Alice Thomas Ellis on secrets

When not beset by the other obligations that have rendered me an unreliable blogger lately, I've been reading Alice Thomas Ellis's The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1987), the first volume in The Summer House Trilogy, which Paul Dry Books has recently done readers the service of returning to print in the States. I've written already of my love of Ellis's fierce, astringent novels, a love that grows with each new one I encounter. Her observations are so acute--and, more distinctly, so uncompromising in their judgment--that The Clothes in the Wardrobe easily kept my Twitter feed busy all week. A sample:

Surely to make a great fool and spectacle of yourself for the sake of another is a form of martyrdom.

No one can love a person who knows a secret about him that he would prefer not to know himself.

Pride is the subtlest of sins, offering the most morally destitute some comfort.

She couldn't help disapproving of people. It seemed to be essential to her sense of identity.

If it is not possible to be free, perhaps to be hidden is the next best thing.

I told my mother with timid spite, hidden terror, and a certain mad braggadocio.

If she was a wife, she was, by conventional standards, a gloriously bad one.

Tonight, I'll add a scene that probably ought not to be taken straight as advice--in context there's more going on in this conversation than might appear at first read--but is fun to think of as such:

I wondered as I thought of secrets if I might find some release in telling Lili the thing that festered in my soul, and I asked her if she would listen.

She said something I found so odd that my vision of the world faintly changed and my despair lessened. If the world was not as I perceived it then it was possible that I was not damned. I felt no great assurance of comfort, but my conviction of evil grew a little less.

She said, "If you have a secret you don't want the world to know you must never tell it except to an enemy. And if you must tell your dearest friend your secret then you must tell others too, for inevitably the world will get to know and you will blame your dearest friend and lose him. So tell him, if you must, but also tell his brother and the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker and then you will never know who has betrayed you and you can, to some degree at least, go on loving your friend. If you tell your enemy, your hatred will be even more satisfactorily justified, but the best thing to do is tell the priest. No one else. He won't tell. The trouble is, sometimes people want to be betrayed. It makes them feel more at home and less lonely."

And if you don't believe in priests, your only option is the wind and the stars.

In the beginning

One reason I appreciate blogging is that it mostly relieves you of the stress of writing an opening. While each post is an individual piece of writing, it also has a place in an ongoing conversation; a blogger is allowed to presume that he and his readers are already friends, having been chatting about books for years now, with today's post just another byway in an endlessly digressive, destinationless journey. The problem of openings is thus solved.

Novelists, on the other hand--well, I feel comfortable assuming that it's hard for them not to obsess about that first paragraph. It's the handshake and greeting of someone new at a party--but unlike a meeting in real life, if your new acquaintance doesn't instantly find you engaging, he can just turn his back on you without apology or risk of censure, and you may never get a chance to convince him he got the wrong impression.

In just the past few days, I've read three great openings. Each one is different in tone and substance from the others, but they all succeeded: they made me want to keep going.

The first is from Dan Kennedy's caustic, uncomfortable--but very good--dark comedy American Spirit:

Ten years ago when someone asked Matthew the question, "Where do you see yourself in ten years?" he remained silent and tried to look like he had an answer and was only considering how to phrase it. Inside the head, however, the only answer he could hear was, Those days will eat me alive, and Matthew knew that probably wasn't what you were supposed to say. It's ten years later and if he can swing this storm of time that's standing still in front of him, fortune will smile like it never has. But it is hard to find a hint of promise in a calendar found suddenly blank; Monday through Friday wiped clean against one's own wishes or plans, a wide-open grid of Valium-and-Heineken-kissed dead end days with a horizon way past the weeks on the page. Maybe thirty-five now, maybe forty, close enough anyway--in America these days, one's forties seem to start at twenty-five.

What a combination of ominous content and tightly rhythmic prose! The implied whisper I always hear in italic speech--Those days will eat me alive--makes that unvoiced thought shiver with actual fear. And there's no way I wouldn't want to keep reading a writer who can manage the knocking of consonants (and consonance) in "It's ten years later and if he can swing this storm of time that's standing still in front of him, fortune will smile like it never has," with its hint of a corporate lingo persisting with bloody-nosed bravado amid failure. Kennedy's book is kin to other recent novels of male failure and degeneration--there are echoes here of Sam Lipsyte and Benjamin Anastas--but Kennedy's attention to his prose, and the compelling way he conveys his protagonist's internal narration, with its mix of startling truth and mediated (and medicated) self-deception, makes it stand out.

The second comes from one of my old standbys, Rex Stout. The problem of opening for a genre novelist, especially one writing about a series character, is on the one hand less acute (because his readers already know his work) but on the other more difficult (because he's written about these characters and similar situations over and over and over again already). In Death of a Doxy (1966), Stout solves the problem by simply throwing readers right in:

I stood and sent my eyes around. It's just routine, when leaving a place where you aren't supposed to be, to consider if and where you have touched things, but that time it went beyond mere routine. I made certain. There were plenty of things in the room--fancy chairs, a marble fireplace without a fire, a de luxe television console, a coffee table in front of a big couch with a collection of magazines, and so forth. Deciding I had touched nothing, I turned and stepped back into the bedroom. Nearly everything there was too soft to take a fingerprint--the wall-to-wall carpet, the pink coverlet on the king-size bed, the upholstered chairs, the pink satin fronts on the three pieces of furniture. I crossed for another look at the body of a woman on the floor a couple of feet from the bed, on its back, with the legs spread out and one arm bent. I hadn't had to touch it to check that it was just a body or to see the big dent in the skull, but was there one chance in a million that I had put fingers on the heavy marble ashtray lying there? The butts and ashes that had been in it were scattered around and it was a good bet that it had made the dent in the skull. I shook my head; I couldn't possibly have been such an ape.

Longtime readers of Nero Wolfe stories will, I think, recognize immediately that there's something off here: we've seen Archie Goodwin at plenty of crime scenes, and in plenty of places where he shouldn't be--but this time the worry feels different, more deep-rooted. So we read on, and we soon learn why . .  .

I'll close with the opening of Alice Thomas Ellis's The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1987):

I remembered her all my life. For years the image of her had hung in my mind like a portrait in a high room, seldom observed but unchanging. Sometimes, unawares, I would see her again suddenly revealed in the vaulting halls of my head. She was sitting on a grassy bank, leaning forward a little, a cigarette between her fingers, and she was speaking. I could not remember what she was saying, nor even if I had understood her, but I knew that what she was saying must be, in some sense, significant. She wore a cream-coloured cotton frock with large puffed sleeves, sprigged with tiny brown flowers; he stockings were cream-coloured too and on her feet were white, barred shoes. Her hair grew in dry red curls, dark red like rust or winter bracken. She was not at all beautiful, but even with her likeness before me I had always assumed that she must be, since she carried such conviction in her forgotten words and her enduring appearance. Her name was Lili.

This one, I'll admit, comes close to cliche: even a beginning writing student could see the way to create suspense and intrigue with an opening like this. What saves it for me is the imagery ("the vaulting halls of my head," "dark red like rust or winter bracken"), and the fact that the words--the content of the woman, in some sense--have been lost, and what remains is simply the deep understanding of her significance. Ellis's novel is now, thankfully, back in print, available as part of The Summer House Trilogy from Paul Dry Books. I've raved about her quite a bit before, and my enthusiasm is undimmed.

Continuing to fall for Alice Thomas Ellis

With every book of hers I read--in hideous large-print editions because that's all Chicago Public Library has--it becomes more clear that Alice Thomas Ellis is nearly a perfect writer for me. She's funny, mordant, and impressively dark, much of her whiplash humor coming from the combination of her characters' terseness and their seeming lack of social filters. Ivy Compton-Burnett, her most obvious influence (who knew that a writer as sui generis as Compton-Burnett had a legacy?), shares that trait, but Ellis also brings to mind the social comedy and satire of Barbara Pym and Penelope Fitzgerald, and the clear-eyed believer's often-comic understanding of religion that we find in J. F. Powers.

One writer I'd not linked her to until the most recent book I've read, Pillars of Gold, is P. G. Wodehouse. Yet there are a number of Wodehousian attitudes or turns of phrase in the book. Even as simple a bit as this description of an emotionally disconnected husband listening to his wife--

Scarlet said much more, and while he had not listened closely, he had got the gist.

--smacks of Wodehouse, whose characters, distracted, apprehend the world largely as a gestalt rather than a concatenation of specific details.

Then there's the borderline criminality of so many of Ellis's characters, and the sense that even murder is a problem only to the extent that it will out. Wodehouse's characters would never stoop to murder, of course--blithe violence being much more the territory of Compton-Burnett's family jealousies--but they do fret an awful lot about the depredations of the long arm of the law. Read the following passage from Pillars of Gold and imagine that Constance is a Wodehouseian aunt--in the brash, Aunt Agatha mold:

"It's not your fault," said Constance. "If you was anyone else, I'd say, get divorced, but you did that once and then you went and got married again. You can't help yourself. It's your destiny--all writ up in your stars. You could kill him, I suppose, but you've got to remember this: if you do, what you have to do next is ruffle up your hair and mess up your garments and appear howling and all distressed at your local nick, saying you don't know what came over you. On no account look out your passport and make for the airport because they'll catch you in customs and the judge will be cross and tell you you're a calculating murderess and give you twenty years. If you follow course one, you'll get off with a caution or three month's community work. That's today's Helpful Home Hint."

And to think I've got another ten books to read!

Alice Thomas Ellis, Penelope Fitzgerald, and more

In the comments to my recent post on Alice Thomas Ellis, reader zmkc left a link to a post she'd written about Ellis's husband, Colin Haycraft, an editor who was at least in part responsible for shepherding not only Ellis, but also Penelope Fitzgerald and Beryl Bainbridge into print.

If you enjoy any of those writers, zmkc's post is well worth checking out. Along with some delicious quotations from one of Ellis's novels, she also reflects on the pleasures afforded by the brevity of the work of all three women:

As well as providing us with the pleasure of Bainbridge, Fitzgerald and Ellis's writing, Haycraft also argued in defence of the short novel (apparently, he wrote something called 'a satire' on the subject for the Times Literary Supplement, but, as it was well before the advent of the internet, I can find no trace of it). I support that view, not because I don't enjoy Dickens or George Eliot or Tolstoy, but because I think the lengthy novels that are published nowadays are rarely up to the standard of their predecessors. Nowadays they are often really just sloppily edited - or completely unedited - short novels (there's a slim volume lurking inside every fat volume, or something like that).

Oh, and there's a bonus of some A. N. Wilson-bashing, a pastime I always enjoy. Much as I appreciate his biography of Tolstoy and his book on the Victorians, I feel he's still got a ways to go before he's fully paid out for the jaw-dropping mean-spirited pettiness of his memoir of his friendship with Iris Murdoch and John Bayley.

As for Alice Thomas Ellis, I'm sure you'll be hearing more from me soon--I'm waiting impatiently for the Chicago Public Library to dig up copies of a couple more of her novels.

Alice Thomas Ellis

If work obligations weren't continuing to take up just enough of my time and brainspace to keep me from being able to form coherent thoughts about other books, I'd have a proper post for you today on Alice Thomas Ellis's wonderfully strange novel The 27th Kingdom (1982). I read it on the recommendation of Gregory Wolfe, who praised Ellis in response to a request from the New York Times for suggestions from readers for good religious fiction. Wolfe described Ellis as "like Muriel Spark but darker!", to which I'd add, "like Barbara Pym, but darker," and "like Waugh, but less misanthropic," and "like Ivy Compton-Burnett, but with a soul."

The 27th Kingdom is funny and clever, its sentences a careful blend of everyday flatness and matter-of-fact lunacy that is almost exactly what I'm looking for in comic writing and satire. Ellis, of whom I'd somehow never heard before, wrote thirteen novels, and if the others are anywhere near as good as this one, you're going to have to hear me championing her a lot in the months to come.

Tonight, however, I'll just share a particularly entertaining passage. I'm quoting at greater length than usual here because the humor of the passage develops so well and along such unexpected paths that it seems wrong to cut it short. The novel focuses on Aunt Irene, who runs an ill-defined not-quite boarding house where her nephew, Kyril, also lives. In this passage, they're chatting about evolution with Victor, a local who frequently stops by to unload some of the antiques and valuables that his sketchy family "recovers" from "abandoned" buildings:

"It's extremely difficult to explain," said Aunt Irene rather pompously, for she knew that if she actually udnerstood this theory it would be easier to propagate. The fact that she didn't believe a word of it herself was irrelevant at the moment. She wanted to convince and educate Victor and wipe that naughty look of amused and superior contempt off his face. It was suitable, she thought, for persons of her background and education to dismiss as potty as many theories as they liked, but it was very annoying when the unlettered did it.

Aunt Irene really inclined to that simplest of all views: the one expressed so cogently in the book of Genesis, which explained everything with appealing clarity. This was the only view that explained, for instance, mayonnaise. It was patently absurd to suppose that mayonnaise had come about through random chance, that anyone could ever have been silly or brilliant enough to predict what would happen if he slowly trickled oil on to egg yolks and then gone ahead and tried it. An angel must have divulged that recipe and then explained what to do with the left-over white. Meringues--there was another instance of the exercise of superhuman intelligence. To Aunt Irene the Ten Commandments seemed almost insignificant compared with the astonishing miracle of what you could do with an egg. As the angel had left in his fiery chariot he must have added, "And don't forget omelettes, and cake and custard and souffles and poaching and frying and boiling and baking. Oh, and they'r frightfully good with anchovies. And you can use the shells to clarify soup--and don't forget to dig them in round the roots of your roses," the angelic tones fading into the ethereal distance.

It was obvious therefore that the egg had come first. There was something dignified about a silent passive egg, whereas Aunt Irene found it difficult to envisage an angel bearing a hen--which, despite its undoubted merits, was a foolish and largely intractable bird. The concatenation of chickens' wings and angels' wings would have had about it an element of parody which would have greatly lessened the impact of the message.

There must have been three eggs, thought Aunt Irene, going into details. One to eat then and there, and two to hatch--a boy and a girl. It was quite possible to hatch an egg in a human arm-pit--it had been proved on various American campuses and went with swallowing live goldfish and putting ferrets in your trousers.

"Why are you looking like that?" asked Kyril.

"I was wondering why people put ferrets in their trousers," said Aunt Irene.

"Thanatos," said Kyril. "An illustration of the death wish."

"What I wish," said Aunt Irene, "is that you'd never read Freud. It's had a very leaden effect on your conversation."

Reading that, can you possibly not want to seek out the book and read the rest?