This is not to suggest for a moment that writers aren’t desperately interested in the spiritual self, in the psyche (a key word, that, because it includes the soul), and in questions of morality.
But Phoebe awaits, so can we leave morality out of it for a little while longer?
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Universality: it appears that all three no-entry signs – Dreams, Sex, Religion – warn of a deficit of universality. We have seen how dreams and sex confine the writer to an unshared consciousness; religion does it differently, because it claims, at least, to have universal application. In fact, the main monotheisms explore a dully partial view of the cosmos, whatever the sect or sub-sect. Greene’s faction was Roman Catholicism. So he might have commanded a plurality in fifteenth-century Europe. But not now: in an intellectual age that has grown used to quasars, singularities, and curved spacetime, Greene’s novels are still inviting us to gape at the burning bush.
We have been begging a question – a big question and a very pertinent question. How can an autobiographical novel possibly attempt, let alone achieve, the universal (though Saul found a way)? But let’s go on begging it for now.
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As you see, I’m stalling for time. Yes, yes, Phoebe. Christ, she’s as bad as Spats…
Remember that homily of Saul’s about ethics and morals, about ethics being money and morals being sex? In a civilised society on a good day morals and ethics are part of the same thing, which is integrity – though it must sometimes be soothing to compartmentalise them, as Americans do. Then you can say to yourself, Well, my ethics may not be too clever, but my morals seem to be holding up. Or alternatively, My morals are admittedly not of the very finest, but my ethics…
Morals and ethics, money and sex. Dear oh dear. Julia would have laughed with far greater abandon if she’d known the half of it, the tenth of it – the penultimate truth about me and Phoebe Phelps.
Novels produced by people in their early twenties are more or less bound to be loosely autobiographical. Write about what you know and what you’ve lived has become a widely circulated and valuable piece of advice; but that’s what you’d be doing anyway, willy-nilly, because you’re clueless about everything else.
So I put ‘Rachel’ in my first book – I even put her in the title. When it came out she read it, and rang me up, and we met, and that night the affair resumed. I was astonished: all the gross indiscretions, all the painful secrets laid bare – and that deliberately but repulsively cold-hearted final chapter! Oh, life-writing (as Churchill said of Russia) is ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. But somehow the very act of composition is an act of love.
Now imagine for a moment that Phoebe was herself imaginary: only very glancingly true to life, a made-up character in a made-up novel. As I set about fashioning her, how would I proceed?
Well, first I would take Phoebe and stylise her looks and her emotional presence – largely through gross exaggeration (this part is always fun). Next I would cumulatively burden her with qualities that answered to the general design of the novel I was trying to write (its arguments, themes, patterns, imagery, and all the rest). She would then have to behave herself, never deviating from her designated role. And by then, after all that, the original Phoebe would have disappeared, buried like a fossil under the sediment of invention.
This novel, the present novel, is not loosely but fairly strictly autobiographical. And to qualify for an appearance in such a work all you need is historicity. You just need to have happened – and you’re in.
*1 The very first mainstream novel came well over a century earlier, and it wasn’t in English…Restlessly searching for prototypes, literary historians have tried to enlist Petronius, Apuleius, St Augustine, and Rabelais (or some antique satire or icicled Norse saga), but I see no reason to push it back any further than Don Quixote. Even now the reader feels the awe and apprehension of being present at a birth – the birth of a new genre. Don Quixote, Part 1 (1605) is instantly recognisable as a modern novel. And, not content with that, Cervantes gives us Part 2 (1615), instantly recognisable as a post-modern novel (this may be the greatest double-coup in all literature)…There is of course no sex in Don Quixote, and not only because our hero’s love-object, the glamorous Dulcinea del Toboso, is just another delusion.
*2 Things go rather more smoothly when the novel in question is all about sex (as in Lolita, say, or Portnoy’s Complaint). Here the sex scene is no longer a divagation: thematically it earns its keep, and doesn’t just drain the unities. (Notice how, at the end of an interposed sex scene, the writer suddenly has to snap out of it and ask, Uh, where was I?…Ah, yes.) In addition, any signs of specialised interests, marked preferences (and any signs of authorial excitation) bring to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s one-sentence parody: ‘She let out a cry, half pain, half pleasure (how do you figure a woman?), as I rammed the old Avenger home.’ Sexual failure – the dreaded fiasco – can be written about, but in such cases there isn’t a great deal to describe. In his gentle book of essays, On Love, Stendhal treats the fiasco as ‘tragedy’ (which is certainly how it feels at the time), but all one’s writerly instincts assign it to comedy. Sex is itself assigned to comedy. What is our reaction to sex written about earnestly? Laughter.
Chapter 2 Phoebe: The Business
Although we won’t even consider doing this point by point and blow by blow, we may as well start with the first date. Everything was decided on the first date.
It was 1976.*1
Kontakt
Martin met Phoebe – no, he picked her up, he pulled her – one April afternoon on a
