman, no less. Divorce proceedings are undertaken, but, alas, romance between the artist and the Prairie Breeze is out of the question until Mr. Wharton is a free man.

 

 

Esther's relationship with Mr. Hazard is more complex. He proposes to her, and he is so damnably persuasive that she accepts. Having accepted him, she decides to become a good clergyman's wife. And she quickly discovers that she's too analytical and skeptical for the job.

 

 

If you think you see what's going to happen here, you are wrong. I am partial to books that surprise me; having read so many, I think of myself as beyond surprise, and am viscerally delighted when someone pulls a switcheroo on me. This book surprised me completely.

 

 

It's a slight book, not a masterpiece, but it has some nice things: some terrific vignettes of New York City in the Gilded Age; a very neat little side-trip to Niagara Falls in the wintertime (no, not a honeymoon); and some clever dialogue.

 

 

But the thing that draws me back over and over again to Henry Adams is his intelligence and acuity. If you'd asked me if there were any late-nineteenth-century American novels featuring an atheist heroine engaged to an Episcopal clergyman, I would have giggled and said, “I doubt it.” And what do you know? Henry Adams wrote one. And it is brief, and vivacious, and charming, and well worth a few hours of your time. You can find it, free for nothing, on Project Gutenberg. I recommend it.

 

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Reading list

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I have a confession. I don't read novels much anymore.

If my thirty-year-old self could hear me saying that, he'd kill himself. Novels, up until recently, were a vital part of my reading diet. I actually learned things from them. The really good ones are well-written too; you can actually read a sentence aloud without embarrassment. (All together now: “It is a truth universally acknowledged . . .”)

But novels tire me now. One more saga of failed marriage, one more Bildungsroman, one more academic mocking Academia. And they go on, and on, and on.

I'm talking about Novel Novels, you understand: the things they review in the New York Times, the big chunky things you talk about with your friends at the Explorer's Club. I still feed on a steady diet of Other Stuff, as do we all: for me, it's biography (especially autobiography and letters), diaries, popular science, spirituality (go ahead, mock me!), history, and cultural stuff. And young-adult fiction, which for me fills the need that some people fill with crime novels or science-fiction novels. As Alice noted very astutely, books should have pictures and conversations.

But we're talking about Novel Novels.

Here's what I've read over the couple of months:

English, August. Upamanyu Chatterjee. Okay, this wasn't bad. It's set in modern India, about a guy taking a civil-service job in a city he hates. It's funny, and the depiction of Indian life is interesting. But he repeats himself too much: too many trips back and forth from the office to the hotel, too many long digressions. I know it's supposed to depict the main character's boredom, but all it did was stimulate my own boredom. I put it down about two-thirds of the way through, but I still remember a couple of the scenes vividly, so I'll probably go back and finish it one of these days.

The Towers of Trebizond. Rose Macauley. A reread. A laugh and cry book. “All camels are insane, but this one is more insane than most.” I think, when I die, I want a copy of this book in the coffin with me.

Against the Day and Inherent Vice. Thomas Pynchon. I feel about Thomas Pynchon the way you feel about someone who saved your life. I love him, and I will buy every book he writes, and I will tote it around with me, even if (like “Against the Day”) it weighs eighty pounds. But I will never finish “Against the Day.” It's too scattered, and I'm not sure what he's getting at (I even tried annotating it, as if it were “Finnegans Wake,” to no avail). “Inherent Vice,” on the other hand, had some good stuff in it, and a little hint of “Crying of Lot 49,” and one of those almost-happy endings that Pynchon does very well. (Most of his endings are pretty dark; when he ends something on a positive note, it's a good day.)

The Violent Bear It Away. Flannery O'Connor. Another reread. Vicious, evil, funny. I picked it up, and I had to finish it, I couldn't stop. Can you think of a better name for a character than “Tarwater”?

What's For Dinner? James Schuyler. I'd never heard of it. I took a chance on it, and it paid off. Funny, dry, unsentimental, and unexpected. Worth reading.

The Western Lands. William Burroughs. I wish I were William Burroughs. I have a copy of his last diaries; he cried for days when his cats died. His books are dark and self-consciously perverse, but I love them anyway, because he was a good writer, dammit.

The Summer Before the Dark. Doris Lessing. She throws words at you like lawn darts, and her sentences are long and clumsy. But her books are amazing. The plots don't matter; people come and go, things generally go downhill, oh well, that's life. But the people – ah. Remember what I said about actually learning things from novels? I learned something from this one. I coudn't tell you what it was, but I did. Haunting.

Okay. So maybe Novel Novels are okay after all. I just get a sinking feeling sometimes when I walk through the Fiction section in the bookstore, that I'm letting the team down. But I guess we're okay for now.

And what have you been reading lately?

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