Of Myths and Men
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing OF MYTHS AND MEN BY PEARL K. BELL John Gardner is a professor of Old and Middle English at Southern Illinois University, and in an earlier, well-received novel, Grendel, based...
...The dialogues of the title take place in desolate churches and cemeteries between the book's two central characters—the melancholy police chief of Batavia, Fred Clumly, and a mysterious stranger calling himself the Sunlight Man, wild and wise, half-lunatic and half-magician, who can set a barn on fire with his eyes and pick a policeman's pockets without stirring the air...
...There was a time when "they had the whole world before them...
...The Manticore is narrated by Staunton's son David, who played only a minor role in Fifth Business...
...He is also a grimly controlled alcoholic, and he has been celibate, by choice, for over two decades—a chilly secular monk afraid of feeling and involvement...
...After a year of such painful probing, David has learned that "understanding is not the point...
...Now, in The Sunlight Dialogues (Knopf, 673 pp., $8.95), Gardner has again drawn upon his particular academic expertise...
...Writers & Writing OF MYTHS AND MEN BY PEARL K. BELL John Gardner is a professor of Old and Middle English at Southern Illinois University, and in an earlier, well-received novel, Grendel, based on the Beowulf legend, he used his specialization to rich and witty advantage...
...That novel ended with the mysterious death of Boy Staunton, a wealthy industrialist, whose car was either driven or pushed into the waters of Toronto harbor...
...Cultivated, urbane, superbly in control of his limber and delightfully civilized prose, Davies would undoubtedly rather cut off his hand than write such typical Gardner phrases as "ratiocination-colored hair...
...Betrayed by life itself...
...Hodge's children, confused shards of the old man, are altogether lacking in his confident presence, and no longer own the vast landholding that gave backbone and stability to the family dominion and political fiefdom...
...The novel is made up almost entirely of David's analytic conversations with Dr...
...He has attempted a work that will exhaustively touch upon everything he has known, thought, or speculated about human destiny, shaped in the microcosmic form of a doomed family in Western New York...
...The Manticore continues the fascinating history of the Staunton family that Davies related from a different point of view in an earlier book, Fifth Business...
...If Gardner had discarded the mummer's costuming of pretentious allegory and woozily gorgeous prose, The Sunlight Man would have been a remarkable novel, bearing powerful witness to human greed and remorse, hate and decadence, the wages of cruelty and love...
...Beneath Gardner's elaborate mythical superstructure, however, is hidden an absorbing story of murder, betrayal and ethical confusion—an intimately authentic portrait of small-town American life and the sinister currents that mislead the best and the worst of men...
...Avoiding John Gardner's pompous manipulation of myth, magic and madness, Davies provides us with a much profounder grasp of their importance to us all...
...Yet wizardry and madness are by no means the same, nor were they in the medieval time of Gardner's allegorical model...
...Clumly, old and congenitally irritable, a glutton for food, has for years been nailed to the cross of compassion in his marriage to the blind and difficult Esther...
...Johanna von Haller, who guides him skillfully through the predictable therapeutic stages in which he is, by turns, miserable, angry, resistant, compliant, hostile, pathetic, or receptive...
...He is in fact Tag-gert, the disgraced youngest son of the late Arthur Hodge, Congressman and patriarch of a once powerful Batavia family...
...The one manipulates reality to produce illusions, the other is disconnected from reality altogether...
...Still, he wants his crazy magician to stand not only as a figure of evil but also as chorus, seer and virtuoso...
...When the renowned magician Magnus Eisengrim, an important character in Fifth Business, appears toward the end of The Manticore, Davies uses this deus ex machina for some crafty nov-elistic wizardry of his own without in any way lessening the moral weight of the book's analytic progress...
...He is a good man of lumberingly sober morality whose commitment to law and justice is as unwaveringly fixed as mountains...
...Though Davies' star turns are great fun, his more valuable achievement is David Staunton's painful journey of discovery...
...As Gardner seems to see it, in the mangy and smug America of the 1960s where formerly proud families like the Hodges have "decayed to ambiguity" and the ethical kingdom of God is in ruins, a magician is dangerous and a madman speaks threatening truths...
...But subtly, so subtly that no one had noticed the thing as it happened, the might of the Hodges had sifted between their fingers...
...Unfortunately, the novel is finally defeated by the demonically comprehensive hubris of its ambitious author...
...And lest anyone be tempted to overlook his profound mystico-philosophic design, Gardner festoons the book with epigraphs from many modish sources: the / Ching (holy book of the '70s), Sir Thomas Browne, the Mahabharata, Brecht...
...Feeling is the point...
...The manticore that appears in one dream—a fabulous beast with the face of a man, body of a lion, and tail of a scorpion—is a reminder from David's unconscious that his undeveloped feelings can be dangerous, because he is as yet "not a whole man, or a whole lion," but a creature unresolved and incomplete...
...by making his Merlin both magician and madman, Gardner seriously blurs Tag-gert's symbolic stature, and the Sunlight Man becomes simply a useful literary conceit, which does not seem to be what the novelist originally had in mind...
...The once gentle Taggert, driven beyond the Up of hell by a psychotic wife and the death of his sons in a fire that has scarred him almost beyond recognition, has come home to Batavia to ply his magic and play the fool of God...
...But as a novelist he is completely dissimilar...
...In the course of these sessions he faces some profound truths about himself and the people—mainly his beguiling but despotic father—who shaped his life...
...Like John Gardner, the Canadian author Robertson Davies has a passionate interest in magic and in the various mutations of temperament and value that occur from fathers to sons...
...We learn early on that the Sunlight Man is not the transient stranger he claims to be...
...Even with its thick mythological smog, some parts of the book have prodigious strength and beauty, and Gardner clearly has talent to burn...
...Acutely aware of the vulgarity and deceit of simplification, he is in clear-sighted command of his intentions and the way he will choose to fulfill them...
...In his new book, The Manticore, Davies explores with an uncommon range of intuition and intelligence the mysteries of a mind besieged by its own demons...
...The dyspeptic chief is enraged by the Sunlight Man's mad litanies about freedom, love and the doom of civilization: "The old feeling came over him again, the absolute, irrational certainty that the [Sunlight] Man was the sum total of all Clumly had been fighting all his life...
...Yet Gardner's purpose is even larger, and ultimately self-defeating...
...Distraught with his father's odd way of death, David goes to a magic show, and when the Brazen Head onstage invites the audience's questions, David shouts "Who killed Boy Staunton...
...At 40, David is a wealthy, successful criminal lawyer...
...Though he is writing about contemporary America, he makes it heavy-handedly clear that certain bloody events in Batavia, New York, in the stifling summer of 1966, are to be read as an allegory, a mock-medieval romance of the present day complete with knights, ladies in distress, dragons, and magicians...
...Staunton was found dead in the driver's seat, with an egg-shaped pink stone tucked inside his mouth...
...To say that The Manticore is largely a psychoanalytic dialogue gives a feeble idea of its charm, wisdom and dramatic excitement...
...Although this aspect of the Sunlight Man is obvious, his deeper philosophic function in Gardner's unweeded garden of symbols remains curiously vague...
...Understanding and experience are not interchangeable...
...With his astonishing feats of tirade and prestidigitation, he proclaims a coldly arrogant ideal of boundless freedom, unmoved by its risks: Three innocent people are murdered because of him, and he sadistically holds three others captive—for nothing more than the sake of his brazen entertainment...
...Clearly the author, while alert to the pathos of its necessity, is on the side of order...
...Or feudalism giving way to republican democracy...
...But his sly intent is to destroy the ordained—and, it is strongly implied, the American?architecture of order...
...Drunk, David stumbles out of the theatre before he hears the gnomic reply, and soon after, in search of the answer to a more urgent question—why is David Staunton going mad??he flies to Zurich to begin a Jungian psychoanalysis...
...Should these murky clues prove insufficient, the chapters are given gaudy titles, like the initials of an illuminated manuscript: "When the Exorcist Shall Go to the House of the Patient," "The Dialogue of the Dead," and in a burst of ludicrous pomposity, "Nah ist—und schwer zu fassen der Golt...
Vol. 55 • December 1972 • No. 25
