Blog

Christina Stead’s third novel, ‘House of All Nations’ reads like Balzac on steroids. When Stead, a big fan of the French super-realist, left Australia to work in trade and banking houses in London and Paris in the early 1930s, she found that all the characters she had to deal and socialise with could have stepped straight from the pages of ‘La Comédie humaine’. Apparently bankers and businessmen and their various vacuous hangers-on were just as ruthless, amoral, grasping, delusional, energetic, greedy, avaricious, and toadying social climbers in the 1930s as in the 1830s. Well, well. Suffice it to say that these characters also seem surprisingly recognisable to contemporary readers; with minimum tweaking, this novel could be set in the 1987, 2008, pick your period of financial rapacity and instability: ‘plus ça change’ as Balzac might have remarked.

So Stead was inspired to write this far too long but still compulsively readable picaresque describing the rise and fall of the boutique bank, ‘Bertillon Frères’, commandeered and powered by the mercurial charismatic Jules Bertillon. The House of All Nations, referred to only a couple of times in the novel, is a Parisian brothel, so you can see where Stead is coming from with this. However, here is one of those unusual examples in literature where a mismatch between intention and achievement actually results in a better work. Stead was a communist and what is obviously meant to be a savage takedown of capitalism’s immoral gaudy excesses, and she does make her points, winds up being a thoroughly entertaining comedic romp.

In these pages Stead is ‘of the devil’s party without knowing it’ as Blake said of Milton’s depiction of Satan in ‘Paradise Lost’, or maybe she does know it, anyway, whether or not, Jules, the in-house devil here, drives the whole show with his charisma and energy, the typical speculator’s eternal optimism. He is cast as the negative principle, the rotten core of a rotten system, but we’re charmed and fascinated by him as is everyone else in the novel, and so very clearly is Stead. Blake thought Milton wrote ‘in fetters’ but all chains are burst here as Jules, our animating spirit, effortlessly bends the whirling world of pre-war plutocratic Paris to his various extravagant whims.

Although a long book, 800 odd pages, the texture is curiously light, insubstantial, like its leading man; Jules is a will-of-the-wisp and despite the occasional anti-capitalist diatribe (not his), he stops the show from getting too stodgy. His Sancho Panza, Michel Alphendéry, who basically runs the bank for him, efficient servant of his desires and excesses, is based on Stead’s lover-soon-to-be-husband, another William Blake (anglicised from Wilhelm Blech) and is also a communist. A Marxist banker, how about that? Almost all the characters are men, and there are a lot of them, although there is no problem following it all. None of them have much depth, but each rings true, you know them, you’ve met them, like in any successful picaresque.

Another factor that keeps things skipping along, aside from Jules, is that it is largely a book of conversations. Talk, talk, talk, that’s all these bankers ever seem to do, and so we have the same frenetic energy that you find in Dickens or Dostoevsky where various obsessives grab you by your lapel and hold their faces that bit too close but still you’re mesmerised and even convinced by their schemes until they finally release you and you realise what madmen they really are.

Yes, Jules fiddles while Europe burns, well not quite yet, but although above I mention the ‘timelessness’ of the cast, one of the fascinations of this novel is Stead’s perceptive rendering of the contemporary political and social scene. We know what’s going to happen, she doesn’t, but the coming cataclysm is well and truly foreshadowed, all the instability, shifting allegiances, anti-Semitism. Jules knows he is dancing on the edge of a volcano, although it’s not capitalism that’s going to suck everything into a black hole, but forces far more sinister. Hitler often crops up in conversations―no-one seems to quite know what he is about―as does the nascent (doomed) Spanish republic and all the various communist and workers’ insurgences, England dropping the gold standard, Mussolini in Africa, the Depression in America etc. A real snapshot.

Can I recommend this? Well you need to have time on your hands, but with the present pandemic lockdown (I’ve lost my job), it could be the go: not too heavy, not too light. Possibly best read with one of those low-alcohol beverages of the period, a long Pimm’s say, with mint and chopped fruit. Although Stead would go on to write a truly great novel after this, her wild and furious ‘The Man who loved Children’, still there are plenty of brilliant literary flashes here. So, I’ve given you my snapshot, and I’ll leave it to you.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ is his second most famous and acclaimed novel. The first is, of course, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, which, when I travelled throughout India and Europe in the eighties, it seemed every backpacker was reading. For that reason I read it too, and despite all the florid invention and clever political take-down, I was surprised to find myself pushing to reach the end. The same effort a few years later with ‘Love’. Again, wonderfully colourful and imaginative but finally facile and even dull. I dared not admit it to myself at the time, these famous books, sensational magical realism. What was I not seeing, not feeling?

Coming back to ‘Love’ some decades later, my answer is: not very much. Although Marquez has written fine shorter works and tales, the stand-out being ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’, I feel the various story-telling techniques he employs cannot be so well sustained for the longer efforts. Through too much indulgence in his box-of-tricks or hall-of-mirrors, or however you like to describe it, we end up with a sacrifice of psychological depth and development for endless imaginative spin.

These days, magic realism is out of favour for political reasons, seen as offering a falsely hyped-up version of a marginal culture to slake an urbane reader’s thirst for exoticism, just another version of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’. This is as silly a reason for not liking the ‘technique’ as the previous wild enthusiasm for its apparent innovations. Your standard reader loves a story, that’s why they pick up a book―entertainment, escapism―but story or no story, it is characters that really drive a novel, human engagement, and unless the plot takes over, ingenious in its own right, the longer the novel extends, the greater complexity those characters need to have.

In one explanation or defence of his approach, Marquez has claimed that the supernatural is in fact the ‘natural’ way the people he writes about see their world. The magic is ‘real’, the world wider and stranger and more various than we cosmopolitan rationalists suppose. Maybe so, on the other hand this sounds to me like a disingenuous agenda for working both sides of the street. Either the world of a novel is consistently fantastic and credible within itself, or it is not. It may be my blinkered vision, but I have difficulty seeing how something can be both magical and real, satire notwithstanding, and this has always been a problem for me with this kind of literature (Salman Rushdie in ‘The Satanic Verses’ actually exploits this by presenting dual opposed existing worlds).

Marquez’ invention is prodigious, he is like a brilliant composer who given a nursery theme, can extrapolate endlessly upon it. But after a while, the brilliance is not enough, because the theme is, after all, the same set progression of aural experiences, there is no sustained development. The composer needs to know at what point the audience will have had enough, and stop well before. ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’, a straightforward story of the wooing of a widow by her former rejected lover, partly based on Marquez’s parents’ and his own ‘courtship’ histories, could have efficiently been told in forty pages as opposed to four hundred. The back of my Penguin edition compares ‘Love’ to Proust’s ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ but Proust’s profound explication of the psychology of his actors, not to mention the many superbly dramatic scenarios he presents are a world away from Marquez’ one-note protagonists and their simple tale.

There is not so much ‘magic’ in this book as in many others of Marquez and I could readily take it on board if not for the major problem described above. A few other problems should also be noted, particularly some forms of ‘love’ described rather breathlessly which have not dated well; if ‘love’ is another feverish illness, varieties here are overdue for inoculation. There is a rape, a number of near-rapes, later in the novel our hero Florentino grooms and seduces an adolescent, all this cast in a positive light, and also it’s difficult to credit Florentino holding a candle for Fermina throughout such a long life of non-stop frantic sexual activity. This might be just a ‘Latin’ thing, but still. In this light the mitigating ‘excuse’ is, I suppose, the excess of passion which infects Florentino as opposed to Fermina’s husband, Urbino, a moderate rational man of science and eradicator of disease (passion?), but morally this all just doesn’t hold up, whatever the culture.

One aspect I did enjoy was the very complete picture Marquez paints of early twentieth century coastal Colombia, both the landscape and the society. He really brings that lost world fully to life, all the differing occupations and activities, the politics and class structure. Perhaps not so removed from the Cartagena/Barranquilla of his youth; here he is returning to his homeland in 1982 after an extended exile abroad to conjure up this nostalgic literary extravagance, while increasingly around him is a mire of drugs, violence, terrorism and corruption.

Nevertheless, a brilliant setting on its own is never enough. Finally, ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ is a novel of seemingly endless dead ends and elaborate diversions attempting to maintain our interest in two flat characters performing a repetitive dance we soon grow tired of watching.

‘How are we to live?’ author/poet Angela Rockel posits in the penultimate of sixty chapters in her memoir cum essay: ‘Rogue Intensities’. By this point a superfluous question since she has eloquently answered it in the preceding 325 pages. Sixty chapters because each one corresponds to a month in five calendar years diarising and detailing both inner and outer life, semi-subsistent, on an old farm in, I assume, the Huon valley south of Hobart. This book is, I believe, destined to become some kind of classic, what kind I’m not too sure, but I know it will savoured and passed on by lovers of literature and the natural world in an ever expanding readership. It is an amalgam, a miscellany of poetry, history, philosophy, science, all interpenetrating and bound together by the author’s singular vision, realistic and mystical.

Rockel migrates as a young woman from New Zealand to marry into a generational farming family, entering fully into her newly adopted life. She becomes an active agent in a landscape long worked over by dispossession, violence, plunder, hope, hardship, pollution, erosion, wastage, and now evolving and responding to the pressure of global climate change. She observes and describes how through all this the land endures and renews. Giving no precise co-ordinates―this could be any number of places anywhere―a confined, relatively remote farm and landscape she has come to love passionately. Love and reverence are printed on every page of this book.

In the daily and seasonal rituals she presents both an encyclopaedic and intimate knowledge of the birds, insects, reptiles, mammals, some of which co-habit with her in her writing shed, some of which she farms, and also the plant life, which she cultivates, the fruits, vegetables, flower essences. It is an enviable life gradually constructed over decades; Rockel seems almost at one with her varied varying environment.

She stares down all the terrible things we have done to the lands we have colonised, and offers the possibility of hope. Just look, she says, how the natural world can show us life is miraculous after all. Got a city-chafed soul like me? Start each morning with a chapter or two of this book and things will seem worthwhile, well at least until mid-afternoon. Highly recommended.

When I first read Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen’s ‘Seven Gothic Tales’ back in my early twenties they had quite an impact on me, so I was a bit miffed forty years on to find how much I had forgotten of them. The most powerful of the stories, ‘The Monkey’, I’d forgotten completely, whereas the one I’d enjoyed most at the time, ‘The Dreamers’, now seemed a little too ‘Gothic’, although still a thrilling read. It is also the only story of the group that is (nominally) set in Africa in what is a very Eurocentric book.

But what an odd book this is! Published in 1934, set in the early 19^th century harking back to the 18^th, it is almost as though the First World War and ensuing modernist revolution has never happened, save for the deep seam of nostalgia and lost Romanticism. Although Blixen officially wrote the stories when she permanently returned to Denmark from Kenya, I can’t believe that they weren’t recited, written, written, recited (all those stories within stories) the many long evenings with or without company she spent in her stately colonial redoubt on her coffee farm (no electronic distractions). The very fact they were written in English is testament to this; she had spoken nothing else for seventeen years. Like Conrad and Nabokov, Blixen’s English is not entirely natural, but unlike them, she aims for a refinement and purity rather than a virtuosic verbosity, at one with her aristocratic ideals. She puts everything she wants to into these tales, they are her own private creative fantasy for her own entertainment before others, and the odd conjunctions and anachronisms arising from her individual indulgences are a large part of their originality and charm.

It was that originality that struck me most that first reading, and this time as well. I could see how Blixen had borrowed from Hoffman and Stevenson, and probably Poe, she might have read Poe in Baudelaire’s translation, but it seems to me that none of these writers contain the psychological depth and complexity of Blixen, so we can assume that the modern psychological novel, James certainly, has also had an influence. And Shakespeare, of course, who she references continually. But why are they ‘Gothic’ and what does this mean? Without trotting out the usual bells and whistles readers bring to mind when they think of Gothic Lit., and certainly most of those are here (an actual ghost appears and chats in ‘The Supper at Elsinore’ which seems entirely natural in context), beyond the merely sensational and melodramatic, what is fascinating about the Gothic is how it was used as a device to show and discuss the subconscious. Well before Freud tried to pin them down, the Romantic poets and the Gothic novelists extensively evoked subconscious urges in metaphor and symbol. It’s the underlying power in works such as ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’, and so too in these stories. And you can’t pin them down here, because they are the stories themselves, so as you read, the writing is always radiating various possibilities of meaning.

Has this book dated? In terms of sexual mores, yes, certainly, one aspect that will put off some modern readers, but all Blixen’s values are of a piece, bundled up with her personal (feudal) aristocratic take on the world, specific modes of behaviour with God at the top and a descending order of being. Although the money for the farm came from her side of the union with Baron Blixen, Karen Blixen went to Africa partly so she could be an aristocrat, even a ‘noble’. Her marriage gave her the title, and colonial Africa gave her the castle and the serfs, and also many opportunities for noblesse oblige. By our post-colonial lights, this is all wrong, and anyway it was never going to last, that’s largely what ‘Out of Africa’ is about, but Africa allowed Blixen to live the way she felt she ought to live, what she was born for, and that view of life and its values are embedded in these tales.

Uppermost is honour, acting honourably, or failing to. ‘The Old Chevalier’ as a young chevalier treats a prostitute as a princess and so she briefly becomes one, whereas the young soldier in ‘The Monkey’ practically rapes an innocent to force her into marriage to hide his homosexuality, and with this act releases physical evil into the world. The differing settings/societies Blixen presents are all elaborately coded, characters wear many masks; they deceive others, or, as in ‘The Poet’, deceive themselves. The reader is often second guessing (what is really going on here?) giving the stories at times the tension of a thriller, as for example in ‘The Deluge at Nordeney’ where the final revelation, like a modern detective story, evokes a sort of existential despair. And I really never did work out what was going on in ‘The Roads around Pisa’ which presented to my mind like one of those Celtic patterns, always elaborately turning in on itself.

Endlessly fascinating and compelling, escapist but also genuinely disturbing, there is nothing quite like ‘Seven Gothic Tales’, well nothing I’ve come across. Do yourself a favour and curl up with this book one dark and stormy night, or even one bright and sunny day.

On page 158 of my edition of Ingmar Bergman’s novel, ‘The Best Intentions’, Bergman quotes a short note from his paternal grandmother’s diary, Sept. 1912: ‘Henrik came with his fiancée. She is surprisingly beautiful and he seems happy. Fredrik Paulin called in the evening. He talked about tedious things from the past. That was inappropriate and made Henrik sad’. This is preceded by an eleven page scene which is built, imagined, from this note giving substantial proof, if any were needed, of Bergman’s great powers of dramatic invention. And so the entire novel. As Bergman explains in his prologue, he was compelled to write ‘The Best Intentions’ after coming across a box of old family photographs. This, with a few diary entries, is the basis of this recreation, or reclamation, of his parents’ early courtship and marriage. But despite the biographical frame, Bergman, as in his films, does not hold back, freely showcasing a sequence of vivid and intense scenarios that may or may not have corresponded to what really happened, but I suppose, in the faith that he delivers to the reader, and presumably to himself, the general truth of the business.  

Bergman often wrote novelistic treatments prior to making a film but he also states in his prologue: ‘This book has not been in any way adapted to the finished film’, an award winning feature for which he wrote the screenplay but did not direct. He wants us to accept the book as it stands which we probably would not do without his comment, not only because of the later film, but also because the way this story is presented. Firstly, there are the authorial intrusions, such as above, which give a partial post-modern effect, the text commenting on itself. Fortunately in these Bergman does not offer alternative versions, which I feel would damage the integrity of the story he tells, although he and we are always aware that this is only one possible telling and events could not have occurred exactly this way. Secondly, much of the text is presented as a play script, with the various characters’ names in bold before their speeches and directions for delivery of those speeches in parentheses. Personally, I did not find this disruptive, but quickly accepted it like subtitles in a foreign film. In accordance, the prose passages are in present tense and with the combination here, the story often ‘leaps’ from the page. Although this is probably more due to content than form.

The content. The opening scene sets the pace with a tragic and irreconcilable stand-off between Bergman’s father and his father. Both are shown as impossible passionate men, although later in the novel we do see some reason for what seems to be Henrik’s unreasonable intransigence. And this is largely Henrik’s story, Bergman trying to understand and come to terms with his own father, and this first impression, not contradicted but developed throughout the novel, is of a man whose innate high principles act as a kind of obsession. He is such a dominant figure not because of any overweening or charismatic personality, but simply through the depth of his own spiritual and personal convictions. You can’t get around them and neither can he. For a man of God, he finds it very difficult to forgive, and throughout the novel one gets the impression that Bergman is trying very hard to forgive him. Maybe that is the reason for the book.

For novelistic balance, it’s just as well that his wife, Anna, proves to be pretty much of the same mettle. The couple’s coming together, their fierce clashes and harmonies and deep love for one another makes for an extraordinarily intense and dramatic experience. With so many fatuous and crappy ‘great love stories’ forever around in book and on film, it is something of a revelation to come across the real thing.

Subsidiary characters, the individually realised scenes and surroundings, times and places, are all intricately wrought, although Bergman does tend to focus almost exclusively on individuals. He takes us back into another world, of religion and duty and tradition, but we note the various ways in which that world still impacts on our own. And no matter how different all the rules and regulations, we also note how much human passions are an abiding constant.

All up, I thought ‘The Best Intentions’ a great read and I recommend it unreservedly.