Setting the wild echoes flying
John Whitworth THE WORM AND THE STAR by John Fuller Chatto, £9.99, pp. 246 Dylan Thomas Is an unlikely source of prosaic wisdom, but he did once wonder what a poet ought to get up to during those long hours of every day when he wasn't writing poetry. Dylan, famously, spent the time getting into mischief and it didn't real- ly do him any good at all. Larkin spent it pretending to be a librarian, and awoke and found it true. Graves wrote historical novels, Day Lewis detective ones, Betjeman, lucky chap, got himself on the telly.
Some, we know, take to criticism and that is that, as far as the poems are con- cerned. John Fuller, of course, has a prop- er job. But he has also done something else, turned himself into a serious prose writer, perhaps an English Jorge Luis Borges, who was a poet too, after all. I am afraid I love the short stories of Borges, and bang goes my Larkinian cred. But Fuller's puzzle me. Reading his elegantly transparent prose is like reading the philo- sophical essays of the quintessential Oxford
Comb, I'm honey.'
philosopher J. L. Austin. There is nothing so jejune as obfuscation; each sentence is limpid, with all the stripped- down clarity of a road sign, and yet, at the end of the journey (and each Fullerian journey is deceptively short), where the hell am I? Is there any way out of the town's one-way system, and do I really want to be here at all?
What is a Fuller short story like? The openings are always fun. Here are a few:
We had been looking forward to our trip to Applecheek Woods for weeks.
I was doing something totally insignificant when I had my vision, something hardly worth remembering at all. Still, I'll give you an idea of the circumstances. I was in the Polo.
It was so easy to give up Tommy. She always had her husband, after all, and Jack had shown himself to be infinitely forgiving.
After he had put down the insurrection, Colonel Abu sent the army into the capital and announced a curfew.
'You've given it to her, haven't you?' he sud- denly said.
What is it about these sentences? They have poise, assurance. They know why they are there and they know where they are going. If they have echoes, of Henry James, of Somerset Maugham, of something very like Enid Blyton, we can be sure their author is aware of it. After all, as Borges might have said somewhere, what can we do at this late stage in the history of the language but echo what has gone before? The Enid Blyton beginning opens out into a neat exposition of that hardy perennial, a boy's sexual awakening. I love the olfactory conceit — from the smell of balsa cement to the smell of a big sister's knickers in the bathroom via the smell of nail varnish. V. S. Pritchett would like that, I think.
It is almost as if these pieces are written illustrations of a thesis on the short-storY form. The elliptical nature of some of them, without obvious beginning or end, 15 in line with Chekovian precept. On the other hand the Colonel Abu stories (which I like less) are anecdotal, from a different tradition, or at least from models that are much older — tales out of Boccaccio, out of The Arabian Knights. Sometimes, at the end of my walk round The Meadow as it were, I feel I have been ever so elegantly trifled with. Sometimes, as with the alien for whom Time runs back- wards, I feel the pleasure you get front watching an intricate little machine. Always there is intelligence, sensibility, an admirable mind not quite, perhaps, at fn. h stretch. Most successful are the stories about sex; they have the submerged sav- agely of some favourite Fuller poems. Not all full stretch? Is that really just'? I pick the stories up again. I reread the sole two-and-a-half pages. I turn the little machines around; set them going once more. Puzzling. Irritating. Interesting.
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