The Literary Season of Bruce Chatwin
Podhoretz, John
John Podhoretz THE LITERARY SEASON OF BRUCE CHATWIN In praise of the Rhulen class. The arts have become so politicized at this moment in our cultural history that whenever one looks at a...
...Their mother, Mary, is the captain of their fate...
...Their fates are sealed, and "united at last by the memory of their mother," they bid each other good night...
...he favors their sullen daughter, Rebecca...
...whether it is John Irving's The World According to Garp, which is enjoyed by its mass audience for its pornographic violence but is given serious critical consideration for its portrait of a man suitably defanged by the strong liberated women around him...
...On the Black Hill is the chronicle of their lives, beginning with the courtship and marriage of their parents to the death, at the age of 80, of Lewis...
...Benjamin thwarts Lewis's ambitions at every turn but one...
...Even their internal lives are mixed together...
...Jones are born with the twentieth century...
...She favors the twins...
...Could you live in this...
...the twins' first memory," Chatwin simply tells us, "was of the day when they were stung by the wasp...
...She first sees her future husband, Amos Jones, in church just before her father's demise, during a service when she "felt her heart was breaking" upon hearing the words: "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow...
...After her funeral, the brothers move from the bed they have shared in their own room for most of their lives into the bed once occupied by their parents and, since their father's death, by their mother alone...
...Lewis is away for two months, but "drawn irresistibly in the direction of home," he returns to Rhulen in time for his mother to die...
...His right fist smashed into his brother's teeth, and he ran from the house...
...At the age of 38, Lewis finally sleeps with a woman-the wife of a visiting artist who bets her husband a fifth of gin that she can get Lewis into bed...
...Though it is a highly ambitious work, On the Black Hill so limits itself to its own odd world and its own odd tale that a reader used only to accepting or condemning a work of fiction for its hidden (or not-so-hidden) messages will wonder why its author has gone to the effort of writing it...
...if ye be willing and obedient...
...Lewis panicked...
...The Jones twins are at first as indistinguishable to the reader as they are to everyone but their mother, Mary...
...Her hair is greying and there are crow's feet, but Amos with a "breeder's eye" notices that she is slim, and, more important, tough...
...In fact, the infant Benjamin is the insect's victim, but it "was Lewis, not he, who was whimpering with pain...
...Doctorow's Ragtime, which uses an early twentieth-century setting to mask, only slightly, all sorts of horrible and patently untrue statements about the position of blacks in modern American life...
...In a town called Rhulen on the border of England and Wales, twin brothers named Lewis and Benjamin *Viking, $14.75...
...Later that night at the Vision, the following ensues: Benjamin pretended to notice nothing...
...Throughout their lives, the twins retain this extraordinary closeness while at the same time developing their own radically different characteristics...
...Lewis, "the stronger twin, and the first born," has a passion for worldly things, and has worldly appetites...
...he wants them only to work on the farm...
...The arts have become so politicized at this moment in our cultural history that whenever one looks at a painting, watches a movie, or reads a book, one immediately begins to search for "hidden agendas"-political messages wrapped in exquisite Emperor's clothing...
...And yet theirs is a happy marriage, because Amos has offered her a haven from her very difficult past-the social sphere of her "sister in Cheltenham," who believes Mary has married beneath her, and the more exotic Raj, where her platonic love for an Anglo-Indian earned her corporal 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1983...
...She wishes to educate the boys...
...It is not difficult to find them there...
...indeed, rare is the accoladed novel, or movie, or painting, which is not, at its core, propagandistic...
...whether it is these novels, or countless others, most of the highly praised works of fiction of the last decade have really been celebrated not for their literary qualities but for their political ones...
...Her father's death leaves her penniless and homeless...
...He cut a sliver of bread and began mopping the juices off his plate...
...he asks her when they first visit the Vision, which is up for sale...
...What to do, then, with a novel like Bruce Chatwin's On the Black Hill?* No matter how deeply one burrows into it, one finds only the novel itself...
...Throughout her marriage, this powerful woman tries to be "willing and obedient," but she and Amos are in conflict at almost every pass...
...Benjamin's task in life is to keep his brother in isolation...
...John Podhoretz, who writes regularly on fiction for The American Spectator, is on the staff of Time magazine...
...She is the "sad and beautiful" daughter of an Anglican missionary who spent her early years in India and Palestine...
...Benjamin's love for Lewis was murderous," Chatwin tells us...
...Whether it is E.L...
...Nothing," Lewis faltered, fumbling for a napkin to wipe away the lipstick, but Benjamin had nipped round the table and rammed his face up close...
...Indeed, they are so alike that it is not clear where one ends and the other begins...
...I could," she replies, and so this wildly disparate pair-he with a heavy rural accent that she must strain to decipher, and she with her damask tablecloths and fancy meals which are "a reproach to his tablemanners"-marry...
...This was the first time Lewis demonstrated his power to draw the pain from his brother, and take it on himself...
...Then his voice rasped out: "What's that you got on your cheek...
...Benjamin, however, wishes only to stay on their farm-called "the Vision"-with Lewis, forever, alone...
Vol. 16 • April 1983 • No. 4
