Perhaps like a
good number of others, I had not read W. M. Spackman a month ago. The
welcome reprinting of his work which required support from state and federal
arts agencies, a private foundation, and a state university illustrates the
need for liberal funding outside the marketplace if the arts are to flourish.
Page numbers in
parentheses are references to The Complete Fiction of W. M. Spackman. Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes. I follow Spackman in not italicizing foreign
words. (He had other uses for italics.)
Perhaps I am
influenced by having read all of Spackman’s fiction, first novel to posthumous
publication, without pause, but I find very little to distinguish one of his
characters from another. Likewise, apart
from a few jarring incidents such as the murders in A Presence with Secrets,
there is virtually nothing in the way of plot.
Characters end as they began.
Everyone is trying to “be a gent” and go by the rules, but this never
impedes their “headlong” hedonism.
W. M. Spackman’s
readership is limited by the nature of his work. Both the themes of his stories and the manner
of their telling are out of step with current taste, and the reader is
fortunate that the Dalkey Archive Press which has the luxury of privileging
literary values over those of the marketplace, has reissued his novels. His unvarying topic is his personas’
enthrallment to their sexuality, yet their subjugation is a sweet one in plots
transparently based on wish-fulfillment in which intellectuals or artists, even
in middle age, find delectable young things constantly seeking to climb into
their beds. The challenge is to juggle
these affairs. Even apart from their
routine adulteries, his heroes (and their ladies) are so sophisticated as to believe
in nothing at all. Far from despairing, they
simply sigh and make the best of it while the sun shines. It seems they all like their creator must
have gone to Princeton (he to Oxford as well) and thus know better than the
less fortunate.
Furthermore,
Spackman is a stylist in an age when even poetry is often flatly prosaic. He developed a unique rhetoric which, while
sometimes capable of old-fashioned Ciceronian flights, often takes the form of
an extended monologue by one of his many virtually identical characters. Far from hesitating at what might put off his
less learned readers, Spackman liberally sprinkles his text with French,
Italian, and Latin. [1] Ovid in
particular returns again and again as an authority on love. Just as a Renaissance sonneteer employ a few
Classical references in the praise of his lady, Spackman’s learning magnifies
his homages to the power of love. He
would not, I think, mind my impression that his heroes would likely consider
the use of Latin to be highly decorative in itself and a learned lover surely a
better one.
Spackman delights
in epigrams and in parodies recalling the adept use of these forms by Oscar
Wilde and Max Beerbohm not so very long before his own time. He loves out-of-the-way words, some of which
are found in no lexicon but his own. In
general one would consider this sheer delight in language Spackman’s primary
appeal were it not that his erotic fascination is so pronounced. The combination of these factors has set
limits to his reputation in spite of high praise from critics and novelists
like Edmund Wilson, Stanley Elkin, and John Updike.
I can imagine in
some future age Spackman scholars discussing his mores rather in the manner of
medievalists puzzling over courtly love, “Did anyone ever actually live like
this?” Spackman’s narratives, though,
are best considered not as realistic narratives, but as dreams. More recent psychologists may rightly
question Freud’s notion that dreams represent the encoded fulfilment of
frustrated desire, yet in the case of this literary dream the principle is
quite accurate.
In these days the
first impediment to appreciating Spackman must surely be is his characters’
attitudes toward sexual morality, though such censure is, of course, entirely
non-literary. The ethics of fictional
personae or indeed of their creators can have no place whatever in artistic
judgments. Could one object to the Iliad
at the outset because the story concerns heroes disputing over possession of a
female slave? Or, to take a closer
analogue, can the masterful Lolita be denied a secular imprimatur due to
its central figure’s obsessive pedophilia?
Garbled as the issue may have become in recent years in some academic
settings, it can only lead instantly astray.
It is also true as well that for all Spackman’s fascination and
expertise with style, any reader of his books is likely to doubt that to the
author content is a matter of no significance.
In fact his stories
seem little short of obsessive. Spackman
emphasizes amoral sexuality to the exclusion of most of the rest of human
experience and the dominance of the erotic in his sensibility lends a great
deal to his characteristic tone, contributing to his themes and to the beauty, ven, of his work. Those who might find the values of Spackman’s
predatory professors unacceptable even in a work of fiction will have little
more to say of him, leaving it to others to examine the uses to which Spackman
has put the these dubious mores. In the
flippant tones of Spackman’s characters, “Man’s and his own individuated rut” is
neither more nor less than “after all how we had all behaved.” (275)
Spackman’s
erotomania, though, unlike that of others enthusiasts such as Norman Mailer,
does not seem to center on orgasm. He is
quite simply lost in utter astonishment at the sight of a naked woman. The only sexual acts he describes are
caresses, physically tracing the same wondrous territory that so enthralls his
sight. Repeatedly he depicts scenes of
lovers in bed, the man gazing raptly at the female body in quasi-religious
devotion. Whether such grace descends
from the le bon dieu, Bona Dea or the more frequently invoked iddio, it always
transfixes the lover.
When Johnnie Coates
(just the age of Spackman’s son) encounters such an experience in As I
Sauntered Out, One Midcentury Morning language nearly fails him. “How to describe an epiphany! – I felt I had
never, till now, even imagined what woman’s loveliness could be – and not just
could be, but holy god there before my eyes was!” “ I adored her with a mixture of wonder and
exaltation that amounted to innocence.” (539)
Yet, though this
initiation is in that case displaced onto the next generation, the innocence seems
in a way durable indeed. Spackman’s
personae never get over being flabbergasted and instantly subjugated at the
sight of a naked woman. He wishes to
relish the wonder. Reveling in “the
sheer physical thereness of you” (519), he can desire nothing more. ”Let me contemplate you.” (364) The lover is “dazzled” (429), “stunned,”
“transfixed” (395). He is “ensorcelée,” “spellbound”
(411), and the lady’s “sorcery” exercises “its absolute dominion “ (566) “To see a girl’s body in memory was one
thing, and you could endure it, but the dazzling reality of it, tangible and
there, and past belief temporarily yours, reduced you to idiocy.” (408) In bed one can only marvel at “the total
sensuality of it” (366), all tingly nerve endings and no ratiocination. They lay there in great comfort, and they
might simply have been mindless.” (367)
Just as
Spackman’s men are always on the lookout for the next lovely “girl,” the women are
peering around in search of a “bel homme.”
Given that lasciviousness is entirely mutual, of course, elides the pain
and power relationships that ordinarily play an ugly role in sexual
adventuring. The female voice in the
middle section of A Presence with Secrets is as taken with Hugh as he
eventually comes to be with her. His
first appearance to her is like a vision, “an epiphany, my first-ever sense of
Man after Woman, and understanding it!” and feels, as a consequence,
“sexy-wild, out of my mind” herself, with “alarm bells going off all through me”
to be with her cousin (253-4), though this does not impede her from thinking also
of their ill-fated host Alain “Mon Dieu qu’il est beau, the skin of his
neck is so white I feel as if I could taste it, and I wondered what he did for love.” (257) In A Difference of Design Maria
Gostrey says with a bit of annoyance to Sather, “Goodness, I only made love
with him two or three times, you can’t be jealous about that!” (406) Two-thirds of A Difference of Design
are narrated by Fabienne, la Comtesse, who reflects on “my lightminded
ancestresses and I” skirting the edge, afraid that perhaps the playacting of
love may be nothing but “marivaudage.” (343)
This sexual
enthusiasm is no generational matter.
When Eve in “Declarations of Intent” consults her mother about her love
life, the parent is so wrapped up in her own liaison she can scarcely pay any
attention to her daughter’s. (524) In
As I Sauntered Out One Midcentury Morning . . . Francesca’s godmother
and her friends have no difficulty accepting the younger generation’s amours as
to be expected.
The lover’s
relationship remains, however, ambiguous.
In “Dialogue at the End of a Pursuit” a woman’s convoluted description
of her motive for love indicates in its qualifications and back-turnings a
tension that would be absent in purely sybaritic frolics: “Oh sweet but where
but in bed am I likely to find out how much I’ve perhaps decided that want to
have you discover all the things I can be? Or do I ever?”
Of course, among
the painful complications ordinarily associated with love affairs is the
jealousy of spouses, yet in Spackman as in Andreas Capellanus, adultery is
favored. In A Difference of Design
Lewis Bingham’s uncle is said to have remarked over a new prospect, “Absolute
dish of a girl. Married, too, which is always convenient.” This may, Bingham admits, “sound a bit lazy –
competition only from a husband.” Yet
his uncle had “an entirely humane position . . . even if it looked like a
dilemma of egotism . . .it was really an act of humanity.” (381) The husband, after all, is simply “a character
in the unchanging comedy of manners that marriage has been from Classical
Antiquity on.” (583) Adultery is “Women’s
happiest birthright and perquisite” (425) and a civilized person can only
wonder about “all the fuss there can be about infidelity.” (528)
The affairs for all their compulsive energy
and all-but-numinous glow are in a way simply passing the time. Most if his characters seem utterly concerned
with careers or children; they find themselves born into the caste of the idle
rich and find no more reason to question their destiny than any dhobi wallah. Even if they hold a lucrative position in a bank,
it is less a job than a perquisite of privilege. Eve’s mother’s lover “doesn’t even go
downtown unless a case comes in they think will interest him.” (524) When asked what he “did,” Bingham responds diffidently. “He said oh he was pretty much standard
fare. Made money. Spent it.
Made more. Tended to spend that
too.” When pressed, he adds that he has
a sloop and plays squash. (380) Of the
notorious Uncle John, Sather notes that, though he held a law degree he lived
on unearned income. (563) “Philadelphia
rentiers weren’t expected to ‘do’ much of anything. Except, naturally, behave well in a
well-fixed way. If they saw fit to.” (563) Though the Wobblies would have called them
parasites, they can be disarmingly straightforward. “What was the use of being born into the
privileged classes if one couldn’t have it both ways?” (153) When in Spackman’s posthumous last book, a few
hints seep in suggesting that somewhere some people are concerned with feminism
and social justice, his hero, a political commentator, reacts not so much with
reactionary attitudes as with total cynicism.
“Political blundering is constant, because an electorate of simpletons
cannot elect politicians smart enough to deal with the simpletons who elect
them.” (550) He later writes a
provocative essay “Love Makes You Go Whee!” (not a bad text to fit Spackman on
a bumper sticker) provoking “an instant feminist outrage” “as good as a
contract” in spite of the fact that “I, naturally, hadn’t a drop of anti-Lib
blood in my body. God knows, from
kindergarten on I’ve liked girls.”
Spackman’s
indifference about politics extends to the social structure. Again and again he concedes the undeserved
privilege which his characters enjoy, regarding it as a fact of nature, an
order he accepts the way the world works.
Thus they all would claim to be “Properly brought up, is all. Did as I thought I was being told. Thought I was supposed to.” (394) For women as well love is not a “passion,”
but rather “a part of the good manners of being a woman,” further explained in
the most evasive terms “a way if behaving,” “a style, a procedure, even.”
(396)
Everyone, of course, learns his or her own
“generation’s ground rules,” (566) making sex a simple matter of good manners. “What kind of cock-eyed heartlessness was
this, to girls who’d at least had the good manner to behave as if they wanted
me as much as I said I wanted them.” (551)
A second go-round after a “gentlemanly interval” would be right for “any
man of sense.” (238)“ Ike Trimmingham
summarizes an affair by saying, in poetic form,
“Must you go? As I was
brought up one should say,
And as you were brought up to (fuming) expect me to.
(559)
The reader will notice that
parenthetical word which is all that suggests the strains that often accompany
what is meant to be free love. On the
one hand, both man and woman are party to the game, constrained not by
traditional morality, but rather by the stronger social code of their set whose
members can afford to dedicate themselves to pleasure. “In the immemorial tribal way, Uncle John
left me the essential traditions of tribal comportment, and the tribal opinions
and perquisites that established them to start with, as well as more money to
maintain them,” and yet, in pursuit of such selfish ends, it is all the more
important that the codes be observed. “In
usage there are no substitutions!” (546)
In what looks a
bit like a defensive maneuver Spackman regularly maintained that content (and
the themes it implies) played little role in his work. He complained about
critics who reduced a work of art to “its ‘content’ – the thing’s theme, its
‘ideas,’ its everlasting Meaning.” “Content is not what any decently gifted
novelist is chiefly concerned with.” To
him “style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are a lot of
hogwash.” [3] This principle is
illustrated in practice by the writers to whom Spackman pays homage: Marivaux,
Henry James [4], Wallace Stevens.
These claims are surely disingenuous considering the fascination with which Spackman, over the course of his entire career as a writer, explored the joys of lust and the shadows cast on the paradise of the bed by chance, jealousy, even by romance. He could hardly be indifferent to content having spent his entire career constructing a series of dreams of his own libido’s ego, but his reticence is part of his etiquette. The jouissance he offers is not really confined to a baroque style, but those with good manners will know not to inquire further. Surely Cicero was a mentor for style, though, apart from being a tiresome moralist, Spackman found his prose like Caesar's far too pedestrian.. Ovid is an explicit influence, both for painstaking art and for erotic enthusiasm.
And it is most emphatically true that Spackman
delivers style for those who have a taste for it. From antique rhetoric to Nichols-and-May
dialogue he offers verbal goodies for a variety of tastes. His specific gift is the construction of
lengthy branching monologues that are nonetheless architectural for seeming
colloquial.
So why not? (171)
Notice here a characteristic mannerism, the use of italics
to indicate an arch tone. A passage like
this, while in fact planned with demanding precision gives the impression of
being spontaneous and formless. A bit
after this excerpt, the reader marvels at a sentence that runs very nearly a
full page (192-193) and presumably feels at the end like applauding as though
for a jazz solo or a singer holding a sustained note.
One further
example must serve for a great many.
-- Though at dinner, and this, again, they had on that terasse
of his hotel, the summer dusk already deepening into night over the fading
gardens off into the black leaves of the lindens beyond, so that the massed
flaming of a hundred candles, table by damask’d table, made it as if a low
pavilion of light without walls had been built out under those vaults of
darkness; or again, it could have been a lighted proscenium stood out there,
set for the staging of a play, and the actors there, and in that sift
brilliance, above the crystal and silver of the tables, the eyes of actresses
would be like jewels as they looked at you – at dinner then Maria was exploring
consequences.
(405-406)
In phrases and
shorter passages as well, showy cadenced, often periodic, rhetoric fills every
page of Spackman’s work and provides surely the basis for the admiration of
those among his readers who enjoy the play of language. Contrary to the recent trends in literature
favoring the vernacular, Spackman likes his English rhythmic to the point of
self-consciousness with the syntax twisting and halting and weaving about like
tropical vines.
Just as his
characters savor even the most casual affairs (as well as more profound fleshly
revelations), Spackman’s pleasure in words embraces mere pastimes and he is
drawn to what others might shun as affectation. Thus the prolonged three-syllable
pronunciation of Malachi or the two syllable “dar ling”in Heyday and the
idiosyncratic apostrophe in “damn’” for “damned” can only be called
mannerisms. Even odder, Nicholas’ in Armful
of Warm Girl says “dammy” for “damn me” which sounds positively seventeenth
century. The flowers of French, Italian,
and Latin often ornament his prose with Ovid the most frequent visitor to his
novels. Hugh Tatnall’s use of iddio
for god vitiates the term, its foreignness suggesting ironic unbelief and the
less-used form of the word his fondness for the subtly odd. His classicism extends to the somewhat silly,
as in his characters’ use of Boeotian to mean stupid or boorish. He loves out-of-the-way words and sometimes
introduces those which occur in no dictionary but his own such as psychagonist
(275) and anulnerous (209). At least these
like their author come from good families, from good classical roots.
There is indeed
something of the smart-aleck undergraduate intellectual about him, in verbal
taste as well as in the pursuit of love.
Spackman is sufficiently lavish in his use of epigrams that his
characters remark on it. “He’s just
constantly tossing off these wildly unexpected sardonic epigrams off Lisa, he
just impromptu made up that phrase ‘as un-American as good apple pie.’” (205) Discussing the end of an affair, after
quoting Catullus and then Ovid, Jock suggests they “call for an over-priced
Clos de Bèze
and be done with it. “ The Comtesse
responds “’But men recover,’ I said.
‘All you need is someone to indulge you if you’re simple-minded. Or over-indulge you, if you’re not,’ and he
said lightly, ‘Oh, epigrams,’ and signaled the sommelier.” (360-361)
Spackman’s
characters often share with their author a Quaker background, useful as a
piquant contrast to their current way of life.
The sudden introduction of a quaint saying using thee and thou throws
their revels into high contrast. The
primary meaning of this heritage is that it constitutes, like an ancestral
estate, ironic bona fides for membership in Philadelphia’s elite.
He delights in a
broad variety of witty parodies: of Ovid (193), of a cantata libretto (190), a madrigal
(168), and, a special favorite, blues in dialect (32, 105, 146). [5] If he is not titillating the brain with a display
of the most refined cleverness or his erogenous zones with a willing partner,
he rouses the taste buds (in imagination at least) with the most extravagant
menus. Fond of cooking rather elaborate
meals myself, I have difficulty believing a twentieth century American ever ate
such lavish spreads, even when provided with a cook. Here is what Spackman is pleased to call “a
minor meal.” Note how he begins slowly
with plates indeed simple, though dignified with French names, but then he
mounts like fireworks when he reaches the crêpes. “A crème de concombre soup, suprême
de volaille, and a salad to glisten in the noon light, with
a little farcie to keep body and soul together, glazed crêpes
actually and very pretty with their glossy little crests of sliced and lozenged
truffles” and for dessert a “bavarois with kirsch-soaked strawberries piled
round in crimson dunes,” and “a Montrachet flashing green and gold in its ice.”
(176) Those dunes of liqueur-laden
berries are not simply the end of a nice dinner; they are part of the
topography of an appetitive world. [6]
What Spackman’s
characters want they call “catnip.” [7] The use of this term suggests at once the
instinctual basis of their desire and its superficiality. Catnip, after all, may cause a pet to perform
entertaining antics, but it is not associated with long-lasting pleasure or
deep feelings. In the same way, the
people in these novels make a habit of snickering, particularly when
contemplating their sexual adventures. [8]
“The sheer libertine faithlessness of all this had so amused him that he
opened his eyes snickering.” (246)
Perhaps the
shallowness of the experience implied by these words is illuminated by another
of Spackman’s verbal leitmotifs, the word “marauder.” His characters are always worried that they
may stray into bad taste by presuming too much of their lovers. Yet they can say that love is finally self-love
and the fact is universal and no less desirable for that fact. “Wasn’t it a matter of amour propre? – if you
weren’t in love what was wrong with you!” (396)
When everyone readily admits that
they are simply seeking amusement, their aestheticism will often tend toward a
supercilious edge – it is no wonder that readers are reminded of Ronald Firbank
as well as Henry James and Nabokov – that reveals a solipsistic absorption, a
core self-interest about which no one need feel guilty since it is shared with
everyone, or, at least, everyone who counts, doubtless mostly
Princetonians. There is a sort of
existential bravery, even heroism, in those who carry on with such honest
fervor in a world where they are in the end alone and helpless, whose culture
offers only hypocrisy for values. Spackman
in fact confounded some of his fans with his claim in a postscript to Heyday
that the book is basically “an elegy upon the immemorial loneliness of
man.” He sounds almost existential.
The “paravent” that
makes the hotelier in Arles “much relieved” serves only the
interest of propriety (389). While it is
unnecessary as a physical screen, it is useful as an improvisation to preserve
a façade of decency that all parties know is pretense. Thus, while no one involved really believes
in the wickedness of non-marital sexuality, all maintain their respectability
by acting as if they do, that is, embracing the dissimulation of an outworn
moral code in the interest of social harmony.
The elaborate dance of interests between man and woman in Spackman is complicated
by this tension between human behavior and the social codes that allow people
to live in large groups. The fact that
his characters seem to have no responsibilities allows him to focus entirely on
the management of libido.
Spackman boasts
the considerable virtue of being highly entertaining. His effervescent wit and his musical rhetoric
guarantee rewards on every page. His
themes and characters might annoy some readers and even incense a few, but they
are on the mark for everyone who has been struck dumb with desire or who has
had the fortune to see a theophany in a lover.
One might dream with Spackman and Hugh Tatnall of a place where “The air
was full of angels.” (281) The cult of
self-interest among his women and men alike is recognizable even to those who
may have felt a stirring of altruism now and then, and his cynicism in general is
a useful corrosive against idées reçues.
His style is a delight, plotted out to the sound of every syllable in a
way that is rare in recent years, though it may be de trop for those like
his Quaker forebears, suspicious of luxury.
For the rest of us his work is a rare and delightful confection.
1. Spackman studied French and Italian literature at
Princeton and read the classics at Oxford’s Balliol College.
2. Given Spackman’s
fondness for Marivaux, it may be that he in fact favors “marivaudage,” even
defined as the quality of being precious or affected in writing.
3. Quoted by Steven
Moore in his Afterword, p. 632 from Spackman’s essays “An Ex Parte for
Comedy,” “Undeath of the Novel,” and “A Time Was Had by All.” For Nabokov, one of his favorite writers,
obsessive content is likewise paired with a gorgeously elaborate prose
style.
4. Indeed A
Difference of Design is (for one thing) a rewriting of James’s The
Ambassadors.
5. The whimsical
painting title (284) is in the same mood.
6. They are
sufficiently potent in Spackman’s imagination that they reappear in the next
novel, still crimson. This meal consists
of “a fresh-caught Loire salmon flown in from Nantes,” “cool cheeses, the
crimson dunes of wild strawberries on their paillasses of bright leaves, the
torrone mole they left untouched.”
(224-225)
7. On 408, 433, 517,
530.
8. See pages 342, 408,
433, 517, 530.
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