extreme legibility

Couples by John Updike (Knopf, 1968)

 

 I suppose the reason I've never read John Updike's Couples is because, based on everything I've ever  heard about it, I thought I would hate it.  It is, in many ways, a hateful book--in every sense of that word--but I didn't hate it.  It exasperated and disgusted me, but I also found it compelling, vividly observed, and often beautifully written.  

My problems with the book come from the characters, as conceived and presented by Updike.  They are all portrayed crudely and simplistically, stereotypically: the Asians are sallow (if not yellow); the Blacks, while mainly non-existent, are sub-human when they do appear; women are not much more than a sum--or cipher--of their sexual parts (tits, ass, and cunt); and the Jews have hooked noses and pockmarked skin.

The character at the center of all this white hetero smug male cluelessness is Piet Hanema, married to the beautiful and implacable Angela and fucking Georgene, Foxy, Bea, and Carol.  He is not a sizable or interesting enough character to support the book's length and scope, which are overreaching.  Most of the interesting things he thinks seem to be Updike's ideas grafted inorganically upon the character, and he sinks below the surface of authorial weight.

I actually, and surprisingly, liked some of the women characters: both Angela, Piet's wife, and Foxy, his (primary) mistress and second wife, are smart, funny, and refreshingly straight-forward and practical.  They are both much too good for Piet.

 

*Men and Cupid: A Reassessment of Homosexuality and of Men's Sexual Life in General by Harold Martin (The Fortune Press, 1965)

 

This book, as its subtitle suggests, is an exploration of and explanation for (male) homosexuality written by an apparently crackpot layman and published during the interval between which the Wolfeden Report was submitted (1957) and its recommendations legally adopted (1967).

Martin proposes there are two distinct types of homosexuality: contingent/optional and positive/independent.  The first includes men who seek sexual relief with other men only because sexual intercourse with a woman is not possible.  The second includes men who have sex with men because they are physically disgusted by women and are naturally attracted to men.  (He also proposes a third category, a sort of combination of the two: heterosexual men whose long-term exposure to their wives renders them impotent from lack of desire and who then turn to sex with men because it is novel and therefore stimulating.)  

Martin does argue that homosexuality is not a disease and cannot be cured, that it is (in the second instance) an innate quality that can be found in any man, disregarding physical attributes and gender-stereotypical appearance.  (He informs that although he is undoubtedly heterosexual, he has a slight, feminine build and a voice that is often mistaken as a woman's on the telephone.)  That is all well and good, but beyond that Martin proposes several theories that are rather absurd.  He posits that there is a natural difference between genders that feminism wishes to negate, resulting in dominate women who are also by virtue of their smaller stature and  softer bodies, incapable of become real adults (like men) but remain illogical, petulant, and selfish children all their lives.  (One wonders about his poor wife, and their "happpy" marriage.)  Because these childlike attributes of women are physically innate, the goals of feminism are doomed and dangerous.  So this is why homosexuality is much more prevalent  in the Western (European) world, where women are not properly subjugated as the inferior creatures they are.

Martin also suggests that Western Christian religion makes sex tabu and that men can not engage in it, especially during their sexual prime (late teens) when they are not yet married.  The preponderance of men with enlarged prostates in the Western world is evidence of this: in other cultures men are sexually active throughout their lives and their prostates are regularly emptied (he doesn't consider how masturbation fits into all of this--he appears to think that if men feel  guilty about having sex, the idea of masturbation is simply too devastating to even contemplate).  Therefore, all Western men become celibates with enlarge prostates.

His theories of the innate physical and mental immaturity of women and the cultural scourge of prostatitis don't seem to have much bearing on his theories of homosexuality, but most of the book, and by far the most passionately argued passages, concern these two irrelevant subjects.

 

 

The Bachelor by Stella Gibbons (Longmans, 1944)

 

The only book I've read by Stella Gibbons is the creepily hilarious Cold Comfort Farm, so when I came across some of her other books I  bought them and began with The Bachelor.

It's a novel set in a country house just outside of London during WWII, or "the Nazi War," as it is always referred to here.  The house, Sunglades, is inhabited by Constance Fielding, her brother Kenneth, and their cousin Frances ("Frankie') Burton.  A third Fielding sibling, Joan, lives with her husband in London.  The occupants of Sunglades are all unmarrried, in their 40s (Kenneth), 50s (Constance), and 60s (Frankie).  Because their house is large and comfortable and a safe distance (23 miles) from London, it becomes a much-desired refuge for evacuees from the blitz, and the novel features four in particular: Betty Marten, a beautiful and jolly woman, a friend of the family's (and once a particular friend of Kenneth's--her refusal to marry him has thwarted his romantic life); Betty's 27-year-old son, Richard, a tall and sensible intellectual and semi-invalid (lung problems); Vartouthi, an immigrant from a tiny made-up European country somewhere between Italy and Turkey and now occupied by Italians; and the elder Mr. Fielding, a gay  roué of 78 whose involvement with night clubs and fast living has estranged him from his family for many years.  Alicia Arkwright, a well-bred young woman and a neighbor of the Fieldings is also involved.

The plot, which spins around three or four romances amongst these characters, is funny and engaging (although over-extended at nearly 400 tight pages).  The characters are all  cleverly conceived and portrayed, some sympathetic, some endearingly ghastly.  Miss Fielding is particularly entertaining--she finds fault with everyone and everything with a blithe hostility she thinks is humanitarian.  And Vartouthi, the young foreigner in their midst, hired as maid-of-all-work, ends up running the household and stealing (almost) everyone's heart.  She receives two marriage proposals in the book, and accepts the second, from Kenneth, much to Miss Fielding's chagrin.  She (Vartouthi) is a unique and delightful character, refreshingly honest and free-spirited.  

Half-way through I felt that things slowed down and that the book was much too long, but as I continued reading I liked it more and more and was sorry when it (finally) ended.

The Bachelors by Muriel Spark (J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1961)

 

An early novel--the fourth?--of Spark's many novels, The Bachelors is set in London and revolves around two groups: one (mostly, or ostensibly, heterosexual) bachelors, the other a group of spiritualists, who conduct seances with a venal criminal as a medium.  The plot centers upon a court case and trial that brings these two groups together in an entertaining way, and the novel has a large and varied cast of vividly eccentric characters.

One of these, Ronald Bridges, a graphologist and epileptic, is the decent moral center of the book, and endears himself to the reader and pretty much everyone around him.

 

My Own Unaided Work by Hermione Gingold (Werner, Laurie, 1952)

 

A collection of sketches, monologues, lyrics, and a short autobiography by the truly fabulous La Gingold.  

Her uncanny intelligence and sly, original sense of humor are much evident in these souffle-like pieces, that are delicious but melt like spun sugar as one reads them.

 

Mr. Bridge by Evan S. Connell, Jr. (Picador, 1987; originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1969)

 

A companion volume to Mrs. Bridge (see below), published ten years later in 1969.

Mr. Bridge is a much less pleasing book than Mrs. Bridge, mostly because Mr. Bridge is a much less sympathetic character.  And the book is a third longer than Mrs. Bridge, so one feels overexposed to Mr. Bridge, and grows tired of him long before the book ends.  Many of the incidents related are repetitive and Mr. Bridge is impervious to just about everything that happens to him, maintaining self-control and small-mindedness and bullying confidence until the very end.  It's written in the same style as Mrs. Bridge, in brief, glancing chapters capturing specific moments and encounters, but it lacks Mrs. Bridge's bonsai-like exquisiteness--it's somewhat lumpy and unpleasant.

 

Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell, Jr. (Viking, 1959)

 

I found this book to be wrenchingly, almost punishingly, sad.  It details the life of Mrs. India Bridge, which is, by all external accounts a good life: she marries a successful, hardworking, and wealthy lawyer, lives in a beautiful home in a wealthy and exclusive suburb of Kansas City, has a maid to do all the cooking and cleaning , has three healthy children, lives a life of plenty (diamonds, trips to Europe, expensive cars), enjoys robust good health, and yet is always depressed, panicked, confused, bored.  She is a stranger to her mostly absent and tyrannical husband, an embarrassment to her children; even her friends seem to tolerate her with a combination of amusement and pity, for she is totally incapable of being honest or genuinely intimate with any of them.  One of her friends, Grace Barron, who shares Mrs. Bridge's existential anguish, is able to express her feelings of despair, but no one really listens or takes her pleas seriously, so she ends up killing herself.

Connell tells this story by relating small moments and incidents in a mosaic that is beautifully detailed and exquisite.  He is unsparingly brutal with all his characters, who all fail and punish one another in known and unknown ways.  There is no love in this book, at least no love that is successfully and directly expressed and acknowledged.

Is this a heartless exposure of the American Dream and the myth of the happy family?  Connell's tone is so cool and distant it's hard to know what he is thinking, or wants the reader to think.  If there are moments of love and warmth, he overlooks them, and works especially hard to find the moments of failure and mortification.  Mrs. Bridge, despite its gentle and polite tone, is a brutal and terribly sad book.

 

You've met her in your own town.

  She's seen often at card parties, P.T.A. meetings, and Country Club dances.

  You think you know her, but do you?

God on the Rocks by Jane Gardam (Europa, 2010; originally published by Hamish Hamilton in 1978)

 

This short novel has the typical Gardam eccentric and poignant flavor, but it seems somewhat under-baked and carelessly wrought.  It is  amusing and lively and bright; it's just not particularly moving or coherent.  But as its subject is the effect of other people's past on our present--particularly a parent's past on their children--perhaps that ramshackleness is appropriate.  

The novel takes place in small English seaside town during a warm summer in the 1930s, when Margaret Marsh is eight years old.  Her father, a bank manager and fundamentalist Christian, and her mother, a spirited and independent  woman whose real love was thwarted by class differences, are not at all well-matched and fall dramatically apart.  Their disunion is aided and abetted by two people: Lydia, Margaret's sensual and morally unfettered nanny, and Charles, the decent, but inconsequential upper-class man that Elinor, Margaret's mother, loves but was forbidden to marry (by Charles' mother).  

Gardam moves freely in time and space, and sometimes skips abruptly from character to character, in glancing takes.  I think the problem may be Margaret herself, whose preternatural wiseness and maturity are somewhat difficult to believe.  She is an interesting and engaging, but not an entirely believable character.  Gardam leaves a lot out of her story, expecting the reader to make connections and fill in the blanks.  This gives the book a pleasant airiness and softness, but one perhaps wishes the entire thing was a bit more digested.  But this  book's fresh crispness may satisfy--and delight--less expectant readers.  I can image a better, more potent and  devastating version of this book.

*Seventeen: A Diary of the Teens by a Boy (Aubrey Fowkes) (Fortune Press, no date [1940])

 

This is the penultimate  (I think) in a long series of diaries published anonymously by Fortune Press in the 40s and 50s.  Aubrey Fowkes, their alleged author, is 17 in 1918, and this volume chronicles about six months, from June through December--his summer holidays and his last term at public school, during which his invalid father dies and the First World War ends.  I had read several of the first (chronologically) diaries, when Fowkes is a very young schoolboy, developing his fascination with bums, lavatories, homoerotic roughhousing, and corporal punishment.

At 17, he has outgrown none of this obsessions and has aged into the role of aggressor and user, alternatively torturing and coddling his fags (or, in the local parlance, "ticks").  He also has crushes and passions for boys his own age, and describes all these varied relationships in exhaustive and (fairly) graphic detail.  His passionate yet unconsummated friendship with a young farmworker during the summer holiday is especially poignantly described, along with his relationships with his mother, father, older brother, and school masters.

Aubrey is a complex, interesting, self-aware and observant narrator.  He has a great eye for detail and ear for dialogue.  The final days of both his father and the War are movingly evoked, and his mixed feelings about leaving school--and childhood--are complexly and engagingly rendered.  This is a book of surprising humanity and depth--far realer and more honest and compelling  than Peter Waring (see below).

*Peter Waring by Forrest Reid (Readers' Union, 1939)

 

Peter Waring is a completely rewritten version of Following Darkness, one of Reid's early novels, published in 1912. 

It is the coming-of-age story of Peter Waring, a boy growing up in Newcastle, Northern Ireland, early in the twentieth century.  Peter's father is a bitterly unhappy school teacher, whose wife left him for another man when Peter was a child.  So Peter grows up shuttling between his father's cold and mean cottage and their neighbor Mrs. Carrol's lovely seaside estate, Derryaghy, which is full of warmth and color and love (and perhaps ghosts).  Mrs. Carrol virtually adopts Peter, allowing him to spend long periods at Derryaghy, pays for his education, and introduces him to Kathleen and Gerald Dale, her sophisticated niece and nephew from London, who are both a bit older than Peter (he is about 16 when he first meets them).  Peter falls in love with Kathleen, and Gerald seems to fall in love with Peter.  Peter is sent away to a grammar school in Belfast, and made to live with his father's sister's family, who are an unattractive lot struggling with poverty and to whom Peter feels superior.  In Belfast Peter meets and befriends Owen Gill, an attractive, intelligent, and highly moral and intellectual boy from a wealthy family.  

The novel mainly concerns itself with Peter's friendship with Owen, and his misguided and doomed pursuit of Kathleen, who likes Peter but doesn't love him, a fact which Peter is curiously and maddeningly unable to believe or accept.  His pursuit of her ends in an act of sexual assault that is much more disturbing than it is treated, and from which Kathleen mysteriously absolves him.  Peter tries to kill himself by exposing himself to the cold night rain, but only suffers a long illness, the cure for which is happily a months-long trip to Southern Europe, paid for by the ever-generous Mrs. Carrol.

Peter is a hard character to like--he's not self-aware, he misjudges other people, he's a snob, he's petulant and often nasty.  While these qualities make him a believable adolescent, they don't make him particularly sympathetic or engaging, and he doesn't seem to mature very much despite his experiences.  Many of the secondary characters are more complex and interesting than Peter.

There is also a constant reference to some unnamed and unexplained "thing" that is bothering Peter throughout the book, something Peter longs to confide in someone but cannot, not even to the reader (the book is narrated in first person).  He finally divulges all to Mrs. Carrol, but the reader is only told the fact of his confession, not its content.  It seems as if Reid assumes the reader--or certain (gay?) readers--will know what is plaguing Peter, but the effect is a maddening obscurity at the very depth of the book that today seems extremely coy and unsatisfying, especially as Peter is not allowed to have--or at least reveal- any homoerotic feelings or actions.