The Blaze of Noon - Rayner Heppenstall

Rayner Heppenstall... Where to start? Well, the only reason I bought this book was because Heppenstall is relevant to two of my radio drama research subjects, Eric Linklater (whom he hated) and Dylan Thomas (whom he claimed to be closer to than he was and who quite probably hated him). I have read some of Heppenstall's lesser works. His Imaginary Conversations are rubbish, his Four Absentees is a bit snooty but essential to the study of Fitzrovia in and after World War II.

I knew The Blaze of Noon had been a bit scandalous when it came out in 1939 because Heppenstall tells us so at least twice in every book. What makes it scandalous is the sex. One would think, twenty years after Lady Chatterley, with Henry Miller in full flow attitudes might have been more advanced in 1939. Not so. There is a good deal of sex and immorality here; the descriptions are accurate, almost clinical; and mutual masturbation features. But what makes it shocking or distasteful is the contempt with which the process is depicted. Neither partner cares two hoots about the other or indeed other partners who may be effected.


In other senses the novel is even more daring. Our narrator - I hesitate to call him 'hero' or even 'protagonist' - is Louis Dunkel and Louis Dunkel is blind. He used to be prominent doctor but sight loss has reduced him to the role of masseur, in which capacity he is to spend the spring and summer in Cornwall with the slightly invalid Mrs Nance and her niece and nephew, Sophie and John Madron. Louis describes how he gathers first impressions. He is disturbed and intrigued because Sophie withholds all the usual clues from him. Louis becomes obsessed with Sophie, John becomes slightly obsessed with Louis. Mrs Nance has plans for Louis. She has another niece, Amity Nance, living not too far away. Amity is blind and deaf and is cared for by a permanent nurse. Amity's possible arrival is both a prospect and a threat for Louis. When she does finally arrive in the closing sequences of the book things get really distasteful.

Heppenstall is remembered by many as a world-class hater. He claimed to have been a socialist when young but made no bones about being the most reactionary of Tories in later years. He worked for the BBC for twenty years in the Forties, Fifties and early Sixties, so Telegraph Toryism would have been expected. Although he was in his late twenties and married when he wrote The Blaze of Noon, the opinions reflected here are juvenile and sometimes downright nasty. He wears his learning like a teenage boy wearing his father's coat. He seems to have learnt an enormous amount of things with neither the personal depth to understand them or the wisdom to evaluate them.


He was a strange, unpleasant man. This is a strange, unpleasant novel. It is well written, beautifully constructed (in that sense you would not think it was his first novel), and I cannot imagine the world as discovered by a blind man being better done. Otherwise these are characters you meet everywhere in fiction of the period albeit they reveal shortcomings you will rarely find elsewhere. Yes, Heppenstall is critical of their behaviour - but Heppenstall was critical of everyone and everything all his life. These are quintessentially Heppenstall-type people.

Thin Ice - Compton Mackenzie

Quite a surprise, this. I hadn't realised Compton Mackenzie (who I came at via his Highland novels and his involvement with Eric Linklater) had ever written a book about homosexuality, let alone one as sensitively handled as this one. I should have known, however, given that I knew that Sinister Street and Carnival (which became the first great literary adaptation by BBC Radio in 1929) were considered quite racy in their day, and I had read somewhere that he wrote a couple of lesbian novels, one of them Extraordinary Women.

Actually, I think I avoided Extraordinary Women for fear it might be comic. Thin Ice (1956) certainly isn't comic. It's a beautifully done faux memoir of a friendship between Henry Fortescue, a politician, and George Gaymer, a gentleman of leisure, between 1896 and 1941. Both, of course, are versions of Mackenzie himself. It was Mackenzie who founded the Eastern Intelligence Service during World War One and who later insisted on supporting the wrong side, in his case the Greek republicans. In the book it is Henry who is recalled from the political wilderness to run an Eastern Intelligence Agency in World War Two and whose lifelong advocacy for the Turks has kept him out of high office.

Most of the time Henry can contain his homosexuality, which was of course a crime in those days. But when he has time on his hands, or is frustrated by politics, he becomes reckless with rent-boys. George helps cover these indiscretions up in a small way - other gay men within the political class take care of most things - until the end, when Henry is inevitably blackmailed and George has to confront the seedy side of his friend's private life.

The memoir style works beautifully. It is not the story of a great man with a guilty secret, or a man who missed his chance at greatness through weakness. It is the story of a much-loved friend with a problem. George does not judge or shy away from Henry's gay friends and lovers - indeed he often comes to like and admire them for their personal qualities. Nevertheless he claims to have written his manuscript immediately after Henry's death in 1941 and kept it under lock and key until 1955, when he judges that society is more prepared to receive it.

In its way, Thin Ice is a miniature masterpiece by one of the great writers of English novels in the 20th Century.



Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders

Well, what can I say? Where do I start? Lincoln in the Bardo is, quite simply, the most extraordinary book I have read in years. It is experimental, existential and yet profoundly moving. It is, on the face of it, bat-shit-crazy, and yet it never once loses its humanity.

I am kicking myself for not realising up front what the Bardo is. I thought it was perhaps a district in Washington. Obviously, it is Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan version of the Elysian Fields, where the dead go initially, before moving on to an even higher plane. As a writer on the Elysian conversations of Eric Linklater and a researcher into the early work of Ted Hughes, who was deeply immersed in Bardo-based projects which never saw the light of day, I consider myself duly abashed.


We enter the Bardo through many pages of quotations, which as far as I know are genuine, from accounts of the death of 11-year-old Willie Lincoln, son of the President and possibly the first presidential child to die in the White House. These then segue into snatches of speech from people who seem to have nothing whatever to do with Willy or Abe - Roger Bevins III, Hans Vollman and the Reverend Everly Thomas, who we come to realise are our guides to this entry level of the afterlife. They are spirits and make no physical concessions to their former corporeality. Mr Bevins has hundreds of hands and eyes, Mr Vollman a prodigious member. They have come across the new arrival and don't know how to help. Children normally pass through this stage quickly but something is keeping Willie back.


That something is his father, the President the psychopomps have never heard of, already weighed down by the horrors of a civil war they cannot imagine. He comes to Willie's tomb, takes out the body and cuddles it, unaware that everything he loved about his son is looking on. It is young Willie who in the end comforts his father and persuades the spirits of the Bardo (of whom we encounter dozens) to accept what they have thus far been unable to accept - their death. It's a beautiful touch - Saunders creates euphemisms for the Bardo like sick-box instead of coffin. The book ends in a blaze of multiple matterlightblooming phenomena as the Bardo depopulates.


It sounds ridiculous - it looks impossible on the page, with chapters as short as a single line and all the conversation laid out like quotations and no non-speech at all. And yet it works beautifully. Saunders is a well-respected essayist and short story writer but, amazingly, Lincoln in the Bardo is his first novel. Turns out it was well worth waiting for. It's an instant classic of modern American fiction, comfortably up there with Pynchon and Salinger and Jonathan Safran Foer.

White Maa's Saga - Eric Linklater

White-Maa's Saga is Linklater's first published novel. It came out in 1929 but describes events of eight or so years earlier. It reflects Linklater's own experience after the war when he went to Aberdeen University (Inverdoon here) to study medicine. Linklater was slightly younger than his alter-ego Peter Flett - he had lied about his age to enlist in 1916 whereas Peter was of full age in 1914 and served for the duration.


This student generation is not like any other. The university acknowledges the common debt to those who served and makes allowances for men like Peter when they fail their examinations. Peter fails three times but seems set to go back for more until the very end of the novel.


Between spells at Inverdoon Peter returns to Orkney where his sister Martin (yes, Martin) runs the farm Peter inherited from their parents. In both Inverdoon and Orkney Peter's main sphere of activity, when not drinking or boxing, is the pursuit of young women. There are three in the novel, nowhere near as many as the hero encounters in Juan in America, Linklater's breakthrough hit.


I'm sure the descriptions of Aberdeen's student quarter are accurate. They are amusing, too, in a studentish way. But it is Orkney, as ever, where Linklater's language takes flight. The various social strands are laid out: spinster Martin, the rambunctious Sabistons of Redland, the tinkers whose travelling seems to have been confined to the islands for several centuries, and those who work for absentee landlords, among them the villainous Isaac Skea.


The simple pleasures of the Annual Fair and an island wedding contrast with the equally ancient traditions of the university. There is no question which Linklater prefers. The climax, set in the neolithic Ring of Brodgar, is exciting and effective. Linklater, who was thirty when the book came out, came into literature with a highly effective bang. Well worth checking out - and don't let the ugly title put you off: it is actually Peter's Orcadian nickname, the dialect term for a herring-gull.

Magnus Merriman - Eric Linklater

Magnus Merriman (1934) is Linklater's comic take on early literary fame and Scottish politics.  Linklater was familiar with both: his third novel Juan in America, also reviewed on this blog, had been a considerable success and on the back of it (with a nudge from his friend Compton Mackenzie) Linklater stood as the very first Scottish Nationalist candidate in the East Fife parliamentary by-election of 1933 - with a similar catastrophic result to that suffered by his hero here.  Linklater lost his deposit with only 3.6% of the vote.  Even the candidate for the Agricultural Party got five times more than him.

For me, as a political activist, the first third of the book, with its raucous scenes of Edinburgh nightlife and the local literati, is the most entertaining.  The rabid poet Skene is easy to identify in reality but I would love to know who some of the others are, especially Meiklejohn, the journalist who lends his dress trousers.

Merriman's sex life is quite breathtaking for the period and one wonders how much of that is based on the author's experience.  It is noteworthy that he married in 1933 and Merriman is probably the first book written after his marriage.  His wife Marjorie, to whom the novel is dedicated, is clearly not the model for Rose, the farmer's daughter Magnus marries in Orkney.  The Orkney episodes make up and second and much of the third 'acts' of the book.  The tone changes, awkwardly but not unpleasantly, as Magnus rediscovers the beauty of his homeland, its simple rustic pleasures and, ultimately, Rose.  In between is a brief return to London where Magnus writes journalism for a newpaper owned by Lady Mercy Cotton.  Lady Mercy and girl-reporter Nelly Bly both apparently figure in Linklater's earlier novel Poet's Pub, which I haven't yet read.  Again I cannot guess who her real-life parallel was.

I continue to enjoy Linklater.  His politics are not mine but there is material here which, 80 years on, is just as accurate in its condemnation and outright abuse of the political classes.  Linklater is a conservative but his not the Thatcherite free-market, greed-is-good, greed-is-great brand.  No, Linklater is an old-school conservative of freedom, honesty and fair play.  He is a good sort and good company.

 

Private Angelo - Eric Linklater

Is Angelo Linklater's masterpiece?  It may well be.  Arguments can be made for the two Don Juan novels, and some of his books for children are classics in their own right, but I suspect Angelo is the one that will count.

Written in 1945 and published in 1946, Angelo was Linklater's first novel since immediately before the outbreak of war.  This was not because of block but because Linklater was a genuine war hero.  Shot in the head in World War 1, by the time Chamberlain made the war broadcast on September 3 1939 Linklater was already on active duty guarding Scapa Flow.

Within a few months the famous novelist had been seconded to the Ministry of Information, for whom he produced the official history of significant battles, all of them glorious defeats.  This led him to collaborate on radio versions with the BBC which in turn led to his famous series of dramatic 'conversations' which were tremendously popular and upon which I appear to be the world expert.

The last conversation was Rabelais Replies in 1943.  Linklater then returned to active service, based in Italy between the Italian surrender and the Allied clearance of the Germans from Italy.  This is the period in which the bulk of Angelo is set.

Angelo is the soldierly everyman, good-hearted and dutiful enough but lacking the dono di corragio.  As with all moralities, from Everyman itself to Pilgrim's Progress, his adventures lead to him finding that which he started out lacking.  All of it is done with Linklater's characteristic humour - he is a comic novelist in the tradition of Dickens and Compton Mackenzie.  But much as Linklater admired the fighting man, he absolutely loathed the political nincompoops who led the world into war.  And he says so, several times.  Passages here reflect the tone of his first and best radio conversation The Cornerstones (1941).

I can't pretend I like The Cornerstones when I skimmed through it nine or ten years ago.  Since then I have discovered and anatomised Linklater's radio work, learned about his impressive life, measured his considerable literary achievement and come to love some of his novels.  That absolutely includes Private Angelo, which should be on every school syllabus instead of puffed-up guff from writers who weren't there and didn't understand.

Ripeness is All - Eric Linklater

Ripeness is All was written in 1934 and published in 1935, by which time Linklater was an established and successful novelist.  He was writing too much and it shows.  The humour here is sometimes forced and the story is not as long as the book.  You sense padding.

Nevertheless, Linklater is a spectacularly talented writer.  The sheer force of his prose keeps you going through the duller bits.  His viewpoint is idiosyncratic.  He takes some unexpected swipes at unusual sacred cows - the blessed state of maternity, for example - and makes no bones about some of his characters being gay and lesbian. Some critics feel his humour is aggressively masculine but I do not find it so.  Here, his male characters are all idiots.  The character he clearly likes best is forty year-old spinster Hilary.

The plot is inventive.  The bachelor John dies and leaves the family fortune to whichever of the progeny of the late Jonathan Gander (his father) has the largest number of legitimate children by a given date.  So begins a comical race to procreate.  The comic twist is that it turns out stern Victorian patriarch Jonathan had a lot more progeny than anyone knew.  I don't think I'm giving too much away by revealing that.  It's set up quite early on.  The problem is, it's never really resolved.  You get the impression Linklater hits the contracted word or page count and then just wraps things up as quickly as he can.

I increasingly enjoy Linklater and enjoyed reading this.  It's not one of his best but it's better than many other comic novels of the period.  It is very English, which is an odd choice for such a proud Highland and Islander.  It is strikingly reminiscent of Linklater's friend and fellow Scottish Nationalist, Compton Mackenzie (who was, of course, English).  Indeed, Ripeness is All is effusively dedicated to 'Monty' Mackenzie.  I wonder if it was meant as a homage.

The Revolution - Eric Linklater

A real oddity - three linked short stories published by the White Owl Press as a single volume just 80 pages long.  In 1934 Linklater was about five years into his fiction writing career and still wildly experimental.  We begin with the story of the Russian actress Olenina (not a million miles away from Lenin, namewise), marooned in London by the outbreak of World War I, the mistress of a high-ranking British officer and on the verge of having sex with a Russian waiter who she thinks is about to volunteer for active service.  There's a neat twist, quite funny, and then we move on to the revolution itself, in Baltland, a sort of Nordic Ruritania. King Oscar III is a benevolent constitutional monarch brought down by the actor, playwright and socialist Jean Paris - who just happens to the lover of the actress Olenina.  The King and Queen are exiled - along with Paris and Olenina, considered by the ruling Committee of Five "to be dangerous to the new Republic by reason of their ability to excite the populace, their unruly and impolite views of life, their penchant for criticism, and their tendency to revolution."  In the third story the exiles are lodged together in a Scottish Highland castle and they come to realise that their causes and beliefs are not so far apart.

Every writer goes into a bit of an eclipse after their death but Linklater's has gone on far too long.  He was a significant writer of the mid Twentieth Century with a unique outsider's viewpoint (he considered himself an Orkney man and was passionate about the very far north), an easy narrative gift, a satirical humour and a lifelong fondness for pushing the boundaries of his chosen form.  He was also a major radio dramatist with a short but critical role in World War II home front propaganda.

In many ways he's like a Scottish George Bernard Shaw but funnier and in no way a pacifist (he was badly wounded in World War I and on active duty guarding Scapa Flow before war was actually declared in 1939).

The Fort - Storm Jameson

I've got to be honest: my copy doesn't have a cover and I've borrowed the above image from the ever-reliable Fantastic Fiction.  Also, I only bought it because the title cropped up during some academic research I'm doing on another forgotten bestseller of the Thirties and Forties, Eric Linklater.

One reviewer described it at the time as a hybrid of a play and a short story.  No it's not, it's a novella and I'm sure the word was current in 1941.  Jameson wrote it in the couple of months immediately after the fall of France in June 1940.  It is set, specifically, on June 13.  A wounded English officer has taken refuge in the cellar of a French farmhouse.  Also hiding there is a French officer and two of his junior officers.  During the night another English soldier arrives and a German is captured.

What the story is really about is Jameson's utter contempt for the defeatist element of the French nation.  She does not make the mistake of over-egging the heroism of the English nor portraying the young German as just a mindless fanatic.  She is convinced both of the justice of the war (despite having been co-founder of the Peace Pledge Union in the late Thirties) and the damage it will surely do to the world.

The ending is a surprise which would have been much more powerful at the time.  As it happens, it is exactly the effect my subject Linklater pulls off at the end of his first radio 'conversation', The Cornerstones.  The Fort was also adapted for radio in 1942.  You have to try and imagine the effect the ending had on British listeners enduring the Blitz.

Juan in America - Eric Linklater

Eric Linklater is not a name on literary lips these days, but in his prime he was enormously popular and critically highly regarded. His wartime radio plays for the BBC were seen as so important to the war effort that they were discussed in broadsheet editorials. His third novel, Juan in America, was a bestseller and whilst it may seem entirely fanciful, Linklater's own travels as a young man were even more incredible - India, China, and indeed America. This is a novelist who knows whereof he writes.

I don't know, but I suspect his work and amatory experiences were not quite so varied as Juan's, who goes from college football hero to bum to slinger of hash, bootlegger, ice cream dispenser, upside-down opera singer and movie extra, and whose conquests include an Amazonian acrobat and a gangster's daughter.

Juan is a direct descendant of Byron's Don Juan. He shares the Don's taste for adventure and the ladies without being either predatory or amoral. He is a likeable companion as we follow his picaresque travels. There are occasional affronts to modern taste - Linklater's handling of black people is not what we would wish, though it has to be remembered that he was writing in America in 1931 and in many ways reflects the attitudes of East Coast Ivy Leaguers of that era. Read closely enough and you realise that, whilst he doesn't seem to rate his impoverished black characters as individuals, he does empathise with their historical plight, "the result of forcibly transporting a people from one continent to another, using them in slavery for several generations, and then bestowing on them a nominal freedom and a position beyond the pale of society."

All in all, Juan in America is a splendid example of English picaresque from the first half of the 20th century. As such, Linklater's rivals in the field were not Huxley or Forster but Priestley and Mackenzie, neither of them particularly popular these days either. But Juan in America has never been out of print in the eighty years since it was written, and that has to be the best kind of recommendation.