The Man With the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren

 

It’s hard to believe that The Man with the Golden Arm was written in 1949. It seems so fresh, and contemporary, and its approach to drugs and criminality so open, that one wouldn’t believe it could be the product of buttoned-up, frightened post-war America. The collection of deadbeats and low level criminals depicted in its pages is remarkable.

The Chicago of the novel seems to sit somewhere between Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and the apocalyptic Africa of William Burroughs’ Wild Boys but the depiction of the daily lives of these characters is more realistic than either of those novels: Steinbeck’s Mack and the Boys, however impressively they are depicted, have that characteristically Steinbeckian whiff of idealism about them, while Burroughs, even when he is chronicling the more savage side of drug-taking, always runs the risk of romanticising the life. Algren does none of this. Like the characters of Carson McCullers, Algren’s are real, flesh and blood, as prone to terrible mistakes as honourable acts. Reading The Man with the Golden Arm, we believe we are in Chicago’s Polish Downtown, and we believe in the moral and social disintegration of Frankie Machine, and we believe that, despite this, the community of which he is a part will be sustained. It is an outstanding example of naturalistic writing that can lay bare the deprivations and assorted ills of a society and still leave one feeling optimistic about human nature.

The eponymous Man is Frank Majcinek, known to all as Frankie Machine, a stud-poker dealer regarded as the best in the business, hence the golden arm of the title. Addicted to morphine after being treated with it for an injury sustained in World War 2, his life begins to unravel. His fabled golden arm fails him. He falls into crime. His wife is in a wheelchair as a result of his drink-driving. He ends up in jail. His mistress leaves him. Worse ensues. This sounds like a catalogue of calamity, and it is, so how can one argue that The Man with the Golden Arm is an uplifting piece of fiction?

Well, the first thing to note is that the novel was, as one might expect, controversial in its day. Norman Podhoretz, for one, thought it glorified the underclass at the expense of decent society. Such an assertion from Podhoretz, of course, is proof positive that the novel most certainly does not do that: being attacked by Podhoretz is a clear indicator that you’re doing something right and the more he criticises the more you should feel satisfied with your efforts. And Algren, while clearly depicting the underclass of his novel in a more positive way than neocons like Podhoretz would deem healthy, nonetheless cannot be accused of naive liberalism. This can be seen most clearly in the character of Captain Bednar.

Bednar is one of the most human characters in the story. His humanism is not some starry-eyed idealism: he knows the criminals he deals with are no good and will amount to nothing. And yet he craves some form of connection with them. We are told, from his point of view, that “[i]t was patently wrong that men locked up by the law should laugh while the man who locked them there no longer felt able even to cry.” He is trapped inside his own unhappiness. “I know you,” he says to them. “You think you’re all members of one another, somethin’ like that.” And yes, their community is “something like that”, but again not in a romanticised way. Those critics of the novel, like Podhoretz, who suggest it is burdened by liberal romanticising of poverty and the poorer classes haven’t read the novel, just the cliched version of it their political views force upon it. Again from Bednar’s point of view, we are told:

For every man was secretly against the law in his heart, the captain knew; and it was the heart that mattered. There were no men innocent of intent to transgress. If they were human – look out. What was needed, he had learned long ago, was higher walls and stronger bars – there was no limit to what they were capable of.

Somewhere along the line he had learned, too, that not one was worth the saving. So he’d been right in saving none but himself. And if that had left them all to be members of one another, then it had left him to be a member of no one at all. Had, indeed, left him feeling tonight like the most fallen of anybody.

This is extraordinary stuff. The captain simultaneously condemns and pardons, disapproves and understands, wants and rejects, seeks harmony and craves isolation. His conflict is total and despairing. There are no easy answers, either for him or for us. But there are questions, so many questions. And this is why the novel is ultimately uplifting: it forces us to question preconceptions, to wonder, to empathise, to criticise. It forces us out of the comfort of our own prejudices to think about things and people and society in radically different ways.

What is truly astounding about the novel is its language. It is (before it was even invented) hiphop, rap. Above all, it is jazz, a hymn to the motion and poetry of the rhythms of life. Take this passage, told from the viewpoint of Sophie, trapped upstairs in her wheelchair, listening to the activity down below:

The smell of despair, the odor of whisky and the scent of the night’s ten thousand dancers, the perfume and the powder sprinked across the deep purple roar of barrelhouse laughter, the armpit sweat cutting the blue cigar smoke and the hoarse cries of those soon to grow hoarser with love, scents and sounds of all things soon to be spread up through a thousand rooms into her own room. Till the drinkers and the dancers, the gamblers and the hustlers and the yearning lovers came dancing and loving, came gambling and hustling in a wavering neon-colored cloud down her walls.

That writing is so good it makes you shiver.

Flash 500 Flash fiction competition

I'm pleased to have won third prize in the latest Flash 500 flash fiction competition with my story, Momma.

This is a story that is circling round in my head at the moment. It's adapted from my first novel, Cloudland, but written first person in my protagonist's voice, rather than the third person of the novel. It makes it more intimate. I have a longer version of the story as well, and I'm working on a longer story at the moment which expands on the same scene, too. It's becoming a bit of an obsession.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

 

Ruth Stone is a beautiful young woman. By that, I do not mean physical beauty – I’m not sure her appearance is even described in any detail – but in her personality, her humanity. She represents all that is vulnerable, that is hopeful, that is fearful in each of us and all of us. She represents the individual. She represents life.

Ruth and her sister Lucille live in the small western town of Fingerbone, on the edge of the Fingerbone Lake. Their early life is disrupted by the death of their mother, following which they are brought up by their grandmother who, despite the generational gap, tries to instil some normality in the girls’ lives. She dies, however, and the girls are subsequently looked after by their great-aunts, Lily and Nona, a pair of fatalistic old maidens who are quite unsuited to bringing up two young girls. The girls quietly rebel, missing school more often than they attend and living their own lives of wild freedom entirely apart from the rest of Fingerbone, even their peers, a friendless existence that comprises just the two of them. In despair, Lily and Nona try to contact the girls’ aunt, their mother’s sister, Sylvie, a black sheep who left home very young and has lived a nomadic existence riding trains from somewhere to nowhere, making casual acquaintances and living lightly. Against the odds, Sylvie responds to their entreaty and returns to the old family home in Fingerbone. She agrees to take over the upkeep of the girls, much to the relief of Lily and Nona, who retreat to the safety of their previous, structured existence back in Washington state. Thus, the girls are left in the care of yet another housekeeper, the quixotic and unpredictable Sylvie. Her approach to the task is unconventional, to say the least, and it gradually becomes clear that her behaviour is far from what passes for normal in old-fashioned Fingerbone.

And so the girls’ lives twist once more. For Lucille this proves a turning point. She is alienated by the lack of order in Sylvie’s chaotic existence. She returns to school and concentrates on her studies, she breaks the close bond with Ruth and makes new friendships; ultimately, she is repelled entirely by Sylvie’s lifestyle and leaves home altogether, staying instead with her home economics teacher. She chooses convention. Now Ruth is alone with Sylvie, and a curious, though inevitable bonding begins.  Ruth, a sensitive child still affected by the death of her mother, is drawn to the ethereality of her aunt, to her free-spiritedness, her unwillingness to be bound by conventions. Although Ruth, like Lucille, has returned to school, she agrees to miss an exam in order to accompany Sylvie on a trip to the lake and thus we reach the turning point of the novel, in which Ruth and her aunt make decisions which will shape their lives forever.

Housekeeping is an extraordinary novel, haunting and humane, with a quiet depth which resonates more powerfully for its lack of overblown rhetoric or fanciful mythography. On the contrary, with her clear, crystalline prose and pitch-perfect symbolism, Marilynne Robinson creates characters who are wholly believable and a situation which is at once desperate and beautiful: perhaps what unfolds is not best for either Sylvie or Ruth, but who would deny them the opportunity to experience it? Who would wish to shackle these free spirits or diminish their glow? Who would make them live a life more ordinary?

The locale of the novel is essential to its understanding. It takes place around the lake after which the town of Fingerbone is named. There is something primordial about it. It is home to the dead – countless unfortunates reside within it, including the girls’ grandfather and mother, and yet, because everything in Housekeeping is placed in opposition to something else – it is also the bringer of life, water, the sustenance that all existence requires. So we have water and land, death and life, and there is no neat division between them. Thus, the lake floods the town every year and things which people might wish to keep separate are comingled – life in death, death in life, order through chaos.

In this way, then, Ruth’s early life is dominated by death and water and, in particular, the unfortunate confluence of the two. Her grandfather dies in an accident when his train plunges from a bridge into the lake. Years later, her mother commits suicide by driving into the same lake. Water suffuses the novel, from the flood that engulfs the family house for days on end to a night Ruth and her enigmatic aunt, Sylvie, spend adrift on the lake in a small rowing boat. Water, of course, is the most inconstant of materials, eternally fluid, kinetic, permanently impermanent. And such, of course, is the nature of human interaction, particularly for outsiders like Ruth and Sylvie, people with one foot in reality and another somewhere else, somewhere simultaneously internal and exterior, people who reside at once in their heads and in some otherworld.

The central metaphor of the novel is that of housekeeping – the ways in which human beings try to exert control over nature and their external surroundings, imposing order, conformity. At the same time it represents the ways in which communities bind together through convention and usage. Grandmother Sylvia responds to her new task of bringing up the girls by imposing a routine of housekeeping, rigid and conservative like the community of Fingerbone in which they reside: controlling nature, conforming to society.  It is futile: nature cannot be controlled, nor can the human spirit be tramelled against its wishes. When she dies and the free spirit Sylvie takes over the housekeeping, she throws open the windows to the elements. Not long after, floods symbolically claim the lower floor of the house while Sylvie and the girls retreat to the upper levels. Sylvie hoards tins and papers instead of cleaning and tidying, and the house turns into a calamitous mess. All the while she shuns the Fingerbone community, making no friends, speaking to no-one, living entirely outside their norms. It cannot last. The community turn against her, accuse her of being unfit to bring up Ruth. Thus, the metaphor of housekeeping, as elucidated by first the grandmother and then Sylvie, stands for doomed defiance of both nature and civilisation, of the impossibility of taming the chaos of the cosmos or escaping the strictures of community.

Nonetheless this is an upbeat book and its ending offers hope. Ruth is the heroine of the novel, and so is Sylvie, and the pair of them, heroines both, forge a pact that is as uplifting as it is foolish, and quite, quite beautiful.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar is, along with Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, my favourite novel. These three novels have forced me to think about literature and about life in a different way and they have transformed my own writing.

The Bell Jar is a novel that quietly and beautifully portrays a woman’s emotional descent into darkness. That may sound grim, but the way Sylvia Plath melds humour and pain is remarkable: the unfolding of Esther Greenwood’s emotional crisis is perfectly handled, and the balance of laughter and tears is superbly controlled, the former sliding inexorably into the latter, but with faint echoes remaining throughout, the tracks of hope in a landscape growing increasingly darker. I suspect it is impossible, now, to extricate the novel from the history and Esther Greenwood from Sylvia Plath. After all, it is so autobiographical that Plath originally felt the need to publish it under a pseudonym and it didn’t appear under her own name until three years after her suicide. But it is unfortunate, really, if the novel is submerged beneath the myth of its author, because it needs no external pathos to give it power.

When we first meet Esther Greenwood, an ingenue from Boston, she is working as an intern in New York, working on a successful magazine. This is not her milieu, and while she is not exactly gauche, she is far from assimilated into New York life. We first get a hint of her dissociation from the activity around her in the novel’s famous opening line: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.” That the Rosenbergs’ electrocution is barely mentioned again in the novel further establishes her disconnection from reality (although, of course, this high-tech execution acts as an ominous foreshadow of Esther’s subsequent, highly traumatic electroconvulsive therapy).

Initially, though, one has little inkling of what will follow. The early passages, even the darker ones, are shot through with humour. There is a deftness and lightness to them that is, in retrospect, extraordinarily skillful. One often hears people say of those around them who attempt suicide that they had no idea, and this is the case with Esther. She appears a complicated young woman, certainly, not entirely comfortable in her skin or her surroundings, but her breakdown, which is precipitated when she returns home to provincial Massachussetts and is overlooked for a writing course on which she had set her heart, nonetheless comes as something of a surprise. And just as people will do in similar circumstances in real life, one retrospectively picks over the evidence of the past for clues of her distress and indeed they are there, submerged in the minutiae of daily life.

 

Esther’s decent into depression and suicidal tendencies progresses through the summer. Even now, though, there is a lightness to it that beguiles the readers, lulls them into a false sense of hope. It seems at first like depression-lite, the manufactured sort of emotions you might get in a soap opera when a major character’s flirting with the blues is scheduled to last for so many episodes, after which she will snap out of it and return to normal. Or perhaps we see Esther as a female McMurphy, the sane one in the asylum ward, and hope, like we do with McMurphy, that she will prevail against the system. But we know that McMurphy doesn’t prevail and, in The Bell Jar, we come to realise that Plath’s lightness of tone masks the growing distress in Esther’s mind, and her depression is far from superficial. She is a deeply troubled woman and, finally, we begin to seriously fear for her.

She comes to feel as though she is trapped beneath a bell jar. This is a horrifying image: trapped, suffocating, no prospect of release, everything outside, visible but not touchable, out of reach, beyond your world of confinement and gloom, a distorted vision of normality in which you cannot share. Her suicide attempts grow more serious. Her first experience of ECT is horrific. Her second, for entirely different reasons, is more so. The woman she trusts, her therapist, Dr Nolan, promises her that she will not subject her to further ECT without warning her. Dr Nolan is true to her word, but it doesn’t feel like it to the distraught Esther. This scene has a terrible emotional power: if you want to know how to write, this is a good starting point; and if you want to understand other human beings, in their distress and fear and hope and need, likewise this is a piece of emotional treasure trove. Be warned, though: Esther’s terror is contagious.

The novel grows darker yet, and then lighter. It ends on a note of hope. All the same, it ends without resolution, as befits the life of a woman in torment. After all, as we know from the life of the author of this novel, the only feasible resolution is likely to be the wrong one. But in The Bell Jar, at least, the reader can imagine, believe, hope that Esther Greenwood lives on and finds happiness.

The Spire by William Golding

 

William Golding’s The Spire begins dramatically: “He was laughing, chin up, and shaking his head. God the Father was exploding in his face with a glory of sunlight through painted glass...” This explosion is not literal, then, but effected by a burst of light shining through the cathedral window. All the same, the idea of a godly explosion portends what is to come, and what unfolds in the novel is the inevitable destruction of a mind consumed by God and all his certainties without any concomitant mechanism for exploring God and his mysteries.

There is, in Christian theology, and in particular in Roman Catholic theology, an essential binary of faith and reason. However, this is not a binary opposition: rather, both are essential to a true religious sensibility and it can never be an either/or principle. Faith is about maintaining belief, reason about questioning the suppositions behind that belief. St Augustine referred to credo ut intelligam – I believe that I may understand – while Peter Abelard, a rationalist before his time, suggested instead intelligo ut credam – I understand that I may believe. Abelard also used a form of the Socratic dialogue to pursue arguments, with his sic et non – yes and no. For Abelard, reason took precedence, but faith was nonetheless essential. Augustine, too, saw the power of reason. Indeed, the quote I just mentioned more rightly continues thus (although one seldom sees it in this form): "I believe that I may understand; and I understand, the better to believe". With this, Augustine is establishing a clear relationship between these two poles of understanding. Nonetheless, he cannot accept that reason, alone, can bring harmony with God. “If you comprehend it, it is not God,” he says. Thus, faith and reason must co-exist. Pope John-Paul II explained this when he noted:

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth - in a word, to know Himself - so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.

His successor, Pope Benedict, also considered the duality of faith and reason to be central to the human experience, suggesting their relationship was “a subject not only for believers but for every person who seeks the truth, a central theme for the balance and destiny of all men."

Although I'm a non-believer, I can nonetheless accept Benedict’s contention here. Faith, however, undoubtedly was also a key component of William Golding’s make up and the duality of faith and reason runs unmistakably through this, his sixth novel. The Spire takes a real building – the 404-foot spire of Salisbury Cathedral – but invents the man who created it – the fictional Dean Jocelin and the course of events that comprised its troubled construction. Thus, it is both true and not true, and we can both believe and disbelieve it. As we shall see, this duality is central to the novel.

Jocelin believes absolutely. The spire is being added to a cathedral which is built on insufficient – even, perhaps, almost non-existent – foundations, and Jocelin’s principal builder, Roger Mason, repeatedly warns him it is unsustainable. Indeed, Mason is so concerned he asks to be released from his agreement to build the spire but Jocelin refuses. It is a matter of faith. Jocelin believes he has been chosen by God and this is the act he has been chosen to complete. His belief is total, unswerving. It cannot be questioned, it cannot be tested. Ultimately, it overtakes all reason and he loses his sanity. As a result everything collapses around him – as, of course, symbolically we expect the spire must at the end. Obsessed by his mission, Jocelin neglects his duties. The cathedral falls into disrepair, even disuse, as services are removed elsewhere because of the noise and disruption. Around him, his relationships wither. Ultimately, a Church commission arrives to quiz him on his actions and he is found wanting and is stripped of his office. By now, too, he has succumbed to “consumption of the back and spine”, or tuberculosis, and by the novel’s end he is a much diminished man. Still, it seems, his obsession remains. His faith is total. Reason is not privileged. But by any measure – whether Roman Catholic or secular – his life ends in failure.

Roger Mason, meanwhile, is a man of reason who lacks faith. Early in their project, Jocelin would call out to his master builder, “What! Still no faith my son?” to which Mason would offer no reply. And so we can see that this duality between the two men truly is a binary opposition, as forces in conflict, and not, as the Catholic faith would contend, in harmony. The result is tragedy.

 Is The Spire theerefore simply a debate about the nature – and need – for both faith and reason? It is undoubtedly that, and it debates those questions superbly. But it is more than that. Golding, of course, although he was much concerned with theological questions, resided among humanity, and he knew humanity, knew its strengths and great weaknesses. Thus, while the theological aspect of  The Spire is undoubtedly central, profane themes run through the novel, too. There is adultery, perhaps even murder. There is a strong – and dangerous – strand of paganism running alongside the pious engineering for God. There are the manifold foibles of humanity.

And, for all his blind faith in his project, Jocelin is as flawed a human being as any of us. In particular, he is beset by sexual desire, most notably for Goody Pangall, the wife of the crippled and much maligned cathedral worker, Pangall. Jocelin is greatly distraught when he discovers Goody, whom he has idolised as a child of God, is having an affair with Roger Mason. Mason, meanwhile, overcome by his own problems, not least the impossibility of building the spire, succumbs to alcohol and ends the novel a drunken, suicidal wretch. The novel, then, is a combination of sacred and profane, known and unknown, true and untrue, good and bad. And all of this is premised on the twin facts of faith and reason.

There is and there must always be a mystery in human existence. This is not merely a matter of theology, although it is undoubtedly that. It is also an inescapable truth that we do not and cannot know what happens in Hamlet’s “undiscovered country”, the realm of the beyond, what is the true nature of death. Those who have only faith and who never seek to question that faith miss something essential in their lives. It is, after all, the nature of human beings to question things; it is how we progress as a species. And equally, people of a religious temperament would suggest, those who live by rationality alone miss something of the numinous beauty of existence. I would certainly agree that there is a mystery, but I do not privilege it in the way Roman Catholics, in particular, seem to do. In The Spire, there is no mystery for Jocelin, only the certainty of his endeavour. For the reader, however, there is mystery and ambiguity aplenty, as Golding seeks to confront us with the uncertainty of existence. His characteristic stream-of-consciousness style renders meaning opaque: thus, is Jocelin’s angel a real manifestation of his piety or a symptom of his tubercolosis? We do not definitively find out. Does the spire fall? We do not find out. Mystery. Mystery surrounds us because we cannot know everything. This is a useful corrective, perhaps, for hubristic notions of man’s superiority, although such notions are greatly overplayed in my estimation. And it may be that Golding, sceptic though he was, agrees. The greatest mystery, in the end, may not be the sacred one, but the profane.

I suggest this may be the case because, ultimately, the greatest mystery in The Spire is revealed to be Joceln’s own motivations. Throughout the novel we have been assured the building of the spire is a tribute to his faith and to the glory of God. In his final delirium, though, we understand that his motivations were more secular, a response to the sexual urges he has tried, with decreasing levels of success, to repress. Or do we? Or is this, too, a mis-speaking? We do not know. Mystery remains, as it must.

Golding himself accepts that point. Speaking of this novel, he suggests: “The writer is aware of that whole spectrum [of possible meanings or interpretations], but he doesn’t choose between them. What does the right choice matter, so long as the spectrum is there?”

The Spire is an astonishing novel. This review comes nowhere close to mining the seam of symbolism which it contains. It is a novel that needs to be read and re-read and possibly re-re-read in quick succession in order to begin to comprehend the nuances of meaning it contains. It is a work of utter genius.

Myth Becomes Fact

CS Lewis observed that the myths of all primitive religions are expressions of an innate desire for the transcendent God to make contact with mankind in order to assauge our sins and guilts. From this position, it is easy to view Christianity as just another religion, and its central tenets, such as the Virgin birth, the resurrection and Jesus’s divinity, as further examples of myth. In particular, they could be seen as emblematic of myth surrounding the dying god, which appears in a great number of ancient mythologies. The Virgin birth and the resurrection could thus be understood as symbols of the peristaltic flow of life, birth and rebirth, regeneration, renewal across generations. This view came to prominence, of course, with J.G. Frazer’s anthropological research at the turn of the nineteenth century, and has been developed further in more recent times by Joseph Campbell et al.

Lewis, however, argues that, “as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact”. Thus, the old myth of the dying god is given historical provenance when we move from “Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where” to the historically verifiable crucifixion of Christ. He goes on: “By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle”. It is “the marriage of heaven and earth: perfect myth and perfect fact”. Thus, for Lewis, Christianity appears to be the “true” religion, standing at the pinnacle of human development.

This was a view that Eric Voegelin understandably grew uncomfortable with in his later career, causing a profound change in his thinking in Volume 5 of his magnum opus, Order and History. For novelist Cormac McCarthy, too, there appears to be a consistent wrestling with myth and the notion of “myth become fact”.

In McCarthy, we certainly see a reflection of the straining for contact with the transcendent God. The litany of characters who debate God’s existence in McCarthy’s oeuvre clearly reveals this, as do the heretic in The Crossing and the range of eschatologically-minded prophets who people McCarthy’s universe. God, of course, never appears, and this creates the tension which drives McCarthy’s fiction. Far from accepting Lewis’s conception of “myth become fact”, McCarthy continues to wrestle with the notion that there is no Christian certainty and the notion of contact with the transcendent God is no more than a chimera. The catharsis that comes with acceptance of the myth and surrender to the fact becomes impossible; the resulting existential tension is all the greater because of the sense of despair, or disappointment, or failure that ensues.

Thus, McCarthy appears to be caught between regarding with awe the mystery of religion and remaining sceptical about the very possibility of that mystery. He wants to believe the myth that Lewis believes. He is on record as saying so: Garry Wallace paraphrases him thus: “He went on to say that he thinks the mystical experience is a direct apprehension of reality, unmediated by symbol, and he ended with the thought that our inability to see spiritual truth is the greater mystery.”

But his fiction consistently shows that he comes across a barrier which appears insurmountable. Thus, he appears to be trying to write his own myth, in order to make it work.

To be honest, the idea that God deliberately used existing primitive myths to seed the minds of humanity in order to make them accept the “truth” of the incarnation is wholly unconvincing. Jesus may genuinely have existed – the evidence is persuasive – but to assume that the myths surrounding him must also therefore be true is a logical non-seqiteur. To look at the myths as articulated by, say, Joseph Campbell, creation myths and stories of sin and redemption and so on, and to acknowledge the mythical nature of these stories, and then to look at precisely the same myths in a Christian context and claim that these myths must be “true” because Jesus was real seems naïve.

It is almost impossible, now, to separate myth from reality in the American West of the 1850s, only 170 years ago, far less what occurred two millennia distant. The texts consistently tell us the stories are “true”, but one must not forget the role of propaganda in propagating myths.