A la Recherche

Halfway through Marilynne Robinson’s gorgeous novel Gilead, the narrator, John Ames, a 77-year-old preacher in Iowa, makes this observation: ‘Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behaviour, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense.’

It is unusual for moral responses to be set aside in favour of aesthetic ones in a theological context, especially (one might think) where the context is Calvinist. The practice is more familiar, even if it often goes unrecognized, in literature. It is, for example, one of the sustaining tensions of Tolstoy’s work – Anna concludes that Karenin is a bad man immediately after being disgusted by his clammy hand. More directly than most fiction, Gilead portrays an individual trying to make sense of his life. This might also serve as a description of the art of autobiography, and I immediately found myself applying Ames’s remark to a clutch of autobiographies I had recently read. The first one – I’ll call it The Incoherent Me – was bad, and it was not redeemed by the author stating at the outset that he was going to write as he remembered, without any attempt at ordering his material. Why, I wanted to ask him, are you saying this? You are a writer: it is your business to order your material. What use is an autobiography that involves no serious self-examination? Then I read Vesna Goldsworthy’s wonderful memoir Chernobyl Strawberries. Born in Belgrade in 1961, she was educated in the twilight years of Yugoslav socialism. In a sequence of short, wonderfully evocative passages, she describes how the stable world of her childhood contrasted with the chaos of her grandparents’ lives. Simultaneously, we see how an apparently secure world was revealed in the end to be hopelessly flimsy. In 1986 she married an Englishman. During the 1990s she reported on Serbian affairs for the World Service, started teaching, wrote a book, had a child – and then was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was this sudden threat of death that impelled her to write her memoir, but it is not what gives the book its power. In an afterword, she makes a similar remark to that in The Incoherent Me: ‘In this book I wrote about my family’s past as I remember it . . . I didn’t want to research anything . . . This is not a faithful reconstruction of the past; it is an imprint of an individual memory.’ In Goldsworthy’s book, however, the remark is a recognition of a process rather than a shirking of responsibility, for individual memory ‘imposes its own patterns across time’. Although she writes well and is often very amusing, it is the way in which she imposes patterns, her artistry, that makes her book so good: it reflects something true about the way in which people make sense of their own and other lives. By contrast, Tom Maschler’s Publisher is so lacking in self-awareness that the result is comic, and the banality of his observations means that the book doesn’t even work as a compendium of anecdotes. Because it is recounted without any aesthetic engagement, a life which, on the face of it, seems such promising material is turned into something ridiculous and without relevance for other human beings. But it was while I was reading Richard Wollheim’s extraordinary Germs that these comparisons began to acquire definition. Wollheim was a professor of philosophy (he died shortly before the book’s publication); aesthetics was his speciality. Though it contains observations and anecdotes from his adult life, Germs is essentially a memoir of childhood. His father was a German-born theatrical impresario, his mother a gaiety girl. The descriptions of them are superb but they are incidental, for the subject of Wollheim’s book is himself, his own developing consciousness and sexuality. Never let it be said that Surrey is dull: even his account of sitting on the loo as a child telling himself stories ‘in which the combatants were represented by the tassels at either end of my dressing-gown cord’ is intimately absorbing. He goes on to tell us about the occasion on which he was taught to wipe his own bottom and adds, ‘This small incident was probably the single greatest increase in personal responsibility that my childhood had in store for me. It is what I think of when I hear moral philosophers discuss responsibility.’ This small vignette is constructed of several layers: the child making up stories, the adult instructing him about loo paper, the child’s response to that instruction (as reported by the adult author) and the adult comment on the event. Coming from a highly self-conscious academic philosopher, the comment is at once deliberately provocative and also, perhaps, true. But above all, it reveals Wollheim’s conviction that these tiny, seemingly unimportant events from childhood are the making of the adult. His minute, vivid descriptions of them, and of the processes by which they lodged in his mind, demonstrate that it is so. There is another celebrated autobiography in which a boy is seen sitting on the loo. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov describes how he would ‘unravel the labyrinthian frets on the linoleum, and find faces where a crack or shadow afforded a point de repère for the eye’. His adult conclusion is, ‘I appeal to parents: never, never say “Hurry up” to a child.’ These elegiac moments and the clear images of a vanished world are not the outpourings of nostalgia. They constitute an intense effort to recall and re-imagine the experience of a child learning to make sense of the world by aesthetic processes, which are themselves represented through an aesthetic process. In a famous passage, the boy sees his father rise up outside his window, tossed by the unseen hands of his estate workers, ‘in his wind-rippled white summer suit, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon’. When the author adds that the figure is ‘like one of those paradisiac personages’, he prefigures his father’s death by re-presenting the childhood spectacle in an image that remains suspended like an altarpiece behind the entire book, a constant suggestion of the way in which the adult viewed his father. Like Nabokov, Wollheim has no doubt about his own sensitivity as a child. Nor does the reader. An exquisite description of Allen (his father’s manly chauffeur) dismounting from his bike runs to half a page, and one does not doubt that the sensibility here is the child’s. Likewise the case of the tapestry bag, with its tortoise-shell clasp, in which the author’s grandmother kept her knitting: ‘I used to imagine with great vividness the intense pain I would feel if my testicles were caught in the bag as the clasp closed over it.’ But what makes the book so remarkable is the magical way in which the child’s awakening aesthetic sensibility is conveyed through the adult’s mature one. Take just the beginning. ‘It is early. The hall is dark.’ Thus begins an intricate account of a fall, which proceeds with a sequence of sentences each containing a syllable more than its predecessor (the significance of which is explained later). It can be no accident that the book begins with a fall, with its connotation of Original Sin. The adult (unlike Nabokov, an admirer of Freud) ‘loved to trace back to this isolated event . . . a number of emotions that have patterned themselves over the subsequent years of my life’. The germs of the title refer, specifically, to the germs that Richard Wollheim’s mother believed came from without (she therefore closed the windows when she cleaned the house – a truly startling business, according to Wollheim), and which his governess believed came from within (she wanted to open the windows, thus causing his mother to start the cleaning all over again). But they are also a metaphor for those character traits that come from external influences and those that are innate, a distinction that runs throughout Wollheim’s memoir. The most extraordinary instance of the latter relates to the smell of newspapers. He mentions it several times, and towards the end of the book, after an astounding anecdote about his disgust at being given sherry from a glass that had been upturned on a sheet of newspaper in a cupboard, we read: the smell of newspaper . . . is the most persistent thread in my life, stronger, more unchanging, than any taste or interest, more demanding than any intellectual challenge, and I have never seen any way in which the power of love could transform it. It is like a ghost in a house that could be expelled only by demolishing the house. The idea of germs is embedded in this remark: in the smell itself, in the sense of an infection (of a life). In its puzzled tone it echoes the doubt about whether the germs come from outside or inside, and suggests too that we are made whole by these individual tastes and tendencies, just as the house of Wollheim’s childhood was home to him because of foreign influences, not in spite of them. It is a tribute to the genius of Germs that such an observation seems not only plausible but poignant. The achievement is fundamentally an aesthetic one: Wollheim is, as Marilynne Robinson puts it, an ‘artist of his behaviour’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 7 © John de Falbe 2005