This piece first appeared in the December 5, 1997 issue of Commonweal.
How many gimlet-eyed and razor-tongued English lady novelists can there be? Evidently an unlimited supply. I was vaguely aware of the name Hilary Mantel, but remained wholly innocent of her work until a friend urged her 1989 novel, Fludd (Penguin, 186 pp.), on me. It’s a magically atmospheric book set in England’s damp and gloomy north. Father Angwin, a sodden, grandiloquently grumpy parish priest who has misplaced his faith, takes center stage, at least initially. A wonderfully drawn little platoon of nuns, and the mysterious interventions of Fludd, Angwin’s new curate (or at least everyone takes Fludd to be the new curate), keep the reader guessing—about everything.
“The church in this story bears some but not much resemblance to the Roman Catholic church in the real world, c. 1956,” Mantel mischievously instructs her readers. After bantering viperishly with his trendy bishop, Angwin is ordered to clear up the unfashionable clutter of his church by chucking most of its plaster statues. In an obscure kind of defiance, Angwin buries the banished troupe of chipped and faded saints in the back yard of the rectory. Things then begin to happen.
Mantel doesn’t waste a word or a gesture. My delight with Fludd sent me to her 1995 novel An Experiment in Love (Henry Holt/Owl, $12, 250 pp.), an astringent coming-of-age tale. Carmel, the narrator/protagonist, is a bright and ambitious Catholic school girl from the north who ends up, along with two of her classmates, at university in London. It is 1970, the brave new age of the pill and legal abortion, and the novel follows the fitful progress of the three through the matter-of-factness of adolescent sex, and its not so matter-of-fact consequences. The narrative continually shifts from Carmel’s now chastened perspective, to her childhood memories, to the searing story of the girls’ university years. Mantel is a deft conjurer of mood and psychology as she captures the superficial intimacy of many college relationships, a knowingness that often conceals profound isolation and loneliness. Caught between the disappointments and bullying of parents, the utilitarian morality of university life, and the utter indifference of the larger world, adolescents naturally cling to one another. Sex and love are something the young imagine they can posses completely, only to discover that nothing as powerful as sex is so easily commanded. Mantel is masterly in showing how nothing touching on human desire is quite what it appears to be at first blush. This is an unnerving book, especially in the way it reveals how careless our treatment of each other can be when personal morality finds little resonance in the forces that order the larger world. Mantel’s A Change of Climate (Henry Holt/ Owl, $12, 321 pp.) is next on my list.
Like most people, I’ve put off reading Marcel Proust until retirement or until I’m condemned to a long prison sentence. Alain de Botton’s whimsical, wonderfully alert How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel (Pantheon, $19.95, 197 pp.) has nearly convinced me to alter my retirement plans and criminal habits. Botton, author of the novels The Romantic Movement and On Love, appears to be a preternaturally charming fellow. This clever book is a tribute to Proust’s singular attributes as a writer, an old-fashioned endorsement of Proust’s exquisitely calibrated moral sensibility, and a rumination on the sheer pleasure of reading. Botton makes nearly everything about Proust’s notoriously circumscribed life seem as rich and comprehensive as the Parisian’s prose style. Proust, of course, was a world-class hypochondriac, yet as Botton puts it, that affliction is best understood as but a symptom of the writer’s heightened appreciation of life. Too precious? I didn’t find it so. And Botton’s stories about Proust’s robust father and broth- er, the latter of whom walks away after being run over by a truck, and about Marcel’s attentiveness to his friends and generosity to strangers, especially waiters, fills this slight volume with a wealth of incident and detail.
Above all, Proust was a scrupulous writer and a compulsive rewriter. “Cliches are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface,” Botton explains Proust’s hatred of lazy writing. “And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it.” Just so.
If Botton reminds us that we ultimately possess experience only through an act of the imagination, Roger Shattuck’s Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (Harvest Books, $14.95, 370 pp.) offers a magisterial exploration of the relationship between imagination and the moral life. Shat- tuck’s indispensable book is a fair-minded defense of taboo and of the need to renounce certain kinds of experience and knowledge. This is not a call for censorship—Shattuck’s liberal credentials are unassailable—but rather for regulation where needed, as in the case of pornography, condemnation when deserved, and restraint always.
Much of Shattuck’s concern originates with his outrage over the recent literary and even moral elevation of the Marquis de Sade. Shattuck, a leading scholar of French literature, is at pains to alert the unsuspecting to how morally repugnant and dangerous Sade’s work is. Forbidden Knowledge presents a wide-ranging argument, making a case against, among other things, violent pornography, genetic engineering, and the dangers of empathy or compassion in assessing criminal culpability. But more important, Shattuck rehabilitates the intellectual case for self-denial as a spiritual and moral good. In brilliant readings of Emily Dickinson and the seventeenth-century novel La Princesse de Cleves, he recalls for us the “pleasures of abstinence.” “Integrity of feeling,” Shattuck suggests, is impossible without a capacity for asceticism. A balance must be struck between knowledge and restraint, between what arouses and satisfies desire and the cultivation of the very sources of desire itself. As Emily Dickinson construed that paradox: “A charm invests a face/Imperfectly beheld—/The Lady dare not lift her Veil/for fear it be dispelled….”
Forbidden Knowledge has important things to say about the need to approach all human understanding, even scientific understanding, with a full measure of humility. Without an acceptance of limits, a whole world of moral and aesthetic experience is lost to us.
