Slightly Foxed No 7 Autumn 2005

Johnny de Falbe, Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood (eds)

Editions

Review

This issue contains an article by Johnny about biography, based around Richard Wollheim's Germs. Here is the text:

Half way through Marilynne Robinson’s gorgeous novel Gilead pbk £7.99, the narrator, John Ames, a 77-year-old preacher in Iowa, makes this observation: ‘Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience.  That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behaviour, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense.’

The Calvinist doctrine ‘by their works ye shall know them’ is not usually presented as a matter of aesthetics, but it is not far-fetched to interpret predestination as an aesthetic issue.  Here lies the profound sense of internal tussle underwriting Tolstoy’s work: time and again, moral judgement is subverted by aesthetic considerations.  Thus Anna concludes that Karenin is a bad man immediately after being disgusted by his clammy hand.  The more Tolstoy resists the impulse to make such remarks in his later work, the more one feels that he misses the truth of his earlier work.  But if taking an aesthetic element into the account of a person’s moral profile is not a new idea, Ames’s expression of it – his use of the term ‘aesthetic’ – is more suggestive of Nietzsche than Calvin.  It is surprising, and moving, and casts light in unexpected directions.

When I read Gilead, I had recently read a clutch of very different autobiographies, and I lit on the remark because it made neat sense of a point that had struck me.  The first autobiography was bad, and not redeemed by the author stating at the outset that he was going to write as he remembered, without any attempt at ordering his material.  Why, I wanted to ask him, are you saying this?  You are a writer: it is your business to order your material: it is naïve to suppose that the disorder of your book is in some way engagingly natural.  It is just unexamined, and what use is an autobiography that involves no serious self-examination?

Then I read Vesna Goldsworthy’s wonderful memoir Chernobyl Strawberries pbk £7.99.  Born in Belgrade in 1961, Goldsworthy married an Englishman in 1986.  During the 1990s she reported on Serbian affairs for the World Service, started teaching at a London university, wrote a book, had a child – and then was diagnosed with breast cancer.  It was this sudden threat of death that impelled her to write, but it is not what makes the book successful.  In an afterword, she makes a similar remark to the one I found in the earlier, bad memoir I had read: ‘In this book I wrote about my family’s past as I remember it… I didn’t want to research anything…  This is not a faithful reconstruction of the past; it is an imprint of an individual memory.’  In Chernobyl Strawberries, however, the remark is a recognition of a process rather than a shirking of responsibility, for individual memory, she observes, ‘imposes its own patterns across time.’  Although she writes well and is often very amusing, it is the way in which she imposes patterns, her artistry, that makes her book so good: it reflects something true about the way in which people make sense of their own and other lives.

In marked contrast is Tom Maschler’s, Publisher, in which the author displays himself to be so lacking in self-awareness that the result is comic.  Worse, the banality of his observations about the people he has met means that it doesn’t even work as a compendium of anecdotes.  A life which, on the face of it, promises so well for a book, emerges as ridiculous and irrelevant to other human beings.  What made this rather fascinating for me was that I had just read Richard Wollheim’s extraordinary Germs.  Here, even a description of sitting on the loo as a child telling himself stories ‘in which the combatants were represented by the tassels at either end of my dressing-gown cord’ is intimately absorbing.  He goes on to tell us about the occasion on which he was taught to wipe himself and adds, ‘This small incident was probably the single greatest increase in personal responsibility that my childhood had in store for me.  It is what I think of when I hear moral philosophers discuss responsibility.’  In this small vignette we see several layers of imposed order: the child making up stories, the adult instructing him about loo paper, the child’s response to that instruction (as reported by the adult author) and the adult comment on the event.  Coming from an academic philosopher, the comment should not be taken at face value: but it reveals Wollheim’s conviction that these tiny, seemingly unimportant events from childhood are the making of the adult.  His minute, vivid descriptions of these events, and the processes by which they lodged in his mind, demonstrate that it is so.

There is another celebrated autobiography where a boy is described sitting on the loo.  In Speak, Memory hbk £10.99pbk £7.99, Nabokov describes how he would ‘unravel the labyrinthian frets on the linoleum, and find faces where a crack or shadow afforded a point de repère for the eye.’  His adult conclusion is, ‘I appeal to parents: never, never say, ‘Hurry up,’ to a child.’  The elegiac moments and the clear images of a vanished world are not the outpourings of nostalgia.  They constitute an intense effort to recall and re-imagine a child learning to make sense of the world by aesthetic processes, which are themselves represented in an aesthetic process.  In a famous passage, the boy sees his father rise up outside his window, tossed by unseen hands, ‘in his wind-rippled white summer suit, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon,…’  When the author adds that the spectacle is ‘like one of those paradisiac personages…’, it is the adult prefiguring his father’s death in an aesthetic construction that remains suspended like an altarpiece behind the entire book.

Like Nabokov, Wollheim has no doubt about his own sensitivity as a child.  Nor would a reader be likely to contest this.  The exquisite description of Allen dismounting from his bike runs to half a page, and one does not doubt that the sensibility is the child’s.  Likewise the tapestry bag, with its tortoise-shell clasp, in which the author’s grandmother kept her knitting: ‘I used to imagine with great vividness the intense pain I would feel if my testicles were caught in the bag as the clasp closed over it.’  But what makes the book so remarkable is the magical way in which the child’s awakening aesthetic sensibility is conveyed through the adult’s mature one.  Take just the beginning.  ‘It is early. The hall is dark.’  Thus begins an intricate account of a fall, which proceeds with a sequence of sentences each containing a syllable more than its predecessor (the significance of which is explained later).  It can be no accident that the book begins with a fall, with its connotation of Original Sin.  The adult (unlike Nabokov, an admirer of Freud) ‘loved to trace back to this isolated event… a number of emotions that have patterned themselves over the subsequent years of my life.’

The germs of the title refer, specifically, to the germs which Wollheim’s mother thought came from without (and therefore she closed the windows when she cleaned the house  – a truly startling business in Wollheim’s account), and which his governess believed came from within (she wanted to open the windows, thus causing his mother to start the cleaning all over again).  This distinction between character traits that come from external influences and those that are innate is implicit throughout Wollheim’s memoir.  The most extraordinary case of all is the smell of newspapers.  He mentions this several times during the book, but towards the end, after an astounding anecdote about his disgust at being given sherry from a glass that had been upturned on a sheet of newspaper in a cupboard, we read: ‘…the smell of newspaper… is the most persistent thread in my life, stronger, more unchanging, than any taste or interest, more demanding than any intellectual challenge, and I have never seen any way in which the power of love could transform it.  It is like a ghost in a house that could be expelled only by demolishing the house.’  The idea of germs is embedded in this remark: in the smell itself, in the sense of an infection (of a life).  In its puzzled tone it echoes the doubt as to whether the germs come from outside or inside, and suggests too that we are made whole by these individual tastes and tendencies, just as the house of Wollheim’s childhood was home to him because of foreign influences, not in spite of them.

It is a tribute to the genius of Germs that such a remark seems not only plausible but poignant.  And the achievement is fundamentally an aesthetic one: Wollheim is an ‘artist of his behaviour’ (Robinson); he ‘justifies’ his behaviour ‘as an aesthetic phenomenon’ (Nietzsche).  It is no coincidence that the word we use to describe the aesthetic accomplishment is one that is ‘morally judgmental in the ordinary sense’: good.

The blurb on the first edition of Germs refers to ‘An earlier book, A Family Romance…’  I found a copy of this, and was fascinated to discover that it was published as a novel.  Although it displays the extreme attention of Germs, it has none of its aesthetic resonance.  It is a very bad book published, as it happens, by Jonathan Cape in 1965, when Maschler was ‘in sole charge of all book acquisitions’.  Germs, on the other hand, which is a masterpiece, was first published by a tiny publisher called The Waywiser Press, after being turned down by several large firms. - review by Johnny de Falbe

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