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A Family Story

A family man is having a mid-life crisis, his own personal crisis of masculinity. His life is one of comfort, safety and regularity and it feels too easy. He wants to grapple with nature, he wants to feel that he’s protecting and providing for his family. So he persuades his wife that they should leave their comfortable home and move to a remote island to live in a lighthouse: the man, his wife, his son -a gentle, sensitive boy, on the cusp of adolescence- and his physically very small but extremely tough foster-daughter.

The wife is a gentle, calm, nurturing woman, who, without complaint, sets aside her own preferences in order to help her husband get through whatever he feels he has to get through. But she pays a price for her selfnessless. Life is tough on the island, she gets lonely, she misses the things she loves back home, and, for all her overwhelming need to care for others, she can’t completely bury her resentment at being taken for granted, as if her own wishes were of no account. (To add to her sense of being confined, her husband is so determined to be a provider and protector, that he’s constantly telling her to take it easy and leave everything to him.) She occupies herself by making a garden that the sea promptly sweeps away, and then by painting from memory, on the inner walls of the lighthouse, a picture of her beloved garden at home.

Unknown to any of the family, they’re followed to the island by someone who has become obsessed with them. She is a desperately isolated figure, so appallingly alone that it’s frightening just to be in her presence, so lonely that her loneliness freezes everything around her. (Such people do exist – I’ve met them myself).

There is another extremely isolated figure, the island’s single existing inhabitant, who they just call the Fisherman, because he won’t tell them his name. He lives in a tiny hut and refuses to talk to anyone.

It doesn’t sound like a children’s story, but the title of this book is Moominpappa at Sea, by Tove Jansson. The father, his wife and his son are not human, but Moomins, which (as you probably know) are cute, hippo-like, cartoony creatures. The tough girl is a tiny fierce-faced creature called Little My, and the lonely being that follows them is a creature known as the Groke, who freezes the world around her not just in a metaphorical way, but quite literally. If she sits somewhere for too long the ground turns to ice, and everything that grows there dies.

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The Three Classes

In a certain country the people are divided by law into just three classes: the Owners, the Experts and the Workers, the precise boundaries between them being set down in the relevant statutes. At one point the Owners, who were at that time basically warlords and protection racketeers, were in charge of everything. However, as time went on, the Experts – merchants and what we might now call professional people- grew more influential until the Owners deemed it advisable to allow them a share in the running of things. There had in fact always been a few Experts co-opted into the Owning class in return for services rendered, but now they as a class were granted a say – and their very own house of Parliament alongside the House of Owners. And in due course both classes, Owners and Experts, became known collectively as gentlefolk – as opposed to the rough folk, who were the Workers.

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I Hope I shall Arrive Soon

Back in my social work days, I was often involved in the placement of children in foster-homes who were from abusive, neglectful or otherwise messed-up backgrounds. Such children are often difficult to look after: closed off, self-destuctive, prone to challenging behaviours. If you didn’t know better, you might think that all their carers had to do was to provide whatever was missing from their own families -love, stability, safety, boundaries- and those children would cease to be sad and difficult, just as a hungry person ceases to be hungry when given food. But in fact closed off and challenging children tend to remain so for many years and few, if any, completely get over early traumas.

I have some personal experience to draw on as well as professional. My own childhood was nothing like as bad as many I encountered in my professional life, but it was not a very happy one all the same, and I often felt profoundly alone and unseen. I am in my late sixties now. I have many kind, warm friends, a lovely wife, grownup children and small grandchildren who I love and who love me – all things that once seemed frighteningly beyond my reach – yet I still often feel myself inside to be that lonely, isolated child. My subjective experience, a lot of the time, is that I still lack things that I do objectively possess. In fact, you could almost call this my resting state, the place I end up if I don’t do something to avoid it.

I read somewhere about a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps who would sometimes burst into tears when presented with a meal. No amount of food could take away the memory of starving.

One thing that has helped me to think about this is a story by Philip K. Dick. His own childhood was unhappy, and he had many problems in his adult life, including drug addiction and an inability to sustain relationships with women. The story is called ‘I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon’ (though it was originally published under the equally appropriate title of ‘Frozen Journey’), and it’s sufficiently important to me that I once wrote a whole 20,000-word dissertation on it for an MA in English Studies.

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Things Unsaid

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

One of my weaknesses as a writer is that I have a tendency, which I constantly have to fight, to spell out things that readers could fill in for themselves. This comes from a fear of not being understood. (I think this fear originates in childhood and probably has a great deal to do with why I write at all). Of course readers do not always latch on to what I mean to say, which feeds into that fear, but this is inevitable. Authors can’t control what readers take from their books, just as we can’t control what other people make of us in real life.

But the second part of this quote -it comes, I must admit, from a book I’ve never read- is also interesting. You can omit things which you know, and the reader will still sense their presence, but if you omit things you don’t know this makes ‘hollow places’ in your writing.

The way I have always put this is that a reader does not need to be shown everything in order for the fictional world to come alive for her, but she does need to feel that the story-teller understands the fictional world, and could answer the questions that are left unanswered. Otherwise there really is a feeling of hollowness. The very best stories never feel hollow in that way (of the books I’ve read recently, Hangover Square is, for me, a good example). A lot of good stories are flawed but not ruined by hollownesses (A Hair Divides falls into that category). Some stories feel to me so hollow as to be not worth reading.

A Hair Divides

Another mid-century British writer recommended to me by my late friend Eric Brown (see earlier post on Patrick Hamilton) is Claude Houghton. He’s not well-known these days. Most of his large output is no longer in print, and the few books that are still available are only so because they’ve been reprinted by Valancourt Books, a company which specialises in bringing forgotten books back from obscurity. I’ve read three of these books now: I am Jonathan Scrivener, This was Ivor Trent, and A Hair Divides.

Ivor Trent and Jonathan Scrivener are in many ways very similar. Both are set between the two world wars. Both have an eponymous character who is not present at all for most of the novel. Both have a main viewpoint character who is seeking to learn more about this absent charismatic figure, and does so through a series of interactions with the friends, lovers and acquaintances of the missing character. Both too deal with the idea of a superior human being, who perhaps offers some hope in a world that seems to have lost any sense of direction. Shades of the Nietzchean superman? They are both engaging reads, and Ivor Trent in particular left a particular dream-like flavour in my mind that stayed with me, though (as with all dream-like flavours), I would be hard pressed to say what it was. None of the characters was very likeable, though, and they and their stories did not stay with me.

A Hair Divides I think is a fine book.

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Athena

As I’ve mentioned before, I sometimes go to the Museum of Classical Archaeology with a friend of mine, to try and draw some of their magnificent collection of casts of Greek and Roman Statues. I’m not particularly good at drawing, and the Greeks and Romans were very good indeed at sculpting, so, as much as anything, it’s an exercise in appreciation: sitting in front of amazing images, and just taking them slowly in.

One of my favourites is this bust of Athena, the goddess of wisdom. In my imagination, she is looking down at the human world, but, although I’ve tried many times, I’ve never been able to capture her expression in a drawing – or for that matter in words. She is interested, certainly, but in what way? Is this the expression of a scientist observing an ant’s nest, or a chess player considering her next move? Or maybe a falconer standing on a cliff and watching her hawk below as it circles above its prey?

We have so much acuity in recognising tiny nuances in faces, and yet it is extraordinarily hard to reproduce them, and even harder to name them.

Patrick Hamilton

“He was not a major writer,” says Doris Lessing a few lines into her otherwise appreciative introduction to my copy of Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude. This makes me wonder what one has to do to qualify as a ‘major’ writer? Having recently reread The Golden Notebook, which I loved back in the seventies, I have a feeling his work may age rather better than Lessing’s own.

I only knowingly came across Hamilton for the first time a few years ago (though before that I was a fan of the Hitchcock film, Rope, which is based on a Patrick Hamilton play.) He was recommended to me by my friend the late Eric Brown, who had a real feeling for British authors of the mid-twentieth century. I read, in quick succession, Slaves of Solitude, Hangover Square and the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, and loved them: the writing, the humanity, the originality. And, when I recommended these books to other people, they either turned out to already be fans, or, if they read the books for the first time, were as enthusiastic as I was. (Except my wife, to be fair, who is not prone to reckless enthusiasm, and thought Slaves only ‘quite good’). I have recently reread those first two again and remain very impressed. Slaves is my favourite, but with Hangover Square a close second. I also particularly liked the third book of the Twenty Thousand Streets trilogy, The Plains of Cement, in which the barmaid Ella has to choose between marrying a horribly unattractive older man who treats her like a child, and depriving her frail mother of a chance to come out of poverty.

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Collective Punishment

And, on a somewhat similar topic to my last post, is there such a thing as collective guilt? Is it acceptable to mete out suffering and death to people, simply because they belong to the same nation, or the same ethnic group, as people who have done wrong to you and yours?

Plenty of people think it is acceptable, and all nations act as if they think it is when they go to war, since all wars involve death and suffering for non-combatants who could have had nothing to do with whatever offence their compatriots have committed.

What makes no sense is to condemn the ‘killing of innocents’ by the other side, but defend and condone it when it’s done by your own.

(No logical sense, I should say. It certainly serves a psychological and political purpose.)

Massacres

There’s the old-fashioned type of massacre, and the new kind. In the old kind, people are murdered en masse by others who are right there in front of them. Men, women, children may be killed indiscriminately, buildings may be looted and set alight, girls and women may be raped, but, whatever exactly the massacre consists of, it’s done by people who can see with their own eyes both their victims’ faces and the direct consequences of their own actions.

In the modern kind of massacre, the killing is done from the sky by people who have never met the folk they kill and don’t have to see how they die. This second kind can be as deadly or deadlier than the first – in World War II, for instance, a hundred thousand people were killed in a single night’s raid on Tokyo, many of them burnt alive- but the aircrews can fly back to base without witnessing the burnt and broken bodies they’ve left behind them, the screaming children covered in blood, the frantic parents clawing at the rubble…

We tend to be less appalled, less morally outraged, by the second kind than the first, to the point that bombing raids are not usually even described as massacres. Like the people who do the killing, we seem to buy into the idea that there’s something less culpable about murdering people you don’t ever meet, than doing it face to face. And certainly I find it easier to picture myself pushing a button to release a bomb, even when I know the bomb will kill and maim children, than it is to imagine myself, say, plunging a bayonet into a terrified child. But is there really a moral distinction? Or is it just that the former makes us feel less squeamish?

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