Week Beginning Sunday 7th May 2006: "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept" (1945) by Elizabeth Smart (1913-1986)

First Line

"I am standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for the bus to come in, and all the muscles of my will are holding my terror to face the moment I most desire."

Diagnosis: 6/10. Again, a strong opening line, which made me want to read on. Rather abstract if anything, but the imagery works very nicely.

Impressions

I've made an exception with this book and not done a character list, simply because it is the most solipsistic novel I've ever read. No characters are mentioned by name (apart from the unimportant Mr and Mrs Wurtle), and there is very little dialogue - it is almost entirely a chronicle of the thoughts and feelings of the narrator. Not a great deal happens in terms of action - the narrator falls in love with a married man, the man and his wife come to stay with her, the narrator and the man have an affair. The affair continues, they are arrested going to Arizona for immorality (because they are crossing state borders together without being married). The man stays with his wife, but continues the affair and the narrator falls pregnant.

Clearly, when we look at Smart's biographical details, we see that this novel is entirely based on her own experiences. Smart fell in love with the poet George Barker before she even met him - through his work. Then they corresponded, and Barker and his wife flew to the United States to stay with Smart. Smart and Barker began a passionate affair, but he never left his wife even though Smart ended up having four children by him.

This novel is widely acknowledged as a masterpiece of poetic prose, and I can certainly see its appeal - there can be no denying its emotional rawness and you have to admire Smart's courage in attempting to turn her passionate feelings into art by means of such an unusual and unique narrative style. However, I did not enjoy the book. Perhaps it was the fact that I read it straight after Nabokov, an unparalleled manipulator of the written word, but this novel seemed to suffer by comparison. I found the tone of the novel rather pompous and self-serving, and the narrator constantly casting herself in the role of some tragic lamenting Ancient Greek heroine became irritating. In a novel so loaded (perhaps even entirely comprised of) poetic imagery, there were inevitably things that did not always work - phrases like "the thighs of love" "the cold semen of grief" and "the tigershark that tears my mind to shreds" just seemed to me to be ripe for parody. Certainly, it did have its successful moments - I quite liked, for example "Take care of this girl, for she is what makes my blood circulate and all the stars revolve and the seasons return" - but then again, sentiments such as this have been expressed equally beautifully elsewhere.

I don't want to say that this novel was bad, because I can certainly appreciate what Smart was trying to achieve, but in the end I think it was a bit of a disappointment. I picked it up because of the "remarkable" "intense" spiel on the jacket and because of its reputation as a great piece of poetic writing. I was excited by Brigid Brophy's introduction, in which she compared it to Jean Genet, and her gushing praise of Smart is proof that the right reader could certainly find greatness in this novel - unfortunately though, I was not that reader.

Week Beginning Sunday 30th April 2006: "Invitation To A Beheading" (1935) by Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)

First Line

"In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper."

Diagnosis: 8/10. Very intriguing. It was actually reading this first line in Waterstone's that made me buy the book. Like my 10/10 Burgess opening line, it leaves a lot of unanswered questions, but it also very subtly paints a picture of a world that is not like ours - in real life, of course, there is no whimsical law that requires the death sentence to be whispered. In doing this, it perhaps references the dystopias of Orwell's "1984" (though Nabokov himself is very scathing of Orwell in his introduction, calling him a "purveyor of illustrated ideas and publicistic fiction". Ouch.) and, perhaps more importantly, Kafka's "The Trial".

Main Characters


Cincinnatus C.: The protagonist of the novel, who is awaiting execution for crimes that remain unspecified.

Rodion: Cincinnatus' jailer (the name, of course, referencing Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's "Crime And Punishment"). He becomes more and more frustrated at Cincinnatus' perceived "ingratitude" for the food that he brings and the cleaning of the cell.

Emmie: Rodion's young daughter. She visits Cincinnatus occasionally, and at one point it seems as though she is going to help him to escape, but in fact she is just a child playing a game and loses interest.

Marthe: Cincinnatus' wife, who was constantly unfaithful to him during their marriage, to such an extent that her two children are not his. She mostly appears through Cincinnatus' memories and hallucinations, but we do meet her towards the end. Cincinnatus appears to be still deeply in love with her.

Monsieur Pierre: Introduced to Cincinnatus as a fellow prisoner in the cell next door. He plays chess with a reticent and unresponsive Cincinnatus, and tries to befriend him. Later we find out that he is in fact the executioner, attempting to form a bond with his charge in order to make it easier and less impersonal for both of them.

Impressions

Comparisons between this novel and the works of Franz Kafka - the seemingly arbitrary laws, the ambiguity as to whether the protagonist is guilty of the crimes of which he is accused, the fact that we are only given the initial letter of Cincinnatus' last name, the odd, detached relationships between the characters and the gallows humour - seem inevitable. Interestingly though, Nabokov claims not to have read any German literature before having written the novel, pointing out that there were no translations available to him until much later. He does, however, admit that he would rather choose Kafka as a sort of "kindred soul" than some of his other contemporaries.

Indeed, when we put aside these superficial comparisons to Kafka, very few stylistic links remain. Nabokov wrote the book in Berlin in the mid-1930's, having come out of the frying pan of Bolshevism into the fire of Fascism - and certainly, we can read the novel as a comment on the "dull beastly farce" of these two totalitarian regimes. Unlike Orwell and Kafka, though, Nabokov shows us the humanity of the jailers and oppressors - instead of being emotionless tools of the state, Rodion the jailer and Monsieur Pierre (as well as the other minor characters like the lawyer and the governor of the prison) are flawed, almost comic characters - Rodion seems genuinely upset when Cincinnatus refuses to eat his food, and takes it as a personal insult, and Monsieur Pierre is a fat, balding, garrulous clown, who is often talking about sex and, at one point performs a kind of "strongman" act for Cincinnatus in his cell. Through these characters, we are shown the banality and absurdity of the regime which they serve. The worlds of Kafka and Orwell are terrifying because they are run by people who have become devoid of humanity - Nabokov knows that even the most brutal regime is still run by human beings and is therefore prone to error and ridiculousness.

The end of the novel is interesting in this light. At several points in book, Nabokov plays with our sense of reality, describing unexpected actions taken by Cincinnatus (for example, at one point he walks out of the cell and goes back through the park to his own house) and then pulling the reader back by explaining that the real Cincinnatus was simply lying in his cell imagining what he would like to be doing. At his execution at the end of the book, Cincinnatus gets up from the block and simply walks away from everyone. Clearly, this is another example of the "other" Cincinnatus who does not exist - but by now, it is this Cincinnatus who is the most important, because in the moment of clarity before death, he has recognised the pointlessness of the oppressive regime, and sees everything falling apart. In these descriptive passages, firstly of Cincinnatus' cell breaking apart when he leaves it (echoing the temple at Christ's death?) and then of the place of execution becoming little more than "dust, rags, chips of painted wood, bits of gilded plaster, pasteboard bricks, posters", we can perhaps sense Nabokov predict the fall of Communism almost sixty years before the event. At the very least he is suggesting that all totalitarian regimes are destined to eventually cave in on themselves.

Though the political message of this novel is important, this novel would still be a great one without it, simply because of Nabokov's prose style. His manipulation of the written word into something of aesthetic beauty is almost Shakespearean, which is particularly galling given that English is not even his first language. This passage, in which Cincinnatus is going over in his mind what he will say to his unfaithful wife in their last meeting before he is executed, needs no real comment except to sit back and admire it:

"In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you - on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck - even then. And afterwards - perhaps most of all afterwards - I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B...without looking, or without lifting the pencil...or in some other way...we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn."