The Snow Ball by Brigid Brophy (Faber)

 

No appreciation of Brigid Brophy’s fiction could be complete without reference to her passionate regard for Mozart and how she placed him in the all-time pantheon of creative artists. (This was right at the top, ‘on the very pinnacle of Parnassus’ alongside Shakespeare, as she made clear in her 1964 study Mozart the Dramatist.)

Mozart is a presiding spirit through all of Brophy’s novels, but arguably the one that is most thoroughly infused is The Snow Ball (1964), a work that consummately melds Brophy’s deep interests in myth, opera, sexuality and psychoanalysis. Its heroine Anna admits freely to a troika of obsessions: ‘Mozart, sex, and death.’ The Freudian opposites of eros and thanatos, which Brophy considered in her non-fictional Black Ship to Hell (1962), are also shadowy guests in the wings of The Snow Ball.

The novel takes for an epigraph Brophy’s own note from Mozart the Dramatist concerning the age-old critical interest in the question of ‘whether, when the opera opens, Don Giovanni has just seduced or has just failed to seduce Donna Anna.’ In The Snow Ball ‘Did she or didn’t she?’ is turned around to ‘Will she or won’t she?’ as Brophy, with a dextrous touch and allusive skill, brings Mozart’s age into our own.

The setting is ideal for the purpose: an eighteenth-century-themed costume ball on New Year’s Eve, in a London residence so grand as to house a ballroom, home to wealthy Tom and his wife, four-times-married Anne. Anna attends alone, dressed as Donna Anna, unhappily preoccupied by her middle years and what they mean for her good looks, as well as by a general distaste for the occasion. (‘If one wants to forget one’s age’, she will lament, ‘new year’s eve is the wrong eve to start.’)

Like Brigid Brophy, Anna has a highly developed aesthetic sense, and to her keen eye no-one at this ball looks quite right: too many cut-price Casanovas and third-rate Marie Antoinettes. Anna is of the view that people come to fancy-dress balls as their daydreams, and she is pained by the paucity of imagination on display. Yet the judgement she passes on others could be one from which she is willing to exempt herself.

At least one guest at the ball is wearing a mask; and this element of the bal masque makes the vital bridge for the novel into a Mozartian world – the masquerade being, as critic Terry Castle has put it, ‘part of the eighteenth century of the imagination, which in the end is the only one we have.’ A masked ball is usually a subversive occasion, one where feckless acts may suddenly be permitted, and the world turned upside down if only for a night – including the balance of power between men and women, as it is affected by sexual attraction and consenting sexual intercourse.

So, when at midnight Anna meets a masked Don who kisses her on the mouth – ‘not socially, but on the lips, gently and erotically, then with a voluptuous fluttering, and at last with a violent and passionate exploration’ – she is moved to wonder if this mystery man might share her personal obsessions, and whether a closer union is meant to be.

First, though, as if feeling eighteenth-century mores pressing upon her, Anna flees from her suitor, seeking refuge in the sumptuous boudoir of her friend and hostess Anne. It is white ‘like peppermint creams’, done in a style Anna thinks of as ‘tart’s rococo’. There she and Anne share affectionate, barbed gossip and confidences – the reader conscious all the while of a current of erotic tension that will drive the novel toward its finale. 

Anna’s dilemma, though the core of The Snow Ball, is complemented by side-plots. Her kiss with the Don has been observed by Ruth Blumenbaum, teenage daughter of another old friend: Ruth is a precocious diarist who has come to the ball dressed as Cherubino, squired by her disagreeable beau Edward (Casanova). The fitful struggle toward intimacy of these two youths makes for a counter-theme in the novel, as does the slightly unsightly but undeniably contented marriage of Anne and Tom (or ‘Tom-Tom’ and ‘Tum-Tum’, as they call one another in confidence.)

In these parallel amours Brophy makes fine use of her gift for describing human carnality. One evocation, from the female perspective, of what the French call ‘la petite mort’ was thought rather scandalous by readers in 1964, perhaps chiefly because Brophy was a woman and wrote so superbly. And yet Brophy never lets us forget that, however well fitted the partners in this dance, its aftermath can lead nonetheless to thoughts of an entirely different nature. Or to paraphrase Plautus – whom Brophy takes as her other epigraph – even in the midst of the most diverting activities Death may creep up upon us.

This is another tension that persists to the last page of The Snow Ball, where the curtain drops on what is arguably Brigid Brophy's most brilliant fictional performance.

George Steiner, 1929-2020

 © National Portrait Gallery, London

1. In my teens George Steiner was on the telly a fair bit, talking about really great writers and themes in history; and I mean scheduled shows on BBC2 and Channel 4 (who had him as a pundit when they broadcast live coverage of the bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution in 1989.) Having Steiner talk at one through the television made a big impression on a boy who hadn’t grown up with many significant literary works lying around the house.

2. It was on one Channel 4 book-show (about the life and work of Kafka) where Steiner proposed that Kafka was the only great author (i.e. besting even Dante or Shakespeare) who could be thought to ‘have made his own a letter of the alphabet’ – which is such a sharp and charming apercu.

3. I will also never forget hearing Steiner describe the true function of the critic as that of a postman: one who knows precisely where to deliver the missives of men & women of letters. (As I recall, he attributes this image to Pushkin?)

4. Understandably, a great many literary critics rate themselves in the mirror as major wordsmiths, and Steiner no doubt had a sound ego; but he also served a warning here: ‘Cruelly, perhaps’, he wrote in Real Presences (1989), ‘it does seem to be the case that aesthetic criticism is worth having only, or principally, where it is of a mastery of answering form comparable to its object.’

5. Subsequent to hearing the news of Steiner’s death last week I saw a piece from 1996 in Prospect, by James Wood, heavily and rather showily (i.e. ‘hatchet’-like) criticising Steiner’s rigour and high-flown manner, and the windiness of certain propositions, especially Steiner’s insistence on the aspiration to transcendence in great art. Wood thought a writer couldn’t seriously argue this without religious belief of their own, vested in a specific form of faith. 'All great writing,' Steiner insisted, 'springs from le dur desir de durer, the harsh contrivance of spirit against death, the hope to overreach time by force of creation.' Personally I think the hope is sufficient – the belief that the human spirit points us to the possibility, still, of something more than our mortal consciousness. I don’t believe, but most of my favourite art is religious art of a sort.

6. Wood and others mark Steiner down as something of a conservative figure from the 1960s, a button-down among longhairs and so forth. Maybe accurate when viewed from a generational lens, but Steiner certainly wasn’t shocked by or immune to strains of new and daring thought – he just took a view on them as phenomena. His two 1960s-era essays on sexual explicitness in fiction, 'Night Words' and 'Eros and Idiom', I would happily teach today, and I don’t feel the same about a lot of celebrated and f*ck-laden fictions of that era and subsequent.

7. Steiner was quite modest about the few fictions he published, but The Portage to San Christobal of A.H. is a remarkable dramatic-philosophical piece, potent enough for Christopher Hampton to make a play out of it.

8. Like many writers who teach writing, I find it useful to refer to the published and unexpurgated versions of the stories of Raymond Carver, before and after Gordon Lish got to them. They’re a good test of the worth of the sort of literary minimalism which has been critically valorised for all the years that I’ve been reading and writing. Minimalism has its pros and cons, and Steiner was very good on the cons, remarking a few years back that writing "seems to me too often, in this country, at the moment, a minimalist art. Very, very non-risk-taking. Very tight – often admirably, technically. But finally one thinks of the nasty taunt of Roy Campbell, the South African rightwing poet: I see your bridle, where's the bloody horse?"

9. Steiner had a bit of a snub from Cambridge in his early academic career, and believed, if I have it right, that his foreignness made him a bit of a figure of suspicion in the circles where he’d hoped to practise. He certainly fired some bullets in the direction of Cambridge’s circular culture when in 1980 he wrote of Anthony Blunt as ‘The Cleric of Treason.’

10. I was only in the same room as Steiner once, 1998, I think, when the London Review of Books and New Left Review jointly hosted a sort of symposium on Israel/Palestine given by Edward Said. Steiner made some comments from the floor, more in sorrow than anger over things, noting how long he and Said had been writing in the field. Afterward there were drinks in the low-ceiling basement bar of a Bloomsbury hostelry, an unseemly buy-your-own crush with crazy-loud music, and I remember watching Steiner pass alone amid the throng, en route – or so I was hoping, for his sake – to the exit. As a sodality it was hopeless; but still he wore the small, curious smile of this that I’d got used to seeing on the telly.