The Brick of Fate

In the 1970s student grants went a long way. After paying for all the prescribed texts, there was still money left over for a good rummage in the second-hand bookshops. On a whim one day, I bought three novels by an author I had never heard of – Peter de Vries. I was attracted by the cyclamen red typeface on their bright yellow Victor Gollancz covers, and at 10p each they were a bargain. What I didn’t know was that 30p could set my slant on the world.

I was studying Russian and Moral Philosophy – an interesting combination, but one that sometimes felt like a vale of tears. Russian literature brimmed with existential problems and moral disorder – ungovernable passions, the possibility of redemption, the puzzle of history, to say nothing of the sheer wretchedness of ordinary people. And moral philosophy, which perhaps should have helped with all that suffering humanity, often appeared to be pitifully disconnected from it. Peter de Vries soon became the perfect antidote to wrestling with Kant or Dostoevsky. There were philosophical problems aplenty in his books too, but his exploration of them made me laugh out loud and filled me with a kind of rueful joie de vivre, mirroring the mood of the writing. He even tackled the ontological argument. According to the Unitarian minister in The Mackerel Plaza, ‘It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that He need not exist in order to save us.’ The territory covered by de Vries turned out to be remarkably similar to that in my own chosen subjects: the ambiguities of good and evil, the uncertainties of faith, the nature of God, and the quest for happiness. Whereas Tolstoy thought that all happy families resembled one another, each unhappy family being unhappy in its own way, the suicidal poet in Reuben, Reuben asks: ‘Why do people expect to be happily married when they are not individually happy?’ In the same book another character likens the state of marriage to ‘the fabulous invalid the theatre had once been. The same doom was continually predicted for it, while it continued miraculously to survive.’ In Through the Fields of Clover Elsie is distressed by her failure as a woman to ‘yield to pleasure’, but on her third marriage, she still regards sexual intercourse as ‘an unnatural act’. With playful banter and gentle irony de Vries travels tirelessly through the wasteland that can be ordinary family life, setting all turbulence against the tenderness of men and women for one another. With each successive novel I seemed to experience what Melville called ‘the shock of recognition’; which is to say re-cognition, for it was in me already, waiting to be activated. The more I read, the more I began to think that I’d found a soul mate. Born in 1905 in Chicago’s South Side, an area he once described as ‘hermetically sealed’ from life and culture, de Vries was the son of immigrant Dutch Calvinists. I was the daughter of deep-rooted Scots, neither immigrant nor émigré, and woefully wary of travel in any direction. The mining town in which I grew up looked in on itself, suspicious of anything or anyone that didn’t belong. Yet Dutch Calvinism and Scottish Presbyterianism are from the same stable. Theologically they are both Reformed and, theoretically at least, they are both relatively tolerant of different doctrinal positions. They opt for thrift, industry and austerity – all baked together in a moderate oven of moral virtue and served up cold with a bit of gloom and grief. It seemed to me that Calvin and Knox – the two Johns – were made for one another. Both offer rich pickings for the writer, and for the reader. The possibility of religious faith is a recurrent theme in de Vries, but it isn’t simply presented as a literary foil, or a target to be shot down. It’s more complex and layered than that. While de Vries is fairly relentless when it comes to the imbecilities of religious fanatics, or those who are pretentious and pious, he is compassionate towards people’s frailties and fears in the context of religion. Calvinism is often treated as a kind of mystery play, or something from the theatre of the absurd, in which the actors stumble about on a kind of pilgrim’s progress in reverse, the trajectory of their lives irreversibly downward. Benny in The Vale of Laughter seems to speak for the author: ‘The thing about a background such as ours is that we can discard it intellectually without shaking its grip on us emotionally.’ His characters, though singular and often eccentric, are not caricatures; rather they are ordinary people – furniture removers, door-to-door salesmen, garbage collectors – men of goodwill, trying to navigate their way through life, stubbing their toes on what P. G. Wodehouse liked to call ‘the brick of Fate’. Indeed the de Vriesian view of the world is perfectly in tune with Wodehouse. My favourite Bertie Wooster quote could have come from any one of de Vries’s two dozen novels:

I’m not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping.

De Vries also has a special ear for language, and he knows just what it can do. Sometimes it is used as a weapon against fools, sometimes as an instrument of seduction. It can be a solace when suicidal thoughts break through, but it also appears unashamedly in the wisecrack and the one-liner. Like the cleaning lady, he says, we all come to dust. The thought of cremation turns a man ashen. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, says another. Or take the opening line of The Glory of the Humming Bird: ‘The trouble with treating people as equals is that the first thing you know they may be doing the same to you.’ All of this may sound too ludicrous to be worth bothering with, but de Vries’s literary gifts are far greater than the sum of his puns. The gags are not ultimately what you remember about his books; they are merely the topsoil for an underlying bog of kindliness and benevolence and common humanity. Funny and unfunny coexist in the same situation, feeding off one another like host and parasite. It is a wonderful comic vision, but ‘comic’ doesn’t quite cover the sort of novelist de Vries is; he is seriously comic, and the comedy is suffused with a kind of bewildered pathos. There is, too, a moral gravitas to the language. In Witch’s Milk, a novel about the inability of bereaved parents to share one another’s grief, they become

phantoms to one another, curiously stripped of all recognizable characteristics and negotiable qualities. They had been picked up and deposited in some country where their currency was foreign and their language alien.

We are told that at her son’s funeral, Tillie Selzer had instructed the bewildered minister to pray for ‘gaiety and the quiet mind’, for no other reason than that these words are to be found in her favourite prayer. ‘Yet when she saw the boy’s father managing slowly to recover that ideal, she felt her heart harden.’ Later she is persecuted by the futile questions that follow the death of a child.

‘Do you think there’s any point to the whole thing?’ she would say. She hardly expected answers from Pete, knowing the absurdity of trying to make a philosopher of him. But he knew she was shopping for comfort, and did his best to deliver the merchandise. ‘Of course there’s point. Look all around you, the patterns,’ he said. ‘It’s the words we try to do the thinking with that gum the thinking up. Would you think whether life had any meaning if it wasn’t for the word meaning? It would never occur to anybody. So try to forget it. Think of other words. Any words. Make some up.’

And later, when she asks him to cross his heart and tell her if he thinks she will ever see their dead son again, the writing manages to satirize and to empathize at the same time.

‘Of course you will. There’s a lot of new evidence about that. That the societies for psychical research and all are getting up. You never know. We don’t know anything. I was reading the other day where astronomers have discovered some strange blue particles in the Milky Way they didn’t know were there. So cheer up.’

As I got older and life dealt me the odd hammer blow, I became an ever more devoted reader of de Vries. He is a good companion in times of too much reality, helping you concentrate on the absurd in the face of the cruel or catastrophic. Once, during a challenging time in my life, I met a young man whose Dutch Reformed parents – they could easily have stepped out of a de Vries novel – had divorced after a long marital dialectic about whether in the Garden of Eden the serpent had actually spoken to Eve. This helped me no end. My own problems were suddenly of no account. With each novel it became ever clearer that there were great dangers and sorrows involved just in being alive, all of them played out in a world that didn’t make much sense. As in the law of entropy, order was always giving way to disorder. It is a subversive vision, and the writing often seems a kind of perplexed protest against Life – but always with the rider that if it didn’t hurt us, it might just pass us by unnoticed. One day, long after my time as a student, I bought a second-hand copy of The Blood of the Lamb, cover price 5 shillings. It proved shockingly different from the others – bleaker, more anguished, more sober – and evidently written from the author’s own personal torment. Miraculously, it still manages to be funny, but it is essentially a tale of loss and despair, disillusionment and death, culminating in this final sentence:

Again the throb of compassion rather than the breath of consolation: the recognition of how long, how long is the mourners’ bench upon which we sit, arms linked in undeluded friendship, all of us, brief links, ourselves, in the eternal pity.

The narrator is Don Wanderhope, a cradle Calvinist who is sorely tested over two hundred or so pages. His beloved brother dies of pneumonia, his father goes insane, and his wife, victim of depression and alcohol, commits suicide when their only daughter Carol is 6 years old. At the age of 10 Carol is diagnosed with leukaemia. Two years later she is dead. The humour, darkly ironic, is pulled taut between the magnetic fields of hope and despair. Wanderhope – the Dutch word wanhoop means despair – is a doubter on the rack of unbelief. In the end he is reduced to bargaining with God, but to no avail. ‘What baffles me’, says another parent similarly tested, ‘is the comfort people find in the idea that somebody dealt this mess. Blind and meaningless chance seems to me so much more congenial – or at least less horrible. Prove to me that there is a God and I will really begin to despair.’ The pain trickles out in passages beautifully wrought and unsentimental, a perpetuum mobile of the tragic and the absurd, not antithetical, but inherent in the life we live.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 21 © Jennie Erdal 2009