Mad Monologues

The provinces and class angst were a small peninsula on the island that is 1950s fiction, whose citizens travelled all over the place. In Gerald Kersh’s Fowlers End they ended up in suburban bohemia. A Wild West, whose crazy characters are unable to decide if they’re in a movie or at home.

___________

A world of talk. Words a fine mesh filtering out the ugliness of the society, its refusal to listen, to conform one’s own mad conception of the social universe. Neither aesthetes nor artists, more like scallywags; their minds seek not form or beauty, but are lost to confusion and fantasy; words ramshackle cabins they build to protect themselves from the traffic of modern life. Talk. The only way to be the hero; creating drama amongst a troupe that would otherwise play to an empty house. This place is dull and largely defunct. Only losers make it big in Fowlers End; and then only to themselves.

The greatest talker is Sam Yudenow, who takes a machete to the English language; branches hacked off, trees felled, stumps everywhere, the jungle ransacked, he creates his own Eldorado. A man who can only live inside a monologue.

The novel is set in a cinema, called - could it be anything else? - the Pantheon. Full of mad talkers the dramatic action happens not on screen but in the vestibule, kitchen and “genevator” room of this movie-house. The climatic scene an enormous punch up between our two superheroes and a gang of Irish thugs. Entertainment is seeping into life. The talk turns into the real thing. And if we missed the motif the Epilogue makes it clear: Copper Baldwin's dreams of escape have come true: he and Laverock are on a ship to Central America. 

But…a barrier has been broken, and words are no longer a protection from reality. Life has ceased to be a fiction, and these men must engage with it on its own terms. As he watches England disappear Laverock is homesick. Later a sailor punches him in the face and forces him to work in the stoke room. Dreams when transmuted into mundane existence become nightmares.

They should have stayed in Fowlers End. Even though in such places talk is the only salvation. And what talk it is!

“We were talking about Charles Dickens. Now tell me something—why do you read a load of tripe like Martin Chuzzlewit? Why can’t you put that book down? Because you’re interested in what ‘appens to the ‘ero? That twerp? No. Because you’re interested in Pecksniff, the ’ypocrite, and Jonas, and Tigg, the bucket-shop keeper, and that dirty filthy drunken old stinking midwife, Sairey Gamp. You’ve got to see those bastards get what’s coming to ‘em. Ain’t that so? Life is like that too, son. The ‘eroes, the ‘eroes are fabricated. They read themselves up in books, or saw themselves on the stage. It’s the villains that grip you, cocko—black bloody villainy, that’s the salt of life, that’s what keeps you guessing, that’s what keeps you turning the pages! ‘Ate pulls the strings that make you jump, my boy—‘ate keeps you going. You know, you’ve got to be in at the death. Well, I’ve got to be in at the death of Sam Yudenow.” 

The world of the autodidact, where clever people do simple jobs. How cope with the boredom that invariably follows? Create your own fantasies. Fine if you’re an artist, but if just a boho…you risk blurring the boundary between word and behaviour; so that words, so plastic and powerful, so pliable to your wishes, so servile to our dreams, will bleed into a life and so define and determine it. For such characters the environment cannot be inoculated against language; for what they believe they believe true for everyone, Fowlers End transformed into a Hollywood set. There are times when such lives get difficult, exciting, and - yes, for a while - marvellous: all this lowlife talk of sudden wealth ends with a real time coup: Copper Baldwin and Laverock make money (while Sam Yudenow loses out to his rival, Godbolt). It is possible to live the fantasy life. That final heroic battle with Darby O’Kelly O’Toole’s mob a fiction that is also real. The imagination invades the world and turns it into a fairy tale.

Anything can be transformed in talk.

“My pianist’s sister? No doubt. Pleased to meet you. Believe me, Miss What’s-a-name, blood will tell. Vice versa, murder will out, and love will have its way. Blood will tell. It told. That your sister had unfluential relatives, I knew. So I took her into my bosom. Good enough? Good enough. Out of the hands of the police I have kept her - didn’t we, Copper? Nourishment I gave her—didn't we, Lavendrop? Right. Especially in good families is always a black. Sheep, I mean. There is a science about it, miv which there is, if you will uxcuse me, bed-wetting, et cetera, et cetera…. So, you come to get your sister. And quite right to. A man’s got a heart, so I took her out of the gutter. And believe me, miss, rahnd ‘ere you know why they got reinforced tyres on the buses? The gutters. Acid. It’ll eat you away to the bone…. She had some terrible misfortune maybe? A disappointment? Don’t worry, she’ll be in, in a little while. Whereas, in the meantime, I ought to tell you, there’s a little bill owing. I’m sorry to say your sister lost control. There’s a cleaning bill. All in all, it amounts to—look, I’ll leave it to you. I’m like a father rahnd ’ere, Miss Noodle; ask anybody, miv the soluntary exemption of Godbolt. Ah, many is the time your poor old sister has helped out miv Godbolt, specially on the Saturday morning after pay-day. Believe me, the she was worth her weight in dead cats. Once I paid her fine, five shillings, ‘drunk and incapable’, and for the stummick pump half a guinea. But I’m like that, I’m a funny feller. Be done by as you do, Miss. Sam Yudenow asks no reward—he leaves it up to you——”

Sam is the greatest teller of tall tales. His outrageous talk creates a world out of language, in which others are supposed to inhabit. An old church is transformed into the Pantheon; Laverock’s job is not cinema manager, with its uneventful routine, but a cavalry stint in some Western, where he protects the innocents from the locals, savages all. To survive in a dump you need amazing stories. While business itself is one joke after another; although reality always peeps in when they end.

He stopped abruptly, looked at her with more attention, and said: “Now you’re crying I recognise you. Your are Miss Noel. But all dolled up?”

The talk cannot go on forever. It must stop, and the society have its say. This isn't Miss Noel’s sister. It is Miss Noel herself.

It is not only autodidacts and shady businessmen who live inside genre fictions. June Whistler wants to love the scum of the earth, and believes she has found just the man: Laverock. For although of respectable stock he looks, because of childhood accidents, like a bruiser from the boxing ring. To help victims, to be abused by them…the middle-class idealist also needs excitement, a sense of adventure, that ecstatic thrill of self-sacrifice. The movies are everywhere; their sensational stories invading ordinary living; and for some - these down-at-heel-bohemians - even conquering it: John Wayne signs up for the day job. Characters in their own movie-show. Though all films must finish sometime. June Whistler, as befits her class, gets bored with poverty and Laverock and opts to marry a wealthy man.

Laverock himself, although he appears down-to-earth, also lives inside a fiction: he has rejected his background, preferring to live with the poor and mad. Anything is better than working in The City, it seems.

The movies, we could argue - disagree and Sam Yudenow to give you a fistful of words - are a metaphor for the mass-produced ideas conquering the middle-class mind; compare Laverock with Charles Lumley in Hurry on Down. Most are too dull or unimaginative to take these ideas seriously; but a few ornery characters believe in them as if God’s own truth; Kersh’s hero - a true believer - not so lucky as Wain’s, who finds a job in that well-paid world of fantasy, the new media industries.

Nearly all the action is set in the cinema, and most of it is talk. Yet the real drama is outside the Pantheon: that heroic fight; Cruikback’s shenanigans; the bomb that Laverock carries to the railway station. It is a terrific joke. Although the joke, once seen, becomes a little stale: this is a novel that riffs on a gag until it breaks down under the weight of its variations. Yet such talk perfectly captures the atmosphere of this milieu, with its dead-end jobs and tiresome characters; a place where only talk can get you through the long tedium of a typical day. 

This is a strangely dense novel that evokes life on the fringes; a place that is opaque to the outsider, who cannot tell what is real or fake, joke or seriously serious. A closed community where poverty coexists with intelligence, and where Copper Baldwin and Laverock are intellectuals. Talk talk talk talk. It’s the only thing they’ve got…and what a metamorphosis they manufacture, turning losers into superheroes. Biff, bop, bash, clobber, clout. How the words fly! Ouch!

Review: Fowlers End