Michael Wood

‘All the unhurried day,’ Philip Larkin wrote, addressing a long-dead girl who had been drugged and raped in London, ‘Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.’ All that day, and many days more, no doubt. But then presumably, since the girl later talked calmly enough to Mayhew, the drawer gradually closed, the glint of the knives softened, and life continued.

They used to go to Paris when they died. Now good Americans simply shift from one plane of fiction to another, leaving the Dallas of Lee Harvey Oswald, say, for that of J.R. Or so it is suggested in Gore Vidal’s joky novel Duluth, where characters die in one imagined work only to pop up in another. They are just words, you see, easily reassembled. ‘We do not live. We are interchangeable. We go on, and we go on. From narrative to narrative.’ A social climber arriving in Duluth, no, Duluth, ends her life in a snowdrift and reappears in a Regency romance as a French spy and Napoleon’s mistress. A Duluth estate agent resurfaces after death in ‘Duluth’, a television series much admired in the Duluth of Duluth. Are you sitting comfortably? ‘We call this après post-structuralism.’ Sometimes we call it plagiarism as well, ‘but that is a harsh word when one considers how very little there is in the way of character and plot to go around.’ The irony is a bit hefty, but the effects can be eerie and funny. The lady realtor – Heinemann’s text, one degree more post-structuralist than Vidal’s, calls her a ‘relator’ – remembers her former fictional life even when she is translated into the television series, and is able to talk to old friends across her scripted dialogue. Her son in the soap opera says he is going to commit suicide, but she is busy chatting through the tube to her ex-brother. ‘God, she’s great,’ people later say of her acting. ‘Look at the way she smiles instead of cries.’ Vidal’s Duluth, like ours, or theirs, is in Minnesota, but it is also just across a causeway from New Orleans, and only ten miles from the Mexican border. It has a large Latin population, a black ghetto, a corrupt mayor (whose first name was Mayor until he dropped it by deed poll), and an underworld dominated by the shadowy figure of the Dude, who works exclusively through Silent Partners and his answering service. It also has a visiting spaceship. In this Duluth’s America, several Presidents are elected at a time, but no one listens to them, or remembers who they are.–

‘What a chapter of chances,’ Tristram Shandy’s father says, ‘what a long chapter of chances do the events of this world lay open to us!’ The thought is echoed in the closing pages of Clive James’s Brilliant Creatures, whose author-hero is said to be a ‘chapter of accidents’, and in the title and precarious plot of Anthony Powell’s O, How the wheel becomes it! The wheel is Ophelia’s, and suggests the incessant circlings of fortune, but quickly, in Powell’s hands, comes to hint at roulette and the dodgy hazards of English literary life. Comedy loves chance, particularly when it’s the messy, galloping kind which adds insult to ignominy. As when Uncle Toby whacks Walter Shandy on the shin with his crutch while making an irrelevant remark. Or when, to borrow an instance from James, you discover you owe a wallop of back tax on the day your car has been vandalised and peed in. Or when, as in Powell, an old flame, or flicker, turns up out of the blue to hog the television show you were already feeling nervous about. There is no sense of comeuppance on these occasions, only a view of scuttled dignity, and life getting out of hand. What is enjoyable about the tightrope is not the feat of someone’s walking it or the threat that they might fall, but the possibility of a comic wobble, flailing arms and the spectre, but only the spectre, of disaster.

The freedom to juggle with language, Angela Carter suggests, is a promise and perhaps an instrument of other freedoms. Certainly her own cheerful jokes bespeak a lively independence of hallowed prejudices. ‘It’s very tiring, not being alienated from your environment.’ ‘It won’t be much fun after the Revolution, people say. (Yes, but it’s not all that much fun, now.)’ St Petersburg, in her new novel, is ‘a city built of hubris, imagination and desire’, and that, Carter says, is what cities, and lives, should be: crazy possibilities, even impossibilities, juggled into practice. But what if the first freedom is illusory, if all we have to juggle with is cliché, the language of others, a shabby idiom we can’t refresh and can’t abandon? What if the ‘shop-soiled … romance’ Carter finds so much energy in seems to us merely worn down, beaten thin, at best only the shadow of an old puzzle? This is the dilemma that confronts narrator and characters in Joan Didion’s Democracy, a novel whose title itself mimes the slippery problem. Democracy, in Didion’s work, is not a form of government but an item of rhetoric: what the world is to be made safe for; a conspiracy of empire rigged out as a heart-warming liberal dream. An organisation called the Alliance for Democratic Institutions is simply a means by which a once hopeful Presidential candidate in the novel seeks to keep his political flag flying.

Places in fiction often have a curious dual nationality. They are entangled in historical events, marked on a solid social map. ‘It’s not exactly the moon I’m asking for,’ a girl thinks in The Dark Hole Days, ‘but surely all my dreams don’t end here: me in a duffle coat signing on the dole and walking in the debris of Belfast.’ Later she adds: ‘Belfast would fit into a corner of London. Not that it would fit in.’ On the other hand, places are used as pieces of an invention, elements of an intended meaning, and they come trailing all kinds of associations which may not have much to do with their material locations out there in the world. The ‘brilliant’, the ‘deep blue’ New England air and the irremediable Californian innocence that crop up so frequently in Superior Women really belong to literature or mythology rather than to the weather or any particular living Americans. Of course people and even the weather, as Wilde knew, do at times dutifully imitate literature, and that complicates the issue.