William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

Part Two is “Journal of an Airman” and the triumph of The Orators. It should be included in every anthology of the English short story. In it the vague impulses and solutions, needs and prognoses that preoccupied Part One are splendidly focused and dramatized in the diary of a neurotic aviator. The battle lines are drawn. The airman and his comrades face the Enemy. Although meant to function as a metaphor, the Enemy turn out to be suspiciously like the English middle classes at their smug, bourgeois worst. A strange civil war or revolution seems to be in progress in a landscape which is half Icelandic, half Cotswolds, with moors and ice floes, golf links and country pubs. The airman’s tortured and paranoid voice leads us through the mounting conflict with notes and jottings, attempts at aphorisms and pensées. The need for a true Leader re-emerges, while the airman frets about his fear of his mother and his love for his homosexual uncle Harry. The voice is uniquely Auden’s — D. H. Lawrence meets P. G. Wodehouse by way of Freud and Ealing comedies, if you see what I mean.

Throughout, the airman keeps trying to define and fix the Enemy in his mind and encourage in himself the right elements of daring and fearlessness. “Three kinds of enemy walk — the grandiose stunt — the melancholic stagger — the paranoic sidle. Three kinds of enemy face — the fucked hen — the favourite puss — the stone in the rain. Three enemy traits — refusal to undress in public — proficiency in modern languages — inability to travel back to the engine. Three kinds of enemy hand — the marsh — the claw — the dead yam.” And manically on and on. The journal has all the elisions, fractures, non sequiturs and private references one would expect. But what is most striking and admirable is the way Auden has seized on the potentiality of this literary form and exploited it to the full. Hint, allusion and half-meaning suddenly become potent assets: the briefest references can conjure up the density and detail of a long novel.

Here are some examples.

Tea today at Cardross Golf Club. A hot bed. Far too many monks in Sinclair Street.

Thursday

The Hollies. Some blazers lounge beneath a calming tree; they talk in birds’ hearing; girls come with roses, servants with a tray, skirting the sprinkler preaching madly to the grass, where mower worries in the afternoons.

Fourteenth anniversary of my uncle’s death. Fine. Cleaned the airgun as usual. But what have I done to avenge, to disprove the boy’s faked evidence at the inquest? NOTHING.

Monday — Interviewed A about his report.

Tuesday — Pamphlet dropping in the Bridgenorth area.

Wednesday — Address at Waterworm College.

Thursday — The Hollies. 7.30.

Friday — See M about the gin to be introduced into the lemonade at the missionary whist drive.

Saturday — Committee meeting.

Sunday — Break up the Mimosa’s lecture on blind flying.

We are drawn into the batty, surreal world of the airman. We are his confidant, his confessor. We share his worries (his errant love of Uncle Harry, his betrayal of Derek), his grief (Derek’s death, a crash: “His collar bone was sticking through his navel”); his love for E; the dangers of war (“A feint landing by pleasure paddle steamers near the bathing machines”); his own perpetual struggle to be heroic (28th. 3.40 am. Pulses and reflexes normal … Some cumulus cloud at 10,000 feet. Hands in perfect order”).

The final section of The Orators is all poetry — six odes — with examples of Auden at his most silly (“Christopher stood, his face grown lined with wincing/In front of ignorance—’Tell the English,’ he shivered,/‘Man is a spirit’”); evocative (“After a night of storm was a lawn in sunlight”); and typical (“Go south, lovey, south by Royal Scot/Or hike if you like it, or hire a Ford”). But the odes are a mixed bunch, and the best have been reprinted elsewhere, as have the other poems in the body of the book. As a result the work itself has fallen into obscurity, remembered if at all as the original context for a few more famous poems (“By landscape reminded of his mother’s figure” and the superb sestina “We have brought you, they said, a map of the country”). This is a real shame, for in The Orators one encounters the Audenesque at its most vivid and ill-disciplined and, accordingly, most fecund and distinctive. But more than that it reveals the vast range and scope of Auden’s astonishing eye for detail, Dickensian in its precision and accuracy, and provides us with that rare opportunity: to find in prose the word by word, line by line delights of poetry.

1984

This novel begins with a myth. Suppose that every act we committed in our life on earth was destined to be repeated, not just once, but in an endless series of cycles. In that case everything we did, trivial and grand, from minor sin to major goodness, would be invested with a momentous importance simply because of its permanence in the scheme of things. Every act of kindness, selfishness, deceit, self-regard would be etched on existence for ever. And, consequently, we would think twice, thrice, many times, before acting — our lives would be weighted down with import and significance, with unbearable responsibility.

But if, on the other hand, life is instead merely an endless linear flow of time, then every act, every moment, is at once unique and lost for ever — gone in an instant, never to return. The upshot of this theory is that life becomes an affair of utter insignificance, a droll succession of inconsequences — living (Being) is frivolous, transitory, light.

Kundera introduces these two opposing notions at the outset of this — his fifth and best — novel and throughout further opposes their two related qualities of lightness and weight. Which is better (I paraphrase drastically) — a life lived burdened by the weight of responsibility? Or a life lived unfettered by duty and moral injunction: a life of perfect, airy freedom?

This dilemma summarizes what I take to be the essence of this complicated and thoughtful novel. In a typically Kunderan manner, these questions emerge from a disjointed and rambling blend of wry philosophical speculation and fiction. Kundera himself discourses on and redefines a variety of subjects and categories (including vertigo, dreaming, nudity, betrayal, noses, abroad and WCs, among others) while, fictionally, the choices are dramatized in the lives of a pair of couples — Tomas and Tereza and Franz and Sabina — each of whom represents, in varying degrees, one or other aspect of the polarity of lightness and weight. Franz and Sabina have their roles to play in the enacting of ideas, but the central couple is Tomas and Tereza.

Tomas is a successful surgeon and philanderer who, by a series of chances, ends up one day in a provincial hotel where he attracts, inadvertently, the love of a waitress — Tereza. On impulse Tereza follows him to Prague where they become lovers and soon fall in love. Even after they are married, however, Tomas continues to sleep around, but his life has changed more than domestically with the arrival of Tereza, for Tereza is afflicted with “weight”—a sense of the unbearable responsibility of being. And Tomas, one might expect, is lightness personified. But soon he finds — like it or not — that his soaring irresponsibility begins to be tethered: he gains — metaphysically speaking — weight.

He renounces a prosperous career as a surgeon in Zurich to follow Tereza back to Prague after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. There, his career charts a steep decline owing to an ill-timed political article he has written. From top surgeon he descends to local GP, and from there to window cleaner. Ultimately, Tereza persuades him to leave the city and they go to work on a farm in the country where, before they die in a car smash, they find their own brand of happiness and Tomas — or so I take it — shoulders the burdens of responsibility and contentedly renounces “lightness.”