The Well of Saint Clare by Anatole France (1895)

Sometimes France seems to be treading water. The first part of this book is fairly inoffensive and not particularly stirring. Most of these stories and sketches have a commonality in the Franciscan. These emanations from the author's antiquarian side, very well established in his early career, seem somehow to lack a little in the way of compulsion, though that may be my mood talking. They detail moral lessons learned or delivered by wandering monks, often quite eccentric fellows, or they are so purely spiritually aware that the worldly ones around them regard them as such. A couple deal with interactions with Lucifer as fallen angel and subtle doctor, and detail France's relatively enlightened approach to necessary unities between the great dark and the great light; organised modern religion and paganism. A couple of things in this collection are different - one a memorable retelling of the story of Maria d'Avalos, a late middle ages Neapolitan married to a harsh prince, who takes a lover. She and the Duke d'Andria have splendid trysts while her goatlike husband is off shooting and carousing, but they become spoken of round about. The prince hears these rumours, sets a trap, and they are soundly caught. The bloodiness of the time is fulfilled in a welter of stabbing and streaming red, and he leaves their bodies near the front door of the palace for the community to gawp at and learn their lesson. Another sketch deals with Napoleon stopping off in Italy mid-campaign to stay in the house of a Florentine distant relative, becoming importuned by him to assist in the belated canonisation of an ancestor. These pieces have interest, but perhaps not quite enough essentiality to truly whet the appetite.

Commonplace Book

'Now it is well known among novelists that novelists, like women of easy virtue, are utterly without scruple in their use of eyes. Novels in which the principal characters use their eyes to see with are exceedingly rare and are considered to be advanced, unpleasant, and on a doubtful plane of morality. The skilful novelist with a civilized regard for money can, on the other hand, do the deuce of a lot with a pair of blue eyes. Brown eyes can, of course, be used to express fidelity or pique, grey (rare) for modesty, while black eyes are in vogue for foreigners and pronounced cases of sex-repression. But a heroine's eyes should preferably be blue, since that colour lends itself to suitable treatment, inviting easy and moving comparisons with sea, sky, and fountain-pen ink...'

from Nettles in Arcady, in piece in Babes in the Wood by Michael Arlen

Commonplace Book

'...Well, he would soon have the nonsense knocked out of him. People said it was a good thing for a young fellow. "Being bullied at school did my son no harm," people said.

It was a good thing, was it, to have the nonsense knocked out of you? Was it, by God! It was a damned unholy thing. That way, the earth-bound way, lay mortal peril for the soul. Was it nonsense to dream of a better world, to live for a better world...'

from The "Lost Generation", a piece in Babes in the Wood by Michael Arlen

Commonplace Book

'Maybe Hemingway was nothing but a snob at bottom. Well, maybe. But what a daft word that is, "snob," scratching at no more than the surface of the desires that move men and women to desperate humiliations. "He's a snob, she's a snob, they're snobs" - everyone goes round squealing forever, frothing at the mouth with the fruity word, snob, snob, snob - and actually it describes nothing, it describes nobody. But it's a nice fruity word, all the same.'

from The "Lost Generation", a piece in Babes in the Wood by Michael Arlen

Testostero by David Foster (1987)

This crystallised a few things for me. This one is based on the twinned ideas of heredity and identity, with a whole superstructure of other satirical stuff hanging ganglingly off them. It is this quality of being a 'novel of ideas' which finally made itself fully felt - no idea why it took so long, apart from the obvious one of dimness! I looked back over Foster's career to date, and how different he was, especially from ultra-current notions of what constitutes good writing, and had the schlock realisation that I was venturing through the works of a novelist of ideas, in a period when that notion was highly questionable, in fact almost forgotten. It had occurred before, but not truly crystallised, and its contrast to 'creative writing school'-ism and lush descriptivism was accentuated. The idea also made itself felt visually. These books, from North South West in 1973 right through to this one fourteen years later, should not have been produced in their gaudy, colourful Macmillan and Penguin covers. What they needed was the 60s to 80s New Directions treatment - austere black and white covers like those that company gave to writers like John Hawkes and Raymond Queneau, with collagey or single magazine-cutout illustrations. Far from pigeonholing Foster, I think they'd have released him in many ways. The problem is also of course one of countered expectation - could Australia produce a novelist of that kind? Foster is proof that it could. Other than this shroud of painfully gained perspective, the story here is the same old thing. Revelling in his mindpower, and its capacity to mount idea upon idea, refracting them through one another, and have humour lace through the vertical and horizontal network. Irritation with what I can only describe as an overly indulgent attitude to Australianness - the belief that somehow the 'ocker'-ism, that he is no doubt satirising in part, also has some kind of mystical cut-through which lays waste all the silly puffed-upness of Europe and the old world. Though as the meat of this one is digested, that idea thankfully drops away quite a bit. It's the story of twins separated at birth by a dodgy psychologist wanting to study their differing development or not via nurture. One stays in Britain and becomes a cheerful gay aesthete professionally involved in daddy's psychological discipline. The other gets shipped to Sydney, to a job at the local pool at Marrickville, prevailing John Clarke-esque ockerism and an odd little bit of poetry on the side. This poetry gets him a visit to Venice on a Commonwealth Writer's Grant, where he encounters the astounding old world, stinky canals, dodgy officials and mafioso everywhere, and his brother, as yet unknown. Then follows endless permutation of identity (mistaken and otherwise), sex, politics, cultural satire - like a Bazza McKenzie odyssey updated to these terms. Interestingly, it ends with the slightly ludicrous (not that everyone isn't, of course) cultured English brother as an influential art critic in Sydney, which makes Robert Hughes come to mind. He always seemed to me to offer more than he delivered - I wonder if the satire of this is meant to the same end? The journey does get in the end so overlapped and underhinged that it almost falls into smithereens; the swaps, reswaps, upswaps and downswaps bundling through one another in chugging permutation. Yet another example of this author's supreme mental alacrity and resource, meshed into a design which veers dangerously close to collapsing, and still manages to cause the now expected niggle en route.