The novelist as computer
Olivia Manning
Mortal Wounds: The Lives of Three Tormented Women Anthony West (Robson Books £4.95) Elizabeth Gasket( and The English Provincial Novel W. A. Craik (Methuen £5.60) The thesis of Mortal Wounds is much like that of Edmund Wilson's The Wound and the Bow. The artist-writer is a sick or damaged personality contending with his own malaise. Mr West goes further in saying that there is no such thing as a "born writer." The writer is programmed in childhood by certain impera tives and his decision to become a writer is "a matter of the adoption of a strategy for dealing With those imperatives." Or as the poet Larkin Puts it, rather more succinctly: "They fuck you uP, your mum and dad/By giving you the faults they had." Larkin speaks for most people but most people are not novelists. Mr West does not tell us why creative writers are so few but he does tell us that he was once convinced that he was "about to become a major artist." We must take it that he was spared this fate merely by a Personal perfection — or, rather, his mum and dad did not fuck him up enough. Mr West states his thesis but does not go far to prove it. His essays on Madame de Stael, Madame de Charriere and George Sand show that as a result of certain imperatives they had 'a common compulsion to claim to be more than ordinarily important people, and they all resorted to the novel to justify and reinforce their claims" but why choose those three women? A letter-writer, a little-known Dutch woman who produced one or ' two forgotten novels and an exhibitionist noted chiefly for amours do not represent what Mr West calls "writers as a class." Why did he not deal with Jane Austen, Emily Brontë and George Eliot? lecause, I suggest, their austere and dedicated lives did not suit his purpose. They did not give vent to domineering histrionics or play furious games with unhappy lovers. Far from writing to prove themselves important, they were Inclined to be secretive about their work. Their novels, unlike those of Mr West's three subjects, are more widely read today than when they were first published. Had the author not assured us that Madame de Stael and the other two presented them
selves as typically programmed writers, I would
!ave supposed that he had written the three ives some time before and tacked on the thesis as an after-thought. The essays are uneven in length and depth. Madame de Charriere is given a dull forty-two pages. In Madame de Staes one hundred and eighty pages her ssquabbles and peregrinations are detailed to the point of tedium. And although the author Protests against the lack of pity and sympathy vg, lUch Constant's biographer gave Madame de
tael (a woman slowly dying "of a hidden wOund close to the heart") he himself treats her With derision and dislike. There is a strong smell of the male chauvinist piggery in these e_ssays. Madame de Stael's famous feud with Napoleon is shown as a conflict between an nsurd female and a wise, even benign, male. IT West does not stop to consider that Napoleon, too, may have been suffering from a 11.1dd.en wound, one not so close to the heart. At the inquest his sexual organs were found to be
1usually small and under-developed and :11_adatoe de Stael's aggressive sexuality must
,Lave presented him with a challenge he dare not meet.
. Madam de Charriere is briefly written off but .I/1 the George Sand essay we are taken through all the love affairs so necessary to the romantic novelist who depends on emotional titillation for copy. In the postscript Mr West turns the attack on to bigger game. Blows are struck at Flaubert and Henry James but it is Proust with his interest in the male brothel (no mention of that much more reprehensible business with the rats), his homosexuality and "infantile dependence on his mother," who is shown at length: the perfect example of literary escape "adopted for the execution of the behavioural policy to which he was committed by the impression that he had gained of the relationship between his parents in his very first years."
The above half sentence is a fair sample of Mr West's prose which he intersperses oddly with slang not always familiar to an English reader. Louis de Narbonne is described as "strapped" and I could only guess that this means bankrupt. Terms like "a dog's life," "bulldozed," "ditch" occur throughout. Describing a quarrel between Madame de Stael and Benjamin Constant, the author tells us: "He then formally announced that some kind of big deal was in the works by refusing and burning the letter in her presence."
As for the thesis: Mr West might reflect on a statement in Dr Craik's Elizabeth Gaskell: "She [Elizabeth Gaskell] saw and experienced and was part of what she writes. But situation cannot account for success. One needs only to recollect the innumerable other similar but unsubstantial 'tales' turned out in the course of the age — all too often by women — which faded. and left not a rack behind." Mortal Wounds makes no attempt to explain success. Why does one neurotic games-player become Proust while several thousand others merely take to the bottle? What gives the novelist the ability to construct a work in which (I hope I may be forgiven for quoting from one of my own novels): "The effect will have been noted, the elusive cause caught, the characters given substance, made to move and meet each other in telling circumstances; their development mapped; each, in contributing to the story, will have worked out his own fate"? What is the basic imperative that raises novelists from backgrounds as different as those of, say, Dickens, Dostoievski and Joyce? These questions are not answered in Mortal Wounds. Not that it matters. Whether he is born or made, the writer can only be judged by his work.
Elizabeth Gaskell and the English Provincial Novel is a scholarly study of the works of Mrs Gaskell, the Brontës, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy who, as a group, wrote from the viewpoint of provincial society rather than the metropolitan life and culture that influenced Thackeray and Dickens. Dr Craik devotes herself chiefly to Mrs Gaskell, giving a detailed study of the novels from Mary Barton written in 1848 to Wives arid Daughters which is held to be her masterpiece. For myself, I have always felt that compared with the Brontës and George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell is a pedestrian writer, tending to dullness and too much local dialect, but Dr Craik's enthusiasm persuades me to go back to the novels and think again. This is the teacher's gift for rousing interest and I only wish that, when at school, I had been taught through the medium of Dr Craik's brilliant analyses of the novels of Jane Austen, the Brontës and now her latest work, Elizabeth Gaskell.
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