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.

Nicolas Roeg 1928-2018: all of a time

‘When I was 12 years old,’ Nicolas Roeg said once - or maybe more than once? - ‘my father said the most extraordinary thing to me. “The day you’re born is your only chance to really have tomorrow, because by the day after you’ve got yesterday.” At the time it completely confused me, but gradually it began to make a little sense…’

Saying this to my tape-recorder, as it happened, Nic looked rather wry: however sad the sentiment, he surely knew that it constituted a little statement on the major theme of his art. For if cinema is – as art schools define it – a ‘time-based medium’, then he ranked high among those filmmakers who have articulated and poeticized our sense that time is really in the eye of the beholder. In Nic’s work the past, present and future seem to co-exist in the same fleeting instant.

Nic (who died yesterday, aged 90) was – is – a filmmaker’s filmmaker, in the sense that you’re better to measure his brilliance by the influence he exerted than on his box-office takings. He was so original and questing in his work that directors were bound to follow him, and to pay him that great tribute (hommage!) of stealing from his store of magic.

It’s analogous to how the best writing on Hitchcock is Hitchcock’s famous set of dialogues with Truffaut, and the best critical response to his Vertigo is the number of loving emulations of that movie by other filmmakers, rather than the stacks of academic monographs rehashing ‘reception theory.’ Nic’s personal testament, The World is Ever Changing, published by Walter Donohue at Faber in 2013, is the best thing you can read about him.

It might have been better for Nic’s career if all such debts had been repaid him in cash, but he always seemed – how should we say? – philosophical about it. The first time I talked to him at any length he remembered an early pre-release screening of The Man Who Fell to Earth after which his producer Michael Deeley enthused to him that, however the film might fare commercially, his peers would be ripping him off in no time.

I remember the day of that discussion really well. Finding his address in Notting Hill, just a few streets away from Powis Square. Climbing the stairs to his study, passing the framed Hockney Polaroid-collage of Theresa Russell as Marilyn Monroe, custom-made for Insignificance. The study itself, dressed from corner to corner with piles of books and objets d’art. I remember every encounter I count myself lucky to have had with a man who I basically hero-worshipped from boyhood.

The first being-in-the-same-room magic - round about now, only 33 years ago - involved my getting his autograph after a screening of Insignificance and a Q&A at the Queen's Film Theatre, Belfast. Theresa Russell was at his side; and had Jesus Christ chosen Belfast that night as the site of his Second Coming I really couldn't have been more impressed

In March 2009 BAFTA hosted a tribute evening to Nic as a means of bestowing their Fellowship upon him, and the banner they chose was 'The Magician With A Movie Camera.' BAFTA has a reel of highlights here. Danny Boyle and Duncan Kenworthy curated the evening and enlisted a great array of speakers, which I, by an immense stroke of good luck, was invited to join - to speak, I thought, on behalf of the fans in the stalls. So it was a very special and memorable evening - for the honouree, I’m sure, and for all attendees, I hope. Certainly for me.

Nic was – is – as brilliant a filmmaker as Britain has ever produced, the golden era of his work (roughly the 20 years from 1966-1985) standing comparison to the best of anybody else's ever. It’s true that many fans rated the later work less glowingly, and I think that disappointed Nic, as it would any artist. ‘It began to annoy Welles,’ he told me. ‘The Magnificent Ambersons is a huge movie, but all people would say of it was that it wasn’t Citizen Kane.’

Anyone who ever 'interviewed' Nic had a similar sort of experience: you didn’t quiz him, you just listened, and tried to follow his associative leaps. John Huston, very different but also a bit of a magician, seemed to crop up in his conversation a fair bit; Nic especially liked to use Huston’s analogy of making movies as:

‘rather like being the mayor of a mining town – everybody’s working long days to the same end, there’s fun to be had. Then the mine closes, the population leaves, the town is deserted and the director is the last person left. Huston said, ‘Taken all in all it’s a rather melancholy affair.’ It is a loss, curiously, the end of a film – because your life has been in it. Your personal life is put aside. It’s a cliché but the films are like children. I don’t have a favourite, they’re all of a time and that time has gone by.’

He was quite enthralled by the i-Phone and ever-evolving possibilities of image capture, while being truly perplexed by the extent to which people persisted in putting movies together by the same old ways. ‘The weird thing,’ I recall him musing, ‘is that one’s grandchildren will say, ‘I don’t get it, what is a ‘film’? Why was it ever called ‘film’?’ You can start explaining about celluloid and light and they’ll say, ‘Oh…’’ 

Already I’ve had such conversations with my children – time's like that – but Nic’s films are going to endure. The pictures he made were just so strong and vivid and irreducibly part of him, right up to the point where they crossed over and became part of us.

Aickman at the British Library: A Symposium

Our panel of 6, plus the 7th who moved unseen among us. (Photo: Chris Power)

Our Aickman evening at the British Library was, I believe, something of a success. At least, I like to imagine the man himself was with us in spirit, wearing the smile that a ghost would wear while we sang his praises. To be a ‘neglected’, ‘cult’ author is of course to be a bit of a phantomic presence, a perpetual ghost at the feast of English letters, maybe doomed to walk the earth forever unwelcomed. But Aickman is now a kind of fixture in the nation’s great library, and that’s not nothing, as they say in showbiz.

We tried to summon him right from the start of the night by playing a small audio clip of him reading, very characteristically, from ‘Bind Your Hair.’ (In a letter to Ramsey Campbell of June 1978, now lodged in the BL archive, Aickman writes: ‘I always read each story aloud to a [certain] selected person... There is nothing like reading aloud for the tidying up of stylistic shortcomings.’)

Then Ramsey himself spoke, reading from the memoir The Attempted Rescue in which Aickman praises the mountain-film era Leni Riefenstahl at vivid length and makes a tortuously felt effort to exonerate Riefenstahl of her later closeness to the Nazis. It was an astute way for Ramsey to open a window on Aickman’s unbending opinions – mostly of an artistic nature, some of them expressed in political conservatism. He was – to put it mildly, though it was put so on several occasions during our evening – a man out of time, who felt himself born in the wrong age.

Reece Shearsmith’s reading from ‘The Hospice’ could have lasted all night, such was the pleasure it stirred; and Jeremy Dyson’s turn with ‘Wood’, a superb if less-celebrated story replete with a secluded village and some sinister corn dollies, showed very well why The League of Gentlemen, as well as the contemporary turns both in English nature writing and supernatural writing, are really rather Aickman-esque.

In the end I had to ask the panel: here is a superb writer, a writer’s writer, writing (whether he disdained it or not) in one of the world’s most popular genres – why, then, is he still not better known? One reason, perhaps, is now to be found in the BL archive: a letter to a literary agent in which Aickman distinguishes between ‘entertainers’ who ‘write for a specific market’ and ‘artists’ who ‘write in response to a voice inside them.’ Aickman refused to sell out, whether or not anyone was buying. His friend Jean Richardson told me that he steadfastly refused to inject his stories with ‘more subtle sadism’ of a sort that might have served to ring the mainstream bell. No tears, then – for Aickman did what he wanted to do, and the outcomes earned him undying respect, that elusive immortality that many an artist will dream of.

Robert Aickman at the British Library 10.11.2017

Aickman photographed by Jean Richardson

Is Robert Aickman the twentieth century’s ‘most profound writer of what we call horror stories and he, with greater accuracy, preferred to call strange stories’? That was the view of Peter Straub, celebrated author of Ghost Story among others. I think ‘most profound’ is perfectly justifiable even before we get to considerations of style, which in the case of Aickman are considerable. The work is pregnant with unease, melancholia and dread – perfect, then, for this time of year, and also for any other.

Possibly Aickman is one of those writers who will never get his due, doomed to a purgatory of perpetual ‘rediscovery’; but the rediscoveries keep getting bigger. The British Library has now acquired and catalogued his archive, and there will be an event at the Library this Friday, hosted by your correspondent, to mark the occasion and celebrate the man and his work.

To speak of only one treasure in that archive: the Library now holds the manuscript of Aickman’s only unpublished novel, ‘Go Back at Once’ (1975); and that title is so marvellous and so very Aickman that I’m not sure I’d even want to read the work, such is my pleasure in just knowing that it exists.

Extract from The Knives on the Faber site

Over on Faber's website you can read this extract taken from the prologue of The Knives. It finds the protagonist David Blaylock circa 1993 as a young platoon commander in the British Army's share of support for the UN peacekeeping effort - or 'Protection Force'/UNPROFOR - during the Bosnian War.

If your subject is moral quagmires in politics, and mine surely was, then this was an obvious place in our recent European history at which to begin. How was anyone meant to keep peace in Bosnia in 1993 while the territory was being assailed under a preconceived agreement between the assailants (and supposed rivals), Tudjman's Croatia and Milosevic's Serbia, against whom UNPROFOR were not permitted to raise a hand in reproach?

It was hardly surprising that the Muslim population of Bosnia felt a dire need for military assistance in the shape of 'irregulars' - though the shape these volunteer fighters took, as dramatised in the extract, had a grim aspect all of its own.

Getting Started at the Faber Academy: January-April 2017

Pleasure to report, I will be sitting in as guest tutor for the Faber Academy's writing course in Getting Started: Beginners' Fiction, running on Tuesdays from January 24 to April 11 2017. The course is intended to be both playful and serious, an enquiry into what writing is and why we do it. Among the topics I will be exploring with the students are:

•  What makes fiction worth our while?
• How do you develop and shape an idea?
• What does it mean to write about what you know?
• What makes a reader care?

 As of this morning I believe there's still one place available on the course. It could be you?

This NZ Life: The Knives "will have you hooked"

My new favourite magazine is the New Zealand-based This NZ Life, which ran a lovely write-up of The Knives the other week. I can only assume the reviewer, Miranda Spary, took the trouble to position, light and shoot the image of the product, seen right, that accompanies the text. Terrific, at any rate. These are the words I savoured, of course:

'The magic of this read is the richness of its characters – they’re all so alive, cleverly portrayed with an accuracy that calls to mind the drama enacted in real-life Britain lately. The book has been a massive hit in the UK, and whether you’re interested in politics or not, its mysteries will have you hooked and keep you guessing to the very last page – you won’t see the ending coming.'

Church-Going & Book-Talking in Dulwich

Look right and there's Alan Johnson talking to me about his latest memoir The Long and Winding Road, at All Saints Church in Dulwich on the night of Thursday September 29. Churches are grand places to hold literary talks: the acoustics are tremendous, of course, but there's a tenor as well as a timbre that the location loans to you. Larkin put it most finely on why even the non-believer feels some instinctual piety upon crossing the threshold:

'Since someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious / And gravitating with it to this ground / Which he once heard was proper to grow wise in.'

Johnson's new book is as engaging and well observed as the first two, the difference being that it finds him in the tangle of thorns that is professional politics rather than the worlds of childhood and workaday employment that were the grist of This Boy and then Please Mr Postman. But obviously he and I had plenty to talk about; and on the side he could not have been kinder on the subject of how he was getting on with The Knives.