Blank mirror
Francis King
And Never Said A Word Heinrich Boll Pecker £4.50) This, the third of Heinrich Boll's novels, was first published in Germany in 1953, under the title 'Und sagte kein einziges Wort', and in England in 1955, under the title 'Acquainted with the Night'. There has now been a change of translator from Richard Graves to Leila Vennewitz.
With And Never Said a Word Boll made what publishers call a breakthrough; but the very topicality that underpinned the initial success of the book now makes it a little shaky. To the present-day reader the Germany that Boll describes, with its drabness, poverty, lack of housing and ever-present bomb-damage, appears hardly less remote than the Britain of the imperial twilight of the Thirties.
Because of the war so recently ended, Fred and Kate Bogner have been obliged to live with their three children in a single room, bisected by a flimsy partition. They are chronically short of money and their neighbours are either rude or patronising to them. When the story opens, Fred has left family and room, sleeping out wherever he can. The daily misery of life has made him ill-treat the children and he is frightened of what he might ultimately do to them. He works as telephone operator in the local diocesan office (the city, though not named, would seem to be Cologne); and, when not so employed, he spends his time drinking, playing pinball machines, attending the funerals of strangers, tutoring children, scrounging money and meeting Kate in the bedrooms of seedy hotels for sex.
Fred and Kate alternate, chapter by chapter, as narrators, and it is necessary to accept the literary conventions that both speak in the same voice and that both show an eloquence that would in reality be bey ond them. Another literary convention, so often used in first-person narrative that is has by now become a cliché, as each in turn look into a mirror and describe what he/She sees there. Since each is in search of a spiritual identity and since each at some time or other is oppressed with a sense of non-existence, one almost expects that the mirror on each occasion will give back only a blank.
Leitmotiven have always abounded in Boll's novels and there are a number of them here. Repeatedly, for example, there is reference to the nauseatingly acrid smell of vegetables pickled in vinegar — symbol of his two main characters as objects preserved in a sour solution of poverty, fail ure and general desperation. Again, during the weekend covered by the book, there is a convention of druggists in the city, during which one or other of the narrators keeps seeing advertisements for contraceptives or reads the slogan 'You can trust your druggist'.
In contrast, there are many descriptions of the empty grandeur of Catholic processions through sombre and squalid streets and of ceremonies in dilapidated churches almost empty of worshippers. Neither science nor organised religion can do anything for the couple, with Kate heavy both with her sixth pregnancy and with hatred for her sanctimonious neighbours, one of whom is a pillar of the faith.
But though the book is as hostile to the Roman Church as the Church is to the feckless, hopless Bogners, it is finally by a kind of miracle that Fred decides that he must go home (the last words of the novel in German are `nach Hause). He takes this resolve when he unexpectedly catches a glimpse of his wife, going about her task, and fails at first to recognise her. His eyes are opened; at last he is seeing her — beautiful, shabby, despairing as she really is.
The great virtue of this novel is its extraordinary concentration. Whereas so many American novelists seem to write in the belief that you must always leave the audience calling for less, with Boll the exact reverse is true. In less than 200 pages, he has not only told the story of this climactic weekend in the lives of the Bogners but has also managed to convey all the tedium and horror of Fred's years as an unwilling soldier of the Reich and the tragedy of Kate's loss of two of her children. With no less economy he depicts the ghastly roominghouse; a snack-bar, to which, unknown to each other, husband and wife both gravitate, there to meet up with a mongol child who, intermittently, seems to experience moments of illumination beyond 'normal' people; and a whole city in which, out of a desert of ruined buildings and ruined lives, a new prosperity is beginning to blossom.
Despite his acceptance as a prophet and despite his Nobel Prize of 1972, B011 has always seemed to me to be an essentially minor writer, confusedly trying to put on the mantle of a major one; and this is an essentially minor novel. But it is, despite its defects, a work remarkable for its treatment of human suffering without either sentimentality or patronage. There is a wonderful moment when, listening at an open window to a jumble of Sunday sounds coming up from the street, Kate suddenly hears a Negro voice singing the spiritual from which the work takes its title ('They nailed him to the cross, nailed him to the cross . . and he never said a word') and perceives, however dimly, that her own humdrum crucifixion has something in common with Christ's.
Despite an occasional, disconcerting Americanism — as when a maid drags in one of Fred's reluctant pupils `by his suspenders' — Leila Vennewitz's translation reads extremely well. A middle-aged widow sets up a bookshoP a small town in Suffolk. The house j5 haunted by poltergeists. At first business 15 slow but it picks up when she orders 250 copies of Lolita. A General's wife wants the house for an Arts Centre and eventually, hY scheming and pressurising, gets it, and the widow leaves town humiliated. It sounds like nothing, but Penelope Fitzgerald has made it into a solid and satisfying piece Of human life, and is able to convince the reader that every action in it matters, how' ever small — the same consolation as can be found in Jane Austen, though the two writers are not alike. Over it, though not obtrty sively, rises a faint mist of parable: the town is Hardborough, the nearest rival town Flintmarket; Florence Green's riarne suggests hope and courage in taking on this stony ground; the villainess, Mrs Gamartt makes art look silly— 'How can the arts have a centre?' asks Mr Brundish, on Florence's side but ineffectual because he is a hermit; and she is also wily in the art of getting what she wants, though the author assures us that she did not directly suggest to her MP., nephew that he get the new Act passe which empowers the Council to buy up the house. The effect is not as Bunyanesque this might make it sound. The style is under' stated but exact, and the crystalline and amused observation of small country town people, speech, ways, animals and landscapes gives continuous pleasure, especiallY the 1950s bookshop interior, with the boY who comes in every day after school to read another chapter of I Flew with the Fuhret. Mr Brundish is a delight — unused to con" versation, he speaks his thoughts out loud, saying to Mrs Gamart 'You had better offer me something. The bitch cannot deny rne a glass of brandy,' and 'Either this woman is stupid, or she is malevolent'. Which is she? The only flaw in the book is Mrs Gamart's motivation. She sometimes stands for misguided do-gooders -'She did not know that morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct' — yet her macb. nations are surely immoral enough to have alerted even her. Her desire to be important is plausible; but would she have wanted an Arts Centre that much? And would it have made her important? And would the Oldl House have been such a good place for it. One is not absolutely sure why Deben's fish shop would not have done instead. Still, villains with poorly explained motives are not necessarily weak — think of Purcell witches who justify themselves with 'The Queen of Carthage, whom we hate/As We do all in prosperous state'. Mrs Green can get the better of the supernatural; the P°1 tergeists do not deter her because she knows how far they can go. Elsewhere human beings are divided into exterminators and exterminatees, and as an exterminator Mrs Gamart is kept properlY in the background and allowed to work. Margaret Powell's first novel is told by Jane, an exterminator who hogs the stage. i She marries, but not for love, ends up n love with an impotent man, and is so repulsive that it is difficult to sympathise. As the cardboard males come and go, and she rises through the suburbs, refining her accent and ruining everybody's lives, one longs for a sign that irony is intended or that the author is aware of the hollow depths beneath her shallowness; but the hard greedy voice never lets up. The blurb claims that her parents did not love her so she could not give love when she grew up. But nothing is made of this theme. Love for her IS simply a thumping heart and, with luck, a marvellous night'. Her own style, drab and full of clichés, is the only one through which We see events; people seethe with jealousy, are sick with longing, have harsh and unloved childhoods, collapse on settees like Plinctured balloons and fortify themselves With another glass of excellent sherry. Some novelists possess the opposite capacity from Penelope Fitzgerald's – they Produce a sneaking conclusion that no action described really matters, however momentous to the actors. Unfortunately I find this true of both Michele Roberts and Katharine Havekamp. Both novels dramatl_se the writer's own struggle to grow and nnd a way of living as a woman; in A Piece of the Night, to reconcile the selves of daughter, convent girl, wife and mother, and :witch, whore, madwoman, insatiable, lesbians; in Love Comes in Buckets, to survive a destructive addiction to laxatives ,and consequent long spells in hospitals and loony bins. Both heroines start to write near the end of the book as a step towards finding themselves. Their methods are different _ Roberts, all in the present tense, Intercutting scenes, concentratedly sem. sllous and desperate like Violette Leduc in E direct, Havekamp plainer the more mrect, brutally retailing every new bottle .of laxatives and how it was hidden. It is dif ficult read either book for pleasure, though there are pleasures, such as the Tiling similes Michele Roberts sometimes finds as she revisits the scenes of her French childhood: her feet crunch on the white gravel 'noisy as chewinesugared almonds at i a christening party'. Instead the reader s called on to be a sympathetic listener to a Particular chunk of reality. The feminist Philosophy implies that all this matters "Tell it happened to, me a woman; Tell rne about your past," Julie begins to The other women, and they to urge her. better Women sit in circles talking.' Perhaps .o_etter readers than this one might willingly ,u,e Press-ganged into a collective. But I can't help feeling that this philosophy is a prof).
Emma Fisher
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