January 11, 2006
(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/incomingFeeds/article787331.ece)
Edward St
AubynÕs first three novels, Never Mind (1992), Bad News (1992) and Some Hope
(1994), tell the story of a young man trying to overcome his fatherÕs
destructive emotional legacy while seeing all too clearly that his readiest
weapons – detachment, wit, psychological insight – are inherited
from the tainted paternal hoard. To complicate matters further, the young man,
Patrick Melrose, grows up in a world of extreme poshness and wealth, which
gives him all kinds of opportunities for high-end self-destruction while making
questions of inheritance and the family legacy even more intractable. Never
Mind details a few days of PatrickÕs childhood and centres on a scene in which
he is raped by his father, a vicious snob Òdescended from Charles II through a
prostituteÓ. Bad News catches up with Patrick in his early twenties, during the
early 1980s, as he arrives in New York to collect his fatherÕs ashes and
embarks on a life-threatening drug binge. In Some Hope, he negotiates a truce
with his past, having managed to give up cocaine and heroin, while observing
with world-weary distaste the behaviour of the ultra-grand and super-rich at a
birthday party thrown for a feckless aristocrat.
St
AubynÕs trilogy – which is being reissued in Britain under the collective
title Some Hope after its well-received publication in the United States
– is a difficult work to categorize, combining as it does an incest
narrative with upper-class social satire and philosophical musings. In broad
outline, PatrickÕs development follows the arc sketched out by many accounts of
child abuse and its psychological consequences. Aged five, he tries to protect
himself from his fatherÕs first assault by dissociating: he imagines himself
sitting on the curtain pole Òlooking down on the whole scene, just as his
father was looking down on himÓ. As the trilogy progresses, the idea of
Òsitting on the curtain poleÓ becomes a kind of shorthand for the dissolution
of self that Patrick seeks in drugs. After a few too many speedballs in
Manhattan, he experiences a Òbout of compulsive mimicryÓ in which his jabbering
personae are clearly related to the ÒaltersÓ said by the multiple personality
movement to be elicited by sexual abuse during childhood. And while there is no
therapeutic Hollywood ending, Patrick feels better when he tells a friend the
truth about his upbringing and begins to resolve his feelings about his father.
Unlike
most stories of abuse and recovery, however, PatrickÕs is told with more of an
emphasis on black comedy than on psychic regeneration. Shuttling between
different charactersÕ points of view in free indirect style, St Aubyn portrays
David MelroseÕs cruelty as an unusually florid example of the corruption
associated throughout the novels with unearned wealth and status:
ÒDuring
lunch David felt that he had perhaps pushed his disdain for middle-class
prudery a little too far. Even at the bar of the Cavalry and Guards Club one
couldnÕt boast about homosexual, paedophiliac incest with any confidence of a
favourable reception. Who could he tell that he had raped his five-year-old
son? He could not think of a single person who would not prefer to change the
subject – and some would behave far worse than that. The experience
itself had been short and brutish, but not altogether nasty. He smiled at
Yvette, said how ravenous he was, and helped himself to the brochette of lamb
and flageolets.Ó
But
David – who feels strongly that Òeffort is vulgarÓ and that Òthings were
better in the eighteenth centuryÓ – is at least more intelligent and
self-aware than the anti-Semitic toadies and upper-crust shits who make up the
Melrose familyÕs social circle. ÒSometimesÓ, the narrator says, summarizing the
thoughts of one particularly objectionable character, Òit was great festivals
of privilege, and at other times it was the cringing and envy of others that
confirmed oneÕs sense of being at the top. Sometimes it was the seduction of a
pretty girl that accomplished this important task and at other times it was
down to oneÕs swanky cufflinks.Ó At Some HopeÕs climactic party, PatrickÕs
friend Johnny describes the assembled landowners as Òthe last Marxists . . . .
The last people who believe that class is a total explanationÓ. David being
dead, the role of chief gargoyle is filled by Princess Margaret, who is
depicted as an ignorant, self-important reactionary.
St Aubyn
sometimes goes at his dislikeable toffs in a none-too-subtle fashion. His
overdressed ninnies and billionaire dullards are given reams of dialogue
exposing their tedious witlessness and even more tedious wit. Cheap one-liners
(ÒShe probably thought that Algeria was an Italian dress designerÓ) make up the
most loathsome specimensÕ inner lives, while the verbs used to carry dialogue
(ÒsimperedÓ, ÒgiggledÓ, ÒpleadedÓ, ÒsquealedÓ, ÒwhinedÓ, ÒgroanedÓ, and so on)
occasionally make the narrator sound like Private EyeÕs Sylvie Krin. On the
other hand, the more sympathetic characters are given some sharp observations,
usually expressed in an epigrammatic or neatly figurative style. After enduring
too many of DavidÕs dinner parties, Anne Moore, a kindly American, finds
herself asking:
ÒWas she
. . . giving in to that English need to be facetious? She felt tainted and
exhausted by a summer of burning up her moral resources for the sake of small
conversational effects. She felt she had been subtly perverted by the slick and
lazy English manners, the craving for the prophylactic of irony, the terrible
fear of being Òa boreÓ, and the boredom of the ways they relentlessly and
narrowly avoided this fate.Ó
As an
adult, Patrick often falls prey to this self-protective jokiness – a
condition the novels teeter between describing and enacting. The humourÕs
studied heartlessness aims at amplifying the underlying pathos by warding off
any suggestion of authorial self-pity. (Born, like Patrick, in 1960, St Aubyn
makes no secret of being an altitudinously posh ex-junkie.) But the writing
tends to reach for the prophylactic of irony – not to mention the
biological warfare suit of bathos – whenever St AubynÕs pleasure in his
own high style begins to run away with him.
Patrick,
meanwhile, canÕt stop being witty, even in the grip of a terrible speedball
rush, and his hyper-articulate ranting can be annoying. He finds it annoying
too, knowing that, apart from stifling his sincerity, it shows he is still
under the influence of his hated but impressively eloquent dad. Well versed in Proust
and Joyce, he longs for an epiphany or jolt of involuntary memory that might
put an end to his arguments with himself. But what is the self anyway? And what
about all the stuff outside the self? These kind of questions preoccupy both
Patrick and his creator, who has addressed them at some length in his novel A
Clue to the Exit (2000).
MotherÕs
Milk takes up PatrickÕs story as he enters middle age in 2000, now husband to
Mary and father of two small boys, Robert and Thomas. He has become a London
barrister, a cash-strapped – as he sees it – member of the
grumbling professional upper middle classes. Eleanor, his mother, briefly
driven to pill-popping and alcoholism by DavidÕs insightful sadism during the
1960s, is now on her last legs. Having spent PatrickÕs adolescence lavishing
cash and attention on charity work while ignoring her sonÕs spectacular
distress, she has since become a New Age flake, and is now trying to hand over
the house in Provence where Patrick grew up to a transparently fraudulent ÒhealerÓ
called Seamus Dourke. Entrusted with the legal side of his own disinheritance,
Patrick hopes to persuade her not to do it.
The novel
describes four consecutive summer holidays, each of the first three seen from
one point of view – RobertÕs, PatrickÕs, MaryÕs – and the last from
that of each family member, including Thomas, by turn. Robert, a perceptive,
imaginative child, envies his younger sibling and is disturbed by the
realization that his parents do not wholeheartedly love his grandmother.
Patrick, understandably obsessed with not passing on the ÒpoisonÓ of his
miserable childhood, worries that his obsession is making his children as
fretful and neurotic as he is; he also drinks too much, struggles with his
sexless marriage and has a half-hearted affair. Mary, more thinly characterized
than the rest of the cast, is mostly a vehicle for insights into the burdens of
motherhood and the other charactersÕ problems. Their family drama is chiefly
played out in France, where their right to use EleanorÕs villa is slowly
whittled away by the manipulative Dourke, and on a visit to America. Johnny,
now a child psychologist, pays a visit, and there are comic walk-ons for
various monstrous types – notably a City wide boyÕs spoiled brood and a
plutocratic American cousin who considers the Rumsfeld-Cheney approach to
foreign policy too cautious.
MotherÕs
Milk is more than a progress report or coda to Some Hope, being both longer
than the earlier novels – which are practically novellas – and
peopled by a more fully realized set of characters. There are some
attention-grabbing changes of register. But St AubynÕs inclination towards
defensively self-parodic overwriting is held more firmly in check than it was
in the cartoonishly satirical sections of the previous Melrose books. ÒSaidÓ is
almost the only verb used for dialogue, and the similes, though sometimes
showy, all make sense. Now and again, however, the narrator and all the
characters seem not only to have done time in psychoanalysis but to have
studied it behind the readerÕs back. ÒHe hasnÕt read LacanÕs essay on the
mirror stage yetÓ, Patrick says of his infant son, but from the way the
childrenÕs thoughts are represented you get the feeling that he probably has.
Adult misbehaviour is also shown to derive from childhood experience in an
over-neat way.
As for Patrick, he waits in vain for the Proustian moment he thinks might heal him: ÒWhere were the uneven cobblestones and silver spoons and silver doorbells of his own life?Ó. In the meantime, having laid to rest his father, he tackles his only slightly less pressing mother-problem, understanding if not forgiving the cruel selfishness behind EleanorÕs lifelong preoccupation with self-sacrifice. Even his children can see that his witty talk is a little too polished, though: ÒRobert knew that he wasnÕt being communicated with, but allowed to listen to his father practising speeches. All this time while he had been asleep, his father had been pacing up and down a mental courtroom, prosecutingÓ. Throwing all that rhetorical energy into writing fiction might be more therapeutic than drawing up indictments, and although Edward St Aubyn sometimes seems to have found a way to combine the two activities, at his best he has enough novelistic sense to show that theyÕre not the same thing.