Assorted Prose (28 page)

T
HE
L
ONELINESS OF THE
L
ONG-DISTANCE
R
UNNER
, by Alan Sillitoe. 176 pp. Knopf, 1960.

On a British-owned island in the West Indies recently, I read through an anthology of “schoolboy” stories—a genre special to the English, who take their schoolboys with a singularly high seriousness. Some of the stories were jolly spoofs, but the most exciting and convincing were those nakedly concerned with inculcating the social virtues of endeavor, pluck, and fair play. The plot was always the same: a young lad, named Pip or Snip or Fudge or Pudge, by a mighty effort succeeded, though half-blinded by the flapping flags of School and Nation, in kicking the winning goal or bowling the innings that turned the tide. The title story of Alan Sillitoe’s collection,
The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner
, is squarely in this tradition, none the less squarely for being an inversion of it. The school is not Eton or Willows-in-the-Dale but an Essex Borstal; the hero, Smith, makes his mighty effort not to win the race but to lose it; the nation for which he strives is not Green England but the black kingdom of Downtroddendom; and the vision that gives him strength is the memory of his father’s prolonged death of throat cancer.

Now Mr. Sillitoe is a writer of great gifts, and Smith’s inner stream of invective is often very beautiful:

But it raises the question: Is a literature in which all the Haves are pop-eyed potbellies an improvement over one in which the Have-nots are docile animals in livery or comic grotesques pottering around the street? The question might be irrelevant if the author did not go out of his way, in an unexpectedly awkward bit at the end, to associate himself with his antisocial hero: “And if I don’t get caught the bloke I give this story to will never give me away; he’s lived in our terrace for as long as I can remember, and he’s my pal. That I do know.”

It is not for me to doubt the hard lot of the English working class. It was the Industrial Revolution’s first child, and took the worst she had to give. A visitor to England, especially to London or Oxford, seems to see two different races of men: the one pink and smooth and gay; the other dwarfish, dark, and sullen. Yet on the evidence of the other stories in this book, one is led to wonder if a sense of alienation as logical and systematic as Smith’s is not so exceptional as to be unreal. Elsewhere, there is this glimpse: “On the Sunday morning that my mother and father shook their heads over Chamberlain’s melancholy voice issuing from the webbed heart-shaped speaker of our wireless set, I met Frankie in the street.” This rings truer; Chamberlain’s voice, remote and webbed, still has the power to sadden. For surely the discouraging thing, from the Marxist’s point of view, about the English lower class is that they persist in believing they possess a share, if a miserable, bitter share, of the nation. Throughout these stories, for that matter, the revolutionary spirit, where it is articulated, is done so by adolescents, and merges indistinguishably with the revolt against the Grown-ups. And the acquiescent state of old men is portrayed with an insight that cuts through categories of class.

I have taken an uncomfortable amount of space to get this worry off my chest, the worry, that is, that Mr. Sillitoe sometimes plays “tails” to Nancy Mitford’s “heads.” The comfortable duty remains of praising the author’s artistry. It is great. The least of his nine stories is better than fair; the best are splendid. Monologues like “On Saturday Afternoon” and “The Disgrace of Jim Scarfedale” have a rasp, a comedy, a casually
callous acceptance of misery that would be remarkable even without the poetic swing, snap, and surprise. They have a wonderful way of going on, of not stopping short (for instance, Mrs. Scarfedale’s maternal tirade when her son threatens marriage) that lifts us twice, and shows enviable assurance and abundance in the writer. Now and then he fusses too much with
why
his narrators are telling the story, and occasionally (as in “The Fishing-boat Picture”), seems embarrassed for an ending. To write endings worthy of these beginnings and middles must have been a technical challenge: the “turn” is too complacently bourgeois and the “dying fall” too languidly aristocratic. I liked best those endings in which the boy-narrator stood right up in his shabby shoes and explained what lesson he had learned, as if he were assembling a personal Bible out of scraps blowing in the gutters.

In the third-person stories, the language is not always appropriate to the subject. “Mr. Raynor the School-teacher” is a sequence of words in perfect adjustment. The futile confusion within a classroom and the brutal fate of a pretty girl—
“timide et libertine, et fragile et robuste”—
glimpsed from the window work in effortless parallel to convey the brooding over-presence of a slum. I was grateful, too, for “The Match”: a piece of Saturday afternoon fog bottled for keeps. But in “Noah’s Ark” the incident is smothered under rather aloof phrase-making, and “Uncle Ernest” is marred by intermittent niceties.

The dust jacket mentions hundreds of poems and a hundred-thousand-word novel that Mr. Sillitoe has destroyed; and in the last story, “The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller,” we discover the author himself, wearing his own name of Alan, glumly contemplating the books he has read (or not read):

So would we all. The lack of connection between the experiences, usually accumulated by the age of twenty, that seem worth telling about, and the sophistication needed to render them in writing, is the Unmentionable at the root of the mysterious Fall of so many auspicious beginners.
For a moment, the two intersect; the memories are fresh, the new tools are sharp, and a vivid imitation of life is produced. Then the memories recede, and the writer is left holding the tools. It may be merely distance, simplifying distance, that makes the long-distance runner seem a little too pure to be true. But Mr. Sillitoe’s achievement is the measure of his shortcomings, and in his battle with his books he is well-armed with intelligence, humor, and (my guess is) stamina.

 
SNOW FROM A DEAD SKY

T
HE
C
OLLECTED
S
HORT
S
TORIES OF
C
ONRAD
A
IKEN
. 566 pp. World, 1960.

When I had finished reading this big book, I closed it, and looked at the back, and my tired eyes, without my willing it, went out of focus, placing, to the right of Aiken’s face and slightly lower, a dimmer duplicate. Eerily, this secondary image, though less sharp, seemed more
real
than the image it echoed. The shadows around the mouth called into relief muscles potentially expressive of humor and wrath; the cheekbones and eyelids seemed curved and tactile; the hornrim spectacles perched forward dimensionally on the stout, white, pugnacious nose. The photograph was just a photograph, but the photograph’s ghost was a man—a man who, when I tried to study him closely, of course vanished. And I wondered if these forty-one stories might best have been viewed, by some hypnotic relaxation of the cerebrum, in the same way; for their truth seems to exist, invisibly, to one side of their vivid surfaces.

Perhaps this author so obsessed with accident and unfulfillment has been himself slightly misplaced. If he had been born a German, his morbidity might have deepened into Kafkaesque prophecy. If he had been born (preferably at the tag end of the Age of Reason) a Frenchman, his aptitude for erotic psychology—his tender, particularizing concern for things female—might have blossomed abundantly. As it is, in our small, ill-tended garden of native Olympians, he seems a somewhat stunted and tenuously elegant growth, putting forth branches in all directions, yet of whose presence—as Mark Schorer tactlessly points out in his introductory appreciation—we need, after more than four productive decades, still to be reminded. He evokes comparison with the very best; and then suffers from the comparison. Just as his poems, compared with,
say, Wallace Stevens’, seem formless and wan, his short stories, compared with Hemingway’s, seem stylistically indecisive, and, compared with Faulkner’s, insufficiently material and grasping.

Love and death, those two organic imperatives, are Aiken’s all but exclusive subjects. The stories about death—conceived as an ethereal incoherence bombarding our humanity from all sides—are the more strikingly original, and account for his reputation as a teller of sophisticated shudder stories. But he is poles removed from a spook-monger like H. P. Lovecraft; the horror of Aiken’s fiction lies not in the possibility that other worlds exist but in the certainty that they do not. The cosmic vacuity, the central
nihil
haunts him; “the great white light of annihilation” illuminates his scenes and to an extent bleaches them. In retrospect many of his stories seem black-and-white film clips from the twenties and thirties. His characters wake from comic dreams and, singing empty little snatches of song to themselves, move through a world crowded with ticking clocks and seething snow and visual details (“dead matches, a rusty horse-chestnut burr, a small concentration of eggshell, a streak of yellow sawdust which had been wet and now was dry and congealed, a brown pebble, and a broken feather”) observed with an intensity befitting an insane universe. Aiken’s world is so morally insubstantial that hallucinations effortlessly permeate it. In his famous “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” thickening snow becomes the sensible manifestation of an uncaused apathy which closes over a young boy and lures him to death. In “Mr. Arcularis”—a superb fantasy that must be read to be believed—a shipboard romance, rumbling engines, the threat of icebergs, fog, a coffin in the hold, and a sleepwalking exploration of the frozen stars give body and form to a man’s progress toward death on an operating table.

“The fair page of the world, thus reset, becomes a brilliant but meaningless jumble of typographical errors”—this from “Gehenna,” Aiken’s most concentrated and dense explication of a “world of which the only tenable principle is horror.” The horror is not Hitlerian but Einsteinian; crime seldom and war never intrude in these stories, but the interstellar gulfs, the chasms in subjectivity, and the atomic near-void are translated into sensual acrophobia. His compulsion to give shapelessness shape does generate, by backwards thrust, a kind of supernaturalism. “The Disciple,” more than any other American story I have read, breathes life into Christianity considered as local European folklore; Judas and the Eternal Jew meet and talk in an atmosphere supercharged
à la
Isak Dinesen
and Dostoevsky. But in the end, Aiken himself backs away, leaving the reader suspended between realities and doubtful of the author’s good faith. Metaphysical fantasy, lacking the conviction of delirium, subsides into allegorical gossip; “Smith and Jones,” for instance, reminded me too much of those dental pamphlets in which Irving Incisor and Max Molar debate fluoridation. Perhaps, indeed, Death (as opposed to dying, which is a species of living) is a better subject for meditation than for fiction, since it is, however conceived, unknowable, and emotional effects aimed from one conception of it can too easily, by a slight shift of philosophy, be evaded.

More affecting, on the whole, are Aiken’s stories of love. He moves with ease in the swimming minds of women willing to fall in love (“Bring, Bring,” “All, All Wasted”); he tastes the uncanny innocence of promiscuity (“Thistledown,” “West End”); he conveys, in the tiny interval before the spangled curtain of good taste descends, a strong sexual flavor—“Tom took her gloved hand, inserted his finger in the opening, and stroked her palm. A delicious feeling of weakness, dissolution, came over her.” Not that, under the skies of heavenly apathy, seduction is either very difficult or very rewarding. “We came together as naturally as leaf touches leaf or the grass bends to the wind,” one adulterer says. In “Hey, Taxi,” a cabdriver and a girlish tramp drift into each other’s arms like two snowflakes in the universal descent. Such energy as is needed, the women provide; their aggression can be monstrous (“Spider, Spider”). But men are feeble beasts, preoccupied with themselves and their wives, and they send their mistresses alone into howling trolley cars (“The Night Before Prohibition”), betray them to satyrs (“Thistledown”), and begrudge them even the present of a dollar print (“Field of Flowers”). Small wonder, since boredom and abuse invariably follow the scattering of the pollen, that the most moving and ecstatic of these love stories are those in which nothing—physically speaking—happens. The flower opens, the bee hovers, and that is all. In “Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!” an Irish maid and a young architect exchange one kiss. In “Your Obituary, Well Written,” nothing is exchanged but some childhood memories about the rain. It
is
well-written; the poet trembles up out of the prose and the page is solid with sensation. Aiken is impressive when he snows, but nutritious when he rains; I wish that somehow the climate had permitted him to rain more.