Beautiful Beginners
by Dennis Duffy
Literary historians of the future will have a fine time showing the varieties
of modern novel-writing as exhibited in these two books. From Cohen, we have
the contemporary avant-garde novel, and from Jacobson, the contemporary
old-fashioned one. And while the former is far more interesting and powerful
work, the latter exhibits a skill no one should automatically overlook because
the tricks it is performing have been done before.
Since we live in an age of instant tradition, it surprises no one to discover
that Beautiful Losers has certain features that the reader expects
to find in a piece of aggressively contemporary fiction. Many of its scenes
have a phantasmagoric, surrealistic quality about them, coupled with a delight
in blood and buggery, that reminds one of the novels of William Burroughs.
The novel deals with two levels of time--the present and distant past--which
slowly come to a thematic intersection. That is, the events taking place
in each time illuminate each other. We're come across this sort of thing
in Thomas Pynchon's splendid V. Finally, as the novels of John Barth
have prepared us for, the protagonist of Beautiful Losers is either
sexually ambiguous, searching for his sexual identity, or out for what he
can snatch.
As if this were not enough to set it firmly in the Sixties, the novel
also employs a familiar and endearing bit of Popcult to make its point: the
Charles Atlas ads. (Not that we need delve too deeply into scholarship to
locate that: remember Ian Fleming's bit in The Spy Who Loved Me about
the sailor on the 'Player's' trademark?) We have a lament in the book along
the lines of Ou sont les Top Ten d'antan?, as well as a
quasi-science-fictional sexual encounter with a Danish vibrator machine,
a combination of Popcult and monster-mashing recalling the films of Jean-Luc
Godard.
All this doesn't mean that Beautiful Losers is flat, stale and
derivative, but it does show how much of a piece with its time the novel
is. It isn't as good a work as Naked Lunch, V, or The Floating
Opera, but it is a respectable work of its kind. Briefly, the book deals
with a nameless figure (let me call him O) who during his mental disintegration
ruminates upon the suicide of his wife Edith and the degenerative madness
of his friend, lover, hero, and cuckolder, F. O's monologue precedes a lengthy
letter from F, himself no master of expository prose, and a final section
narrated in an omniscient-author manner. When O and F aren't thinking about
themselves, they are painstakingly reconstructing certain incidents in the
life of the Lily of the Mohawks, Catherine Tekakwita, a self-torturing Indian
saint of the days of New France.
What is the book about? Well, it's the sort of book Susan Sontag's
Against Interpretation argues for, the sort of work you watch but
don't attempt to explain. In its dazzling, centrifugal energy, Beautiful
Losers resembles one of those Tinguely machines, a work of craftsmanship
and ingenuity, shaking itself to pieces. But what a shaking!
Yet a theme emerges from this work, a theme undoubtedly Lawrentian. For
the novel is about the corruption of love and its replacement by masochism
and mechanism. Which is where Tekakwitha comes in. In the accounts given
of her self-torment inflicted in the name of God, we find a parallel to the
flagellation and self-abuse (of quite another sort) that preoccupies the
contemporary figures in the book. In their ceaseless pursuit of stimulation
and final oblivion, they are as unable to bear the burdens of the self as
the deluded saint.
As the novel proceeds, the events of Tekakwitha's time increasingly parallel
those of our own day, culminating in the degradation of the Mohawk wrapping
herself in thorns, and our contemporary losers getting raped (not too
unwillingly) by that singular Danish vibrator. Thus the two time-streams
are locked together in a vision of total inability to live with the flesh.
This is not the novel's sole linkage of superficial disparities. In time
(around page 190 for me), the reader senses that O and F are the same demented
wretch. Thus the novel is Prufrockian dedoublement carried to its
utmost conclusion-confusion, as O the mad pedant and F the mad cocksman unite
in a final gambol before death. By his time, the parallels between Edith
(part-Indian) and Tekakwitha have also been developed, so that the characters
and events in the book have been fused in both senses. The novel also makes
an attempt at showing how being a hung-up, identity-less Canadian fits in
with all this. It's nice to know Artists are still thinking about Being Canadian,
but the theme isn't integrated too well into Beautiful Losers.
In its fusion of seemingly discordant elements into a coherent whole,
Beautiful Losers is at least as successful a work as the novels of
Burroughs, Pynchon, and Barth I have mentioned. What holds it back from the
fullness of their achievement is its ultimate thinness of texture. Lots of
funnies, lots of engrossing asides, lots of glimpses into hell. But the central
portions of the novel could have been done much quicker, and the entire book
worked better as a novella. It wouldn't have been a Death in Venice,
but it would have come closer to complete success. As it stands, it is a
novel definitely to be read, but only once.
The Beginners is one of those long novels about several generations
of a large family that serious writers rarely produce any more. But before
dismissing the book on these grounds, recall the achievement of an Angus
Wilson, who has shown how much life is still left in the plotty,
multi-charactered nineteenth-century novel. And it seems to me that Waugh's
Sword of Honour trilogy is at least as full and energetic an examination
of a society as any of his satiric fantasies. Beginning as I did with no
prejudice against the form Jacobson chose, I found his novel on the flat
side.
It is about the Glickmans, a Jewish, South African family. They reflect
the predicament of the Jew, trapped between his guilt at a comfortable
diaspora existence (particularly when so many in the wrong ghettoes
have been exterminated), and his inability to identify with the harsh Israeli
experience. The Glickman's also occupy the ambiguous position of the well-meaning
South African white. All sorts of characters come and go, though there is
little of plot, in the sense of hidden secrets, catastrophic events, etc.
The Beginners is replete with deft social and moral analyses, yet
its effect as a whole is a feeling of greyness. One is tempted to ascribe
this to the final note of the book--how everyone loses his dreams and settles
down into commonplace life, which keeps on going on. But a number of
writers--George Eliot, Kipling, and Bellow come to mind--made the theme of
accommodation and acceptance a matter of excitement rather than of tiredness.
One breathes a fervent 'yes' to Dorothea Booke's hard-won knowledge of the
obscure role life has cast her in, and only a 'so what?' to the insights
of the Glickmans. Perhaps that is what the author wanted, in which case one
can but regret his inability to distinguish between making the characters
flat and making them dull.
Despite the novel's many individual graceful touches--the two-page description
of the Warrentons, the meeting between Samuel Talmon and Benjamin Glickman
upon learning of Joel Glickman's injury, the life of Yitzchak Sklar, a fugitive
from Lithuanian anti-Semites--I cannot see these bits hanging together. If
one is to write a Forsyte sort of saga--with its comparative lack of great
events and concentration upon the shifts in family ties, Jacobson's novel
is that sort of book--perhaps the author should, like Galsworthy, hate one's
subjects. Hate them so strongly that contempt is forever interfering with
narration, but hate them enough to quicken them. And doesn't The Forsyte
Saga sag when Galsworthy takes up the generation he likes?
Jacobson's short stories are masterful in their power of capturing a moment
in a rich social context, rather than just a moment alone. 'Beggar My Neighbour',
with its evocation of the racial dilemma of South Africa in the relationship
between three children, is an instance of this. But The Beginners
is a succession of attempts at such moments which often lack that intensity
of characterization of the short stories. That other Southern African, Doris
Lessing, offers in her work many examples of that short-story intensity carried
over into the novel. But then to read a Lessing character is to wear his
skin.
How sad that the work that went into Jacobson's novel should have produced
little more than a pleasant read. But, to recapitulate, this is not necessarily
the fault of the form, though the author would do well to try something else
before another three-decker. Despite the potential, if slightly shop-worn,
richness of Jacobson's form, Cohen's superficially incoherent work offers
a far more eloquent and unified vision of life. It is still, in literature,
the vision that matters. As F says of Edith, 'The implication of her pleasure
are enormous.'
Leonard Cohen -- Beautiful Losers -- McClelland & Stewart
-- 243 pp. -- $6.50.
Dan Jacobson -- The Beginners -- Ryerson Press -- 488 pp. --
$6.95.
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