A Pure Clear Light by Madeleine St John

I want to talk to you today about an exceptionally good little book by an author who is new to me; her name is Madeleine St John, and the book is entitled, A Pure Clear Light. Ms. St John was short listed for the Booker Prize for an earlier work of hers, The Essence of the Thing. Now that I have read the one I am reviewing today, I intend to read her other three novels as soon as I lay my hands on them.

The last time I talked to you I was reviewing Jamaica Kincaid’s superb novel, The Autobiography of My Mother. The obvious political and moral undercurrents in that book made it an obvious choice for discussion on this program. It had universal relevance to issues of economic oppression, racism, and sexism. The importance of St John’s book is much more difficult to pin down. The characters are undeniably upper middle class, and while the author is very skillful at portraying the cool, rather flippant language of a sort of liberal but not very informed or politically active group of what might loosely be called members of the artistic community in England, it is not easy to care much about the lives of the characters. Nor is it clear that St John thinks the reader should care about them. None seem to be particularly deep or thoughtful.

Still, this is undeniably a morality tale. It is a book about fidelity, loyalty, deceit, and betrayal. It is as if Ms. St John sets out to do a kind of phenomenology of infidelity. Heidegger claims that phenomenology is a description of lived life, and this is certainly a minute description of lived infidelity. The couple in question, Simon and Flora Beaufort, appear (at least at first glance) to be an uncommonly devoted couple with two children and a busy but comfortable life. The only even potentially serious issue between them is one of religion. Flora, a self-described lapsed Catholic finds herself tempted back to some sort of religion, while Simon, the happy and unrepentant atheist is quite happy to have left it behind. But even their disagreement over religion seems to be mostly glib banter, with perhaps just a hint of unresolved existential questions on Flora’s part. She supposes, somehow, that there must be more to life than the comfortable existence they lead.

Simon is not a typical womanizer. By his own account, he is too happy with his life and family, and at any rate much too busy even to think of beginning another relationship. And in fairness to him, he does seem simply to stumble into a liaison with a young accountant whom he meets, Gillian Selkirk. He has elected, because of work, not to accompany his family on their summer holiday, and several of the couples with whom they associate think it incumbent on them to invite the poor man to a home cooked meal. Simon is certainly not looking for a woman; indeed, he relishes his time alone because he hopes, finally, to do something really artistic and important, certainly more important than the kind of popular television programs he directs. He has begun to think that his work, perhaps even his life, is trivial, and that he may be at a point in his life where he must produce something important or condemn himself to a cycle of mediocrity. He supposes that it is the demands of work and family that have kept him from this more important writing. He would not say that he is suffering from a kind of mid-life crisis about the meaning of life, the significance of his personal life, but then he is not really very self-reflective anyway.

Alas, at one of the dreaded duty-dinners, he encounters the cool young Gillian whom he spots, at once, as one of the new autonomous women. She has decided that until she is autonomous both emotionally and financially, she will simply dabble in relationships. No strings, no emotional scenes, simply some sex here and there to relieve the tedium of work.

She gives him a phone number, though he certainly has no intention of calling, and when he does, it is on impulse, half hearted. He asks her to a movie; she accepts. “So it was as simple as that. There was nothing to it, nothing. Ask and it shall be given. And so Simon began falling into the abyss, in all its black, fathomless depth.”

I have to say that at this point, I was still not prepared to see much in this book—more the stuff of television drama than of substantial fiction. But St John knows so clearly what she is about. She understands so acutely just how deceit snowballs, and how much it affects the deceiver even if and when he is not found out. She understands the ways in which guilt destroys intimacy and communication, often enough even when that which one feels guilty about is not all that important in the whole scheme of things.

Flora, the deceived wife, is far and away the deepest of the characters in the book, and she knows from early on that something is wrong. Indeed, she suspects that something is wrong even before the actual infidelity begins. Simon’s midlife crisis sends him first to a desire for real work, real substance in his life, but is diverted quickly into a relationship. Flora, probably experiencing much the same sense of something missing, lack of meaning and purpose, thinks that perhaps religion holds the answer.

What Simon cannot admit even to himself (much less to Gillian) is that he falls in love. Iris Murdoch loves to remind us that most of what gets called romantic love is not love at all, but a kind of self-consoling fantasy. Real love, she insists, is the desire to see the loved one as s/he really is, rather than simply through the veil of ones own cares and concerns. But she also reminds us that falling in lust, so often called love, can (and probably will) happen to many (even most) of us at sometime. And, it is those who deny the possibility who are most lost when it strikes, for to feel lust/love/fascination is one thing, to act on it another. If one boasts that it could not happen, and it does, then it seems so important, so demanding; it seems one must act on it. Murdoch insists, to the contrary, that one can well admit the feeling (in passing), but very much needs not to act on it.

Simon, describing his own state in a very Murdochian way:

He had entered a realm beyond right and wrong. He had stepped—simply in the natural course of events, without seeking to do so—into a world where there was no need, and no place, for such questions: where one simply acted. It was a benefaction, which he done had nothing—that he knew of—to deserve; it was simply a piece of luck, beyond reason or justice.

I am perhaps already giving away too much of the story. What is so incredible and skillful about this novel is the way in which St John uses short, one or two page chapters, to jump from Simon to Flora, occasionally to some other character, each chapter providing a vivid snapshot. And while the presence of the insightful author is there in each scene, her presence is not heavy-handed or obvious. She is so deft in drawing an entire canvas with these mini-views, these snapshots.

The reader knows in a general way what is coming throughout the book, but knowing, or feeling the impending, is a large part of the fascination. What is clear is that this man really does love his wife and family, really cannot even conceive of losing them. He supposes that he can, at any moment, step back from the abyss, that so long as he does not use the word ‘love’ to describe what he feels, to describe the power this new relationship has over him, all will be well.

I think this little novel is about as compelling as anything I have read in the past year or so, and I have to think it is the wisdom of the author that is so compelling. Perhaps she names me, but you will not find yourself anywhere in her pages. You will have to read it find out.

Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid

I want to talk to you this morning about an astoundingly good book entitled Autobiography of My Mother, by Jamaica Kincaid. Those of you who have heard me discussing other books over the years will realize that my tendency is simply to review what I am currently reading, and while I never bother to talk about books that I think are bad or mediocre (and, indeed, rarely bother to finish such books), I do talk about a lot of good first novels. I also mention many books that are good, seem really to have important social or political points, but are not great books or must reads. I say all of this in order to call your attention to this book, to put it in a category not simply of the good, or even the excellent. This book is simply superb.

Let me hasten to add that this is not a book you should read if you are depressed, nor is it one that you should read if your attention is scattered or distracted. You will need to be focused, and you will need to feel strong, for this is a book about oppression—layers of oppression, even a hierarchy of oppression. On the cover one reviewer says that this book is “Fierce, incantatory, lyrical, powerful and disturbing.” Yes, at least. It is also about a person who is fierce and disturbed.

Were I to try to compare this book or to find others of its kind, the first thought that would come to mind is Richard Wright’s Native Son. In Native Son Wright is trying to warn his readers what happens to people who are ruthlessly oppressed and exploited for too long, what the consequences of exploitation are. There is nothing sentimental or heartwarming about that book, and much the same can be said for this one. The entire book is told through the eyes of a woman who is thrown into the world without a mother and left to wonder what might have been had she had one. She is unloved as a baby, unloved as a girl, and incapable of love as an adult. But though the book is, at least on the surface, about this poor girl and woman, it is really about economic exploitation and about the racism and sexism that follow in its wake.

I would say that this is an ugly book were I to concentrate on the events described, on the life of this woman, but the writing is almost searingly beautiful. Indeed, it seems to me that in reviewing this, I could turn to almost any page and begin reading, and if you are a lover of good writing, you would be entranced by the lyricism of the words. Indeed, instead of even trying to overview the series of events this book describes or to encapsulate what I take to be the obvious political messages, I am in a moment simply going to read to you a few passages, trusting Kincaid to recommend herself to you in a way that I never could. In order to provide just a bit of context for the passages I read, let me say that Kincaid understands as well as Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, and his other book The Wretched of the Earth what it means for oppressed people to inculcate the values of the oppressor. The woman in this story is not only motherless, but the daughter of a father who aspires to everything that his oppressors represent. Indeed, he is a jailer, a policeman for the oppressors, as proud of his light-dark skin as he is of his money and his power over those unfortunate enough to be beneath him, to be be subject to his reign. In Kincaid’s words: “... his presence as always was a sign of misfortune. Wherever he was, someone was bound to have less than they’d had before my father made an appearance.”

Almost from first breath, Xuela distrusts, even hates her father—hates who he is and what he stands for, hates what he sees as his strength and his superiority. If she allows him to represent what it is to be a man, it is no wonder; allows him to represent what it is to white, it is no wonder, allows him to represent what it is to be an owner, a ruler a person-in-power, it is no wonder. There is no doubt that Xuela is a person who is full to the brim with bitterness, a person who hates life, who distrusts the future, who is cynical and who preaches a kind of destructive nihilism. A kind of echo of Wright’s essay, “White Man Listen,” this book is a warning about what we can expect to reap from decades and generations of oppression.

And now, let me direct your attention to Kincaid, to her writing, her words, and then you can decide when you will choose to pick up this book.

“My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity, at my back was always a bleak, black wind.” Though the language of her peers, the language of Dominica, is French patois, her first words are in English. As she later reflects on this, she says: “That the first words I said were in the language of a people I would never like or love is not now a mystery to me; everything in my life, good or bad, to which I am inextricably bound is a source of pain.”

Dropped off by her father to be cared for by a woman who did his laundry, she in one bundle, the laundry in another, she is not surprised by the indifference of her keeper. When her proud, even supercilious father sends her to school (unlike the other girls around her), the first words she learns to read are at the top of a map; the words are, The British Empire. “My teacher was a woman who had been trained by Methodist missionaries; she was of the African people, that I could see, and she found this a source of humiliation and self-loathing, and she wore despair like an article of clothing, like a mantel, or a staff on which she leaned constantly, a birthright which she would pass on to us. She did not love us; we did not love her; we did not love one another, not then, not ever.” Xuela says of herself that she is partly of the Carib people, partly of the African. “The Carib people had been defeated and then exterminated, thrown away like the weeds in a garden; the African people had been defeated but had survived.” Because Xuela can read so well and can remember every detail of what she reads, her teacher tells the other students that Xuela is possessed, that she is evil, and cites as evidence the fact that her mother is Carib. Everywhere there is distrust; her father tells her that “these people” cannot be trusted, though she quickly comes to see that “these people” were ourselves. “.... this insistence on mistrust of others—that people who looked so very much like each other, who shared a common history of suffering and humiliation and enslavement, should be taught to mistrust each other, even as children, is no longer a mystery to me. The people we should naturally have mistrusted were beyond our influence completely; what we needed to defeat them, to rid ourselves of them, was something far more powerful than mistrust. To mistrust each other was just one of the many feelings we had for each other, all of them the opposite of love, all of them standing in the place of love.”

When her father remarries, Xuela is (eventually) brought ‘home’. “Not long after I came to live with them, my father’s wife began to have her own children. She bore a boy first, then she had a girl. This had two predictable outcomes: she left me alone and she valued her son more than her daughter. That she did not think very much of the person who was most like her, a daughter, a female, was so normal that it would have been noticed only if it had been otherwise: to people like us, despising anything that was most like ourselves was almost a law of nature.”

That this book is beautifully, hauntingly written is undoubtedly true, and even more important is the substance, the ‘message’ of the book. It is a great book, and one that you should read.

The Starlite Drive-In by Majorie Reynolds

I want to talk to you this morning about yet another first novel entitled The Starlite Drive-In, by Majorie Reynolds. Had I not known from the jacket cover that this is a first novel, I certainly would not have guessed it. The writing flows evenly; the characters are vivid and believable, and the story is one that is certainly worth telling.

I suspect that, like Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay, the author decided on the ending of this story right from the beginning of the telling. Of course, I won’t give away the ending, but, again, like the de Beauvoir novel, I felt less convinced by the ending than by the story itself. But the ending is incidental; this is another coming of age story, and one that is eerily beautiful and wonderfully convincing.

The entire story is told through the eyes of the lead character, Callie Anne, though the mother in the story is at least as important as the girl, and both, in important ways, come of age. Callie Anne lives literally on the lot of a drive-in movie; her father manages the drive-in, cleans it, keeps it up, even serves as projectionist every night.

I think no one who was of my generation could deny the romance of the drive-in theater, and I don’t mean simply because of the steamy action inside the cars. Even today when I drive by a usually abandoned drive-in, I am reminded of the many warm summer nights spent looking at the big screen, and, like her friends, I see Callie Anne as a lucky girl. After all, she gets to see the movies every night, either keeping her father company in the projection booth, or wandering the lot. She has an uncanny ability after a half dozen or so viewings to half lip-read, half simply remember the lines of the actors.

In fact, Callie Anne lives a lonely, isolated life. Besides the fact that the drive-in is located far from the homes of her mostly farm children friends, her mother is quite literally confined to the little house on the lot. What began as simply panic attacks when she ventured into the city have multiplied to the point where she will not, cannot leave her home at all. With Callie Anne, she is a loving and doting mother, and the bond between them is drawn very well. The father, however, is quite a different story. Callie Anne loves him despite his gruffness and hot temper, but she sees clearly that rather than helping her mother to overcome her fears of the outside world, he has instead exacerbated those fears. Though he complains often and bitterly about being bound to the place by his wife’s fears, it is all to obvious that at some level he enjoys the power that he has as her keeper. She depends on him for everything, and he in return is ever more surly with her, belittling and demeaning her before the eyes of her child. Treating her, indeed, as a child in a grown-up’s body.

And this makes for an interesting reversal, for Callie Anne is at that peculiar and painful age when she is quite obviously not a woman, indeed, she still has the stick-figure shape of a child, but neither is she a child. She has been forced into an odd sort of parenting role with her mother, and she finds it necessary as well to intercede between father and mother, trying to soften the blows of his insults, to reassure her mother, to protect her. But she is as afraid of her father’s mood swings, his unpredictable tantrums, and simmering silences as is her mother.

Enter Charlie Memphis—a mysterious figure hired by the owner of the theater to help her father shore up its crumbling fences, broken pipes, and general decadence. Callie’s father is partially disabled, dragging one leg as he walks, and Charlie Memphis has been hired to do the heavy work that her father cannot. What develops is a truly beautiful little love story. First, and quite predictably, Callie Anne falls for this handsome stranger who spins out stories that are romantic and almost believable. Charming and smiling, even tempered and attentive, Charlie Memphis is everything that her father is not. Charlie Memphis quickly comes to see the predicament of Teal, Callie’s mother, and he sees also all the ways in which her husband, whom she always calls Claude Junior, is complicit in her confinement. Big and strong and competent Charlie Memphis is drawn almost immediately to the sweet and attentive vulnerability of Teal, though his attentions are so subtle, so proper, so deferential that even Teal is not frightened or put off by them.

I have, perhaps, already told you more of the story than I ought, but it this beautiful dance between Teal and Charlie Memphis that becomes central to the story. He is able literally to save Teal, to lead her out of her house, out of her obsessive fears, back out into the world of trees and birds and beauty. It is one of most tender love stories that I can recall, and Callie’s place in the story is bittersweet. After all, the man she loves, falls for her mother, and then he accomplishes what she never could in literally loving her mother out of her confinement. Add to this the disloyalty she feels towards her father, since she sees what he does not. She comes to feel that she is an accomplice, her father chained to the summer heat of the projection booth while her mother is resurrected. Happy for her mother, of course, but as mean and unpredictable as her father is, he is her father, and she understands on some level how his anger and depression stem from his feeling trapped by his life, his wife, his disability.

In many ways, I see this simply as a microcosm of many, many marriages. Both partners feeling somehow trapped and diminished by the other, and both somehow acting out their resentment at being trapped, unfulfilled, by withdrawing love. A combination of loyalty and fear keeping them together, and not understanding themselves well enough even to begin a conversation that might free them. Callie Anne is victim, referee, defender; she understands her father’s sense of being trapped, for she, too, is trapped by her mother’s fears. And yet she fears her father for good reason; she sees what his anger does to her mother, sees her diminishing by the day in his eyes and her own. And Callie is, herself, often enough the target of her father’s unpredictable rage.

I don’t want to pretend that this is a great book, or that it suggests some ultimate solution to this unending war that often goes on between two people who cling together out of fear and manage only to destroy each other in the process. But I do think Reynolds manages to tell a simple story that rings with larger truths. And Callie Anne is a figure whom I am quite sure you will not soon forget.