Portrait of a lady and her daughter
Caroline Moore
EROS AND PSYCHE by William Riviere Hodder, £15.99, pp. 246 Here is a useful test to help you decide whether this is the book for you. Do you, when reading The Sacred Fount, hurl the book into the corner of the room, shouting `For Chrisssake. Did they sleep with each other, or didn't they?' Do you, even secret- ly, agree with the critic who found three phases in Henry James' creative life: James I, James II, and James the Old Pretender? Or with H. G. Wells, who compared James' gracefully groping prose to an elephant try- ing to pick up a pea? If you have answered `no' to all of these, you are an initiate, and May pass the portals.
To say that William Riviere's novel is Jamesian is in practice an understatement, since critics use eponymic adjectives merely as an indication that an interesting compar- ison might be drawn. Here, however, is a work that at times reads like a pastiche of the Master. If you can imagine Henry James crossed with Charles Morgan's neb- ulous metaphysics and George Meredith's vivid complexities of metaphor, with an exhilarating admixture of Patrick Leigh Fermor's descriptive virtuosity . . . well, you are probably a novelist yourself.
I must confess that my own reactions were mixed. Eros and Psyche is infinitely beguiling; it is also frustrating, occasionally even downright irritating. Riviere's is a world of 'airy possibilities', of tentative yet labyrinthine speculations, endlessly refract- ed through the preternaturally sensitive, fallible and shifting consciousness of the various protagonists. Most of the time, I was thoroughly enchanted. Every so often, however, I became hot for certainties, and was reminded of nothing so much as the zig-zag progress of a fly in a closed room, apparently dodging ghostly swatters too tenuous' for our grosser senses to perceive.
But I do hope this will not deter readers. Even those who revere Henry James, after all, can rarely discuss his style without suc- cumbing to the temptation of simile.
It is difficult even to talk about the plot of this novel without being cast in the same Camp as Anna — a character who asks sturdily straightforward questions, and is therefore accused of weighing the 'ethere- al' heroine 'in her so grossly material scales'. The real `plot' of the novel is almost entirely inward — not an external story, but a voyage of self-discovery, experi- enced through minds implicated in their own maze-like processes. The 'grossly material' world, indeed, is refined to pure aesthetic reactions: the novel is set on a Greek island of brilliantly described beauty — not at all chocolate-boxy, for its vivid particularity can include plastic bottles washed up on the beach; yet for all that about as far from kitchen-sinkery as one can get. William Riviere's sea-scapes are particularly masterly, their shifting depths self-consciously appropriate. This 'real' world continuously dissolves into the inward one of characters whose self- exploration is conducted through extended metaphors of hallucinogenic specificity. An image is seized upon, elaborated, takes on a life of its own, becomes at least as solid as the external landscape.
In grossly material terms, however, this is the situation. Imogen Scottow, a successful, beautiful, self-contained fashion designer, is the mother of a 15-month-old daughter whose father she defiantly refuses to name. Imogen moves like a dancer, and has a face like fine china, with a 'beautiful glimmering glaze': 'it could be, or could appear to be, utterly cold, that china face.' Riviere is characteristically subtle in describing the effect of sheer or mere beauty, which simultaneously attracts and repels because it is pure surface. Imogen (rather unusual- ly, for heroines who are ethereal do not in general resort to Max Factor) enhances her `glaze' with make-up: a good touch, for cos- metics are an armour which may be offen- sive or defensive, and underneath may lie selfishness or vulnerability, superficiality or spirituality . . . Such speculations are part of Riviere's fascination with the 'nebulous possibilities' in which his world abounds.
The limitations of this world are perhaps felt most strongly in the difficulty of believ- ing in Imogen as a mother. Motherhood is nothing if not grossly material. It is a prob- lem the author himself acknowledges, and so partially defuses: Imogen's godmother Laura 'wanted to cry: You're sheer spirit, you can't have a child!' Again, the envious criticism that few single mothers with babies would be able to spend the entire day — and night — swimming, fishing, rid- ing, taunting old lovers and endlessly tread- ing the labyrinthine 'palace' of her own mind (love in a tumbledown mental shack is the fate of most mothers; and their only `glaze' is that of exhaustion) is similarly pre-empted by Anna's comments on Imo- gen's apparent lack of all normal maternal feelings.
Imogen has brought her daughter Angel- ica to stay with Laura on a Greek island. But Laura has also by chance invited Dario, an impoverished Italian aristocrat and melancholic lecturer in the History of Aesthetics, who, it turns out, was once Imogen's lover, and, as everyone immedi- ately suspects, is probably the father of her child. Probably, but not certainly: Angelica was conceived just as the relationship was broken off; and Imogen taunts questioners with the possibility that she might have consoled or revenged herself by embarking immediately upon another affair. And if Angelica is Dario's, was she conceived in a spirit of desperation, love, or cold-hearted calculation? About the only possibility which is not explored is crude accident.
In the course of a single day, the ex- lovers re-appraise the past, the reason for their separation (to the question 'What went wrong?' Dario replies 'She . . . she shone a light on me': readers will differ as to whether they find such parabolic eva- siveness intriguing or infuriating), and the possibility that their spirits are still `calling' to each other.
It would, you may gather, be rather easy to mock this book, simply because, for all its accumulation of qualifications and moral ambiguities, there is something pro- foundly unrestrained if deeply literary about its intensity. Like James, Riviere is fond of pronouncing his characters to be `sublime' or 'magnificent.' There is, too, a preciousness about the very notion of lovers so set apart from the common herd by the refinement of their sensibilities that an ordinary relationship, whether in or out of marriage, is out of the question. Theirs has, of course, to be 'an accord so tenuous as to be invisible' to ordinary folk, 'a mira- cle of one thought, one feeling that might for two thirsts be one brimming glass of the wine of consciousness.' It is a measure of Riviire's virtuosity that absurdity is kept at bay.
Again, it would be all too easy to parody Riviere's style: the self-conscious inver- sions, the hothouse pantings, the almost total inability to use the simple verb 'to say' (his characters 'rejoiced wonderingly', 'con- cluded quietly', 'uttered steadily', 'interject- ed, also somewhat gushingly', and so on). But the truth is that there is real substance behind these mannerisms — a thoroughly and invigoratingly subtle exploration of complex states of mind, in which hopes and fears, the longing for love and a dread of security and domesticity sway the hearts of the protagonists, and in which one is con- vinced of the obscure paths by which old love could turn to resentment, abject long- ing, real or false iciness, or perhaps even generosity and that miracle of 'brimming' consciousness. Gross though I may be, I shall now go and seek out Mr Riviere's earlier novels.
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