Co mp osition
Francis King
The Negligent Daughter Edith de Born (Allen & Unwin £4.95) Even more than Conrad, Nabokov or R.K. Narayan (about whom I wrote a fortnight ago), Edith de Born is a literary sport. Born in Vienna, she married a French banker and now lives in Belgium; but it is in English that all her seventeen novels have been composed. I use the word 'composed', rather than 'written', advisedly, since, as with Conrad and Nabokov, one receives an impression of infinitely meticulous care in the shaping of every paragraph and even of every sentence. As with them too, one senses a loreigness', though it is impossible to point to any one passage and declare: 'No one English could have written that.' This foreigness is not a matter of vocabulary or syntax —each of these writers has a far more varied vocabulary and far firmer command of syntax than many a native-born novelist— but of rhythm. In the case of Edith de Born, this rhythm seems to be one, not of her native German, but of the French which (so I am told) she speaks with such precision and fluency. French too — in a manner reminiscent of Andre Gide and Julian Green — is the economy with which she tells her story, making the areas that she leaves blank assume as much importance as those that she fills in.
The start of The Negligent Daughter is an advertisement in The Times for an undergraduate, Oxford preferred, to edit an English manuscript in Brussels. Since the advertiser is male and asks for 'a PHOTOGRAPH', the young man, Nigel Turner, who answers it, wonders if his future employer may not be homosexual. But this suspicion is shown to be groundless as soon as Nigel arrives in the house, jammed between high-rise office-blocks, in an elegant quarter of the city. Monsieur Frederichs is interested, not in young men, but exclusively in his neurotic, beautiful, impetuous adopted daughter, Lizzi.
It is Lizzi, not Frederichs, whose writing needs correction; and what she is writing is, mysteriously, a memoir designed to be read solely by the married Englishman, a descendaneof the painter Turner, who has been her lover. But has the Englishman ever existed except in her imagination? And is the memoir a record of fact, a part-fiction or a total fantasy?
The reader is now led, with Nigel, into the labyrinth of Lizzi's past: the deaths of her father and mother in a motor-accident when she is only four; her anorexia, cured by a doctor with whom she becomes infatuated; her expulsion from two schools; her adolescent love-affair with a married Italian philanderer; her break-downs and suicide attempts; her vain efforts to succeed as an actress, her marriage to a Bulgarian sociologist . . . But nothing is ever quite as the reader or Nigel imagines it. The past has become a multiplicity of artefacts, all constructed out of the same raw materials but entirely diverse in their shapes and colours. Monsieur Frederichs shows off his artefact to the visitor, Lizzi hers, other characters theirs.
Throughout the novel there is a tough thread of predetermination: 'Our thoughts think us and our acts act us. That is how we live, not the other way round.' There is also the constant implication that the production (or construction) of a memoir is more an act of obfuscation than one of revelation. 'I always think that the urge to write is one method of concealing one's inner life by appearing to display it.'
The book is full of wisdom, as well as of intelligence. Often this wisdom is expressed in the form of an aphorism. For example: 'People want more and more from governments they believe in less and less.' Or: 'People no longer work — they have jobs.'
Edith de Born's books have almost invariably been concerned with civilised, if not intellectual, people, who have no difficulty in expressing themselves richly and succinctly. To write about such people —tended by devoted but dwindling bands of servants in large houses often full of objets d'art in the taste of a bygone age —is something that few novelists can now do with any conviction. Edith Wharton once did it superby well; Enid Bagnold with hardly less accomplishment. Edith de Born has the same toughness and the same compassion as these writers. Like them, she belongs to the world that she describes and yet has been distanced from it by an exceptional sensibility.
The book ends with no easy answers to the questions raised; and in this it differs from the thriller that it resembles in its adroit shuffling of a whole conjuror's pack of mysteries and revelations. Comparatively short, it nonetheless gives the impression of the pasts of its characters receding in a long perspective. Its only failure is to establish the existence of its English catalyst, Nigel, in full. Where everyone else is given so secure a social and moral niche, he is somehow denied one.
Here is a writer who, though she has always had her loyal admirers, ought to reach a wider public. That she deserves such a public is proved by this novel — so assured in its construction, so sparkling in its writing and so full of understanding of the pathetic deceptions practised by even the strongest individuals to conceal their inmost feelings not merely from others but from themselves. Passenger Thomas Keneally (Collins £5.25) Running Nicely and other stories Morris Lurie (Hamish Hamilton £4.95) Somerset Dreams and other fictions Kate Wilhelm (Hutchinson £5.50) The exuberance and lift of Thomas Keneally clothe powerful religious and moral structures. The narrator is an unborn child who, as the result of a Great Ormond Street test, is imbued with knowledge of the minds and actions of his parents, innocent Irish Sal and unredeemed Australian Brian. He is also privy to the mysterious ways in which the mysterious Gnome moves, who first appears following Sal around and then takes on the task of saving her and the foetus from Brian's iniquities, from urgings for abortion and from despair; he reveals that he, too, is searching for a mother: a relationship with Sal closer than that of lover, which leads to misunderstandings. Beneath a racy, often hilarious narrative — the foetus is quite a little wise-cracker, with a powerful urge to live, wielding a mean intra-uterine left-hook when Sal needs encouragement or warning — there lurk supremely important issues. Brian tries to escape parental responsibility: 'Having lost his innocence. . . he felt in a guilty way that a father ought to have an ideology . . . enamelled and seamless. . . he didn't want me to see him empty handed.' Sal, the blessed innocent, chosen by the Gnome to be his 'mother', is saved by his machinations; but he is killed in the Australian desert by an agent of Mammon. So who do you think the Gnome is? It must be the wittiest, most effervescent argument yet in favour of life rather than knife: DV rather than d and c. And it is, in spite of the narratorial person, an exciting cliff-hanger: will the foetus survive? He does, but the Gnome dies saving him.
Morris Lurie, another Australian writer, is a short-haul man with a whippy style. He is best when he deals with the intricacies of the father-son relationship, with Jewish social life, with reverberating minutiae. Conversational compression is what he's good at; and beneath it all, clear-sighted innocence of perception. Chekhovian charity behind cynical spectacles.
The frighteners are on with Kate Wilhehn's truly searing American fictions. Student dream researchers bite off more than they can chew in a sinisterly normal village: a terrifying claustrophobic night in a snowbound bus station is not what it seems; a trip to an evil-free, Edenish planet, where there is nothing to fear but fear itself; a stress-free household where the wife is followed by sinister hounds which mirror, perhaps, her own pent-up aggressions. Most of the stories are distinguished by slow build-ups from normality to terror. But perhaps, as the Goons used to say, it's all in the mind, you know.
Mary Hope
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