WRITER'S BLOCK
Vincent, Norah
WRITERS BLOCK Barry Unsworth's novel examines the unexamined life By Norah Vincent The name of the British novelist Barry Unsworth rings only a vague bell for American readers. But it should ring...
...By the distinctive red birthmark on his face, Benson recognizes him as Thompson, one of his fellow infantrymen in the war...
...Regarding a passing motorist who was, like Benson, startled by the leap and has stopped to see if he can help, Benson reaches out, only to touch the stolid wall of a stranger's impassivity: He looked into the man's eyes, sad and moist and shifty under the mildly reeking brim of his hat, and felt for a sharp moment an impulse to embrace him...
...For extra money, which he rarely if ever collects from his impecunious clients, he coaches abysmally bad closet poets and avocational writers in his spare time...
...But Benson is stalled in his work, having fallen into a stubborn bout of writer's block...
...Something tangible and sustaining is at the bottom of Benson's well...
...Yet, through it all, Benson keeps his delightfully wry sense of humor, and displays it to us at all the right moments...
...And his 1988 ^-ug-^^ and Rum, which has just been published here in the United States, proves equally compelling...
...The eyes that looked at Benson were bemused and fierce, eyes of an animal unable to understand its own ruin....Nothing was sure on his face except the imminence of its dissolution...
...Benson is a man made of soulful Norah Vincent is a writer in New York City...
...So, instead of writing, he wanders the streets of his dismal city looking for portents and signs, shreds of meaning in everyday life that might wake him from his creative torpor...
...He would have liked to enlarge on this, now that the need of action was over, to commemorate this death with at least a few minutes of conversation...
...Benson has many such encounters with strangers on the street and even comes near to being pummeled senseless by a gang of street thugs when he tries to engage them in one of his searching, metaphorical conversations...
...The novel opens with Benson making his usual rounds one afternoon on the city streets, when he notices what looks like a carpet falling from the rooftop of a block of flats...
...But that, of course, is Unsworth's point, and it's what makes Sugar and Rum a novel worth reading...
...Then, late one evening, Benson encounters a bedraggled street urchin singing for change in the street...
...And it is as well something of an untidy book: Hardly any plot, for example, manages to appear except in the observations and memories of Benson, the story's world-weary protagonist...
...At sixty-three, he is an established writer residing in Liverpool, working on a novel about the Atlantic slave trade (the subject of Unsworth's Sacred Hunger...
...1t seemed now to Benson that he had heard death in that palsied singing, that he had sensed it while he followed Thompson's slow steps back here to his lair, that the knowledge had informed the memories of these recent days and nights...
...His hopes for some companionable sense of loss, or the soothing effect of shared recollections from combat, are dashed here as well...
...When the carpet hits the ground "with a sound a carpet wouldn't have made," Benson sees that the airborne object was a man, a suicide, who is now lying dead in the street in front of him...
...But the motorist had already turned away...
...From here, the novel meanders slowly to its conclusion, and that conclusion arrives as a non sequitur, offering little in the way of resolution...
...As they share the whiskey, Benson realizes that Thompson is too far gone to make any real sense of their shared experiences in the war...
...It's difficult in the end to know whether Thompson's dullard lethargy or Slater's hermetic obliviousness is more alienating, just as it's difficult to decide which is the more horrifying example of the unexamined life...
...Benson goes on to meet another war buddy, Slater, who lives near the city in a lavish mansion...
...There is, of course, real suffering going on, but morose, navel-gazing godlessness is not the theme in Sugar and Rum...
...Determined to make some retrospective sense of his haunting memories, Benson buys a bottle of scotch and follows Thompson home to his ramshackle abode in one of Liverpool's worst slums...
...Slater, like Thompson, simply thinks their war experiences happened too long ago to merit remembering...
...But it is in its language that Sugar and Rum succeeds where other books fail, and in its ability to conjure up inner life—reminding the reader that at their best, words can bridge the gap between the mind and the world outside it...
...1 thought it was a carpet, at first," he said, "you know, from the way he fell...
...injuries, most of them incurred while serving in the British army late in the Second World War...
...Benson responds with characteristic thoughtfulness and awkward personability...
...He won England's Booker Prize in 1992 for Sacred Hunger, a work of fiction that deserved high literary honors...
...But, much to Benson's chagrin, when he knocks on his door and introduces himself, Thompson doesn't seem to know who he is, but invites Benson in anyway...
...Instead he made a gift of words, presented a fragment of his experience...
...this larger truth swamped the piecemeal operation of memory...
...Unsurprisingly, his "Fictioneers," as he calls them, have the unde-sired effect of driving him more deeply into the existential despair from which he is so intent on freeing himself...
...Sugar and Rum is an intensely revelatory, semi-autobiographical novel—^which hardly sounds like a recommendation, given the confessional goo so often bottled as literature these days...
...Here Uns-worth's powers of observation, and his ability to capture the pathos of the moment assert themselves: Perception is a leaping thing and the gatherings of the leap are always obscure...
...But, unlike Thompson, who is so clearly a man defeated by experience, Slater coasts mindlessly over the surface of his bourgeois existence, as far removed from the brutal lessons of war as a modern teenager who's never known adversity—or so it seems to Benson...
...But it should ring louder...
...His is an oddly warm and substantive sort of nausea—the kind from which a serious Jack Lemmon character might suffer...
Vol. 4 • June 1999 • No. 38
