Sad parable
Paul Ableman
Sleepless Days Jurek Becker (Secker £4.95) Some months ago, reviewing Arno Schmidt's The Egghead Republic, I asked rhetorically: which is the more bleakly unfunny, German humourous writing or German serious writing? Sleepless Days provides some evidence to suggest that it is the former. It is intensely, almost paralysingly, serious but includes a few deliberate jests. These are not, however, the reason why the work is funnier than The Egghead Republic since they, like the gags in Schmidt's book, are painfully laboured. No, it is the unconscious humour which occasionally disperses the pall of metaphysical gloom and provides the reader with a Chuckle or two. Try the following: Simrock, the hero, is instructing the proletarian Boris in political fundamentals. 'He [Simrock ] pointed out the usefulness of commitment, not ommiting the moral aspect: competition meant more than increased pressure for productivity; it reinforced. . .the sense of being part of a collective, of working .for something for which others were working at the same time. Boris interrupted Simrock, who still had a great deal more to say, with the remark that, with all due respect for their friendship, Simrock could kiss his ass. Instantly Simrock felt that everything he had said, and still had in mind to say, was irrelevant.'
Admittedly, freshly-typed on the page, it no longer seems the acme of mirth. Perhaps you need 80 preceding pages of unallevi ated solemnity to prepare you for the guffaw. Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy mocks German idealism with a story of two German philosophers who produced (I quote from memory) the following exchange: First Philosopher: 'Ach, this world is such a vale of tears, it would be better never to have been born.'
Second Philosopher: 'How true. And how sad that so few ever achieve this desirable goal.'
I'd always assumed, as Russell clearly did, that the story was apocryphal but who can be sure when Becker delivers passages like: .he received a registered letter. It informed him that he had been granted permission to visit his fiancee, Antonia Kramm, on 11 December in the women's prison. After he had put down the letter his first thought was: How happy I shall soon feel!' And: 'It was to Simrock's regret that his emotions frequently led to actions whose significance was already unclear to him a few minutes later.' Compared to Simrock, the hyper-logical Mr Spock of the American television series Star Trek seems a creature of infinite vagary.
There is, of course, a serious side to the German weakness for the depersonalised idea and our century has been dominated by some of its vile consequences. Cambodia, Auschwitz and the Gulag Archipelago all testify to the horror attendant upon classifying people out of humanity and German idealism, in one form or another, bears some responsibility for all three. To be fair, Jurek Becker's short novel is dedicated to exposing the dangers of dehumanisation but a critic can't help wondering if the style might not be more harmful than the message is benign.
Sleepless Days is a sad little parable concerning the adventures of one Simrock, a teacher in East Germany, who is shaken from routine by what he takes to be a minor heart attack. He decides by mechanistically rational steps, that his life-style is defective although he never goes so far as to question the political assumptions of the state tyranny under which he lives. He leaves his the characters have any interior vitallity): with wife and daughter and takes up reforms Then, suspecting he i nt e nds t that institute s t itthuet e may lead itnhralo_s: afl attractive woman (a phrase which, with wife and daughter and takes up reforms Then, suspecting he i nt e nds t that institute s t itthuet e may lead itnhralo_s: afl attractive woman (a phrase which, context, is purely notational since none the his dismissal, he tries a summer job Inca! bakery in order to ascertain if he can .b. the hardships of proletarian .life. Wilno,as little help from Boris, a van driver, he finds he can. Next he holidays in Hung his new girl-friend, Antonia Kramm,r and the lady goes out for a walk one mo Tr! and tries to slip across the .froonno Apprehended, she is sentenced. years' imprisonment. Soon after, Sinl_wch'ing duly sacked for asking mildi"earcotrie, questions of an army officer who has to on what is basically a recruiting rn11:_ i lecture his students. He returns to Boris r s the bread delivery round. The book strive to end on a spiritually positive note: 'He. • remembered his little pain in the classroom and his great fear that Death was breathing down his neck. He thought that, if • he tried to see the whole affair in a favourable light, the anxiety born at that time and on which he was still feeding might after all have been a gain.'
The difficulty about accepting, at the level of overt message, this affirmative ending is that Simrock's revolt has been so meek as to make it impossible to credit him with a heroic role. Instead the reader remains merely depressed by the robot nature of the society that can just be dis cerned through the ponderous narrative. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Solzhenitsyn worked because it was concrete. The reader could feel the cold and smelllthe sour odours of the camp. One span in the life of Simrock fails because it obscures behind a wall of idealism the life it pretends to depict, Harriet Said, the first book by Beryl Bainbridge to be published by Duckworth, read like a first novel, in that its heroine was a child not unlike the author, and it was in fact the first she wrote. But before Harriet Said she had two other novels published, and the second of these, ruthlessly cut and Duckworthised, is now reissued. The early Bainbridge dwelt on each moment, was too explicit; when a character spoke, he also made a physical gesture or his hair shone in the sunlight, and his inner thoughts and his effect on his audience were carefully explained. 'Joseph, stretching his arms high, maybe weary but only seeming to act out the signs of fatigue, said "Wait a minute Roland." 'Edited, he simply stretches his arms high and speaks. The reader is left to infer the falseness of the action. In the earlier version events moved so slowly, because of her overwriting of each moment, that reading it was like wading through treacle.
The conciseness of the cut version is a great improvement. The pruning of adjectives sometimes goes too far 'her little teeth set like pegs between her violet lips' makes more sense than 'her teeth set like Pegs between her lips', which is merely grotesque. Pegs can be any size. And I miss some of the proliferating Sixties details, such as that awful song 'When you come to the end of a lollipop, plop goes your heart'. But repetitions are banished, striving for effect like 'salvation fingers' has gone, and the sloppy punctuation has been made almost perfect. The feeling of muddle in the earlier version was rather appropriate to the story. it was a typically Bainbridgean comic scenario With undertones of violence. Two couples Joseph and Dotty, May and Lionel arrive to spend a supposedly idyllic holiday at a forest camp in North Wales, with the remote owner, George, and a shy toolfitter, Balfour, also on holiday. Joseph brings his small son, Roland, by another woman, and a backward boy, Kidney. But everything goes dreadfully wrong, both in their physical surroundings the unsatisfactory sleeping arrangements, the chemical toilet, the wasps' nest, the vomit in the grass and in their relationships with each other. They try to have the right ideas; Balfour does social'. work, George is obsessed with the suffering of the Jews, Joseph holds forth about modern architecture and tries to 'improve' Kidney. But their tations are claustrophobic, and nobody has the imagination to prevent Roland eating Kidney's tranquillisers. Unnoticed, while they wrangle pathetically, he falls into a coma and dies.
The cut version emphasises the comedy of awkwardness, and the author's more earnest moments, pointing out the failure of love that causes Roland's death, are removed. All this makes it more of a piece with her later novels, but I still value the more intense and lush early Bainbridge. She had not yet learnt to be sly, and though her slyness is now magisterial, she has lost a certain charming willingness to make a fool of herself by being serious. Bosth All Girls Together and The Churching are first novels, and both are admirable, in different ways. The heroine of Paula Neuss's story, set in a boarding school, is gawky, sensitive Hetty, intelligent but unworldly. The art mistress, Miss Embleton-Smith, is jealous of Hetty's friendship with Ellen, a charming and popular girl but as we discover able and willing to manipulate anybody for her own ends. 'Embers' persuades the housemistress that Hetty is 'bad' for Ellen and the two should be separated, so she herself can fawn over Ellen's pottery and invite her to tea. The emotional atmosphere, the infuriating pettiness and double standards of such institutions are brilliantly caught. While Hefty's parents imagine unnameable horrors, and Hetty miserably fails to explain because she does not know what she is supposed to have done, Ellen makes the best use she can of Embers's devotion and on the sidelines Olive Peterson, the organist, is having a passionate (though probably platonic) affair with the music mistress. There are, a few improbabilities, chiefly that Ellen and Hetty would be friends in the first place. The explanation given is that the friendship developed from a crush; Ellen can always do with acolytes and anyway she enjoys the love-letters she gets from Hetty's brother, Martin. The finale, where Martin profanes the Founder's Day dance with his masculine presence and causes the downfall of Embers, is a bit contrived, but the book is still a delight, especially for the accurate lightning sketches of minor characters and its cruelly precise style. The cold comfort vicarage of The Churching is set in a village whose normality is only apparent. The District Nurse, Miss Bed does, is really a witch; slightly wanting Anne Perkins has a peculiar baby which Nurse Beddoes has obviously earmarked as a Devil of some kind; Desmond, the Vicar, is made redundant andbecomes a cosmetics salesman, and Nurse Beddoes takes over the church for Sabbaths. Kate, the Vicar's wife, loves animals but is not much good with people; their practical daughter, Eunice, studying economics, also fails to notice — or halt when she does notice — the advance of Nurse Beddoes's new religion. Beddoes's takeover, unopposed by the inhabitants, of humdrum village life — fetes, Parish Council meetings, church services — is a very good joke, especially as she herself is an utterly normal jolly District Nurse who talks about 'popping the placenta in the fridge'. At the height of her hellish service someone notices that Anne's baby has.disappeared, and Nurse Beddoes shrieks:lao, Iao, Sabat. Deep calls unto deep. Iao, oh golly, what a gubbins I am!' The idea works! because the ordinary surface of village life is made so lumpishly real. At its climax, the book rather falls apart. A sinister Bishop who may be the Devil is 'killed' in a car crash, somebody is murdered in the church, Anne drowns herself, Kate saves baby Eric but may have gone mad. You never find out what happens to Nurse Beddoes, the church, or the redundant Vicar. But there is a great deal of enjoyment on the way.
Emma Fisher
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