SUMMER
GHOSTS AND WINTER REFLECTIONS
A young writer’s first love and
first novel are so often indivisible [J.
Maclaren-Ross, 1955]
In 1958, over sixty years ago, an eighteen year old getting
over a nervous breakdown embarked upon his first novel. Do I recognize
my own teenage self, ‘A’,
the unnamed first-person narrator of
The Summer Ghosts?
On reflection, now that I’m eighty plus, the nine published books
that made up my ‘novelistic’ or novel-writing life, don’t seem at all
like fictions, if they ever truly were. Those nine distant novels seem
more clearly and closely to resemble a kind of extended documentary
film; with hindsight, I can see that they comprise partial elements of a
continuing autobiography – interlinked and rather intimate personal
chronicles covering the period from the late 1950s to the early 1980s.
In fact I hardly felt impelled to invent ‘plots’,
for stories just seemed to happen and I simply had to coax them into
being: all I needed to do, apparently, was observe and describe. This
may sound naïve, and perhaps not the best route for a fiction-writer,
but I was young, after all; in any case looking back at this stage of
the literary journey, I’m a long way beyond embarrassment. In 1962, my graduation year, one astute French film
critic, the excellent Robert Benayoun, wrote an article attacking “such
very young old men as the leaders of the Nouvelle Vague”. They did not,
he considered, possess “the normal qualities of youth”. These Benayoun
defined as “naiveté, idealism, humour, hatred of tradition, erotomania,
a sense of injustice”. As for ‘those’ words: in the late Fifties, the
forbidden four-letter stuff never appeared in print, and certainly not
in full. You might, back then, occasionally find so-called outspoken
novels that included expletives. These when they appeared were spelt
only with dashes, e.g. f––, though for some obscurer Freudian reason the
dreaded C-word was typographically impermissible, even in abbreviated
form. Julian Maclaren-Ross
had ingeniously transcribed ‘fucking’ as ‘flicking’ in some of his
Second World War tales of army life, but these had been long out of
print and didn’t resurface until well after the millennium, when that
estimable author was himself rediscovered, reprinted and biographied.
Writing of his own army experiences in
The Naked And The Dead
(1948), Norman Mailer, just as carefully if more notoriously, wrote
‘fugging’. That bold and outspoken novel became a bestseller in America
and its young author was duly lionised, yet the printer-soothing and
censor-pleasing coinage seemed somewhat coy even then: by the end of a
very long book, a plethora of fugs had become an irritating verbal
compromise, evasion not solution. It seems that upon being introduced
during a New York party, the ever-outrageous Tallulah Bankhead greeted
Mailer: “So you’re the young man who can’t spell fuck.” Splendid stuff,
apocryphal or not! I was recently cheered to find the 1903 Preface
(“Written Twenty Years After The Novel”) which Huysmans added to a
reprint of his continuingly controversial, much praised and vilified
novel A Rebours. He begins
thus: “I suppose all men of letters are like myself in this, that they
never reread their works once they have appeared. Nothing in fact is
more disenchanting, more painful than to examine one’s phrases again
after an interval of years”. Quite so, yet he continues: “Now, sadly
enough, I endeavour to recall, as I turn over the pages, what precise
state of mind I could have been in at the time I wrote them.” An
impossible project, of course, though to confront one’s younger self or
selves might prove an interesting attempt at a belated literary
critique. Perhaps the effort might prompt some salutary reflections, but
a degree of detachment and a measure of energy and humour would be
required and during these pandemic days life seems too short and
uncertain to be looking back.
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