Memory, Mystery, Manners, Mayonnaise
On Alice Thomas Ellis
I’m still, or rather, to be honest, just now, opening up some cartons filled with old diaries and notebooks packed and transported when we moved out of our house three years ago. In the process of turning the pages of old daily agendas I kept for years by hand, and also of the accompanying composition pads on which I would track the focused or stray thoughts of each week as it unfolded, I am constructing a paper trail of what I did and when I did it before I am called in for my performance review at the great human resources department in the sky to see if I’ve met expectations. What I am finding, in pleasing and often unremembered profusion, are detailed clues to what I realize in the clarity of retrospect has been my persistent occupation: making something out of reading, giving it some purchase in the world that might have promise of outlasting for a moment the concentration, consolation, and culture that I sought, and found, between covers. The “something” has taken the form of writing, of course, but the “making” that I recognize now as a thread running through all the pages I traversed has taken a variety of other forms that comprise my almost completed curriculum vitae, such as it is. These include the catalog business I co-founded in 1986 and ran for two decades, A Common Reader; the online organ I created for Barnes & Noble, the B&N Review, in which were gathered for several years the voices of a remarkable roster of critics, authors, and commentators—even a brilliant cartoonist; merchandising systems for digital bookselling; a recommendation engine for which my name joins others on a patent wherever those are found; and a couple of digital apps that were far ahead of their time in imagination and utility—so far ahead, in fact, that they are now long forgotten.
Trawling through my back pages has put me in mind of a piece of wisdom I heard more than three decades ago and I’ve never forgotten. “Every day gets to be a long time ago,” my daughter proclaimed from her perch in her car seat behind Margot and me. “Even this one.” She was three-and-a-half years old, and she had been reminiscing about when she was “little.” I stopped the car to savor the surprise and seriousness of her nostalgia. Already she seemed to grasp, instinctively, the melancholy that haunts our days, what Alice Thomas Ellis, in the last line of her wonderful, affectionate memoir, A Welsh Childhood, recognizes as “a lifelong yearning for what is gone or out of reach.”
A Welsh Childhood was the first of the more than a dozen books by Alice Thomas Ellis that we republished in America as Common Reader Editions, a project smartly and fiercely championed by my editorial colleague Tom Meagher. In the Welsh landscape so eloquently evoked in that initial volume’s pages—and so beautifully captured and displayed for us in Patrick Sutherland’s stunning, artful gallery of black-and-white photographs that amplify the text—things gone and things still here exist under a spell which confuses our understanding of presence and absence; rocks and witches, hills and dwellings, mists and meadows animate the author’s memories of hamlet and family, schoolroom and pub, with a supernatural loveliness everywhere evident and everywhere elusive. It is the loveliness, Ellis recognizes, of passing time itself, the natural force that, on the wings of human awareness, flies forever between this world and the next.
In addition to the loveliness, of course, as Ellis would be the first to recognize (see my sentences on Home Life below), passing time generates a lot of flotsam and jetsam. Going through my own these past few weeks, I came upon afterwords I’d written for our editions of three of Ellis’s works of fiction: The Birds of the Air (her second novel, originally published in the UK in 1980 and reissued by us in 1999); The 27th Kingdom (1982; 1998); and Unexplained Laughter (1985; 1998). Reading these afterwords, I had more than once the frisson of bewildered delight that comes from well-turned sentences one has no memory of turning. The pieces seem to follow nicely upon each other in terms of meditative spirit as they engage themes that, more tellingly still, remain congenial to me and have in fact sprung up again recently as I work through another piece of writing, on a very different subject, that I plan to share next time. So I’ve decided to present the revised afterwords here as a ruminative excursion into first and last things for you to ponder as you while away your summer (I hope you are able to while away some it, at least).
The afterwords are presented below in the order in which I wrote them, and in which we published the books they are attached to, since they seem to me to gather a small collective force when read in the sequence of their composition. But before you get to them, let me give you a brief introduction to Ellis and her work.
We were in a Manhattan taxi, making our way slowly through swirling snow out of the dark wood of Central Park into the burnished wood of the upper East Side, when Alice Thomas Ellis asked: “Do you believe in the efficacy of intercessionary prayer?” She was in New York to visit a friend in the last stages of terminal illness, so the tenor of her thought was not surprising. “Well,” I said, carefully considering my words (it’s not every day you can risk sounding stupid on a profound theme while addressing a woman who happens to be among your favorite authors, and whom you’ve just met a few hours earlier), “I think it is efficacious, even if God isn’t listening.” She turned her face to me, each eye a pool of reflective thought. “Yes,” she said, her agreement so pointed, and yet so pregnant with pause, that I wasn’t sure of its import.
That day ended, as I recall, with Anna—Alice Thomas Ellis being the pen name of Anna Haycraft, who died in 2005 at the age of seventy-two—cooking potatoes in goose fat in a friend’s apartment in Greenwich Village. There was other food that evening, I’m certain, but the goose fat potatoes I remember. The conversation of the two recollections in my mind—prayer and potatoes—seems a fitting emblem for her work, which, in fiction, takes up faith and fate and the mysterious misadventures of both, and, in columns and essays, takes on running a household and other more familiar concerns. Her writing, in two words, is both unnerving and inviting.
I’d first come upon it in the column called “Home Life” that she wrote for the British magazine The Spectator for four years in the late 1980s. Her dispatches on domestic fortunes in town (London: Camden Town) and country (a village in Wales) were a weekly fix of wit and generosity, both stretched so thin by the demands of family and friends they seemed distilled by circumstance into potent eloquence and exasperated humor. She soon became a writer I could not live without. So much so that we published our own elegant, four-volume hardcover edition of the columns in 1997. The Home Life quartet followed close on the tail of our publication of A Welsh Childhood and preceded our editions of her novels, of which the three I write about below were among the earliest to come off press.
MYSTERY, MANNERS, MAYONNAISE
On The 27th Kingdom
The story I shall tell begins like this.
Once upon a time, in the year of Our Lord 1954 . . .
That’s the start of this marvelous novel, originally published in England in 1982. Announcing a fable and invoking not only Our Lord but time in both its timeless and specific guises, Alice Thomas Ellis leads us into her own storied domain—her protagonist’s forebears having journeyed “across 27 lands and 30 countries until they came to the 27th kingdom”—tucked away in the keenly observed chambers of London’s Chelsea. There the recherché, exquisitely (if sometimes rather oddly) mannered world of a Russian émigré and her smugly precious nephew is about to be disturbed by an otherworldly apparition in the shape of a young postulant on leave (might “on assignment” be a more apt characterization?) from a convent in Wales. We are quickly pulled into a novelistic whirl in which the comedy of manners discovers a religious vocation, and sentences career casually from mordant wit (“Her ancestors, she thought, would have had him boiled. In oil. Or, to be more culinarily precise, deep-fried”) to moral scrutiny (“It had occurred to her the other day in church that possibly it was only the good who were able to believe in God—that the wicked, being hideously narcissistic, could see only themselves reflected in whatever they looked upon; could believe only in their own desires and inadequacies, were quite incapable of seeing the truth of a different person or deity”); from psychological acuity (“She took the fraying end of her depression and painstakingly followed it back to its source”) to metaphysical aperçu (“It seemed to her that things here happened every moment and she missed the convent where time was afforded the respect befitting one of God’s more subtle creations. There it was carefully measured and used, but here the hours and days fell in upon each other in a meaningless jumble, like dominoes pushed over by a drunken hand”)—all without missing a beat. No writer I know is more adept at both describing the curtains with which we decorate existence and suggesting what’s behind them.
That’s what drew me to Ellis’s writing when I discovered it years ago in the British weekly The Spectator, which regularly carried her trenchant, droll meditations on domestic matters of every stripe, from children, laundry, and the vagaries of appliances to the eschatology—and occasional graces—of everyday emergencies. Amid all the falling dominoes of a busy household (husband and five children, assorted cats and ever-assembled friends, a dizzying array of embodied help and hindrances), Ellis was able to summon the spirits that dance between the lines of our life sentences.
Her fiction, as the The 27th Kingdom makes evident, elaborates experience with the same virtuosity of attention and expression, the same insouciant profundity. She manages to whip whimsy into the weightiest themes:
Aunt Irene really inclined to that simplest of all views: the one expressed so cogently in the book of Genesis, which explained everything with appealing clarity. This was the only view that explained, for instance, mayonnaise. It was patently absurd to suppose that mayonnaise had come about through random chance, that anyone could ever have been silly or brilliant enough to predict what would happen if he slowly trickled oil on to egg yolks and then gone ahead and tried it. An angel must have divulged that recipe and then explained what to do with the left-over whites. Meringues—there was another instance of the exercise of superhuman intelligence.
In this, her third novel, Ellis had the temerity, for the first time, to bring the supernatural to bear directly on events. Her authorial transits with the transmundane—Valentine’s levitation in church before the astonished eyes of Mrs. O’Connor; her later flight from the embankment to the river to rescue a drowning man—are carried off with remarkable aplomb. The reader is led to believe in them the way he believes in an action he knows has taken place despite the fact that it occurred while his head was turned. The supernatural elements seem to deserve their place within the communion of character and destiny, of familiarity and mystery, the narrative has convened.
Still, outside the story and on reflection, don’t we feel we should mistrust such mischief? Fate must be too heavy to be borne by spirits. Yet what knowledge is there outside of story? Time has no shape without a tale; meaning travels by metaphor. And, if the wisdom of words is any guide, what do we learn about ourselves when we note how we’ve lightened the load of “mischief” itself, pulling it from its roots in misfortune and calamity? Or to be reminded that “fate” and “fairy” are etymological siblings, that our deepest insights into this world have always been shadowed by visits—real? imagined?—from another? Even in matters of the utmost seriousness, fashion dulls our apprehension; those things we think we know for sure are the surest limits to our learning. Laws are never as flexible, nor as durable, as lore.
I’m inclined to argue, as Aunt Irene professes early in this book, that our genes are indeed imprinted with intangibles, and just as this novel’s formidable protagonist feels “her retina was designed to appreciate vast melancholy spaces and beautiful, strange artefacts,” so I suspect our inmost eye is designed to pull words from things, fashion stories from time, search for spirits in the wood—to testify, if only by intuition, to the fleeting momentousness of human life, the terror and beauty of fate, the spark of divinity that never stops haunting us. It’s an intuition, I think, that all of us silently share, if only from “once upon a time” until the teller completes her tale. That mayonnaise requires a leap of faith makes it no less delicious and no less desirable, indeed, no less necessary, even in the face of those explanations of experience which, like Aunt Irene’s smirking nephew, make perfect sense and are quite unconvincing.
WATCHING AND LISTENING
On Unexplained Laughter
Is someone watching? When we stretch our sleep-weary body toward the day, make the coffee, spill the milk, change our clothes—is there a witness as we maintain our balance (or, unsure, stumble) through the millions of minutes that are the parts of our sum (“sum” being the Latin, significantly enough, for “I am”)? I don’t mean a spouse or a child, of course, or any companion permanent or passing whose foot falls familiarly around the house. Nor do I mean to envision a voyeur at the window, peeking purposefully through the blinds. Nor—despite the fact that a watcher is someone my own mind most often entertains while I'm engaging in any number of mild violations of hygiene or good taste—do I mean to suggest a judge weighing arguments of convention and embarrassment, bound by edicts of ethics or superego, or even in command of prerogatives divine.
If truth be told, I suppose, I don’t mean “someone” at all. Let me rephrase my question, then: is there a watching in the world—a wakefulness—attentive to our thoughts and deeds? All of us, at one time or another, have intuited such intent to some vague presence outside ourselves. The feeling can be provoked—quite readily, in fact—by a landscape (the mists and rocks of Wales, the setting of Unexplained Laughter, might well provide it, or any sylvan setting, any spring or fall of water), for there are places that seem alive with apprehensions, as if things gone are still waiting there. Often we can sense such strange advertence to our being in the suspended animation of a fully-moonlit night, or in the eerie surround of profound quiet. Silence can seem so alert. We could assign our sensitivity to mere anxiety, but there are times, I’m certain, when our anxiety is summoned by an unseen audience. In the shadow of its vigilance (whatever its meaning, intention, or intelligence), the very idea of the holy takes root, as the world urges us to repay its watchfulness in kind.
The same shadow, as far as I can see, imbues the fiction of Alice Thomas Ellis with its distinctive hue. That she manages to make light of the difficulty of dramatizing the preternatural is one of the wonders of her work. She begins by crafting a bright foil for her darker themes, unleashing a keen (and deliciously droll) attention to behavioral detail that allows her to set in swift and graceful motion comedies of modern manners that are attuned to both the tenor of our times and the more enduring purport of human nature. Indeed, it’s a pleasure to share her perceptions of people and their qualities through prose which is a wonder of precise observance. All of her sentences seem lit from their own spark of intelligence; at their best, they are epigrammatically clever and composed summaries of vast tracts of social and emotional experience (“She is as careful as a chemist with her reproaches”). And she is one of the few novelists I know whose characters occupy their own thoughts in a way that is true-to-life, expressing the wholly interior and wildly energetic gestures toward hysteria which divert so much of the energy of imaginative people as they, in the privacy of their self-regard, give free reign to the impolitic venom that courses through their consciousness.
While the author’s deft, brilliant portrayal of social milieux is amusing, even arresting, it is the otherworldly shadow her inventions ingeniously cast that distinguishes her novels; through its dim illumination questions kept at a distance by the frantic business of modern life (and the ironic stance of most contemporary literature) are allowed to creep near. Matters of metaphysical moment that are often on the fringes of our awareness—but that seldom raise their heads in the commotion of everyday events because we are embarrassed by their ominous logic, and by the language, lore, and even the liturgy of their superstitious legacies—are slipped into the conversation of Ellis’s fictional gatherings with an only slightly disconcerting frankness, appearing (and disappearing) as quickly as a tray of exotic but alluring canapés. With the sleight of hand of a clever and accomplished hostess, the author invites deep themes into the room and lets them make themselves familiar. And despite our best efforts to ignore their insistent gaze, we recognize her portentous guests and avoid them at our spiritual peril.
In Unexplained Laughter, the fateful gaze is focused in the eyes of Angharad, the mentally impaired, physically malformed, feral girl whose elusive presence—almost, but never quite, wished into absence by the members of her family and their neighbors—haunts the Welsh valley in which the tale unfolds. “If the land was a graven image then Angharad was its priestess,” we’re told, and the prayers that she invokes, in the initially mystifying utterances in which Ellis gives her voice, sound with a riddling gravity that validates her role as ghost, chorus, seer. And she sees everything; in fact, it is her graphic witness to Dr. Wyn’s amorous shenanigans that brings the plot to its quiet climax. Just as tellingly, Angharad hears everything, and seems able to eavesdrop on the very thoughts of anyone in her vicinity. She listens with particular acuity to the premonitions that worry Lydia, the book’s central character, even while she teases this visitor with the uncanny laughter that disturbs the comprehensive silence, both real and figurative, in which the valley dwells.
Silence, of course, is the mute Angharad’s dominion, and she captures any report which enters her domain: “All the sounds of the valley end here in my room.” Looking and listening, laughing, the figure of Angharad strikes me as the local manifestation of a more universal watchfulness, a natural mind which, lacking social articulation, broods upon all within its ken with an obscure yet powerful influence. She is strange and familiar, intense yet inconsequential, frightening, troubled, helpless, fearsome, awesome in her own uncertain right, a force unmeasured and immeasurable. No one acquainted with her is sure of the extent of her understanding, and so all are uneasy in her presence, as if she is the emblem of an ancient yet still effective superstition. The embodiment of unintelligible apprehension, beyond reciprocal awareness, unspeaking and somehow, ineffably, unspeakable, Angharad resembles the specter of death she devotedly describes:
They think that death is waiting at the end of the ride, that life is like the lane and that death waits at the end. Listen. That is death on the other side of the hedgerow. And that swift shadow that is gone, before you turn, from the corner of your eye—that is death. And the whisper you can scarcely hear through the sounds of the birds calling and the wind in the leaves—that is death. Not waiting, but there beside you within reach, within earshot . . .
Is death, then, the watcher I began with, or merely the emissary of a still more knowing attention, as Angharad is the emissary of Lydia’s vocation? That may seem an inappropriate word to apply to the unresolved circumstance of the smart, selfish, attractive, and too-clever heroine of Unexplained Laughter, but something like vocation seems to me to be the underlying motive of all of Alice Thomas Ellis’s fiction. Her favored characters, and Lydia is certainly one of them, flirt with the affections of their own souls and are always taken aback by the force of the attraction they discover. What Ellis suggests through the chiaroscuro that deepens the glittering entertainment of her novels is that our religious yearning—the urge to parse time, to honor the intimacy of holiness, to divine the dreams and responsibilities held in store for us—comes not because we are called, but because we sense we are listened to. Even if our audience remains indistinct, vague, numinous, like air, wind, light, or any other ubiquitous spirit. Like death. Or God.
Or Angharad, always hovering close. Within earshot. Watching. Whispering this book’s last words:
The silence is unbroken.
Listen.
MORTAL REMAINS
On The Birds of the Air
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Genesis 1:2
1 :: Count the days of creation and you’ll find no death; the first flush of Genesis ignores its sting. Inventory the divine inventions of that fundamental week—light summoned to separate Day from Night; and Heaven and Earth called into being; and then grass and herb yielding seed, trees yielding fruit invited into the world; and the sun and moon and stars evoked for signs and seasons, to measure time; and fish and fowl and the birds of the air conjured, and earthly beasts, cattle and creeping things; man imagined in the likeness of God—and you’ll find no trace of the force that will haunt the life so tellingly aroused.
Although the shadow of mortality is soon cast over the bright new world of Genesis, death itself seems to arrive as an afterthought, sneaking into creation as it still steals upon us. Was death inherent in the formless void, independent of the living creatures it would later stalk, a mere reflection of the primordial darkness upon the face of the deep? A small dark born of that greater one, perhaps, but dark enough, sooner or later, for you and me. And for Mary Marsh, the protagonist of Alice Thomas Ellis’s novel The Birds of the Air, whose existence lost its light—and so lies shrouded, without form, and void—in the calamity of her child’s death.
2 :: What’s true of the great world’s genesis is true of our own (with all due respect for proportion). Our first hours dawn from a night every bit as black and long as that which we fear falling into when our time runs out, and yet the first of our eternities of darkness seldom worries us as much as the second. “Although the two are identical twins,” writes Vladimir Nabokov at the outset (aptly enough) of his autobiography, “man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for . . . .” Nonetheless, the joy with which we celebrate a birth is a tacit acknowledgement of the depth of the darkness a newborn illuminates, for every first breath is animated with creation’s original inspiration: let there be light to breach the dark (if only until our flame expires, closing the luminous parenthesis that is our living sentence).
Our somber final fate gets none of the glory lavished on birth’s enlightenment, although death deserves its own wonder, as Mary Marsh considers with lucid bitterness:
Robin’s death, the sudden absolute cessation of vaulting, joyful life, seemed to her quite as astonishing and worthy of remark as that other more widely acclaimed and admired miracle, birth. Despite her anger, she thought that God deserved more notice for this extraordinary trick.
Well, notice He gets, but no acclaim: the magic of death never earns our admiration. We’re scared of it, plain and simple, frightened at the prospect of our own demise and chastened by the passing of others; and, if the deceased is younger than our actuarial intuition deems just, we’re outraged at the violation of life’s implied order.
That sense of violation reveals the true nature of our quarrel with death—the human value of both our coming and going. We invest all creation stories (large and small, universal and individual) with our sense of time, so that every birth is a beginning rather than a revelation, every death an ending rather than a return to the dark waters from which life sprang. For, despite the solemn invocations of our preaching and our prayers, we ignore eternity because our minds do not comprehend it, our hearts cannot hold it; we’re dizzied by its lack of definition. We cast our lot with time because it is our worthiest tool: time alone gives shape to things, makes a human landscape—however invisible its borders may seem—within whatever’s everlasting. Time is the human factor in the divine formula of creation (and so the idol we are most in danger of worshiping too dearly). A birth fosters the illusion that we exert some control over time, and the cruelty of death is its irrefutable denial of that power. We’re left with life’s remains, which, it must be said, are no less noble or significant for their futility: love, memory, and the light our children (if we’re fortunate enough to have and hold them) shine into the obscure future. Death leaves a residue on the living that is tantalizing in its sensibility, that is, in a word—one of the most beautiful of words—haunting.
3 :: To be haunted by the death of a child, as Mary Marsh is haunted by the death of Robin, is perhaps the most poignant and terrible of human conditions. Pulled out of time entirely by her loss, Mary broods within a crepuscular limbo, caught between the light of the living and the darkness of the dead. The business of time, the busy-ness of days, swirls around her with little or no effect except to suggest the senselessness of its resolves. “Housework should be done in secret or not at all,” she asserts to herself, provoked by her poor mother’s reasonable devotion to tasks at hand:
A busy woman was a reproach, insistent and disturbing, a reprimand to the silent scholar or the idle dead, announcing, with each flourish that life was to be lived, and there was no room in the habitations of the living for the grey peace of dust and decay, that the virtuous must polish and wash and sweep and scrub—scouring and mopping, relentless as time.
Longing for communion with her lost Robin, Mary denies time’s demands—and the niceties of human relations that depend, ultimately, upon them—and confronts the abyss with hapless, helpless temerity. She sits and waits, and even her dithering mother detects the portentousness of her inaction:
She had begun to understand, with real fear, that Mary was waiting—such terrible, greedy waiting as she had never contemplated. The woman who had been her pretty, merry little daughter was waiting for the dead to return and, failing that, was waiting, as a lover waits, for death to come and get her.
Mary Marsh’s mourning demands a new dimension, for her sorrow has led her far beyond the timebound concerns—holidays and dinner times, the disappointments of lost youth and the implacable otherness of adolescence, the seductions and betrayals with which broken hearts attempt to mend their years—of the increasingly exasperated ring of family that surrounds her. Stripped of its strength, her soul lacks the resourcefulness to fashion a faith to fathom the abyss she now inhabits. She floats through a spirit world in which she can be nothing more than a vessel bewitched by the emanations that move across the deep of every day. “She supposed she must be dying,” we read on the novel’s first page, “and wondered whether, if she touched the window pane with her cold finger, the cold would seep in from outside as though by osmosis.”
We are familiar with the state of grace (or at least with the idea of it), but that other states—of despair, for instance, or melancholy, or even bewilderment and anxiety—might be conditions of the soul, a possession by divine or cosmological promise of our inmost intelligence, seldom occurs to us. In the novels of Alice Thomas Ellis, such states of mind are portrayed with subtle, singular attention to their spiritual content and context; cunningly, Ellis pays her respects to the otherworldly without ever leaving the familiar world. Like Mary Marsh, the author has learned that time cannot be the only order of our lives, for its marking is not magnanimous enough to comprehend the beauty and cruelty of the love that animates us, or the death that is our destiny. The order that encompasses such a joyful and sorrowful creation surely passes all understanding, but it is undeniably present in the weather of our days, a summoning of power and loveliness that is endless in its invention, something like the Spirit of God that moved upon the face of those first waters, before light and darkness were charged with their labors and set to work.
She could see the snow falling through the small rounded light from the downstairs lavatory window, a light as pure as from any cathedral clerestory. It fell with such soft determination of the still silence—soundless, weightless: gentle alien blossom that would melt, if she waited long enough, into familiar wetness, tears on the face: bathetic melting, mud in the garden, slush on the roads, useless tears.
She lifted her face to the angelic descent in the muted darkness, to the movement compelled by something other than desire, the lifeless idle movement of the drowned, to the veil, grave cloths, the floating sinking cerements, untroubled by blood, by colour: the discrete, undeniable, intractable softness of the slow snow in the night and the silence . . .
‘Robin . . . ?’ she said.
Loath to leave you on such a somber note, I flipped through the pages of Home Life just now to find a passage from Ellis’s fleet and funny domestic mode to lighten the mood before signing off. I hope this one does the trick:
I have thrown away a little bottle of lavender water that went rotten and smelled worse than muck-spreading, and an ancient bottle of Tabasco that lost its flavour and went pale. Perhaps because Easter is imminent, this put me into a spiritual frame of mind. The lavender water epitomises the soul of the sinner: once pure and fragrant as babies’ breath and now absolutely stinking. I don’t know what the Tabasco signifies. Same thing I suppose—if the Tabasco lose its savour wherewith shall the Tabasco be Tabascoed? I think I’ll change the name of the house to that. Tabas Coed. I always wanted a cottage called Pen-Y-Silin and I think it’s true what they say about housework. It deadens the faculties and scrambles the brains. I’m not going to do it again.