Fiction
Farewell, fictions
Peter Ackroyd
Farewell, Fond Dreams Giles Gordon (Hutchinson £3.45) Beyond The Words edited by Giles Gordon (Hutchinson £4.25) I admire Giles Gordon; I admire the fact that he insists on people noticing him, and the fact that he will strike back when he is struck. His prefaces may sometimes wear a slightly pained expression, he may sometimes carry himself like a national institution looking for a preservation order, and his performance may not always match his promise, but he can be a very good writer indeed. But Mr Gordon doesn't want to be a good writer, he wants to be a "new" writer; he doesn't have the relentless formalism of Robbe-Grillet or Denis Roche, and he doesn't share Donald Barthelme's truculent wit, but he still wants to be "new".
"Fictions" is his favourite word — it has a very nice ring to it, and sounds more modern than "short-stories", but it does not signify anything else. The new art of fiction becomes, for Mr Gordon, a question of choosing some themes which are more quirky and epigrammatic than others — rather as an alcoholic will try to cure himself by changing drinks. In Farewell Fond Dreams, a drama of blood and thunder is mediated through the relative positions of two chairs, three people meet in a succession of false identities, Edward Heath and Richard Nixon exchange letters at the depth of the Vietnamese war. I don't expect that these matters have ever been handled quite as Mr Gordon handles them, but somehow there is nothing particularly "new" or astonishing about them. The problem is the old one — it is that of language, known to bad writers as "style" and to academics as "aesthetics"; Giles Gordon is a very entertaining writer and he doesn't actually call it anything, in fact he doesn't mention it. He simply employs the language in the same bland and featureless way it has been used by English writers for a great many years. The mirror may have become a distorting mirror, but it has that old, worn and familiar surface: "knowing, seeing, recording what they have seen, not seeing, not seeing now, too much at stake, too much to see".
The quotation here comes from a series of Mr Gordon's meditations upon a non-theme, entitled `Pictures from an exhibition'. And it is clear that Mr Gordon has forgotten altogether about his language when he turns with such relief to non-verbal sources: there are a number of notes on Hockney, Bacon and other such old-fashioned Romantics, and as a consequence Mr Gordon's mimetic prose is confined and confining. His `style' is cramped at this second remove, and generates a good deal more heat than light as it becomes more and more private and lyrical. It is all very well to discard narrative continuity (a device which, in any case, only becomes noticeable in bad writers) and the glow of detonation which is sometimes known as 'character', but it is not
good enough to insert a merely personal rhetoric in their place. This becomes prima facie evidence of running backwards and only managing to stay in the same position. Mr Gordon, as I have said twice already, does write extremely well when he writes conventionally: he can make us laugh, and he can make us pretend to cry, but his language reverts to its traditional status as the malleable accomplice, generally lying down and refusing to get up and do something.
You can imagine, then, why I was suspicious of Gordon's anthology, Beyond The Words, of "eleven writers in search of a new fiction". "Why fiction?" the blurb asks in its conventionally coy way, but none of the writers in the book have stayed for an answer; each of them has been photographed (rather gilding the lily in some cases), and each of them was asked to contribute an introductory essay. A great deal is made in some of these prefaces of the need to escape from the• conventions of "the nineteenth century", as though "the nineteenth century" were a Belsen from which writers rarely emerge. But nothing is said about the conventions of the "twentieth century", which is a pity since they are much in evidence throughout the book. Mr Gordon sets his own introduction in this spirit, with a few skimpy generalisations about what is now known as "the act of writing"; at one point he even describes this new act as "a nostalgic one; and therefore reactionary" which is one of those combinations of verbal clumsiness and intellectual confusion which leave one breath. less. And then the authors are arranged in a nostalgic and reactionary alphabetical order — beginning, of course, with that most traditional of modernists, Anthony Burgess.
Mr Burgess says that he doesn't want to get "stuck in the nineteenth century", but if he is not careful he may get stuck in the 1960's instead. His contribution here, 'A Long Trip to Tea-Time' is somehow both a parody of, and tribute to, the sick fantasies of children's writers. It is very much like Lewis Carroll, quite close to Flann O'Brien, and even a bit like Anthony Burgess. It is also very entertaining, but I don't for a moment believe that Burgess is in search of anything, let alone a "new fiction"; he has just picked up the one nearest to hand, and polished it up a little until he could see his own face. And similarly Alan Burns who, despite all of Mr Gordon's instructions, is back there in "the nineteenth century" with the best of them: "bourgeois art is a self-indulgence irrelevant to the struggle for social justice" and, after reading his most recent novel, The Angry Brigade, I only hope Mr Burns can struggle better than he can write — otherwise, social justice will be indefinitely postponed. But his story in this book, 'Wonderland', is much better than the novel — perhaps because it is shorter; it is an analysis of poverty and exploitation, or what the rest of us call rhetorical tropes, and there is nothing in the least `new' about it. It takes what Mr Gordon sneeringly refers to as "competent slice-of-life mediocrity" to new heights, and it is by no means "beyond the words": it is actually trapped in them, until its vision 6ecomes as bland and deterministic as the language.
But all this persiflage can be forgiven for the chance of reading Elspeth Davie; her elegant and witty 'Waiting for the Sun' has a beautiful surface to it, but it is also invaded with an imagination which makes it much more than it appears; she, also, is too good a writer to be "in search" of anything — she has found what she needs. Robert Nye is also fluent-and imaginative, and his 'Adam Kadmon' is a very skilful parody of the art of the "story-teller". He beats those rural and Eastern European bores at tlieir own game with a great many imprecations, asides and interventions as his story slowly grinds to a climax. Mr Nye obviously enjoys the processes of his own invention and he is unselfconscious enough to be able to impart that enjoyment to others. And (I hate to mention the point again) there is nothing 'new' about any of it; good writers have been enjoying themselves and entertaining their readers ever since "the nineteenth century" — and, who knows, perhaps even before? I do not believe, in fact, that Mr Gordon knows what he means by a "new" writing or that he has actually thought about the baffling and sometimes recalcitrant business of modernism. So his is a disorganised and eclectic anthology, in which the writers have nothing in common except for the fact that they are not "searching" for anything in particular, and that they are not "new". It is not enough to cut up paragraphs into funny shapes, or to arrange a few surrealistic gestures, or to bore us with inconsequential theories; the language must be changed in order to change the reader, and its first job is to rise above all that fiddle of self-consciously "new" writing.
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