Measuring Up to Forster
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing MEASURING UP TO FORSTER BY PEARL K. BELL In one of those concurrences that no longer seem to surprise (for they have such an odd logic of their own), E. M. Forster died just as...
...Her subject is the death rattle of the marriage of an endearing young Canadian slob, Shirley Perrigny, and her repellently well-organized French husband, Philippe...
...Almost every review I have seen of A Fairly Good Time (Random House, 308 pp., $5.95) has called it "bitchy," yet that hardly begins to describe the funhouse mirror Miss Gallant holds up to the French, and the tone of cold detachment and contempt that informs every page...
...In a highly charged scene, Baldur the prophetic artist and Jarvis the maker of Levittowns come together in a blaze of incandescent discovery—a vision of community, of builders and makers, of housing and art...
...By this criterion nothing could be further removed from Baldur's Gate than Mavis Gallant's latest variation on her familiar theme of New World innocence in mortal peril from the smug sharks of Europe...
...An enormously powerful, paradoxically attractive real-estate "developer," Chuck Jarvis, longs to acquire the Buckingham place, surrounded by fields that have nurtured and protected it for two centuries, and let his vulgar wife paper it with the money he has made from his Long Island Levittowns (which he wouldn't be caught dead living in...
...If a place does not exist then you must invent one...
...Baldur, following his mythological namesake, the god of light and peace, is shattered and dies...
...Of Philippe's hideous petit-bourgeois family: "They would eat sparingly of the veal, for meat created cancer in Madame Perrigny's anxious universe...
...Miss Gallant spares nothing and no one in demonstrating how the gullible girl is monstrously victimized, debased and defeated at the hands of her loathsome husband, whom she acquired as absent-mindedly as she tumbles into other men's beds...
...Miss Clark exposes the old-fashioned, aristocratic bluestocking, Miss Pryden (whose symbolic name I wish were less reminiscent of Jean Stafford's Miss Pride, in Boston Adventure), and the brittle, tensely emancipated brainy females of the 1950s, the time of the story...
...Peristalsis was an enemy she had never mastered...
...The figure in the book's title is an old sculptor, Baldur Blake...
...There, in calm dedication that is easily confused with a frenzied making up for lost time, Baldur begins creating work as gloriously original and radiant as his earlier sculpture had been mechanically competent and lifeless...
...Logically, they had no right to be alive...
...Her intestines were of almost historical importance . . . they were still as nothing to her stomach, in which four-course meals remained for days, undigested, turning over and over like clothes forgotten in a tumble dryer...
...Also as in Howards End, intellectual women are revealed, under stress, to be far less pure in mind and body, far more confused in their ideals and actions, than they like to pretend...
...that will transform the town of Jordan into a model for all America: "We'll teach this country to be lovely again, so it'll be a pleasure to drive around in it...
...Instead, she plucks Eva's husband out from the rubble of Jordan, and provides him with a tortured history that she tells with enormous virtuosity...
...Although the end of Baldur's Gate is weak, disclosing an implausible and rather sentimental path of redemption and self-discovery to the wretched and not very admirable Eva, the rest of the book lingers in the mind with lyrical force...
...For a short and hectic time, almost the entire town is caught up in the electric energy of impassioned plans for communal rebirth...
...Miss Clark's rich and ambitious chronicle of a Connecticut village named Jordan is nevertheless dominated, like Howards End, by a brooding but tough concern with property and houses—with legacies and estates both real and moral, palpable and intellectual, that are fraught with awesome possibilities for good and evil...
...Early in the story, Eva's enigmatic, frighteningly anonymous husband, Lucas—she learns nothing about his life until it is almost too late to matter—a superb handyman and gardener who always leaves a job once he is threatened with success, manages through some uncanny chemistry to persuade Baldur to sober up and return to his studio...
...Her purpose is to reveal how infinitely superior to the brutally calculating, penny-pinching, humorless, glacier-hearted French the warm, selflessly generous dear disheveled Shirley truly is...
...At the end of Forster's novel, the heirs to Howards End know that "London's creeping . . . the melting-pot was being prepared for them...
...This corrosive apathy is not merely a failure of paint and nails and wood, but the shameful neglect of a heritage of love, pride and devotion...
...But as Shirley pursues her destructive course through ever more bizarre species of French women and men, A Fairly Good Time begins to sound like a series of pyrotechnically perfect cadenzas played by a mad soloist who not only can't find the orchestra but has secretly destroyed the score...
...But the dice are loaded and the deck stacked with such gimlet-eyed zeal that Miss Gallant entirely destroys any credibility the reader might have been willing to grant the book...
...The immediate past was eliminated: it had something to do with picking up one object, one feeling, one idea, at a time and finding another place for it...
...Much of the power of Baldur's Gate consists in her robust and exact evocation of trees, rivers and rocks, the sound of bees and the smell of grass...
...At the heart of this dream that makes such unexpected comrades of the man of property and the man of art is Baldur's idea of a new kind of gate that will define and clarify "a new kind of space...
...Although it is in no way derivative of Forster's novel...
...But the true common bloodline of Howards End and Baldur's Gate is in their bold and complex approach to the universal conflict between business and art, money and dreams—between those two great antagonists in Forster's work, the prose and the passion...
...Eva Buckingham, the narrator of Baldur's Gate as well as its pivotal point of memory and change, is the last of a tragic line to live in the fine place that her grandparents had cherished, that her weak and desperately neurotic mother had nearly lost, and that she now regards as a haunted way station between past disgrace and prospective doom...
...To do her justice, she often fashions her slings and arrows with a sharp and elegant wit...
...It was a big psychological shock for cities when they discovered they didn't need their gates any more, and now look at the American countryside, if you can call it that any more...
...It's an atavism on one level, but I'd say a necessary one...
...Miss Clark does not try to assign simple names and faces and causes to his vulnerability and ultimate failure...
...Forster once remarked that "The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends...
...she can cause the personal identity to reverberate with dramatic thunder in the larger and less accessible spheres of society and art...
...On the pompous, tight-sphinctered Philippe: "Rushing, say, to his dying mother's side [he] would have stopped to cover his tracks...
...Writers & Writing MEASURING UP TO FORSTER BY PEARL K. BELL In one of those concurrences that no longer seem to surprise (for they have such an odd logic of their own), E. M. Forster died just as I was coming to the end of Eleanor Clark's new novel, Baldur's Gate (Pantheon, 368 pp., $7.95), and thinking how much it had in common with Forster's masterwork, Howards End...
...heaven and hell were based on it...
...But when Jarvis fails to raise the money it would take to realize Baldur's prophecy, death and hatred replace the vitality of hope, and disappointment howls like an icy wind among the ruins...
...For "the idea of gates," as Baldur describes it, "goes pretty deep, way beyond any practical uses they ever had...
...Abandoning his studio on the hill above Eva's house, he sunk into an alcoholic catatonia, waiting soddenly for death in a seedy boarding house a few miles from Jordan...
...With one vigorous thrust she can both impale and exalt, and she makes the New England character come alive...
...In Eva Buckingham's Jordan, the nonfarming, antique-collecting rich have begun to buy up the meadows and houses in a subtle cancer of dispossession...
...As Miss Clark demonstrated in two earlier nonfiction books—Rome and a Villa and The Oysters of Loemariaquer—she can write about architecture, about the landscape of history and the more immediate pageant of the way men do their work, with the wit and the rhetorical splendor one finds in the best of fiction...
...Like Forster...
...As in Howards End, an old and beautiful house whose roots are inextricably tangled deep in the land and its history is in danger of passing into the wrong hands, or of simply deteriorating through indifference...
...He had devoted most of his life to hacking out work in the manner of Saint-Gaudens and the lesser Renaissance Italians when one day, some years before the book begins, he smashed all his hopelessly unoriginal statues in a drunken rage...
Vol. 53 • June 1970 • No. 13
