A Helping Hand

John Bayley writes a sequel to Europa. The novel’s name - it is called In Another Country - aptly describing the differences between Lars von Trier and himself. Lars sets off his expressionist fireworks on the North Sea’s other shore, while in England Prof enjoys this donnish picnic; its sophisticated gaucheries, the crabbed wisdom that drops marmalade on the salad and upsets the pickled onions, a snatch of pedantry tearing those paper plates. Ho! ho! ho! Bayley laughs, then covers up this faux pas with his bumbling irony, a napkin over crumbs.

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A village at the valley’s bottom waits for an avalanche. It hopes, this is all it can do, that the mountain gods will show mercy to its medieval streets and baroque houses, the shop signs that flirted with Goethe. The gods hoist up their skirts, squat down and confabulate. There is much ribald laughter. Which is fortunate. The helpless need the good humour of these Olympians, and their careless inattention - too high up to see anything but the bold features of the landscape below. What’s to happen here? you ask. The gods will have their fun; they’ll shake a few rafters, pull that inn sign down, kicking it around the streets; louts with a tin can. We’ll batter it back into shape and rehang it when they have left. The gods never - thank god! - staying long.

Oliver will have his nose tweaked and his ear lobes pinched. His pride hurt; these gods  to dump a few bad memories into his unconscious. But what’s a little humiliation to a man with no honour to protect? Oliver will be all right. Always somebody around to salve and bandage his wounded ego.

Her beauty, she knows, is to be her victory. The lady of this mountain fastness has said goodbye to her fellow Olympians. Now she crosses the North Sea, picking up Neptune’s net from his outstretched hand, to land in England, to catch this hero, a foolish but clever young man. 

Oliver, too weak to untie the ropes that anchor him to his past, is grounded in the harbour of his youth. Buffeted by the wind, stuck to a high tide of mud, the hull spotted with rust’s acne, this yacht is rotting away. Oh to pull anchor…but this man has no idea where to go; and anyway, the harbour gates, he thinks, are locked against him. The estuary is a distant dream, of days out years ago with friends who, with a master’s grip and a captain’s confidence, sailed out into this island’s seas. He needs them now! The weak dependent upon the strong to take them beyond the reach of their own timidities. Left to themselves there is only dream….

Liese does have the strength to send this boat into the open sea, to sail it into an unknown future. Only Liese…a foreign country; a tabula rasa upon which Oliver writes himself free of his own history. The strong saving the weak from their inertia.

The weak survive because they drift in safe waters; a flotilla of Sunday sailors, never straying far from port and carried safely along the shore. The metaphor is developing nicely: the boat kept in a marina tended by service staff and protected by security guards, suspicious of this woman’s German accent.

Liese is here! She pushes a guard into the water then throws him a lifebelt. And laughs at his inept paddling. Come on! Come! Come! Quickly quickly… She skips the speedboat out into the English Channel. The coast is soon left behind for metaphor. But I want to return to the wild hair of Bayley’s dunes, the bald headlands of his novel: Liese, we have forgotten Oliver. Ja, Ja, I know. So easy, yes! She kisses me on the lips. Then smiles like a rogue: who knows, she whispers in my ear, what’s happening to that young man. She bites my earlobe and laughs long and loud. Who knows!

It was like a dream of flying, but flying in a medium more warm and more voluptuous than common air. The dingy water enfolded him like silk. A Doppelgänger, a form like his own, but more sinuous and infinitely stronger, seemed pressed against his body, warm at some levels and at others grippingly cool. Turning, he found himself hurried away with enormous strides, his feet skimming involuntarily over the slimy pebbles. The Doppelgänger had transferred itself into two policewomen, two hefty Lorelei, who had hold of him under the arms. He giggled, swallowed a mouthful of water and getting his head round saw the car recede with a smooth accelerating swiftness, while the big linden tree under which it was parked had dwindled to the size of an ornamental cherry. Liese and Duncan were not visible…

… In the grip of his present escort, he felt more than well disposed towards both of them. In the Rhine, the problem that seemed to be looming over him obviously had no real existence. He felt quite confident about Herman, who was an idiot of course, and potentially disagreeable, but he surely could not do any real harm. And Thomson could be fobbed off… Duncan was his friend, and Liese was a dear… and in a very short time he would be leaving Germany.

His escort was still propelling him courteously but firmly downstream. Maudlin as a drunkard in their arms, his thoughts and his feet slipped on together. And then abruptly his thoughts only—his custodians had yanked him bodily off the ground—and instead of pattering over the tepid stones his feet now lost themselves in depths from which a real chill struck upwards. He might have walked over a precipice: the void below seemed as giddy as the drop from the steep hill that lay in sunlight opposite to him. And the bank beside him instead of running parallel, had suddenly turned away.

He wrenched himself free from his captors. They let him go, or rather they let him swim, a tiresome and exhausting exercise after his lordly progress down the river. He struck out vigorously, but the bank continued to recede, and the arms in whose embrace he had travelled were now an impersonal weight of water against which he pushed in vain. He looked round as he worked. There was no one in sight: the car was hidden by a headland, and very far away the tug crept with its attendant barges upstream…

Further down still the shore bent back again: Oliver suddenly found himself quite close to it. But he swam until his knees grounded on the slippery stones. He crawled out and flopped down among the stiff twigs of hemlock or whatever it was. The very opposite, anyway, of that fat weed which roots itself at ease on Lethe wharf.

No life is without adventure and risk. Royal Tunbridge Wells has its accidents and anarchists. Yes. There are times, as here in Wolfenkerchen immediately after the war, when even the weak can be free. To be carried along by others, when, suddenly, they are alone…it is a moment of adventure; but, almost at once, the thought of danger overwhelms them; and they wish, they demand, they plead, to return, now, I said now, to the protection of others, already far away. Oliver is lucky, the water carrying him close to the bank, where he scrambles to safety. Confident in his fate - we know him well - we concentrate on that “escort” and “custodian”, our author’s giveaway words. For such characters liberty is a child’s romp under nanny’s panopticon gaze. Although this nanny is distracted by relatives and friends: Gladys! haven’t seen you for ages…. Unsophisticated, too confident of their own goodness and others charity, the vanity of shyness burnishing the self’s precious image, the weak do go astray; one life lost in a minute. Help me! Help me! The alarm bells of panic. Convinced of disaster and terrified of disgrace, no confidence now in their own resources, in any case few and torpid, their equanimity evaporates in the heat of fear. Only nature’s benevolence to save them. And nature is often beneficent. The weak, the most egotistic of souls, who think only to survive and thrive, usually washing up on some welcoming shore.

Heather isn’t lucky, drowning when she swims against a strong tide: it is her day trip with Duncan, and its promise of sexual adventure, a revolt against the priggish attitudes of her soldierly father and his excessively respectable wife. The strong take greater risks, then suffer the consequences. Heather dies, and is quickly forgotten. It is the fate of the strong. Rarely do they linger long. To engage with life is to change lives making that life difficult. Set apart, you struggle to maintain a self in this world where others want everybody to give it up. But you cannot conform. Your ideas as suspected; people are wary of your force and drive; they think you odd, which threatens them. Soon they are turning against you; at best they call you a crank, at worst they treat you as a heretic. A once pleasant place becomes claustrophobic and threatening. Suddenly you are fighting to survive. The end is quick enough. Heather swims out into the river and dies.1

The weak are passive. Oliver meets Liese through another officer, through Charlesworth, a shadowy character, an army spy, who uses Oliver’s innocence to catch a black marketeer. It is this passivity that attracts the Linkmanns. No threat to the shifty Herman, Oliver offers Liese a relationship that is without passion, therefore without entanglement and risk. After the turbulence of romantic love, and its debilitating aftermath, this woman wants the companionship of an intelligent and sympathetic friend. Having danced with life’s dangers Liese retires to the lounge, where the servants are unobtrusive, the chairs luxurious, the music soporific. Ah, there you are Oliver; you couldn't call Georg and ask for Kaffee and Kuchen….

This novel resonates with loud allegorical tones. Liese is Germany after the war; when the wild passions of a decade were giving way to the cooler relations of the late forties and fifties. Oliver is Britain: nice and sensible; though a bit obtuse and boring, albeit kind and - very important this - safe.2

Yet the weak bring their own risks. Incapable of initiating action they are used by others as instruments: a screwdriver to screw somebody else’s screws. You don’t like this metaphor? Ok, let’s choose something genteel…knowing no more than the rules of chess, Oliver plays an expert and suffers Fool’s Mate. This is benign. It is not always so. Passivity has its own special kind of uselessness. The not-active-in-life characters like Oliver often attract those that are, who then manipulate and abuse their innocence, causing collateral damage to friends and acquaintances.

The army is good for the weak; they are comfortable with its orders, the routine, its social artifice. It is when Oliver leaves the security of the army, when he steps outside the barracks and make friends with Germans, that he feels exposed and vulnerable, his life turning unpleasant. The downside of liberty: its risks, those terrible fears. Nevertheless, through such experiences, of which he’s incapable of acquiring for himself, Oliver grows a little. Only the most unfortunate to remain adolescents for the entirety of their lives.

The games of an army are too complicated for beginners. There are also a lot of them. The occupation game, for example, that keeps the locals under control and runs the economy for the British. The spy game; but this only for grandmasters. The game of politics is everywhere…vast bureaucracies encourage ambition, which produces rivalries that trigger clerkly skirmishes, won by the institutional virtuosos. It is easy for Charlesworth, with his nonchalance and effortless charm. Too easy. The simple Oliver bamboozled by a professional’s simple tricks. Not all games are about power and promotion. For the clever army life is a bore. Spice it up! Duncan. And Duncan Holt does. Seeing an opportunity, he intervenes in Oliver's entrapment: it amuses him. He also hopes to attract his superiors, who, he is sure, will recognise his intelligence and skill, so taking him out of these dull, enervating routines.

This is a strange place, whose customs, perceived as odd therefore scary, cause Oliver to lose his self-possession and self-respect. But the weak are fortunate. A passive element in the plot Oliver survives without penalty; Charlesworth even rewards him with a marvellous reference, a prized peacetime asset. Duncan is not lucky. Highly intelligent, charming, a dynamic personality, he has this flaw: he is no soldier. An amateur amongst professionals - the novel no English ‘crime classic’ - he is bound to fail. He does. Not privy to Charlesworth’s secrets he plays a complicated game without knowing all the rules. Defeat seems certain. Then, as with most clever people, Duncan underestimates the frailties and foolishness of others. Oliver, unable to separate his thoughts from his feelings, loses himself to events and the emotions they generate. He is a hopeless actor, a useless calculating machine. When Duncan tells him of his intrigue Oliver’s feelings are engaged, and immediately he reveals all to the lovely Liese. Aware of his friend’s unreliability Duncan includes it in his calculations; but by now the game has become impossibly complicated, and he loses control of it. The game lost, he is court-martialled.

Duncan is handsome, clever, independent. These qualities make things happen. But they are dangerous inside bureaucracies, which desire them suppressed or camouflaged. Closed communities, dominated equally by the powerful and the nondescript, are threatened by the independent and the smart or the merely wilful. Their detachment, their questions, all that probing, undermining the habits and customs upon which the life of these communities depend. Duncan is a danger. While cleverness itself is an affront to the simple-minded and the lazy, long accustomed to the comfortable rituals and stable routines that require but a modicum of engagement. It is why bureaucracies thrive: they are the natural home of the mediocre, who live off crude ideas and simple repetitive processes. The clever, if given their liberty, win too many victories, which makes everyone else feel stupid and second-rate. This  cannot be allowed. And Duncan does hurt others, he hurts Oliver. Introduced to Liese soon he is seducing her; while Oliver sits impotent with jealousy in the backseat of the car. Then there’s Heather, a beautiful and rebellious girl. Duncan takes her to the Rhine; where, we know, she swims and dies. The metaphors buzz like locusts over a field: to break social etiquette is to risk disaster. Too much the maverick to submit to this community’s discipline, its unwritten codes of social behaviour, Duncan cannot efface his character, by slipping into the bureaucratic background. Instead, he tries to impose his personality onto the army - a silly boy, like most clever men. The army wins, of course.

Can we isolate a few months from the rest of our lives? Oliver thinks that once back home Wolfenkerchen will vanish, to leave a few fading faces in the memory album, whose labels are lost or surreptitiously removed. The army a kind of holiday, quickly erased by the routines of work, its new experiences and the old familiarities; a mixture he quaintly thinks of as ‘reality’. It is not to be. The German occupation even hangs around the streets of his home town. There is Heather’s aunt, who lives just up the road, her husband curious about his army time. Then Duncan arrives, and seduces Mrs Gordon’s daughter, who fascinated by Heather’s death is attracted to Duncan’s charm and looks. The past will not stay in the past. Oliver is offered a job on the strength of the Charlesworth reference; Duncan, though the superior candidate, is rejected because of the court martial. 

The townscape of the past is too big and solid for weak natures to clear away. Though in rare moments it appears that this is possible. In the short run, in the chaotic months after the war, when peace is still fresh, and everything is unsettled, Oliver's army experience, his family’s good name, that reference and the exoticism of Wolfenkerchen, transforms him into an attractive chap. The world’s fluidity, where the ordinary markers are lost, so that nobody knows him, makes even the most unlikeliest jobs become possible for this dull young man: an executive, confusing Oliver with his surroundings, offers him a job in his advertising agency.3 The weak drift on the ocean’s waves, hopelessly and helplessly, when - miraculously - they are washed up on a tropical beach, where…laughing clerks, helpful managers and beautiful secretaries rush down, to garland him with smiles and paper flowers. His hands full of files, his pockets stuffed with pens and paper clips: Oliver’s stay, surely, to be a pleasant one. 

A tsunami hits. Our own past - that psychological longue durée - returns and cannot be denied. Oliver’s lacklustre personality is quickly discovered; while the talents and charm of Duncan Holt rapidly efface that disreputable history.

Civilian life gives space to men with talent and independence. Skill and dynamism and imagination creates a looseness in society, that by accepting the unruly consequences of that talent, weakens strict bureaucratic subservience, which, especially in industries like advertising, can inhibit the free play of mind and hand.4 Mr Gordon, in getting to know Duncan and Oliver, realises he has made a mistake, and suspects he’s become the victim of yet another game - by that strange figure Charlesworth. After one month the decision is made: Duncan will replace Oliver in the firm. The natural order has resumed. In ordinary times the strong impose a continuous present onto a past they cause to wither away. The war’s influence - it didn’t last long - is over. In peacetime it is the strong who excel; the weak more than ever needing someone to save them….

Liese Linkmann crosses the English Channel. She waits for Oliver in Dempster’s department store.

(Review: In Another Country)

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1.  A good portrait of such a character can be found in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o's The River Between.

2.  Although we suspect the whole novel is about Bayley’s relationship with Iris Murdoch.

3.  An ongoing theme in my War Words is the existence of these micro-periods, that lasting a few months produce their own atmosphere, during which certain characters and behaviours come to the fore. They end as suddenly as they had begun.

These periods only have a tangential relationship to the political periodisation normally associated with this time - the Phoney War, the Blitz etc. - and which Alan Munton uses to frame his study of World War II literature. This is an odd work of literary criticism that uses an extremely narrow historical framing - Angus Calder’s The People's War - to judge the politics of an extremely select number of novelists, who are then subjected to a highly partisan analysis. Going beyond F.R. Leavis this work is closer to Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism: it seeks to destroy these writers not understand them. By showing more sympathy to Waugh, Olivia Manning et al. Munton would have produced not only his own periodisation but would have drawn a distinctly different perspective on the war; one seen in Robert Hewison’s Under Siege and Bernard Bergonzi’s Wartime and Aftermath. What Munton especially misses, but where Hewison is particularly adept, is the evocation of the special atmosphere of the literary scene; its radically individualistic culture and the tendency to apprise the world from its own narrow and short-lived concerns: e.g. the shortage of paper; the interference of the bureaucrats; institutional indifference… Literary criticism of any value has to grasp the unique characteristics of its milieu, and show it sympathy. Not so here. Munton’s literary standard is the thuggish politics of Bolshevism, where literary worth is measured by an author’s ideological commitment to the material benefits of ‘The People’; that ‘People’ the intellectual’s knuckle-duster. Poor aesthetes, beaten to a pulp by a hooligan.

4.  The problems for the nonconformist in the army are comically captured by Julian MacLaren-Ross in the Selected Stories.