British Inside and Out
Friedman, Melvin J.
BOOKS British Inside and Out INCLINE OUR HEARTS by A. N. Wilson Viking-Penguin. 250 pp. $17.95. Morton P. Levitt, in his influential Modernist Survivors, casts a jaundiced eye at the recent...
...Hunter played fast and loose with the women in Julian's life and suddenly intrudes on the Lampitt mythology: he ends up by corrupting and demeaning it...
...Its author, Raphael Hunter, had been Julian's bete noire since his school days at Seaforth Grange...
...An imposing passage such as the following makes one think of Proust: "These are the faces which return during nights of insomnia, forever hurt in my memories, and inconsolably so...
...Julian looks back on the shaping events of his past—falling back on what seems to be the Proustian notion that "time is measured by the imagination and not by the clock"—beginning with his twelfth year when he was living with his Aunt Deirdre, Uncle Roy, and cousin Felicity, following the death of his parents...
...Julian himself becomes something of a Lampitt-watcher...
...The narrator's final words about his "secret sharer" are worth noting: "Hunter's destiny and mine appeared to be mysteriously linked...
...His uncle, a clergyman, fashions the myth of a certain Lampitt family—who seem to matter to him more than his own family and parish...
...The ingredients are all very British—public schools, pipe-smoking Anglican vicars, eccentric aristocrats, tasteless cuisine, Oxford and Cambridge backdrops...
...While the events described and the narrative techniques used may seem unspectacular, the witty, allusive style of the telling is anything but ordinary...
...Wilson divides his time between fiction, biography, and essay-writing...
...its narrator, Julian Ramsay, looks back on a formative decade of his life, in which he had his first encounters with the literary, the clerical, the erotic, and the military...
...The arts come together frequently, as when Julian juxtaposes Michelangelo and Balzac: "No one, however, can fail to admire the simple energy, imaginative and physical, required to complete the decoration of the Sistine Chapel or the penning of La Comedie HumaineT A.N...
...The sly, insinuating presence of this biographer-seducer manages to stifle Julian's exuberance and even undermine his affirmative view of life...
...It is said that time is a healer, but it is not necessarily so...
...We were destined, like figures in Oriental religion, to represent two sides of the same phenomenon, the dark and the light, the positive and the negative...
...Memory has the power to encapsulate moments of pain, to freeze them, so that though the person who suffered has drifted on into other worlds and other states of feeling or non-feeling, the remembered moments of pain can stay...
...Julian's retrospective carries him through his boarding school days, his summer in Brittany, and his army experiences...
...Julian shows disrespect for it early in his narrative and grows to distrust it more aggressively when confronted with a slanderous biography of James Petworth Lampitt...
...Incline Our Hearts clearly belongs in Levitt's category of Neo-Victorian novel...
...Especially noteworthy is his use of biography as an organizing principle in Incline Our Hearts...
...The Henry James of The Aspern Papers might be added to the list...
...Yet it is certainly not "stillborn...
...Levitt despairs of its lack of experimentation, of its eagerness to return to the undaring techniques of the Victorians...
...he was a figure without whom my own life was not quite imaginable...
...Incline Our Hearts is a conventional first-person retrospective novel...
...It has a vitality and a caring about style that separate it from those annoyingly frequent British novels which are little more than random gatherings of scenes from English provincial life...
...Commonplace occurrences are relieved by elegant bits of essay writing, by astute references to literature and the other art forms...
...Melvin J. Friedman (Melvin J. Friedman is professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee...
...Reviewers have compared Wilson to Evelyn WaUgh, Iris Murdoch, Barbara Pym, and Anthony Powell, as well as to such Nineteenth Century English novelists as Charles Dickens and George Eliot...
...While Levitt does not mention A.N...
...Morton P. Levitt, in his influential Modernist Survivors, casts a jaundiced eye at the recent British novel: "But the Neo-Victorian novel of Britain, in the third decade now of its dominance, appears to live on, its critics, practitioners, and audience still unaware, it would seem, that it was stillborn...
...Wilson, the author of eleven novels (all published, remarkably, since 1977), he would almost certainly place him among the Neo-Victorians...
...Hunter was not just a figure who would keep cropping up but, much more strangely...
Vol. 53 • July 1989 • No. 7
