Playing Doctor, Playing War
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
Writers&writing Playing Doctor, Playing War By Stanley Edgar Hyman Negatives, by Peter Everett (Simon and Schuster, 200 pp., $4.95), the latest winner of the Somerset Maugham prize, is a most...
...She is always on the edge of being the Charles Addams witch, passionately crushing a puffball in her strong fingers or trembling excitedly as she photographs an idiot child...
...In his various roles as Crippen, Theo is sometimes a meek and submissive husband, polishing the shoes of imaginary boarders at Belle's orders...
...Negatives, in short, is a fable of seduction and corruption, perhaps an allegory of modern history...
...It gave copulation a flavor," Theo later explains to Reingard, in a masterly English understatement...
...Everett is a 33-year-old English writer, and this is his third novel, his first to be published in the United States...
...Everett is less successful in the creation of character, or, rather, I do not think that he has tried very hard...
...Crippen, complete with gold-rimmed spectacles, gluedon mustache, and celluloid collar, and she disguises herself variously as Belle Elmore, the wife Crippen poisoned, and Ethel Le Neve, the mistress who replaced her...
...When he was a child, he imagined romantic crimes...
...Von Richthofen seems to have been a talented man with the odd quirk of liking "to show friends the photographs of charred corpses of the men he had shot down...
...He is a classic example of English marginal sexuality, bored and kinky...
...The Crippen game is socially harmless deviant behavior, like many other forms of sex perversion...
...now, when his libido is not being released in a fantasy game, it turns reflexively on himself: he is always scratching his groin or picking at sunburnt skin on his shoulders or studying his own body in the bath...
...I would say that the writer who has most influenced Everett is Alain Robbe-Grillet...
...These men are not only his rivals and his victims, they are ultimately his symbolic mates, and their bodies have his bullets in them...
...Then Reingard gives him a von Richthofen haircut, and he takes to clicking his heels and addressing the cat as though it were a German dog...
...Theo is a man in his early 30s with little education or ambition...
...As Crippen, Theo can symbolically indulge his forbidden wishes, and symbolically punish himself for them...
...He does not have to commit real adultery or incest, kill or be killed...
...These costumed conjunctions, incidentally, are described with great sensuality and power...
...The identification with von Richthofen turns Theo away from Vivien, as she recognizes from the first, but more than that it exchanges Vivien, and all women, for a mechanical cockpit, remarkably easy to clean...
...she smokes hashish and washes down contraceptive pills with cognac...
...Sometimes she slides over the edge and becomes comic: when she reads up on ant-killing insects, or shows Theo the worms in her urine, or identifies herself with the goddess Kali, or observes "In this outfit I've been mistaken for Garbo,' or sends a discarded lover a parcel of obscenities designed to make him vomit at breakfast...
...First he takes to wearing a leather flying jacket in the shop, and his posture becomes "militarily casual...
...Everett is not fully in control of his medium, particularly of the resources of symbolism and foreshadowing...
...Finally he acquires a wrecked British training plane, and, with the help of the shop's upholsterer, reconstructs it to resemble a Fokker...
...She was once an actress and a beauty, or says that she was...
...Most of the book's hokum is associated with Reingard...
...But it has far more dangerous implications...
...The eroticism of "a pale-green Edwardian corset" or "the black garters with the scarlet frills" in its deepest meaning is the eroticism of Theo's dead mother, an Oedipal gratification, and Vivien is really Jocasta in furs...
...For example: lying in the hospital, Theo's father dreams of an old woman with 15 cancers, one of them called Tono Bungay...
...sometimes the infatuate lover of Ethel, showering her with his wife's furs and jewels...
...The setting is a run-down curio shop, now mostly trading in second-hand furniture, in an unattractive section of an English city...
...A number of details seem symbolic but eventually turn out to have no significance: the morning glory has seven flowers one morning, and twelve another, but that is the nature of morning glories...
...Theo and Vivien have a sex game that they play, in which he dresses up as Dr...
...as Ethel on shipboard, disguised as a boy, she is a vision of ambiguous delights, pastel blue underwear showing through open trousers...
...A young writer who can invent a cancer named Tono Bungay has a bright future...
...To get the worst said immediately, it is psychologically shallow and has a streak of hokum running through it...
...Vivien is probably older than Theo...
...She is a photographer and voyeur, fascinated by abnormality and violence: she gets sexually aroused by bloodshed, war, deformity, and disease...
...as the typist Ethel, naked in Belle's furs, she is at once demure and randy...
...when finally she is carried off deranged and screaming, Theo climbs back into the cockpit, and there "huddles down, staring at the instrument panel and holding his knees...
...The power of the novel lies in the creation of these atmospheres: the dust and clutter of the shop and the peeling decay of the apartment...
...Reingard is younger but more dramatically perverse than either...
...when Vivien and Reingard quarrel, Theo retreats into the cockpit...
...when Vivien attacks him and tries to smash the plane, Theo kicks her in the breast...
...Its identification is not primarily with Crippen's murderousness (he was the meekest and most unlikely of poisoners) but with the possibilities of sexual variety in his career: as the invalid Belle, Vivien comes to Theo padded and veiled, imperious and insatiable...
...Nevertheless, it is a real novel, however slight, on a serious subject...
...as cannot be said of all real novels on serious subjects, it is economical, well-paced, and continuously interesting, what the English call a "good read...
...A man named Theo and a woman named Vivien run the shop and live in the squalid rooms above it...
...Vivien has a history of emotional disturbance and disorientation, she is given to acting out fantasies (the Crippen game, we discover, was her idea), she is simultaneously domineering and masochistic...
...the hysteria and eventual despair of the von Richthofen game...
...The result is small-scale success rather than monumental failure...
...a moth gets into the hospital ward where Theo's father is dying, and a moth similarly gets into a bedroom briefly shared by Theo and Reingard, but such is the habit of moths...
...He has a good mind that he uses only for chess problems, and good looks that he is letting run to fat...
...The von Richthofen game is socially harmless deviant behavior too, in that Theo does not actually shoot any planes down in flames with his wooden machine guns...
...The roots of the von Richthofen game are military homosexuality and sadism, not unique to the Germans but peculiarly identified with them by recent history...
...It is purely masturbatory: its climax is Theo alone in the cockpit, trembling...
...In the course of the novel, a German girl named Reingard spoils the Crippen game, with unfortunate results for both Theo and Vivien, by encouraging Theo into a more consuming identification with Baron von Richthofen, the German flying ace of the First World War...
...Actually, it has lots of sex in it, but it is the sex of death...
...The anticipation that Theo will murder Vivien is continually built up, to no purpose...
...The Crippen game is absurd, perhaps even disgusting (to my mind it is far less disgusting, being at least adult, than the bear-and-squirrel game with which Jimmy Porter and his wife work themselves up to heterosexuality in Look Back in Anger...
...While Theo does chess problems she plays the piano, badly...
...Many of the effects in Negatives are strikingly reminiscent of those in Jealousy, even to the present tense and other cinematic devices...
...Writers&writing Playing Doctor, Playing War By Stanley Edgar Hyman Negatives, by Peter Everett (Simon and Schuster, 200 pp., $4.95), the latest winner of the Somerset Maugham prize, is a most unusual new novel...
...Nevertheless, the game indulges Theo's fetishism, his sadomasochistic impulses, his latent homosexuality, his compulsive promiscuity, all within a stable heterosexual relationship...
...As von Richthofen, Theo has only one part to play, the solitary king of the air who slew the slayer and shall himself be slain, but he comes to play it more and more exclusively...
...Its consequences for society are the extinction of life by catatonic withdrawal, suicide, genocide, or thermonuclear war...
...It is life-giving, in short...
...Sitting in its cockpit dressed in a copy of von Richthofen's uniform, wearing duplicates of his decorations, squeezing the buttons of wooden models of his machine guns, Theo becomes von Richthofen, and in that role he symbolically kills and is killed...
...The plot, however bizarre, can be simply synopsized...
...The names have the patness of allegory: Theo is "God," Vivien is "Life," Reingard is "Guardian of Purity...
...the overdressed and sweaty sensuality of the Crippen game...
...But Everett is a popularizer rather than a revolutionary: instead of taking Robbe-Grillet's principles to the end of the line, which is the non-novel or the anti-novel, he uses them within traditional narrative conventions...
...When Theo tells Vivien that he has discovered his true game, she cries out: "It has no sex in it...
...as a young man, he sneaked upstairs with a different woman every night...
...In the last analysis the von Richthofen game indulges Theo's perversities in the service of sterility and the death wish...
...she is now an alcoholic and a despiser of men in general and of Theo in particular...
...When Vivien kicks the plane, Theo hits her...
...sometimes the guilty criminal who panics and flees England with Ethel disguised as his nephew...
...Reingard is an active trisexual (men, women, and herself...
...Occasionally Everett shows more than that, in some truly imaginative touch...
...Its identification is with von Richthofen's murderousness: he is the killer given social approval instead of punishment, the killer seen as hero rather than as criminal...
...as a result of the Crippen game he may even be a better man...
Vol. 48 • May 1965 • No. 11
