Reticence
Francis King
I n literature, the fashionably dangerous
subject of the Georgian era was incest, of the Victorian, fornication, and of the first half of the 20th century, homosexuality. It now seems as if it were the turn of incest once more. (Even that once staid periodical Woman's Journal carries an article this month with the title 'Incest, the Last Taboo'.) Soon after the war the theme was introduced in a novel, Madame Solaria, which, surprisingly, became a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic. No doubt because of its then 'shocking' subject" matter, the elderly author, Gladys Hun- tingdon, was persuaded by her American publisher husband to adopt the title of her book as her pseudonym. Others speedily followed her lead, with less equivocation and evasion.
Jacqueline Simms's odd, haunting first novel, Unsolicited Gifts, is about two kinds of incest: between siblings and between parent and child. Michael and Fleur, descended on one side of the family from European stock (like much else in the book, the precise nationality — German? — is left to be inferred), enter into a childhood 'mar- riage' in order to secure to themselves alone the ancestral possessions still lodged with their grandmother. But behind this con- scious desire to safeguard a material in- heritance one senses the unconscious desire to safeguard an inheritance of genes. Their game of being husband and wife becomes
suddenly dangerous when puberty forces on to them a less innocent reality. Fleur returns to school convinced that she is pregnant. Michael, equally gifted in music and science, has been experimenting in the deserted laboratory of his dead grand- father, a chemist of note. He decides to repeat one of his grandfather's experiments in miniature but, botching it, blows up the laboratory and so becomes the murderer (as he sees it) of his sister, who perishes in the explosion. Years later another repetition of an experiment, that of incestuous love, br- ings about another explosion, albeit emo- tional and not physical, when, married to a Japanese musician and writer of children's stories, Michael acquiesces in his seduction by their pubescent daughter. His wife, sup- posedly abroad, bursts in on the two when they are in bed together — a happening, fortunately for many people, more com- mon in fiction than in life — and, horrified and disgusted, removes both herself and the child from his orbit. It is she who, in her share of a narration split up between brother, sister, wife and daughter, enun- ciates the theme of the novel: 'The past will not leave us alone to make our lives as we long to.'
Subsequently, the daughter grows up, Passes through a series of emotional crises, starts to lay the foundations of her career as a concert pianist, acquires a composer lover, and loses her obsession with her father. In turn, her father manages to strug- gle hack from the perilous ocean to which the breakers of the past have hurled him and once again settles down in the shallows of life with the Japanese. 'I turned back to Kiyoko, whose hand I still held,' run the final words.
At first, this author gives the impression of not being sure. of what she is doing. Like some nervous art-student under the scrutiny of her teacher, she dashes paint on to now this and now that area of her canvas, as though haphazard. But as Michael jumps about from an account of his grandmother's house to an account of her ancestry, from a china-frog given to him as a short-lived gift to the Louis Quinze desk on which Cosinia Wagner left her letter of farewell to Hans Von Billow, and from references to chemistry to discussion of the Performance of ancient music, one slowly realises with what artistry a whole family history is being evoked. Similarly, the swit- ching from narrator to narrator — Michael is succeeded by Fleur, represented by her `Memoirs of Miss Fleur', and later by his wife and his daughter — is full of cunning, however distracting and irritating it may at first seem. At one point, the novel even contains a fairy-story, in which the boy hero has to make the choice, familiar to every novelist, between 'to see' and 'to be'.
Certain things, like the symbolism of the china frog first given to Michael by his grandmother and then confiscated by her because of some trivial misdemeanour, simply do not come off. Others, like Michael's veerings between the two careers of music and physics — the author herself
seems to be at home in both worlds — come off remarkably well. Timeo Danaos et dona. ferentes . . . The gifts bestowed on a man, whether by the Gods in the form of talents or by humans in the form of love, have as much potential for destruction and misery as for creation and happiness.
I have never read anything else by Jac- queline Simms — and indeed there were many times when, reading this novel, I was all but convinced by its tone that it must be the work of a man. Though so short (151 pages), it encompasses four generations with ease; and though so reticent, it is in- tensely charged with sexual passion, grief and remorse. A remarkable beginning.
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