Evil and poetry
Harry Eyres
THE TELLING by Miranda Seymour John Murray, f15.99, pp. 230 The seed was sown, or the fertiliser spread, for Miranda Seymour's fourth novel by some murky events she unearthed while writing her biography of Robert Graves. These concerned the devastating impact of Graves and especially his fellow- poet and muse Laura Riding on a young American couple they met on the east coast of the United States in the summer of 1939.
These real-life events serve as the springboard into a work of imagination, though the characters of Isabel March and Charles Jennings are clearly recognisable as Riding and (a rather crestfallen) Graves. Isabel March, the jacket blurb tells us, not mincing words, is 'one of the most memorably evil creations in fiction'.
Having recovered one's breath after this hyperbolic claim, one might ask, who are the other memorably evil creations in fiction? Where does their evil reside? In Canonical works like War and Peace, Moby Dick, Middlemarch and Jude the Obscure, evil is not attachable to particular creations, but rather emerges from gloomy obsessions, klees fixes and narrow-mindedness. If there is a theological choice between regarding evil either as an active, embodied principle or as the absence or forgetfulness of good, then the former view might yield memorably evil creations — Ralph Nickleby, Mrs Danvers — featuring in novels tinged with melodrama.
If all this sounds excessively meta- physical, the location of evil is the central mystery and intrigue of this chilling, disquieting tale. The book takes the form of a journal written by Nancy Brewster, an aged 'hermit-heiress' living in a Crumbling mansion on Boston's North Shore, 40 years after the sinister events which led to her incarceration in an asy- him. Is it merely a self-justification for her attempted drowning of her son? Is she putting the record straight? How can we know the truth?
Quite early on Nancy, a solitary and a survivor, tells us she is no writer. This is both a key truth and an artistic problem. Crucial to the story is the fact that Nancy is a rather plain woman, though one tormented by secrets from the past, drawn into a world of poets. She marries an impossibly (in every sense) romantic poetry editor, Chance Brewster, and it is his admiration for March's work which precipitates the disastrous visit by Jennings and March which forms the novel's climax. This is another instalment in the long- running saga of what happens when ordinary, decent (?) folk get tangled up with those mad, bad and dangerous-to- know types, the heirs and heiresses of Byron and Shelley.
The artistic problem consists in how you make a successful narrative out of a journal composed by a non-writer. Here I think Miranda Seymour cheats somewhat. The narrative is not exactly Nancy's journal but a disguised hybrid between it and a more artful telling. At times the narrator's voice comes through clearly — and it's a craggy voice, ejecting pellets of pain through tight lips — while at others it blends into a more anonymous authorial tone. One effect is to smooth over the difficulties and inconsis- tencies you might expect to find in such an emotionally loaded account. Another is that many characters and settings remain curi- ously unreal. New York in the 1920s never comes alive. Men, in particular, are shadowy figures. Chance may be designed to be elu- sive, but he never achieves corporeality.
Ultimately the success of the novel depends on how interesting one finds the central character, and on what it has to say about evil and poetry. Nancy is certainly a credible and at times affecting creation, but her relationship with the world of poets never seems more than abortive. Not being In the old days, they'd have forced him to use his right hand.' a person who loves words, she can never understand the passion which drives her 'husband and March to work together on a dictionary of true meanings and ultimately to fall in love.
Concerning evil, I must admit to finishing the novel in a state of puzzlement. As the book builds to its climax, there are one or two rather nervous mentions of the more wide-reaching evil which was to engulf the world later in 1939. Neither Nancy nor, especially, Isabel appears to be an angel, but their entanglement is not sounded deeply enough to make it echo the huge catastrophe of mid-century nihilism.
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