The less deceived
Peter Conrad
Falstaff Robert Nye (Hamish Hamilton £3.95) 100 Scenes from Married Life Giles Gordon (Hutchinson £3.95) Falstaff has always had cause for complaint against Shakespeare. His creator. exploits him, inciting him to distend and invert Henry IV but rewarding him with exile and the abrupt indignity of an offstage death. Falstaff's revenge has been a series of trans
migrations, advertising his immortality and his god-like ubiquity. Elizabeth I had him retired from the dangerous corridors of power to the suburban eroticism of Windsor Maurice Morgann wrote a justification of his military endeavours; Verdi released him from language into music, making him a vinous decadent of the 1890s. Robert Nye has now brilliantly gratified Falstaff by transferring him from the confinement of drama to the mental freedom of the novel. Drama cramps Falstaff and traduces him, as it does Hamlet. by requiring him to act and to achieve; the novel allows him to luxuriate in his sense of himself and to invent a world or generous lies fit to contain him.
Dying and reborn, swaggering to his feet after a death in battle at Shrewsbury or a drowning in Windsor. Falstaff is one of the recurring gods of literature. and his account of himself in Mr Nye's novel is aptly anthropological. Here he is a lubricious fertility god, an 'English Bacchus', conceived on the giant's penis at ('erne Abbas. born in a holy hole in Somerset during an earthquake. and ritually baptised in mud and hot water. His very name, as he explains in a genealogical chapter. is a pun, a miscegenation of language. Mr Nye makes him nonchalantly cross sexual frontiers: the Duchess of Norfolk turns him from a sappy page into a maid, just as later to escape Ford he masquerades as the fat woman of Brainford. Nye also' gives him the 'freedom of al! religions: Falstaff's beribboned penis is a maypole, the fetish of a pagan cult, but he treats his body and his book as a cathedral, cosmically globular like Chartres and encrusted with gargoyles. The form of his reminiscences apes the C'hristian allegorising of history-he distributes his life across his final hundred days, and events coincide with the days on which they are transcribed ( Holy Cross Day is spent in a brothel with Jane Nightwork) in a meticulous parody of the religious calendar.
With Nye's encouragement Falstaff's generative pretensions extend from religion to literature. Tolstoy considered Falstaff to be Shakespeare's shameful self-image: the salacious punning and rhetorical excess which were the staple of Shakespeare's style can belong only to a vicious, mendacious character. But in truth Falstaff has made Shakespeare redundant. He has not only outlived him, but now vengefully travesties him. Shakespeare's plays are adduced for winking double-entendres: when his new wife tosses Falstaff, off, 'love's labour's lost', he rounds on her to give her 'measure for measure': he spanks her buttocks 'as she liked it'; and as they 'die' together, 'all was well that ended well'. Shakespeare's characters become Falstaff's doxies and dupes. Miranda is his incestuous niece who specialises in fellatio. Ophelia the stepsister he deflowers. Desdemona his deliciously fecund pet rat. Perdita commits acts of shame with lambkins and Titania with donkeys. Beatrice is a leathery disciplinarian, 'who liked to whip and be whipped, with the tongue and other i nstruments of pleasure!' I ago becomes an Italian onanist, Malvolio a lecherous hermit, and Cordelia is the nickname of a 'pathic' pickled in herrings. These acts of exposure appropriate the characters: compared with Falstaff's confidences, Shakespeare's notion of them seems timid, inexplicit and imperceptivo.. Mr Nye's Falstaff scorns the ennobling fictions of Shakespeare's history as much as the decorous half-truths which cover the turpitude of his heroines. Richard II, 'Queen Dick', didn't pine away in tragic self-pity, but was the victim of a political intrigue.
Casual quotation— 'Put up your bright swords', he remarks during a low brawl—is another of Nye's devices for inciting Falstaff to belittle his creator. Shakespeare's plays ossify into dictionaries of cliché. Falstaff always quotes damagingly. ripping his tags from their contexts; those who quote Shakespeare in dreary earnest suffer from a sad debility of imagination: Poins cann,ot help giggling when Henry IV's epigrammatic press-release, 'Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown', is reported at Eastcheap. But Falstaff is parodying a creator whom he precedes in time by a century, and the novel's most demeaning suggestion is that it may be Shakespeare who is quoting from Falstaff. The dramatist becomes a parasite on the character, stealing his jokes. Irresponsible inventiveness makes Falstaff a Shakespeare, while Shakespeare dwindles into a Falstaff, a tame quibbler who has diminished Falstaff's grand larceny into petty literary plagiarism. Falstaff's dying admission that his memoirs are a tissue of prurient lies only confirms his creative genius: he turns life into art, whereas Shakespeare can only make feeble art from the transcription of that life.
Shakespeare. as Falstaff's reluctant and intimidated memorialist, has a number of surrogates in the novel, in the form of the secretaries to whom Falstaff dictates his memoirs. Falstaff exults in his power over these lean, closeted scribblers by making them fetch 'boxes of pens and haystacks of paper' to preserve the least of his mental farts. and by scandalising them: 'it might be as good as mustard to compel a celibate priest to take down details of my little tricks with my niece Miranda.' But as Shakespeare revenged himself on this imperious character by sacrificing him to the chilly Lancastrians and the vixenish Windsor housewives, so the last of Falstaff's scribes. Stephen ScroPe. tUrns on his subject, censors his confessions. and compiles inventories of debts and catalogues of sins. Scrape's domain is fact. Falstaff's unregenerate fiction: but fiction is truer and stranger than fact, and even Scrape. presiding at Falstaff's death-bed. can't be sure he is safely dead. Shakespeare found that Falstaff always managed to have the last word and the last laugh, and ScroPe in the final sentence of the book is frantic to convince himself that he did not hear Falstaff's voice posthumously insisting 'Remember me'.
Mr Nye has equipped Falstaff with sonic new, perhaps incongruous, powers. In the theatre Falstaff is entirely self-centred, a gluttonous solipsist, an adipose Hamlet; removal to the novel obliges him to interest himself in other people, and while his claim to be 'a traveller, in temperaments. an explorer of human nature' is commendable. it is unFalstaffian. So is his rapacious virility. The novel is the autobiography of his prodigious penis, but Falstaff ought surely to be impotent—a victim of women. not Mr Nye's lusty predator.. SexuallY Falstaff must be ambiguous: his obesity is a parabolic femininity, like a hysterical pregnancy, and his promiscuity, as Auden pointed out, is a chaste image of 'the chant?' that loves all neighbours without distinction'. Mr Nye has made the fond mistake of taking Falstaff at his word on these matters. Giles Gordon, the dedicatee of Fa/stall. employs two of Mr Nye's techniques .in 100 Scenes front Married Life—but with notably less success. The techniques are episodic narrative and travesty. Dissection into a hundred chapters is appropriate 10 Falstaff, who lives episodically, in a Per" petual present of self-indulgence, reinvent
ing himself daily. But the method calls Mr Gordon's bluff: the novel is no more than 'a selection' from the possible hundred
scenes of domestic fatuity through which his characters suffer. More may be expected. this novel is itself a sequel to About a Marriage, and Mr Gordon appears launched on an avant-garde coronation Street. 1415 serial of marital tribulation is interrupted hY passages of travesty in which, as in an undergraduate revue, literary lovers.are caught ,at home, and off guard—the Macbeths dtsputing the servant problem, Mr and Mrs Casanova committing anal intercourse. Mr Nye makes travesty an audacious re"• creation: for Mr Gordon it remains merelY travesty.
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