Portraits of the Artist
SINCE the apologetic strain in literattire entered a phase of dominance about a century and a half ago, the need to explain why art, against all the appearances, is a worthy, or perhaps the worthiest, human activity has begotten the equally cogent need for artists to make it plain what manner of men they are. The Governors show them the gate, but they linger, indefatigably explaining that they cannot be done without; for all their queer non- conformity and proud inutility they give truth and savour to the life of the citizen, and the impas- sioned expression (if there is one) to the counten- ance of all science. This apologia is a principal theme in all modern poesis, including fiction, so there is no particular surprise in finding, in a week's fiction, three portraits of the artist as one thing or another.
Hesse's novel has to come first; it is the most philosophical and diagrammatic treatment of the subject, and incidentally it is a quarter of a century old. Thus it is free from the accidents of con- temporaneity and so closer to the thing itself. Yet for a book with so much to say about Life it is curiously deficient in vitality. It is a parable. Goldmund is a boy of great beauty, Narziss, his monastic tutor, a young man of exceptional intel- lect. The monk sees that Goldmund's way to truth lies through the world of the senses; the boy leaves the cloister and acts out his parts of dreamer, lover and poet, while Narziss stays on and becomes abbot. The progress of Goldmund is weightily related to Narziss's advice that he should seek his
forgotten mother; he does this, as he wand about mediaeval Germany, in an endless series joyous love affairs. The life of the senses leads to the discovery of his talent as a wood-ear (a statue of Narziss as St. Jo(m, a projected E Th based on his own mother), but he will not joinl,141. guild, since the settled life interferes with vagrane Del and carnality. So he grows old on the roads, losion. ° the glad animal movements and experiencil is solitude, pain and poverty. A lecher, a murders /1°1 he ends in gaol, having felt upon his pulses tI h agonies of birth and death. Narziss rescues hit w he understands that everything, even beauty an sanctity, is born of sin, however full of spirit, all ri rooted in the grossest senses; the art that derive inu from sense creates the images which defy deal1 as no analytic exercise of the intellect can de "." Goldmund's disorderly life was essential to br proper work, and illumined by God's grace. Wile n, death comes to Goldmund it comes as his moth" , as the image of Eve. The heart may sink at all till ' eternal feminine, at all the dull theses to I discerned even in this scanty summary; but t book is very distinguished. It lacks the force, tt intellectual comprehensiveness, of Mann, a is not so upsetting; but it makes life hard for fortuitous companions in this review.
Mr. Marquand, himself an unusual gradua
*from pop writing to more 'serious' novels, has playwright hero who has made money withot! forfeiting critical esteem—equally admired, as I were, by Mr. T. C. Worsley and Aunt Edna. Mr Marquand is as skilful as his hero, and as a coolly nostalgic chronicler of the good time in Net York and New England he has obvious attrac' tions. Behind the irony with which Thomas Har row meets defeating circumstance is a simila. bland irony of Mr. Marquand's; through this double veil we occasionally glimpse a calculated pity. Throughout this long book the author sus' tains his gently alert, ironic dialogue. He is a very good writer; there is a comfortable feeling to be had from a sentence like 'He loved her humour and her honesty' when it comes from an author fully confident that after all the careful pages spell' on the girl in question no reader could possibly dissent from this flat observation. Just as Harr& cannot help arranging every conversation and scene theatrically, or walk across a room without directing himself, so Mr. Marquand novelisticalh plots his effects. At the end there is a technically' fascinating moment when Harrow inclines to wards an effective, though rather cheap, curtain. but Marquand intervenes cleverly to prevent it Underneath all, though perhaps not in very good conditiOn, is the theme of the artist tnanque, fully' documented from mother on in a complicated series of flashbacks.
Mr. Lewis's book has this much in common With death, that one dislikes and respects it more anti more as one goes on. It is extremely ambitious• badly over-written and over-plotted; as if in the early stages of diabetes it is inexplicably thirst)
and angry. But so continuous is its energy and so evident its intelligence that it is almost fraudu- lently easy to forecast further very good novel', from Mr. Lewis. His hero is a bookseller-novelist who finds the flesh sad and has read practically all the books, including the Modern Novel and the literature of the Euthydemid dynasty of Bactria. He has, with a Greene-like melancholia, a Wolfe- like appetite for food, drink and women; and love changes him rather suddenly into a manic raconteur of a type I cannot place. He is preparing a biography of an important neglected novelist. and the girl is the novelist's daughter. Though lecherous and mythomaniac and violent he has perfectly matured opinions on everything from Wagner and Sisley to the Labour Government
ar of th of ev ki a fe is al
cs d death. He blacks his girl's eye and throws hi. bottles at people he dislikes. When he loses the girl ,rvehis search for her hits the West End like a tornado. 1:4he lovers' conversations are of a standard of ,Ildintellect and allusiveness that has to be seen to be inAelieved. He is angry, it seems, because 'there is ■ srrl po central citadel into which man can retire.' He girls proud and lonely. At twenty-eight he thinks .:11 nobody ever wrote a good novel till he was thirty, il Which makes Mr. Lewis's symbolic age about 01 twenty-nine. For all its preposterousness, its :In Posing, its hangnail subplot, this book has a Genuine furor; the author has thrown everything, i‘c Including his views on what novels should be, into Nit it. He says he dislikes the estranged-artist myth; (I but here, nevertheless, is a portrait of the artist hi as a claret-loving, well-dressed, educated, sardonic he and angry young man. It is the sort of book a le major novelist might omit from a collected edition . thirty years on.
Juan Goytisolo's book has nothing to do with
artists. It is about the murder of a child by a gang th, of boys brutalised by the Spanish Civil War. When
the comparison (essentially irrelevant) with Lord
of the Flies has ceased to bother the reader, this is evidently a distinguished book; to have achieved a kind of stillness—appropriate both to compassion and to art—with material so violent, is a notable ifeat of craft and concentration. Children of Chaos .is translated, one would say very well, by. the almost omnicompetent Miss Brooke-Rose.
al
FRANK KERMODE
Previous page
