finds in R. Austin Freeman's detective stories or Lieutenant-Commander
Gould's collections of curiosities--the charm of useless knowledge.
Reade was a man of what one might call penny-encyclopaedic learning. He
possessed vast stocks of disconnected information which a lively
narrative gift allowed him to cram into books which would at any rate
pass as novels. If you have the sort of mind that takes a pleasure in
dates, lists, catalogues, concrete details, descriptions of processes,
junk-shop windows and back numbers of the EXCHANGE AND MART, the sort of
mind that likes knowing exactly how a medieval catapult worked or just
what objects a prison cell of the eighteen-forties contained, then you
can hardly help enjoying Reade. He himself, of course, did not see his
work in quite this light. He prided himself on his accuracy and compiled
his books largely from newspaper cuttings, but the strange facts which he
collected were subsidiary to what he would have regarded as his
'purpose'. For he was a social reformer in a fragmentary way, and made
vigorous attacks on such diverse evils as blood-letting, the treadmill,
private asylums, clerical celibacy and tight-lacing.
My own favourite has always been FOUL PLAY, which as it happens is not an
attack on anything in particular. Like most nineteenth-century novels
FOUL PLAY is too complicated to be summarized, but its central story is
that of a young clergyman, Robert Penfold, who is unjustly convicted of
forgery, is transported to Australia, absconds in disguise, and is
wrecked on a desert island together with the heroine. Here, of course,
Reade is in his element. Of all men who ever lived, he was the best
fitted to write a desert-island story. Some desert-island stories, of
course, are worse than others, but none is altogether bad when it sticks
to the actual concrete details of the struggle to keep alive. A list of
the objects in a shipwrecked man's possession is probably the surest
winner in fiction, surer even than a trial scene. Nearly thirty years
after reading the book I can still remember more or less exactly what
things the three heroes of Ballantyne's CORAL ISLAND possessed between
them. (A telescope, six yards of whipcord, a penknife, a brass ring and a
piece of hoop iron.) Even a dismal book like ROBINSON CRUSOE, so
unreadable as a whole that few people even know that the second part
exists, becomes interesting when it describes Crusoe's efforts to make a
table, glaze earthenware and grow a patch of wheat. Reade, however, was
an expert on desert islands, or at any rate he was very well up in the
geography textbooks of the time. Moreover he was the kind of man who
would have been at home on a desert island himself. He would never, like
Crusoe, have been stumped by such an easy problem as that of leavening
bread and, unlike Ballantyne, he knew that civilized men cannot make fire
by rubbing sticks together.
The hero of FOUL PLAY, like most of Reade's heroes, is a kind of
superman. He is hero, saint, scholar, gentleman, athlete, pugilist,
navigator, physiologist, botanist, blacksmith and carpenter all rolled
into one, the sort of compendium of all the talents that Reade honestly
imagined to be the normal product of an English university. Needless to
say, it is only a month or two before this wonderful clergyman has got
the desert island running like a West End hotel. Even before reaching the
island, when the last survivors of the wrecked ship are dying of thirst
in an open boat, he has shown his ingenuity by constructing a distilling
apparatus with a jar, a hot-water bottle and a piece of tubing. But his
best stroke of all is the way in which he contrives to leave the island.
He himself, with a price on his head, would be glad enough to remain, but
the heroine, Helen Rollestone, who has no idea that he is a convict, is
naturally anxious to escape. She asks Robert to turn his 'great mind' to
this problem. The first difficulty, of course, is to discover exactly
where the island is. Luckily, however, Helen is still wearing her watch,
which is still keeping Sydney time. By fixing a stick in the ground and
watching its shadow Robert notes the exact moment of noon, after which it
is a simple matter to work out the longitude--for naturally a man of his
calibre would know the longitude of Sydney. It is equally natural that he
can determine the latitude within a degree or two by the nature of the
vegetation. But the next difficulty is to send a message to the outside
world. After some thought Robert writes a series of messages on pieces of
parchment made from seals' bladders, with ink obtained from cochineal
insects. He has noticed that migrant birds often use the island as a
stopping-place, and he fixes on ducks as the likeliest messengers,
because every duck is liable to be shot sooner or later. By a stratagem
often used in India he captures a number of ducks, ties a message to each
of their legs and lets them go. Finally, of course, one of the ducks
takes refuge on a ship, and the couple are rescued, but even then the
story is barely half finished. There follow enormous ramifications, plots
and counterplots, intrigues, triumphs and disasters, ending with the
vindication of Robert, and wedding bells.
In any of Reade's three best books, FOUL PLAY, HARD CASH and IT IS NEVER
TOO LATE TO MEND, it is not fair to say that the sole interest is in the
technical detail. His power of descriptive writing, especially of
describing violent action, is also very striking, and on a serial-story
level he is a wonderful contriver of plots. Simply as a novelist it is
impossible to take him seriously, because he has no sense whatever of
character or of probability, but he himself had the advantage of
believing in even the absurdest details of his own stories. He wrote of
life as he saw it, and many Victorians saw it in the same way: that is,
as a series of tremendous melodramas, with virtue triumphant every time.
Of all the nineteenth-century novelists who have remained readable, he is
perhaps the only one who is completely in tune with his own age. For all
his unconventionality, his 'purpose', his eagerness to expose abuses, he
never makes a fundamental criticism. Save for a few surface evils he sees
nothing wrong in an acquisitive society, with its equation of money and
virtue, its pious millionaires and erastian clergymen. Perhaps nothing
gives one his measure better than the fact that in introducing Robert
Penfold, at the beginning of FOUL PLAY, he mentions that he is a scholar
and a cricketer and only thirdly and almost casually adds that he is a
priest.
That is not to say that Reade's social conscience was not sound so far as
it went, and in several minor ways he probably helped to educate public
opinion. His attack on the prison system in IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND
is relevant to this day, or was so till very recently, and in his medical
theories he is said to have been a long way ahead of his time. What he
lacked was any notion that the early railway age, with the special scheme
of values appropriate to it, was not g
oing to last for ever. This is a
little surprising when one remembers that he was the brother of Winwood
Reade. However hastily and unbalanced Winwood Reade's MARTYRDOM OF MAN
may seem now, it is a book that shows an astonishing width of vision, and
it is probably the unacknowledged grandparent of the 'outlines' so
popular today. Charles Reade might have written an 'outline' of
phrenology, cabinet-making or the habits of whales, but not of human
history. He was simply a middle-class gentleman with a little more
conscience than most, a scholar who happened to prefer popular science to
the classics. Just for that reason he is one of the best 'escape'
novelists we have. FOUL PLAY and HARD CASH would be good books to send to
a soldier enduring the miseries of trench warfare, for instance. There
are no problems in them, no genuine 'messages', merely the fascination of
a gifted mind functioning within very narrow limits, and offering as
complete a detachment from real life as a game of chess or a jigsaw
puzzle.
INSIDE THE WHALE (1940)
I
When Henry Miller's novel, TROPIC OF CANCER, appeared in 1935, it was
greeted with rather cautious praise, obviously conditioned in some cases
by a fear of seeming to enjoy pornography. Among the people who praised
it were T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, John dos Passes, Ezra
Pound--on the whole, not the writers who are in fashion at this moment.
And in fact the subject matter of the book, and to a certain extent its
mental atmosphere, belong to the twenties rather than to the thirties.
TROPIC OF CANCER is a novel in the first person, or autobiography in the
form of a novel, whichever way you like to look at it. Miller himself
insists that it is straight autobiography, but the tempo and method of
telling the story are those of a novel. It is a story of the American
Paris, but not along quite the usual lines, because the Americans who
figure in it happen to be people without money. During the boom years,
when dollars were plentiful and the exchange-value of the franc was low,
Paris was invaded by such a swarm of artists, writers, students,
dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchees, and plain idlers as the world has
probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called artists
must actually have outnumbered the working population--indeed, it has
been reckoned that in the late twenties there were as many as 30,000
painters in Paris, most of them impostors. The populace had grown so
hardened to artists that gruff-voiced lesbians in corduroy breeches and
young men in Grecian or medieval costume could walk the streets without
attracting a glance, and along the Seine banks Notre Dame it was almost
impossible to pick one's way between the sketching-stools. It was the age
of dark horses and neglected genii; the phrase on everybody's lips was
'QUAND JE SERAI LANC?'. As it turned out, nobody was 'LANC?', the slump
descended like another Ice Age, the cosmopolitan mob of artists vanished,
and the huge Montparnasse caf?s which only ten years ago were filled till
the small hours by hordes of shrieking poseurs have turned into darkened
tombs in which there arc not even any ghosts. It is this
world--described in, among other novels, Wyndham Lewis's TARR--that
Miller is writing about, but he is dealing only with the under side of
it, the lumpen-proletarian fringe which has been able to survive the
slump because it is composed partly of genuine artists and partly of
genuine scoundrels. The neglected genii, the paranoiacs who art always
'going to' write the novel that will knock Proust into a cocked hat, are
there, but they are only genii in the rather rare moments when they are
not scouting about for the next meal. For the most part it is a story of
bug-ridden rooms in working-men's hotels, of fights, drinking bouts,
cheap brothels, Russian refugees, cadging, swindling, and temporary
jobs. And the whole atmosphere of the poor quarters of Paris as a
foreigner sees them--the cobbled alleys, the sour reek of refuse, the
bistros with their greasy zinc counters and worn brick floors, the green
waters of the Seine, the blue cloaks of the Republican Guard, the
crumbling iron urinals, the peculiar sweetish smell of the Metro
stations, the cigarettes that come to pieces, the pigeons in the
Luxembourg Gardens--it is all there, or at any rate the feeling of it is
there.
On the face of it no material could be less promising. When TROPIC OF
CANCER was published the Italians were marching into Abyssinia and
Hitler's concentration camps were already bulging. The intellectual foci
of the world were Rome, Moscow, and Berlin. It did not seem to be a
moment at which a novel of outstanding value was likely to be written
about American dead-beats cadging drinks in the Latin Quarter. Of course
a novelist is not obliged to write directly about contemporary history,
but a novelist who simply disregards the major public events of the
moment is generally either a footler or a plain idiot. From a mere
account of the subject matter of TROPIC OF CANCER most people would
probably assume it to be no more than a bit of naughty-naughty left over
from the twenties. Actually, nearly everyone who read it saw at once that
it was nothing of the kind, but a very remarkable book. How or why
remarkable? That question is never easy to answer. It is better to begin
by describing the impression that TROPIC OF CANCER has left on my own
mind.
When I first opened TROPIC OF CANCER and saw that it was full of
unprintable words, my immediate reaction was a refusal to be impressed.
Most people's would be the same, I believe. Nevertheless, after a lapse
of time the atmosphere of the book, besides innumerable details, seemed
to linger in my memory in a peculiar way. A year later Miller's second
book, BLACK SPRING, was published. By this time? TROPIC OF CANCER was much
more vividly present in my mind than it had been when I first read it. My
first feeling about BLACK SPRING was that it showed a falling-off, and it
is a fact that it has not the same unity as the other book. Yet after
another year there were many passages in BLACK SPRING that had also
rooted themselves in my memory. Evidently these books are of the sort to
leave a flavour behind them--books that 'create a world of their own',
as the saying goes. The books that do this are not necessarily good
books, they may be good bad books like RAFFLES or the SHERLOCK HOLMES
stories, or perverse and morbid books like WUTHERING HEIGHTS or THE HOUSE
WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS. But now and again there appears a novel which
opens up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing
what is familiar. The truly remarkable thing about ULYSSES, for instance,
is the commonplaceness of its material. Of course there is much more in
ULYSSES than this, because Joyce is a kind of poet and also an
elephantine pedant, but his real achievement has been to get the familiar
on to paper. He dared--for it is a matter of DARING just as much as of
technique--to expose the imbecilities
of the inner mind, and in doing so
he discovered an America which was under everybody's nose. Here is a
whole world of stuff which you supposed to be of its nature
incommunicable, and somebody has managed to communicate it. The effect is
to break down, at any rate momentarily, the solitude in which the human
being lives. When you read certain passages in ULYSSES you feel that
Joyce's mind and your mind are one, that he knows all about you though he
has never heard your name, that there some world outside time and space
in which you and he are together. And though he does not resemble Joyce
in other ways, there is a touch of this quality in Henry Miller. Not
everywhere, because his work is very uneven, and sometimes, especially in
BLACK SPRING, tends to slide away into more verbiage or into the squashy
universe of the surrealists. But read him for five pages, ten pages, and
you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as
from being UNDERSTOOD. 'He knows all about me,' you feel; 'he wrote this
specially for me'. It is as though you could hear a voice speaking to
you, a friendly American voice, with no humbug in it, no moral purpose,
merely an implicit assumption that we are all alike. For the moment you
have got away from the lies and simplifications, the stylized,
marionette-like quality of ordinary fiction, even quite good fiction, and
are dealing with the recognizable experiences of human beings.
But what kind of experience? What kind of human beings? Miller is writing
about the man in the street, and it is incidentally rather a pity that it
should be a street full of brothers. That is the penalty of leaving your
native land. It means transferring your roots into shallower soil. Exile
is probably more damaging to a novelist than to a painter or even a poet,
because its effect is to take him out of contact with working life and
narrow down his range to the street, the cafe, the church, the brothel
and the studio. On the whole, in Miller's books you are reading about
people living the expatriate life, people drinking, talking, meditating,
and fornicating, not about people working, marrying, and bringing up
children; a pity, because he would have described the one set of
activities as well as the other. In BLACK SPRING there is a wonderful
flashback of New York, the swarming Irish-infested New York of the O.
Henry period, but the Paris scenes are the best, and, granted their utter
worthlessness as social types, the drunks and dead-beats of the cafes are
handled with a feeling for character and a mastery of technique that are
unapproached in any at all recent novel. All of them are not only
credible but completely familiar; you have the feeling that all their
adventures have happened to yourself. Not that they are anything very
startling in the way of adventures. Henry gets a job with a melancholy
Indian student, gets another job at a dreadful French school during a
cold snap when the lavatories are frozen solid, goes on drinking bouts in
Le Havre with his friend Collins, the sea captain, goes to the brothels
where there are wonderful Negresses, talks with his friend Van Norden,
the novelist, who has got the great novel of the world in his head but
can never bring himself to begin writing it. His friend Karl, on the
verge of starvation, is picked up by a wealthy widow who wishes to marry
him. There are interminable Hamlet-like conversations in which Karl tries
to decide which is worse, being hungry or sleeping with an old woman. In
great detail he describes his visits to the widow, how he went to the
hotel dressed in his best, how before going in he neglected to urinate,
so that the whole evening was one long crescendo of torment etc., etc.
And after all, none of it is true, the widow doesn't even exist--Karl
has simply invented her in order to make himself seem important. The
whole book is in this vein, more or less. Why is it that these monstrous