The Art of Lying
MERKIN, DAPHNE
\\friters & Writing THE ART OF LYING BY DAPHNE MERKIN f, as Oscar Wilde opined with characteristic irreverence, Art is only another name for Lying—"the telling of beautiful untrue things"—then...
...Her characters cannot get into bed without invoking T.S...
...The book is a tale within a tale, dual narratives that traverse converging lines: Giles Hermitage, a writer of "civilized and responsible" fiction, lives alone in an English cathedral town...
...Wain is, after all, a thoroughly British novelist as opposed to being British by birth and American by inclination, like Wilfred Sheed...
...Instead, A Pardoner's Tale creaks along, throwing out occasional sparks but mostly dampened by its own cliches: "As the green earth rioted in joy and abundance, as life danced and waved and beckoned from every crevice, Giles faced the knowledge that his own life had come to a halt...
...It is 1953, the year of Elizabeth's Coronation, and Alexander Wedderburn, a young master at the local boys' school, has written a Renaissance verse drama to commemorate the event...
...Their American counterparts, meanwhile, tend to be dubious inventors, sidling up with work that is little more than history or autobiography—the actual in meager disguise...
...Blundering, and in his presence she blundered perpetually, excluded sexiness in his eyes...
...Harriet, his mistress of long standing, has just left him for another man...
...Honestly, what an exhibition...
...Although I am willing to believe that all of one's past life can fall away into inconsequence at the right touch, I am not willing to believe it of either Giles Hermitage or Gus Hawkins...
...they also resemble the men and women of Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy—they even, most unfashionably, resemble each other in a way that the sexes are no longer presumed to...
...as such, he is a full-scale Liar rather than a half-hearted mediator between realms...
...Byatt is the sister of Margaret Drabble, and The Virgin in the Garden (Knopf, 432 pp., $10.95) is her third novel...
...He was amazed that he could make so much noise, and then amazed that he couldn't stop, and then amazed at the case the sound built around him...
...When Helen dies, both of them breathe a sigh of relief and begin living with each other...
...That was all lies you know...
...too much is made of too little...
...they are relentlessly cultured, given to talking rather than doing...
...When Bill Potter and his wife arrive to put a stop "to all this nonsense," the shell of sanity protecting their son from his terror—of his father and of the world—cracks: "Marcus began to scream...
...He pays her daily visits during which he encounters her attractive daughter, Dinah, a classical guitarist by profession...
...Dinah—one of those glassy, implacably coy creatures that male writers delight in tormenting their male protagonists with—is not...
...her younger brother, Marcus, a pale and silent mathematical prodigy, does not...
...she is always intelligent, often witty, and frequently slips in the kind of humanly wise observation for which one reads such novels in the first place: "Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame...
...The glare of her will" and "a peculiar dry sexiness" that the play's director has detected combine to land Frederica a starring role as the young Virgin Queen...
...One has only to look at the current best-seller lists to know that American readers are lured by the purportedly true far more than by the untrue, however beautifully told...
...So far so good...
...They plod into their trysts simply because Wain has determined that they will...
...Byatt sets her novel in a village up on the Yorkshire Moors...
...She writes out of an imperturbable tradition of English literature, a tradition that takes note of contemporary currents without drifting away on them...
...Giles assuages his grief with work, penning the story of Gus Hawkins, manager of a small press-cutting service in London, and recently separated from his wife...
...There is, surely, a terrible fragility about people who try to live by imagination rather than instinct...
...While on a canoeing vacation in Northern Wales, Gus comes upon a numbed young woman in danger of drowning...
...A JL...
...If, for American tastes they are ludicrously cerebral, nevertheless, behind all the erudite chatter lurks the sad knowledge "that poetry had no answer to pain...
...Eliot or D.H...
...She has survived the familial crucible intact...
...John Wain's new novel, The Pardoner's Tale, (Viking, 314 pp., $10.95) is so much an invention that it is difficult to envisage any of the characters existing anywhere outside its confines...
...at home he is irascible and demanding, a paper tiger who roars at those, like his wife and children, who have no choice but to be roared at: "in childhood both Potter girls had given the angry Pied Piper their father's face, the eyes glittering 'like a candle flame where salt is sprinkled.'" Stephanie, Frederica's gentle older sister, horrifies her piously agnostic father by marrying Daniel, a fat and hairy curate...
...Ignored at home, he is grateful for the attention he receives from Lucas Simmonds, a demented biology teacher who uses Marcus as a guinea pig for studies of heightened forms of consciousness...
...And who can blame them...
...Frederica's father, Bill, is a celebrated teacher at Alexander's school...
...Lucas makes a homosexual gesture toward Marcus when they are out on one of their midnight data-collecting outings and goes mad shortly after...
...Giles is infatuated...
...Back to the main plot: Giles Hermitage is called to the bedside of the dying Helen Chichester-Redfern, a devoted reader of his novels who lives in his town...
...casting aside all concerns of his own, he devotes himself full-time to extricating her from the clutches of her brutish spouse and her psychopathic brother...
...he writes predictably about improbable situations, as though he suspects his own unruly conjurings and has decided to tame them with his stern and unyielding prose...
...Alexander, by contrast, "had never considered her as sexy at all...
...The Virgin in the Garden is a lushly-woven novel, a tapestry of conflicting sensibilities...
...Faced with such toiling description, one is hard put to care about either Giles' life or the green earth...
...The play is readied for performance with great fuss that involves the efforts of most of the village...
...Frederica worships the handsome Alexander from afar, attempts to get rid of her virginity (in the garden and elsewhere), and eventually triumphs on her A levels as well as on stage...
...Frederica Potter, a fiery 17-year-old who believes in her own genius, dearly covets a part in the production...
...Embittered by the circumstances of a failed marriage, Helen engages Giles in implausible conversations about the frustrations inherent in male-female relationships...
...She is also an expert practitioner of the seductive arts, and as her mother fades upstairs, she and Giles make love below...
...He is sent to an institution and Marcus, grief-stricken, follows him there to keep vigil...
...She leaves him high and dry at a concert where she is giving her first major performance...
...As it stands, the book is muddy with unconvincing passion, a besotted rather than spirited rendition of cuckoldry and other sexual dalliances...
...If Wain were a different sort of writer, lissome instead of stolid, this might have been a racy novel of middle-aged desire, a clear-eyed accounting of the subversions of the flesh...
...We are temporarily led to believe that Gus and Julia live happily ever after, but in the final chapter Gus—a mere intratlctional alter ego with no rights of his own—is unceremoniously dumped in favor of her Shakespeare-quoting actor husband...
...Elizabeth Bowen, a writer of more recent vintage whom Byatt brings to mind, exposed this vulnerability when she wrote in Eva Trout, "The horrible thing about intelligence is its uselessness...
...Bill refuses to attend the ceremony, then steps forward at the reception to deliver a treacly speech that provokes Frederica's contempt: "I almost thought he was going to say," she tells Alexander, "she has deceived her father and may thee, didn't you...
...Lawrence...
...Byatt writes with a somewhat remote but unerring skill...
...He helps her to his rented cottage, lights a fire, provides food, and takes her to bed in rapid succession...
...The problem is that he does not tell interesting enough lies...
...She disappears the next morning and Gus starts to track her down...
...British writers of fiction revel in the made up, stories and novels that are palpably imagined...
...Now, back to Giles' novel: Gus, over in London, has willingly become ensnared in Julia's plight...
...The woman, Julia, explains that she is running away from her husband because he has "murdered" their love...
...there is no compelling reason, no trajectory of romantic longing—as there is, say, in Madame Bovary—that makes their destiny appear inevitable and thereby gains the reader's allegiance...
...I find it more ambitious in scope and more complexly-delineated than Drabble's work (except for The Needle's Eye), but it is clear why Byatt is unknown on these shores: She is very English—insularly so—in a way that Drabble is not...
...friters & Writing THE ART OF LYING BY DAPHNE MERKIN f, as Oscar Wilde opined with characteristic irreverence, Art is only another name for Lying—"the telling of beautiful untrue things"—then the English are first-class liars...
...The Pardoner's Tale, for all of its erotic fumblings and romantic yearnings, is very thin...
...All the same she is too self-consciously literary: Her book is crammed with bits and pieces of higher learning and sounds alarmingly donnish on occasion...
...The men and women in her latest novel bear some resemblance to present-day men and women...
Vol. 62 • April 1979 • No. 9
