Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears
Francis King
THE MOMENT UNDER THE MOMENT by Russell Hoban Cape, £14.99, pp. 260 By his own admission in his foreword to this collection of stories, essays, sketches and a libretto, Russell Hoban is constantly straining to grasp the ungraspable, to say the unsayable. A vain pursuit, as he sees it — since 'the real reality, the flickering of the seen and unseen actualities, the moment under the moment, can't be put into words.' Why then bother with words at all? Well, there are always those rare occasions when suddenly, miraculously, `the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page'. This mystical view of the nature of the 'real reality' and of the writer's priest-like role as the channel through which, however fragmentarily and dimly, that 'real reality' is transmitted to the reader, now impressed and now irritated me throughout the course of this book.
The first and the most satisfactory of the stories, 'The Man with the Dagger', is an act of homage to one of the best of Jorge Luis Borges' stories, 'The South'. In the Borges story, a Buenos Aires librarian, Dahlmann, travels to the south of Argentina, to the empty shell of a ranch which has long belonged to his family, in order to convalesce from a near-fatal illness. Provoked to a fight in the general store of the remote provincial town in which he now finds himself, he picks up the knife thrown to him by an old gaucho and leaves the store to fight the duel to which he has been challenged and to meet the possible death 'which he would have chosen or dreamt'.
In Hoban's story, the narrator, as it were Hoban himself, goes in search of Dahlmann in an attempt to solve the mystery with which Borges leaves the read- er: when Dahlmann seizes that dagger, what exactly is it that he so decisively accepts? Fate? A test of his courage? The inevitability of death? And is he in fact killed or does he somehow, by some mira- cle, survive? Certainly, in the course of his odd quest, Hoban's 'I' is surrounded by death. In the hotel where he enquires for Dahlmann, the desk-clerk is a living skele- ton; and in this same hotel he makes love to another skeleton, a prostitute called Noir. Eventually he meets Dahlmann; but the mystery remains a mystery.
The world of this story, as of the other seven, is one in which reality melts into dream, the present into the past, the animate into the inanimate. 'My Night with Leonie', for example, is an account of how the narrator falls in love with the Sphinx on the south terrace of the Jardin des Tuileries — 'Not a lovely face nor an inviting one, but so erotic in its utter propriety.' He imagines her to be a virgin; and in the course of a conversation with her, she assures him that she is. But she has lied to him, as his night-time discovery of seven Japanese tourists queuing up for her favours eventually reveals to him.
In 'Schwartz', the inanimate object which similarly becomes animate for the narrator is a stone lion, a Sung dynasty tomb guardian in the British Museum, with a taste for Thelonius Monk. The lion, Schwartz, invisible to everyone else, accom- panies his new-found friend on the tube back to his flat, where they listen to 'Blue Monk' on the hifi. Then the lion, as though he had beccime an embodiment of conscience, begins relentlessly to inter- rogate his host about a tragic and shameful incident in his past.
In 'The Colour of Love', a story which evokes the crepuscular beauty of Venice in masterly fashion, the female narrator, a woman painter, remarks, 'If you think about it the whole thing becomes very metaphysical, but then everything does.' She is speaking of an experience of her own; but she might equally have been speaking of any of these stories.
The essays and sketches are, in general, less impressive. The best of them, written for a seminar of the Israel Association of American Studies in Tel Aviv, the theme of which was 'The American Dream', is a beautiful account, now shimmering with vaguely poetic imaginings and now etched with harshly realistic details, of Hoban's childhood in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. His parents were Russian Jews from the Ukraine who, after a few years of poverty and struggle, satisfactorily established themselves in the New World and so were able to create the home in which their son first heard Bach's Art of Fugue and Schubert's Die Winterreise, first read Lord Jim and Darkness at Noon, first began to walk along 'that wavering edgeline where the sea of the mystery meets the strand of the more or less known'.
The libretto, 'The History of Miranda and Caliban', set to music for mezzo- soprano and baritone by Helen Roe, is as dense and prickly as a thicket of thorn- bushes. Prefaced with the dubious claim that 'Shakespeare didn't invent Caliban, Caliban invented Shakespeare (and Sig- mund Freud and one or two others)', it is unlikely to tempt readers to struggle far through its 39 pages.
Sadly, this collection does not always display Hoban at his strange and haunting best. But there is enough in it of the highest quality to make it worth reading.
Previous page
