How to Be Both by Ali Smith (2014)

The clear first thing to say is that Smith had an epithet for me from page one, which stayed all through the reading of this. She is a natty writer. Meaning that she has a readiness in her, a chatty companionability which contrasts well her occasional stirring qualities, her learning and flexibility. It makes for entertainment. On the other side of the coin, the critical response to this is puzzling to say the least. Is her nattiness also dazzling, mazing, masking? This is two novellas or short novels, which are strongly linked. The first is a young adult piece about a girl / young woman coming to terms with the loss of her mother and dealing, ruefully, with her family (with whom she still lives as she completes her schooling) and with her sexuality. It retails, particularly, a journey which the whole family, including the artist mother before her death, took to Italy to take a look at a fresco. The effect of this painting rains down through all that follows, in its significance for the mother and for the daughter in remembering her. Now, for some reason this has been marketed and published as an adult piece. Not sure why, and I won't set it at Smith's feet - her publishers may have insisted. I think the easiest way to illustrate the issue is to consider a hypothetical: imagine a researcher buys you two gifts from a bookshop, one from the adult section and one from the young adult. They tear the covers and the preliminary pages from each book, and we'll assume they both have no running heads for identification purposes. So you're left with just the two texts and nothing else. Could you tell which one was the adult and which the young adult book? I know I could, and would venture that most intensive readers could do the same. This first novella overwhelmingly has that young adult feeling. Difficult to put it exactly into words, but let's try: a sense of more of the described; a sense of life's full toughness and poetry looming, but not yet fully engaged; a sense of resulting lesser gravitas - a 'staged' quality, for lack of better terminology. And a firm reminder - this is not because the central character is of young adult age. Plenty of adult novels have been written about young characters. This is rather an analysis of tone in the writing. I don't know what the lack of recognition of this signifies. I hesitate to be a doom-monger and say that we're losing our literary critical acuity. But I also hesitate to say that we are just freeing ourselves up, letting our literary hair down, and 'letting everything mingle', in some sort of inane can't-tell-one-thing-from-anotherness, which would be enough to make Edith Sitwell spit chips (appealing though that image might be!). For one thing, that difference, and the gravitas on the adult side of its equation, is something I value. Anyway, this first novella is very enjoyable, and Smith's nattiness and experimental flexibility make it a really strong contender for younger young adults; it discusses grief well, and has playfulness and a certain wiry philosophic strength. The second novella takes us back to somewhere near the Renaissance and the painter of the painting much discussed in the prior novella. This is a strange piece in some senses. Smith has had a decision to make, given what she appears to want. She wants, I think, to make the story readably accessible with modern language, which I guess is fair enough. She also wants to incorporate into it quite a measure of selective experimentation, so as to be able to manipulate the text in an interesting way. There is of course a trade-off for that - and it comes by way of verisimilitude. The further one strays from 'the real' as can be historically understood in those circumstances, the less power one has. The contrast is that the play in it has more flexible warps and wefts. So we get situations that feel "wrong": the painter as a child has problems of understanding, and 'his' (we later find out that actually it's 'her') parents sit down with him and explain in a kind of 70s almost-hippie-helpful kind of way, reminiscent of Oxford-Children's-Library-1973-with-illustrations-by-Victor-Ambrus. We get language and forms of association that are very now. We also get huge selectivity, where, for example, our artist is experimentally transported to our era and watches the girl from the first novella at a gallery, and out in the streets, noticing all sorts of little things about her and things connected with her, and utterly fails to either notice cars, noise, or TV, for example, or to be even slightly frightened by them or anything else in this world of extreme difference. This is not necessarily wrong, because Smith's character can do and see what she wants. But it makes for lesser semblance of reality, and results in the fact that therefore we are funnelled toward Smith's playfulness alone as the reason for being here, reading this, almost like we are being asked 'will you please not expect this to be a realistically created world; will you please just listen to these few things about it?'. This sounds fine, until one considers that an author not asking the reader that has left them free in their imagination, and they're still listening. It's almost like the task wasn't fully compassed by Smith - that experimentation became the cause of the truncator rather than the expander, as one might find for example in the works of Gil Orlovitz, or Penelope Shuttle, or Ann Quin, or.............but, that being said, apart from its being a little overlong, this is again touched by her nattiness. There is plenty here to savour, especially Smith's feeling for colour and prehensile tucking in of philosophic references and art-historical titbits. In the end, I wish this could have been published expressly for young adults, and, in its experiments and liveliness, really impressed them. I hope they find it, despite its adult mask.

Babes in the Wood by Michael Arlen (1929)

This consists of five novellas, and sits well within the usual Arlen remit. They show all the hallmarks: sardonic wit, nervous positivity of an urbane kind, the romance of the twenties, tragic staginess, all blended together with a special skill in piquant detail which makes for enjoyable reading. Confessions of a Naturalized Englishman takes the author as character into a romance with the bored, vivacious wife of a blood. She does not fix readily on anyone, rather appealing to their brightest parts in a superior way and then moving on. The author makes a date, almost against his own good judgment, to see her at the Carlton Grill and is stood up. When she turns up later at his measly Chelsea flat the angel of unhappiness has lighted on his shoulders, and she gets a frosty welcome. They end up as friends. A Girl with a Future has three men, a chivalrous young Frenchman, a young swarthy Spanish millionaire and a stylish English drunk, competing for the charms of a beautiful young American staying in the south of France with a fearfully fierce mother. Angling, suspicion, fellow-feeling, rumours of others and confusion play their part in a round of events where all of their felicities and failures come home to roost. Portrait of a Gentleman places a severe middle-aged Englishman within the grasp of a young, wealthy and beautiful Swedish widow. He is fascinated by her despite himself and gets caught up in jealousy and self-loathing at his own weakness. But, having asked her to marry him, she hesitates. She has realised exactly who he is and what her free ways would do to him. The "Lost Generation" places an English mining engineer in the way of a free spirited bohemian socialite. He is gripped by her, even though there is plenty of evidence that she's anything but pure. At her holiday house in the south of France, surrounded by young people, he fixes on a youthful English soldier, who looks a little sad, but seems upright. Then the strike hits as he realises that this 'dangerous' woman has the soldier in her sights as a conquest. He aggravatedly interposes in the affair at her bedroom door in the middle of the night, and disillusions the soldier even more, who leaves in disgust (of a sort). She forgives the Englishman amusedly, and everything fizzles out. Nettles in Arcady has a romantic young Frenchman fall for the belittled and squashed wife of an English bully. It is the first time a woman has appealed to him as other than a conquest; there is some powerful attraction in trying to save her from her tormentor. But what he doesn't realise is that she has accommodated her place in life and no longer really wants 'saving' - she just needs a friend. Of course, his passion spoils what they might have had. The bright colours and contrasting post-war cynicism here zing with the usual style and witty flow, making for reader involvement beyond that which the material might have commanded in other hands.

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.