Gabriele Annan

A man in a Thurber cartoon asks a woman: ‘But Myra, what do you want to be enigmatic for?’ Or words to that effect. The question kept coming into my head as I read Beryl Bainbridge’s new novel, which is set on the Titanic during the four days before she sank, and narrated in the first person by a survivor whose first and only name is Morgan. The title, Every Man for Himself, suggests that human selfishness is going to be the theme. In fact, almost everyone or rather every man – behaves rather well, observing the women-and-children-first injunction when it comes to piling into lifeboats. ‘Every man for himself’ seems to refer rather to the inscrutability, the enigma of other people. There is a mystery about almost every passenger, and one of them, a middle-aged lawyer called Scurra, is opaque mystery all the way through, down to the scar on his lip – which some say he got in a duel, and others from the bite of a South African macaw. Morgan is only 22, and he develops a crush on Scurra, who is given to portentous and mostly cynical pronouncements. ‘Every man for himself’ is one; but the most portentous of all – because it opens and closes the book – is ‘Not the height, only the drop, is terrible.’ What can it mean?’

‘We are talking in bed, friends again instead of lovers. Apricot-coloured fern fronds wave against the pearl grey background of my flannel sheets. Both of us are surprised to hear thunder, thunder in February, in Wisconsin, over frozen ground and dirty snow. My hand rests lightly on his grey hair, our legs are still entwined.’ What kind of a memoir is going to follow on from this opening? The answer is two kinds. One – the part dealing with the present and recent past in the USA – is pure schlock mixed with aspiring schlock, i.e. laced with jargon and touting every psychotherapeutic and feminist cliché. The subtitle – ‘Healing the Trauma of War and Exile’ – should be read as a health warning.’’

Isaac Babel was a middle-class Jew from Odessa who rode to war with a Cossack regiment. This extraordinary conjunction occurred during the Russo-Polish war of 1920. It is not news, because the single work that made Babel a famous writer – the short story collection Red Cavalry – is based on his experiences that summer, when he turned 26, at the First Cavalry Army HQ in a Volhynian village. The Red Cavalry stories are beautiful, brutal and shocking; but the shock of the unexpected in the Diary – the unlikelihood of such a man being in such a place at such a time – is even greater. Not just a Jew with the Cossacks, his traditional persecutors: but an astonishing writer coming into his own on the battlefield, finding a vision somewhere between surrealism and expressionism, and a new, abrupt and plangent voice to put it over. Besides, Babel witnessed the last battles ever to be fought on horseback and with sabres. Mounted nurses – ‘all whores, but comrades, whores because they’re comrades’ – rode with the Cossacks, while bombs dropped from American planes defending the newly created Polish republic. Their commander was called Major Cedric E. Fauntleroy. What could be more surreal than that?’

‘All stories have in them the seed of all other stories: any story, if continued long enough, becomes other stories,’ declares a female hermit who is the Ur-storyteller in this Indian multi-storey story. The man listening to her imagines ‘stories multiplying spontaneously, springing joyously out of a mother story, already whole but never complete, then giving birth themselves, becoming as numerous as the leaves on the trees, as the galaxies in the sky’. So the man becomes a storyteller himself; besides, his own story is already a story within a story. Many of the stories (but not all) begin with the injunction: ‘Listen.’ Implicit in it is another injunction: let go, accept confusion. For, among other things, this 520-page novel is an Eastern challenge to Aristotelian aesthetics. This is made quite explicit about halfway through, when a well-meaning Englishman presses the Poetics on a clever Indian boy. The boy doesn’t go for it: ‘there seemed to be a peculiar notion of emotion as something to be expelled, to be emptied out, to be, in fact, evacuated, as if the end purpose of art was a sort of bowel movement of the soul.’ Clarity, order, logic and simplicity are Western demands. Forget them if you want to enjoy this riotous, sly and sophisticated saga, which isn’t, in fact, as aimless as it pretends, since it is an argument – sometimes quite a sharp challenge – deliberately aimed at Western canons, ethical as well as aesthetic.’

The hero of Irene Dische’s first novel was Adolf Hitler, alive and well and living in New Jersey. The hero of her second is Benedikt August Anton Cecil August Count Waller von Wallerstein. As a boy, he was obsessed with drawing.