Reading Note:
Voices
6 February 2015
Thinking about The Photograph this morning — I finished reading Penelope Lively’s novel for the first time early last night — I was obliged to remember how large a role disapproval used to play in my reading of fiction. I freely disapproved of many characters, especially those appearing in English books. They were selfish, mostly — I was very turned off by that. And disappointed. Why, I pouted, were the English so unhappy? As you can see, even into my forties I was looking to fiction for a better world than the one I live in. I wanted inspiration. Very few realistic novelists were interested in providing this, or even equipped to do so.
In this mindset, I decided, whenever it was — more than ten years ago, I hope — not to read The Photograph. Another thing that I didn’t like about English fiction was that nobody liked anybody else. Now I would say that I found the lack of generosity dispiriting.
Without noticing it (usually), we grow and we change. My priorities for fiction are different now. I still require good writing. But it’s not enough to say that, because everyone demands good writing, of one sort or another. My sort of good writing assures me, from the first sentence on, that every word has been chosen with every other word in mind — in the ear, really. I want the writer to make certain assumptions about what I already know. (I do not want to be told that London is “the English capital.”) I want to be addressed as a reader of fluent novels. (I do not want it to be pointed out that a character is remember something from the past.) Although I delight in the occasional tirade, I prefer a regular diet of understatement — quite aware that it is flattering to me. (This reminds me that I am as foolish as the people I am reading about, something that I now find deeply satisfying when I don’t find it totally horrifying.) I want to be expected to take an interest in how human beings act, or try not to act, on what’s going on in their minds, while, at the same time, I want each character’s way of thinking and speaking to tell me who that character is. My idea of good writing, however, has probably not so much shifted over the years as focused. Like every old dope, I know what I like.
Somehow, the old disapproval — which I remember being triggered for the first time by John Fowles’s The Magus — has melted away. I don’t really know why, but I’m happy that it has. Now I believe that the only proper target of a reader’s disapproval is the writer. In any case, reading The Photograph entailed confronting an older, evidently less sophisticated self.
(And what do I mean by sophisticated there? I mean “detached,” in the sense of being able to form dispassionate judgments. We ought to be detached from art in the very way that we are attached to life. Sophistication is appropriate to judgments about the world (as Hannah Arendt had it; what Marilynne Robinson calls “history”), but very inappropriate to judgments about people. Our judgments about people ought to be cosmopolitan — cognizant that everyone is unique and was shaped by unique circumstances, some of them quite difficult for us to imagine, but, nevertheless, there they are. It is not uncommon to treat sophisticated and cosmopolitan as synonyms, but clearly a mistake to do so.)
***
In The Photograph, Glyn, a historian in his sixties, discovers a photograph in a closet. The photograph, together with an attached note, gives evidence that his late wife and her brother-in-law were at one point conducting a love affair. Glyn is shaken by this, of course, but, perhaps because he is a historian (a “conceit” of the novel), he immediately resolves to study the nature of his wife’s hitherto unsuspected infidelity. How many, he wants to know: from the moment of shock on, Glyn is preoccupied by the number of such affairs. His jealousy burns off quickly, leaving a peculiarly wounded vanity. That his wife would seek other lovers does not bother him nearly so much as his failure to have noticed. Therefore, he must find out exactly how much he missed.
It is quickly established that Glyn is one of those gotta-do-what-you-gotta-do guys, and this made him less attractive to me than he might be to other readers. Additionally, it might have tightened my critical squint. In the third chapter, Glyn shares the photograph with his late wife’s sister, who is still married to the erstwhile lover, thus setting off a chain reaction of events and responses, many of them mordantly comic. As the novel moves along, however, it becomes clear that Glyn is peripheral to the group of people whose lives he has startled (to say the least). This, too, made me look at him more keenly. Why has he been out of touch with everyone for so long? Don’t they mean anything to him?
There are two aspects of The Photograph that seem to be to be magisterial, to make this a book that ought to be taught in literature courses. The principal one, which I am only going to mention here, is the artistry with which Lively judges attentive readers to an understanding of the story that makes the denouement both unsurprising and highly satisfying. As if she were reversing the mechanism of the mystery novel, Lively seems to hope that her readers will have “figured it out” before she tells them what happened — “what happened” being a matter that is quite brilliantly shrouded in background obscurity. When I say “brilliantly shrouded,” I mean that Lively is almost ostentatious about deflecting our attention. It’s as though she stands in the middle of the road, wearing clown drag and carrying a huge arrow marked Thataway. Young readers will probably miss much of this, and be agreeably amazed to find that it’s all there, which is why the novel ought to be taught.
The other masterstroke is the portrait of Glyn — the double portrait. There is the lively sketch of Glyn the man, which we can sum up here as showing an imposing man with a successful career as an academic on television. Although he would hate to hear it said of him, he is an entertainer. It’s a sideline for him; his real interest is history, research, the hunt. Thinking about him now, I see a sort of all-purpose service dog, possessed of all the useful canine virtues, from the patience of a St Bernard to the remorselessness of a Cairn terrier. So much for the outward Glyn. What took my breath away as I read about Glyn, however was the sculptural manner in which his thoughts and suspicions betrayed, line by line, a monumentally self-contained, monumentally stunted man. It’s unclear that other human beings mean nothing to Glyn, because it’s unclear that he means anything to himself. But he has an insuperable resistance to intimacy.
No, they didn’t mean anything to him.
Near the end, the devastating revelation, which one knew must be in store, is delivered by a figure of severe impartiality.
And at some point then, Glyn has had enough. He can’t manage any more of this, he wants out, he wants to get in the car and head away from Mary Packard, from what she has said. Except that nothing can now be unsaid, her voice will be there always. He must walk down her garden path with her words in his head, and take them home with him.
You will have to read the novel yourself to appreciate how grandly this passage connects tragic irony with the finality of the Expulsion from the Garden: Glyn, as his wife would often tell him, in her gentle way, never listened. Now he won’t be able to help it.