Fathers and sins
Francis King
GABRIEL'S LAMENT by Paul Bailey
Cape, 19.95
In Alan Bennett's entertaining new play Kafka's Dick, one of the characters re- marks that 'The only son who ever told the truth about his father was Jesus Christ and there are doubts about him.' Curious- ly, daughters tend to be more truthful about their mothers. In English literature — whether semi-fiction, like Samuel But- ler's The Way of All Flesh, or semi- autobiography, like Osbert Sitwell's Left Hand, Right Hand — the usual way in which sons lie about their father's is to ridicule them.
It is through ridicule that Gabriel in Paul Bailey's Gabriel's Lament cuts down his father Oswald, in revenge not merely for the mysterious loss of his mother but for innumerable humiliations callously in- flicted. On the first page Gabriel, now in his forties, visits the nonogenarian Oswald on 'what I hoped would be his death-bed.' The interview terminates abruptly, still on the first page when Oswald, 'his hands . . . suddenly restless, pummelling the eider- down', hisses: 'Signs of life, signs of life. Yes, there is definite activity below. I feel a turd worming its way out.' The incident reveals the dying man in an ignominious situation that, to Gabriel, can only be satisfying, since Oswald, in the past, has so often taunted him with his own adolescent bed-wetting. It is also symbolic of the actions of a man who has, in effect, been unable ever to refrain from shitting on those with whom he has come into contact.
But if, like Sir George Sitwell in Osbert's unfilial reminiscences of him, Oswald is presented as a monster, he is, also like Sir George, a monster who keeps one con- stantly amused, in a way that saints often fail to do. Raffish, philistine, bullying, disloyal, dishonest, a liar: Oswald has no redeeming quality, unless it be the cocki- ness with which his head persists in bob- bing up above the waves that constantly threaten to close over it. To his son, while he is still growing up, he delivers a series of opinionated lectures, which provide the book with some lovely set-pieces. There are lectures on Men Who Wear Suede Shoes (they are not to be trusted), on Men Who Cook (they don't last the course), Men Who are Slaves to Cunt, Men of the Cloth, and the Virtues of the Scots and the Vices of the Irish.
Gabriel begins by growing up in a mean, terraced, gaslit house in one of the poorer districts of London. Then an unexpected legacy from a baronet, once Oswald's employer — the precise reason for the legacy is something that it would be unfair to divulge — results not merely in a physical rise, to a family seat in Clapham called 'Blenheim', but also, as far as Oswald is concerned, in a social one. Oswald's car, though minute, acquires a chauffeur of sorts; and the house, after the disappearance of the sixtyish Oswald's thirtyish third wife, Gabriel's mother, ac- quires a housekeeper of sorts.
The disappearance of Gabriel's mother, Amy, is the pivot of the book. Oswald keeps up a pretence to the boy that one day Amy — who, Oswald at first maintains, has taken herself off on a holiday — will come back to them. What in fact has happened to her is revealed only at the close, when Gabriel inherits from his father, as a sole legacy a box containing his mother's letters. At the nature of this revelation I guessed wrongly, imagining something far more melodramatic.
The book differs radically from Mr Bailey's five previous novels, being much closer in method and mood to his biogra- phy An English Madam: The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne — Cynthia Payne's work being, of course, the running of a brothel, and her life being one of providing the sort of harmless pleasure to which the English always tend to adopt an attitude of `You can't do that there 'ere.' Whereas, the previous novels are spare, austere and essentially tragic, this one is rich, ebullient and essentially comic, as Gabriel moves on from 'Blenheim' to a series of dingy lodg- ings filled with colourful characters and to a series of deadly jobs redeemed by lively fellow employees. At one point, Gabriel describes one of the people whom he meets as 'another performer into whose play I find myself suddenly propelled.' There is a larger-than-life and therefore theatrical air about most of these people, grandiloquent- ly, volubly and unashamedly revealing their eccentricities. This air suggests Priest- ley at his robustly humorous best.
I have a few quibbles. It seems to me unlikely that Gabriel's study of itinerant preachers 'Lords of Light' would be bought by Hollywood for a movie, and even more unlikely that the proceeds would enable him to acquire a Georgian Thames-side house at Strand-on-the-Green. It also seems to me odd that Mr Bailey should be under the impression that 'clap' means syphilis. The word he wants is 'pox'. But the book had me laughing repeatedly at such splendid characters as Gabriel's first landlady, her hair present in everything she cooks or serves up, his fellow-lodger Coun- tess Bolina, an impoverished white Rus- sian, who looks like an outsize rabbit dressed in an antiquated Jean Patou frock, and the inhabitants of the Jerusalem, the old people's home (there is a reverberation here from Mr Bailey's first novel At The Jerusalem) at which Gabriel finds employ- ment. Gabriel himself — a waiflike child- man, in constant search of the mother who abandoned him (to solace himself he even dresses up in the privacy of his room, in a Moygashal frock similar to one which she once wore) — is, in contrast, a profoundly saddening character, even though his gal- lantry prevents him from being a sad one.
Since, like the Notting Hill Gate Carniv- al, the Trades Union Congress and the Queen's Christmas Address, the Booker Prize has become an annual event that induces in me nothing but boredom, I shall not speculate about the Booker prospects of this novel. But it is one of the half-dozen most enjoyable to have come my way this year.
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