Labour of love

Pat Rogers

Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Methuen £5.20) 1)eep amidst the foundations of the house of fiction lies the private dug-out of Samuel Richardson. A dark and secret place reeking of pent-up passions and unnamed desires. Some find the atmosphere close and confined,

"fetid," said Coleridge. But to all true Richardson buffs it is as morally bracing as a health-farm. Contemporary admirers (headed by the author) met in a grotto at Fulham to commune with Sir Charles Grandison. The modern fans retreat to lower depths to explore Clarissa's psyche and her seducer's libido.

, Among these Richardsonians the ablest and certainly the most devoted is Mark Kinkead-Weekes. His new book comfortably breaks the record for prolonged submersion: 500 pages smuggled out from the concrete bunker. The recent standard life ran, or crept, to more than 700; but in that case the authors took the occasional natural break. Mr Kinkead-Weekes never even thinks of coming up for air. He spends his first 390 pages analysing the three novels in turn, with a scrupulous and neck-ricking resolution not to lift his head from the text. He never deviates into biography. For a moment, on page 293, comparison with another writer — George Eliot — is suggested, but it is quickly dropped.

.There is no reference to any body of ideas outside the books. Distant cries from the real eighteenth century cannot hope to penetrate this sanctum. The author rightly insists that we must not reduce the novels of Richardson to social documents or psychological case

histories; and he bestows some justifiable scorn on the worst offenders, Marxists and psychiatrists alike. Instead, he offers us the critical equivalent of Clarissa — a big, beautiful, unstoppable convoy of textual analyses.

I said just now a 'new' book: but Mr Kinkead-Weekes has been many years at his task and it shows. He has lived so long with his material that he can readily separate the creative artist from an importunate editorial super-ego whom he calls "Mr Richardson." He can happily rewrite Pamela and split Grandison into two, one part titled " Harriet Byron." (Now where have I heard that before?) He often has second thoughts, and while they may be better ones this does leave the scent of a twice-cooked dish. Mr KinkeadWeekes has the solitary's trick of debating with himself and I can't help wondering whether his earliest opinions however assailable, might not have been the freshest.

Besides his sojourn among the sandbags has given him too rooted an aversion for Mr Richardson. The puff-writer may be a bore with his interventions and moral glosses; but he can not be simply identified (as Mr Kinkead-Weekes seems to wish) with Samuel Richardson's 'ordinary self.' We must avoid the snobbish assumption that there was a prosperous aldermanic printer and an imaginative Doppelganger. Of course, Richardson did do everything at the approved bourgeois pace. A liveryman and citizen at twenty-five, he was married at thirty-two — not too soon, not too late — and ended up Master of the Stationers' Company. He actually married the boss's daughter twice, having been once widowed, which is overdoing things even by the strictest rules of the protestant ethic.

This untroubled progression through life looks most unlike the artistic career as we know it. Richardson seems so plump and complacent in his success-story that we can't believe he had enough experience to make a half-way decent writer, let alone a delineator of dark nights of the soul. It is as though Benjamin Franklin, another practically-minded printer of the day, should have come up with the symbolist aesthetic between his other inventions.

Yet such things were once possible; and we do ill to equate personal alienation with artistic creativity. Crucial to Richardson's development, in my view, were his early experiences in the trade. He printed Defoe's domestic manuals and edited The Complete English Tradesman. He produced off his own bat an Apprentice's Vade Mecum and a vol

ume of model Familiar Letters. During this phase morality, sexuality, identity became live issues for Richardson, wrapped up among worldly concerns: and out of this came the writer. None of these activities are allowed into Mr Kinkead-Weekes's book; everything to do with Mr Richardson is shepherded away from the door.

The best part of the study is a concluding section on form and style, which would make an impressive monograph in its own right.

Here Mr Kinkead-Weekes pays ample tribute to that "courage of the imagination " he discerns in the novels. He abandons his earlier moralist vocabulary of codes, values, integri ty, standards, conscience (a sample passage:

"That Richardson should be driven to make such a connection in the particular and individual terms of 'is'; when there i no such general ethical terms of 'ought,' shows that his imagination has exceeded the proper licence of 'ought' "). He finally admits some other writers into the text, and offers some fruitful comparisons with Defoe and Fielding. One only hopes that readers will still be in a conditidn to pursue them.

Mr Kinkead-Weekes has clearly brought it off for the Richardsonians. This is in comparably the most, sustained and intensive criticism which the novels have ever had. It is a sumptuous banquet for those who know and love Richardson's work. But it does,

not offer a very warm invitation to those so far excluded from the circle. Most of us will emerge from the reading like the prisoners in Fidelio, blinking at the unfamiliar sunlight. too dazed to make out our notes from the underground.