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Wednesday 24 October 2012

The Watch Tower (1966) by ELIZABETH HARROWER


The Text Publishing Company Australia, 2012




 
Anyway, the obstacles were unarguably too great.  Who could break out?  Who could do more than marvel dully at survival?  Who had energy and initiative now to spare for what was merely reasonable?  What promise had the world held out ever that there was anything to escape to?  What was there to desire in this nightmare but the cessation of strain?  On the other hand, what sensible kind-hearted citizen would not scoff at the suggestion that there could exist in a charming white colonial house in the suburbs a human situation slightly beyond the powers of commonsense to mend?  Sydney was such a pretty, ordinary city!  Women are notoriously neurotic, of course!  What's the harm in a fellow having a few beers at the end of a day's work?  If his women are gloomy, no wonder he drinks!  Good luck to him!



 

The Novel:  The sudden death of her husband causes Stella Vaizey to remove her daughters –– Laura and her younger sister Clare –– from their country school so they can come to live with her in Sydney.  The blow is a doubly harsh one for Laura, a bright girl who, according to her headmistress, is certain to earn a scholarship that will allow her to follow in her dead father's footsteps and study medicine one day.  But the beautiful, elegant, rather remote Mrs Vaizey refuses to be swayed.  She needs her daughters with her, she explains, so they can help each other through this difficult time in their lives –– a time certain to be made even more difficult by the outbreak of World War Two.

 

For Stella, 'helping each other' means having her daughters wait on her hand and foot while she lounges around their flat, smoking exotic Abdulla cigarettes and pretending to recovering from the 'tragedy' of her late husband's secretly unlamented death.  The day-to-day running of the household is left entirely to Laura – a kind, self-sacrificing girl who loves her mother enough to abandon her scholastic ambitions and, in time, take a dull job as a secretary in a box factory to support her and Clare.  But these sacrifices fail to satisfy the narcissistic Stella, who yearns to return to England, where she was considered a great beauty in her youth, before the spread of the war makes travelling there impossible.  When Laura's boss –– an older man named Felix Shaw – unexpectedly proposes to the girl, Stella spots her chance and takes it, gladly leaving Laura and Clare to take up their new life with this virtual stranger while she undertakes the perilous voyage 'home' without them.

 

Felix (whose name means 'happy' in Latin) is an entrepreneur, a restless man always on the lookout for a floundering business he can buy, build up into a successful enterprise then sell on to one of his friends –– men who, after their business has been transacted, rapidly lose all interest in retaining his friendship.  At first, Laura feels flattered to be the wife of such a clever man, to receive his generous gifts and become the mistress of the fine house in Neutral Bay, with postcard views of Sydney Harbour, that he takes her and Clare to live in.  Yet things are not as idyllic for the newlyweds as they ought to be.  'If Felix teased her a little strangely, almost unkindly, it meant nothing in particular.  Against the teasing and the employer's look and tone, she had to weigh the lovely house, the garden and water-views, and the fact that she and Clare were to be taken care of.'  Being taken care of, Laura tells herself, must surely serve as adequate compensation for any little quirks her older, rather fussy new husband might have developed during his bachelor days.

 

Although Felix strives to give his employees and everyone else he knows the impression that he's a contented if occasionally henpecked husband, the truth is that he's a violent control freak, an aggressive, dictatorial alcoholic who insists upon unresisting devotion from his wife and sister-in-law and expects them to work for him, at home and in his various businesses, for little or no pay.  His bullying even extends to making them spend every evening at home with him, listening in respectful silence while he rants about the government's inept conduct of the war or belittles another lost 'friend' who had the gall to turn his back on him.  He's a lonely unhappy man whose private misery can only be borne by keeping those closest to him in a continual state of suspense, never sure from one day to the next if he'll explode into another easily provoked rage or unexpectedly shower them with gifts.

 

Laura and Clare soon teach themselves to accept the consistently inconsistent nature of Felix's behaviour –– they have no money and nowhere to go and their mother, whom they hardly ever hear from, is far away in England –– developing a strategy of mutual but terrified complaisance that allows them, and him, to treat his drink-fuelled rages as though they haven't occurred.  This habit of voluntarily burying their heads in the sand has a profound affect on the sisters as the years go by, making Laura ever more masochistic in her devotion to their manipulator ('Poor Felix!' becomes her nightly mantra) while Clare finds herself becoming completely detached from her fellow human beings, unable to connect with them in any lasting or meaningful way because his mindgames have robbed her of the capacity to believe in any form of human goodness.  A pattern has been set that cannot easily be broken, not even by the war ending and Clare beginning a new job with the government.  The emotional and sometimes physical abuse Felix subjects them to is no longer something they have trained themselves to tolerate in order to prevent their precariously-balanced household from disintegrating.  Like Felix himself, it's become the governing factor of their stressful, joyless, completely circumscribed lives.

 

Over time, Felix's behaviour grows more and more erratic.  He sobers up, only to fall spectacularly off the wagon any time he feels his role as breadwinner and head of the house is under threat or even being questioned.  He screams at Laura, vowing to sell everything they own and leave her penniless, only to give her a diamond ring or take her on a longed-for outing a few days later, reviving the false expectation that things might somehow be different between them from now on.  They never are, yet Laura stubbornly refuses to leave him, clinging to her baseless belief that changing him is something that may still be possible if only she continues to believe in the future of their marriage.  Any time Clare raises the notion that there might be more to life than serving as Felix's uncomplaining victims, Laura quickly invents some excuse to justify their ongoing acceptance of his abuse, blaming his anger on overwork or the fact he has no close male friend in whom he might confide and share his many pressing business worries with.

 

The arrival of Bernard – a young Dutch war refugee who works in Felix's newly-purchased clothing factory –– introduces an unknown element into the sisters' emotionally stunted lives.  Bernard, who has been working night and day in two jobs so he can afford to bring his family to Australia and study for a botany degree, is close to death and in dire need of rest.  Felix and Laura, seeing him perhaps as the child they never had (and thankfully never wanted), take him in, pressing Clare to deliver food and medication to his room even though she displays no interest in meeting or befriending him.  But something about Bernard –– his lack of guile, the many hardships he's uncomplainingly endured both prior to and since arriving in Australia –– gradually re-awakens something inside her, prompting her to do whatever may prove necessary to help him achieve his goals.

 

Felix, however, has other ideas.  Consumed by jealousy, he undermines Clare's efforts to find Bernard a university scholarship by cunningly offering to pay for the boy's education himself.  Bernie can be trained to do the books for the factory, he tells Clare.  By the time he's been doing that for a few years, he'll have given up this nonsense about studying botany and be reduced to the status of another 'guzzler' that he, his debt-collecting benefactor, can browbeat, ridicule and victimize any time the mood takes him.

 

But will Bernard cooperate with his plan?  And if he refuses to do so, what will the consequences be for Clare and Laura?  Can they ever really escape the prison they've created for themselves or will it turn out to be their grave? 

 

The Watch Tower has the pace and energy of a thriller but it is so much more than that.  It's a brilliantly observed psychological novel, a chilling exploration of what drives some human beings to become tyrants and others to become their masochistic, excuse making victims.  Harrower depicts life as a power struggle, a contest between unevenly matched egos in which the poor, weak and obliging never stand a chance against the wealthy, strong and selfish.  Its setting – Sydney during World War Two and the early 1950s – only highlights the tragedy of Laura's situation.  This was not a time when good but weak-willed wives had the option to walk out on their consistently abusive (or just plain crazy) husbands.  Laura is kind, she invariably means well, but these distinctions don't prevent her and Clare from being passed from one narcissistic sociopath (their mother) to another (Felix) as though it's somehow fitting that they should have no say whatsoever in how they lead their lives.  The various cruelties they're subjected to are casual, even mundane, but are all the more cruel for being things they teach themselves to accept because to do anything else would be 'wrong' and, even worse, socially unthinkable.  Prisons, Harrower suggests, are not only places constructed of bricks, steel bars and concrete.  They're also places we create inside ourselves, places we often choose to inhabit willingly because we lack the courage required to face the difficult realities that might allow us to escape them.

 

 


ELIZABETH HARROWER, c 1972

 

 

 

The Writer:  Why does a writer stop writing?  Give up in the middle of what, in the eyes of their contemporaries, ranks as being a successful, still promising career?  There can be many reasons for this – ill health, substance abuse, a string of damning reviews, a succession of impenetrable creative blocks or, in the case of Elizabeth Harrower, the feeling that she 'just can't be bothered anymore.'  After publishing The Watch Tower in 1966 she never published another novel, prompting her friend Patrick White to inscribe the following observation on the flyleaf of a book he once gave her: 'To Elizabeth, luncher and diner extraordinaire. Sad you don't also WRITE.'

 

White's dismay isn't difficult to understand.  That a novelist as gifted, as genuinely original, as Elizabeth Harrower should decide to turn her back on literature is not just a shame, it qualifies (in my view, anyway) as a major literary tragedy.

 

Elizabeth Harrower was born in Sydney on 8 February 1928.  Her parents separated soon after her birth and she moved, with her mother Margaret, to the industrial city of Newcastle in northern New South Wales.  (She would later use her childhood experiences in Newcastle as the background for her second novel The Long Prospect, changing the city's name to Bellowra.)  She lived in Newcastle until the age of twelve and then returned to Sydney, which she left again in 1951 to visit relatives in Scotland and London, fully expecting never to return to the land of her birth.

 

While living in London she wrote her first novel Down in the City which would go on to be published in 1957.  The Long Prospect –– the story of an intellectually curious girl who becomes the misunderstood victim of small-town snobbery –– followed in 1958, with one reviewer naming it the best Australian novel since Patrick White's Voss which had appeared the previous yearHarrower, who was always close to her mother and disliked being apart from her, returned to Australia in 1959, where she soon found work with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and as a book reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald.  These were to remain her main occupations until she took a job with the publishing firm of Macmillan in 1961, the year her third novel The Catherine Wheel appeared.  Her only novel not set in Australia, it disappointed the critics but made her determined that her next book would be as perfect as she could make it.  For the next five years, she spent every night and weekend doing little else but writing what became The Watch Tower.  'I didn't care how long it took,' she stated in a 2012 interview.  'I just thought, I have to get it right.'

 

 

ELIZABETH HARROWER, May 2012

 

 

Her dedication paid off.  The book was hailed as 'a dense, profoundly moral novel of our time' and earned her the admiration and friendship of other well-respected Australian novelists including Christina Stead and Kylie Tennant.  But the emotional toll the writing of it took may have been too high for her.  Although she completed a fifth novel, Harrower refused to publish it, angering White and other friends who felt she was betraying her talent by choosing to remain out of print.  Her thirty year silence did not prevent her from winning the Patrick White Award in 1996, an annual $25,000 prize given, since 1974, to a writer who has made 'a significant but inadequately recognized contribution to Australian literature.'

 

Elizabeth Harrower now lives in a small flat in suburban Sydney, where she continues to pursue her lifelong interests in reading, foreign languages, music and politics.  To many people she still ranks as one of the truly great Australian novelists, a creator of work that has passed the toughest test of all –– the mercilessly unforgiving test of time.  The uncompromising bleakness of her vision may not be to everybody's taste, but then true greatness, like true genius, seldom is. 

 

 
 
 
Use the links below to visit the ELIZABETH HARROWER page at the Text Classics website and read an article about her by GAY ALCORN, published in The Sydney Morning Herald in May 2012 to publicize the reissue of The Watch Tower.
 
 
 
 


   

 
 
Use these links to read a short post about The Watch Tower by JULIE PROUDFOOT on her interesting WordPress blog Passages of Writing and a longer post about the novel on the amusing literature blog His Futile Preoccupations:
 


 


 

 

 

 

 

 -- UPDATE --

 
ELIZABETH HARROWER died in Sydney on 7 July 2020 at the age of ninety-two.  Use this link to read her obituary:
 
 

 

 
 
 
 
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 Last updated 23 September 2021 § 

 

Monday 15 October 2012

The Write Advice 022: GEORGE ORWELL


Still, every at all individual man has an inner life, is aware of the practical impossibility of understanding others or being understood –– in general, of the star-like isolation in which human beings live.  Nearly all literature is an attempt to escape from this isolation by roundabout means, the direct means (words in their primary meanings) being almost useless.


New Words (1940) 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read more about the life and work of ERIC ARTHUR BLAIR, better known to the world as GEORGE ORWELL:

 


 

 

 

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Thursday 11 October 2012

Appointment in Samarra (1934) by JOHN O'HARA


Vintage Classics/Random House UK, 2008




You went to the Gibbsville Club for lunch; Harry was there.  You went to the country club to play squash on Whit Hofman's private court, and Harry was around.  You went to the Saturday night drinking parties, and there was Harry; inescapable, everywhere.  Carter Davis was there, too, and so was Whit; so was Froggy Ogden.  But they were different.  The bad new never had worn off Harry Reilly.  And the late fall and winter seemed now to have been spoiled by room after room with Harry Reilly.  You could walk outside in the summer, but even though you can walk outside in winter, winter isn't that way.  You have to go back to the room soon, and there is no life in the winter outside of rooms.  Not in Gibbsville, which was a pretty small room itself.



 

The Novel:  The small Pennsylvania coal-mining community of Gibbsville during the Christmas season of 1930 seems an unlikely setting for a grippingly constructed tale of wilful self-destruction.  It's a town where everybody knows everybody else's business, where the classes rarely mix and the lines between the 'good' and 'bad' people appear to be clearly and permanently drawn.  Friendship is everything and no one, it seems, dare defy the rigid if unspoken rules which serve to govern and define it.


But these rules don't necessarily apply to Julian English, popular owner of the local Cadillac dealership.  Although English is considered to be 'good people' – respected businessman, well-liked member of the country club, devoted husband to Caroline, a girl he's known and loved since childhood –– his conviviality is a sham, concealing a deep but secret hatred of his fellow townsmen, their hypocritical morality and, most damningly of all, himself. 

 
It all comes to a head at a Christmas party where Julian rashly and inexplicably throws a drink in the face of his neighbor Harry Reilly –– another of the 'good people' who recently loaned him money to prevent his struggling business from sliding into bankruptcy.  This seemingly trivial act, committed in a moment of drunken recklessness, is enough to gradually alter the town's perceptions of him, turning friends into enemies and revealing the bitter and sometimes long-submerged animosity he inspires in the hearts of many of Gibbsville's most prominent citizens.  The general consensus is that Julian is a bit of a jerk –– smug, opinionated, a shirker who should have fought in World War One but somehow managed to worm his way out of doing his patriotic duty, a bit too confident of his ability to charm and hoodwink everyone he knows, particularly when the person being hoodwinked happens to be female.  Although he tries to apologize to Reilly twice, this doesn't prevent him from becoming the town pariah, a sort of walking scapegoat for everything that's wrong with it and with those who, voluntarily or not, are obliged to call it home.

 
The most surprising change of all, however, occurs in Julian's wife Caroline.  While she loves her husband and still gains a lot of pleasure from their very active sex life, she can neither understand nor condone his behavior, blaming it, as she has so often in the past, on his irritating habit of drinking too much at parties.  At first she is sympathetic to what he's done, agreeing that Reilly's a fool but begging Julian to apologize to him for the sake of rescuing his business.  Little by little, however, her forgiving view of her husband's ill-considered rudeness changes, leading her to spurn his sexual advances at the moment when he finds himself most in need of her love and affection.  Angered by this rejection and the increasing hostility of his neighbors, Julian ceases to care what happens to him and takes refuge in the arms of local torch singer, Helene Holman –– another self-destructive decision that succeeds in completely alienating him from his wife even as it threatens to arouse the ire of Helene's boyfriend, local bootlegger Ed Charney.  But now the line has been crossed it appears there's no way to uncross it.  Caroline walks out on him and Julian, realizing at last the terrible trick he's played upon himself, is left to face his future, or lack of one, alone. 

 

Harcourt, Brace & Company first US edition, 1934

 
 
Appointment in Samarra was John O'Hara's first novel and one of the first in North American literature to feature a realistically unsympathetic protagonist.  Julian English is not at all a likeable character but he immediately strikes the reader as being a credible human being – as strange, capricious, lost and dangerous as human beings, especially when they're drunk or feeling pressured or misunderstood, can all too often be.  By choosing to tell Julian's story not only through his eyes but also through those of Caroline, his loyal employee Lute Fleigler and Charney's delivery man Al Grecco, O'Hara creates a kind of subtle Greek chorus effect featuring a sense of hubris and nemesis as powerful as anything to be found in the tragedies of Sophocles.  


It's the inevitability of Julian's decisions that makes them fascinating, a relentless compulsion to destroy which makes it impossible to stop reading the book and shows why O'Hara was also a successful playwright who worked for a time, albeit unhappily, as a Hollywood screenwriter.  His ability to capture modern North American speech patterns was nothing short of extraordinary, as was his ability to reveal what he saw as being the quintessentially sexual nature of women –– a radical idea which had never been explored in the literature of his native land before he began to do so with astonishing and sometimes confronting insight.  The critic Harold Bloom was right to nominate Appointment in Samarra as one of the '100 Best Modern Novels.'  As a snapshot of its time and a glimpse into the heart of a troubled, self-hating individual and the hypocritical community which triggers and then becomes a willing participant in his downfall it is, in the truest sense of the term, a masterpiece.

 

 


JOHN O'HARA, c 1960

 

 

The WriterJohn O'Hara enjoys the rare distinction of being one of the few authors in the world who got to compose his own epitaph.  'Better than anyone else,' he wrote of himself, 'he wrote the truth about his time.  He was a professional.  He wrote honestly and well.'  Brendan Gill, a journalist colleague of O'Hara's at The New Yorker during the 1930s and 1940s, called this 'an astonishing claim' but in one sense, at least, it's difficult to refute.  O'Hara's early work – the two hundred short stories he published in The New Yorker and other magazines, as well as his first two novels Appointment in Samarra (1934) and BUtterfield 8 (1935) –– contain some of the most devastatingly honest insights into the North American psyche ever published in the twentieth century.  If O'Hara's literary reputation is not quite all it should be these days, then that's perhaps due more to his belligerent, difficult, social-climbing personality than it is to the outstanding quality of his important early work.

 

O'Hara was born on 31 January 1905 in the Pennsylvania coal mining town of Pottsville – a community that would serve as the model for the town of Gibbsville in which so much of his later fiction would be set.  His father was a surgeon who belonged to the local country club and made a good life for his wife and eight children, owning at one time five automobiles, a show farm and a stable full of horses.  Yet O'Hara grew up feeling that he didn't belong in this world, that his family's lower class Irish-Catholic heritage prevented it from being truly embraced and accepted by Pottsville's ruling Protestant elite.  He was a man who, throughout his life, had the desire to be acclaimed and belong but simultaneously did everything in his power –– drinking, fighting, bullying and verbally abusing those who came into contact with him –– to guarantee he would remain the perpetually snubbed outsider.
   

 

Tragedy struck in 1925 when his father died without leaving a will, reducing his family to penury overnight and robbing the twenty year old O'Hara of his long-cherished dream of attending Yale University –– a blow from which his ego, according to those who knew him, never fully recovered.  Instead of going to Yale, he was forced to take a series of menial jobs –– waiter on an ocean liner, nightclerk in a hotel, public relations man –– before finding his niche as a newspaper reporter, first in his native Pennsylvania and then in New York City.  Some critics believe that it was his work as a reporter, with its emphasis on sticking to the facts and describing events as clearly and succinctly as possible, that formed his writing style, which has been described, and not inaccurately or disparagingly, as 'no style at all.'

 

During these years O'Hara also began to drink –– a habit which made him violent and obnoxious and cost him more than one close friendship.  (He once threatened to punch a midget at '21,' a famous New York nightclub, until another midget allegedly knocked him flat on his drunken ass.)  In 1928 he sold his first sketch to The New Yorker and soon became, along with Dorothy Parker and James Thurber, one of the genuinely admired 'stars' of that culturally significant magazine.  This was in spite of the fact that he was personally loathed by its managing editor, Harold Ross, and developed a reputation for being difficult to work with because he steadfastly refused to change a single line of his work once it had been submitted for publication.  The quality and popularity of his stories were enough to guarantee that Ross went ahead and published them anyway.

 

 

ERNEST HEMINGWAY [l] and JOHN O'HARA [r] c 1935

 

 

In 1934 O'Hara published his first novel, of which Ernest Hemingway said, 'If you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well, read "Appointment in Samarra".'  One year later he published BUtterfield 8, a novel inspired by a news story about a beautiful girl whose dead body had mysteriously washed ashore on a Long Island beach.  The book is his imaginative recreation of the events preceding her death and became another bestseller, confirming his status as a major new literary talent.  He would go on to publish another fifteen novels, the fourth of which, Pal Joey, was later adapted as a musical and turned into a successful 1957 film starring Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak.

 

Unfortunately, the acclaim O'Hara received for his first two novels proved to be the exception rather than the rule throughout the rest of his career.  The combination of hard drinking, his difficult personality and what critics began to deride as the unnecessary tawdriness and prolixity of later novels including Ten North Frederick (1956) and The Lockwood Concern (1965) saw his reputation, if not his sales, suffer a dramatic downturn.  His reputation was further tainted by his work as a magazine and newspaper columnist, in which he was outspoken in his support for the Republican Party and criticized the decision made by the Nobel Prize committee to award the 1964 Peace Prize to black civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King.  This was ironic, given that O'Hara himself had always dreamed of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and believed – mistakenly as it turned out –– that he was guaranteed to do so following the death of Hemingway.  When John Steinbeck won the award in 1962, O'Hara wrote to congratulate him, adding that there was 'only one other author I'd rather see get it.' 

 

O'Hara died in 1970 without having won the Nobel Prize or living to see the campaign, led by fellow novelists like John Updike and EL Doctorow, to reevaluate his literary legacy and ensure his best work found its way back into print.  He was survived by his daughter Wylie and his third wife Katherine Barnes Bryan, his second wife Belle having died of congestive heart disease in 1954.

 

 

 
Use the links below to visit the website of THE JOHN O'HARA SOCIETY and read an interesting blog post by ST GEORGE BRYAN, the grandson of his second wife KATHERINE BARNES BRYAN and somebody who knew and saw a different side of the writer's usually combative personality.
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

The most recent biography of JOHN O'HARA –– John O'Hara: The Art of Burning Bridges by novelist GEOFFREY WOLFF –– was published by Knopf in 2003. 

 

 

 

 

 

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Of Time and the River by THOMAS WOLFE (1935)



Last updated 17 September 2021
 

Monday 8 October 2012

The Write Advice 021: AL KENNEDY


A writer being purposely unhappy when writing provides such a glorious and unpredictably rewarding path through lifewell, that's borderline criminal.  If the budding writer just settled down and wrote, then he or she would become more and more who they are happy being, and might make things other people can like and feel happy about, too.  Better still, the sheer effort of getting better, of pushing sentences to shine brighter, of fumbling about in the dark of half-formed ideas and feeling foolish and lonely and scared –– that's more than enough suffering to be going on with.  And, even better than that, when you've taken your exercise for the day, you'll feel great.  You'll be tired, but you'll have dignity.  You tried your best and maybe learned something and if not today, then tomorrow –– who knows how good you might get.

The Guardian (2 April 2012)



Use the link below to visit the website of British novelist, journalist and stand-up comedian ALISON LOUISE KENNEDY:

 

http://www.a-l-kennedy.co.uk/

 

 

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The Write Advice 046: RICHARD BAUSCH

 
The Write Advice 039: DEBORAH EISENBERG

 
The Write Advice 033: TAMA JANOWITZ

 

Thursday 4 October 2012

Lasso Round the Moon (1954) by AGNAR MYKLE


Panther Books UK, 1968

 

 

 

 

He went and stood behind her and took her by the shoulders.  She turned towards him and when he kissed her, she fell heavily against him.  He led her across the floor to the divan.  He thought –– 'Why am I doing this?  This is not love, I don't even know if it is love-making.  We don't want to be good to each other, just to have each other.  Now we are going to have each other, but in reality we shall have fought a fight with sword and dagger.  I hated her sparkling, twinkling, cheeky face from the moment she asked for a light; she hated my pale face from the moment I was about to walk past her table without paying any attention to her.  Now comes the avenging, now comes the fight and for place I have chosen my divan.  Now we shall have at each other: she at me.  I at her.  All right.  But why?'

 

 


Translated by 
 
MAURICE MICHAEL  
 
(1960)



 

 

 

The NovelIt is surely no coincidence that the epigraph for Agnar Mykle's 1954 bestseller is also the title of Thomas Wolfe's posthumously published 1940 novel You Can't Go Home Again.  Like Wolfe, Mykle's novel concerns a young man's search for love and his attempts to come to grips with the past, the future and his as-yet unrealized artistic aspirations.  Unlike Wolfe, Mykle also deals with sexuality and male/female relationships in what was, for the 1950s, a remarkably frank and sometimes painfully honest way.

 

The book opens with Ash Burlefoot, its central character, boarding the train that will carry him back to the dull southern Norwegian town where he was born.  Now a successful composer, Ash has mixed emotions about returning to the home of his ageing parents –– people he's never felt particularly close to and has not visited for years.  (He's returning home to attend the funeral of Balder, his younger brother.)  The journey draws him back into the past as journeys of this kind so frequently seem to do, reminding him of his first trip away from home, taken when he travelled to a remote northern town called Inner Pool to become the caretaker principal of its small but thriving business school.  He was twenty years old then – an ambitious if callow and pretentious young man, not long out of high school, tormented by lust but awkward with girls, desperate to find something –– art, literature or music – that would give his life the purpose and direction he feared it would permanently lack.

 

Inner Pool is a small community, populated by fishermen, miners and bored gossiping housewives.  It doesn't take long for the disenchanted Ash to cross paths with Gunnhild, a local waitress a few years older than himself.  They quickly become lovers –– a 'secret' which just as quickly becomes common knowledge among Ash's business school students and the nosy townsfolk.  Although Ash enjoys having sex with Gunnhild –– an uneducated woman who's had a hard and unrewarding life, filled with many affairs and drunken one-night stands –– and sometimes feels he might be on the verge of falling in love with her, he ultimately decides they don't belong together and ends their relationship, only to learn soon afterwards that she's become pregnant by him.  This news changes everything.  Ash must marry her, she says, and provide for her and their unborn child.

 

To buy himself some time, Ash accepts a new job running another business school in the even smaller, even grimmer town of Outer Pool.  He's very lonely here, missing Gunnhild and wracked by guilt even as he does everything he can to avoid having to see her again.  Eventually he meets another woman –– a middle-aged divorcee named Siv whom he feels irresistibly drawn to both sexually and, more surprisingly, intellectually.  In time, Siv too becomes pregnant by him, although her attitude to this problem is very different to that adopted by the long-suffering Gunnhild.  Siv makes no demands of Ash and quietly arranges an abortion for herself, travelling alone to Oslo to have the procedure performed while Ash stays in Outer Pool to face his other responsibilities.  Eventually worn down by Gunnhild's nagging and his own paralyzing sense of guilt, he allows her to go ahead and set a date for their wedding.

 

The wedding, however, never takes place.  At the last minute, Ash panics and returns to his parents' house in the south, stating that he won't betray himself by marrying a woman he doesn't love but will do everything necessary to meet his financial obligations to her and their newborn daughter.  While living with his parents, hiding from the world as he works at a succession of menial jobs to earn whatever money he can in order to provide for Gunnhild and the baby, he receives word from Siv that it was 'too late' for her to go through with the abortion she planned to get.  She too, it appears, has given birth to a daughter.  Like Gunnhild, Siv also plans to keep her baby, prompting Ash to propose to her –– a proposal he fully intends to honour this time by going through with the marriage ceremony.  But this, alas, proves to be no more than wishful thinking on Ash's part.  Siv soon receives a letter –– sent to her in secret by his interfering mother –– begging her to give her child up for adoption.  This is what Siv does, telling Ash it will the best thing for all three of them in the long run –– a decision he's reluctantly forced to accept as being the only practical one that can be made under the circumstances. 

 

As the years pass, Ash realizes that he owes a great deal to these two very different women for educating him and giving him the confidence and freedom needed to pursue what, at the time he knew them, was his far-fetched dream of becoming a composer.  His return home, dreaded and delayed for so many years, becomes an unexpected opportunity to make peace with his troubled past and forgive himself for the foolish mistakes of his youth, including the neglect of his dead brother Balder whose unconditional, perpetually taken-for-granted love was the only 'true' love, he's now come to see, he has ever really known. 

 

 

Gyldendal Norway, 2007

 

 

 

Lasso Round the Moon is a far more interesting novel than the preceding plot summary might make it sound.  What raises it above the level of a mildly titillating sex melodrama –– its sex scenes are few and far between and not even eyebrow-raising by today's standards are its lyricism (reminiscent of Thomas Wolfe without ever being specifically derivative of him) and its uncompromising honesty.  Ash isn't always a likeable character.  Nor, in many respects, is he always a sensible, pragmatic or sexually responsible one.  What makes him fascinating is his divided personality –– part libertine, part lover, part romantic dreamer and part clumsy, insensitive buffoon.  Mykle offers no easy answers to the problems that Ash's immaturity (and failure to wear a condom) create for Gunnhild and Siv because he sees, rightly, that there are no easy answers to such problems, that each human life is an experiment which must fail or succeed as our individual quirks and flaws dictate.  The most incisive comment on the novel came from VS Naipaul – author of A House for Mr Biswas (1961) and no slouch as a novelist himself –– who wrote:  'Mykle is longwinded; he has certain rhetorical mannerisms, and his technique is clumsy [which may, in fairness, have partly been the fault of his translator].  But the sensibility is true, the passion genuine. The book is likely to attract attention because of its frank sexual detail.  But this detail is a necessary part of Mykle's theme, which is of development and discovery; it is of a piece with the intensity and honesty of the book.'  

 

'Intensity' is indeed the word which best describes the theme and style of Lasso Round the Moon.  The book has dated –– what novel doesn't begin to show its age after fifty-eight years? – but it still burns with the flame of what it is to be young and passionate but socially unsure of yourself, tortured by the things you think you want but don't yet understand how to get or keep.  It's about life and how tough it can often be to live it, which I for one would argue is what any true novel ought to be about.

 

 

 


AGNAR MYKLE, 1956

 

 

 

The Writer:  Agnar Mykle was, in every respect, a martyr to the cause of free speech not only in his native Norway but also in the wider international sense.  The publication of Lasso rundt fru Luna ('Lasso Round the Moon') and its 1956 sequel Sangen om den røde rubin ('Song of the Red Ruby', which tells the story of Ash Burlefoot's university days) led to him and his publisher being prosecuted for obscenity –– a charge they were eventually acquitted of, although not before the trial it provoked ruined Mykle's career and all but destroyed his faith in humanity.  After the trial – which between 1957 and 1958 made him arguably the most notorious writer in the world –– he went bankrupt, spent time in a mental institution and eventually became a misanthropic recluse, shunning all requests for interviews and photographs like Scandinavia's answer to JD Salinger.

 

Mykle was born in the southern Norwegian city of Trondheim on 8 August 1915, the son of a housewife (who may have sexually abused him as a child according to Norwegian scholar Anne Luise Kirkengen) and a professional marching band musician.  Like his alter-ego Ash Burlefoot (or 'Ask Burleføt' in Norsk), he suffered from chronic asthma as a child and was frequently bedridden, forcing him to miss a lot of school.  He recovered sufficiently to attend a mercantile high school in Trondheim, from which he graduated, with outstandingly high marks, in 1935.  Between 1935 and 1937 he earned his living –– as does Burlefoot – as a teacher in several small schools located in the Finmark region of Norway, at that time a very remote area in the country's extreme north, bordered by Finland and Russia, mostly populated by iron ore miners and their families.

 

Mykle married for the first time in 1936 and left teaching in 1937 to attend the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen, obtaining a business degree he would ultimately never need or use.  During his student years he became closely associated with the Norwegian labour movement, writing speeches and scripts for short films and plays intended to dramatize its reforming socialist principles.  (It was his later lampooning of the organization in The Song of the Red Ruby that some scholars believe led to his prosecution for obscenity as a delayed form of revenge.)  He began writing and publishing short fiction around 1945 and publishedTaustigen, his first book of stories, three years later.  

 

In 1947, his first marriage over, he married his second wife Axeliane 'Jane' Holm.  Jane was a puppeteer and that same year the couple went to Paris to study the art of puppetry together.  This experience later led them to co-author a book about puppetry titled Dukketeater which appeared in 1956 and was for many years considered to be the most influential book on the subject (a universally popular form of entertainment during the late 1940s and early 1950s) ever published in their native Scandinavia.  They also founded and, for a time, served as co-directors of the Norwegian Puppet Theatre, a version of which still exists today. 

 

In 1951, Mykle went to London to study theatre and then to North America to do the same as the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship.  Following his return to Norway he took a job with the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation and divided his time between teaching, producing television documentaries and writing.  His first novel Tyven, tyven, skal de hete appeared in 1951, establishing what was to become an increasingly controversial reputation for sexual explicitness.  The novel was subsequently translated into English as The Hotel Room, but it was the translation of his second novel –– Lasso Round the Moon –– that would earn him the attention of the anglophone world.  The translated editions of Lasso Round the Moon and The Song of the Red Ruby would go on to sell in excess of one million copies, making him famous and, until his trial ended, one of the wealthiest people in Norway.

 

  

AGNAR MYKLE (centre) during his trial, 1958

 

 

 

While being tried for and acquitted of obscenity did not end Mykle's career, it certainly made it difficult for him to find publishers for his next two novels, neither of which came close to equalling the success (or the notoriety) of his previously published work.  He also ran afoul of the Norwegian version of the Inland Revenue Service, which sued him for failing to pay the necessary amount of income tax on what the impressive international sales of his banned books had earned him.  His marriage to Jane also ended during his trial, leading him, in 1960, to marry a twenty-two year old girl named Toril Hofseth.  His marriage to Ms Hofseth likewise ended in divorce, although he did reconcile with Jane and eventually remarried her, living with her until 1978 when he moved out of their home to spend the final sixteen years of his life in self-imposed seclusion (which apparently did not prevent him from referring to himself, somewhat immodestly, as 'the greatest author in the world').  He was declared officially bankrupt in 1966 and published his last book, a story collection titled Largo, in 1967.

 

Agnar Mykle died in the Oslo suburb of Asker on 15 January 1994.  Dozens of articles and at least eight books about him and his work have appeared since his death and he's now regarded as the Norwegian DH Lawrence – an important, widely studied writer who bravely paved the way for the sexual permissiveness now taken for granted in the West.  His complete essays and letters were published in three volumes between 1997 and 1998.  A Danish film version of The Song of the Red Ruby a film he loathed to the point of personally declaring war on Denmark for having allowed it to be made –– was released in 1970.  A new cinematic adaptation of Lasso Round the Moon, to be directed by Sølve Skagen, was rumoured to be in production in Norway several years ago but nothing has been sighted of it yet.   

 

 

Unfortunately, none of the work of AGNAR MYKLE is currently available in English translation.  Visit your preferred second-hand bookstore (or its online equivalent) if you're interested in reading Lasso Round the Moon (1954) and its sequels The Song of the Red Ruby (1956) and Rubicon (1966).  


 
 
Use the links below to read a short article by North American author, critic and book buyer LEWIS MANALO about the 1957 obscenity trial of AGNAR MYKLE and a short explanation of what would now be diagnosed as the author's Narcissistic Personality Disorder (DSM-IV) a condition that affected every aspect of his life and made him immensely difficult if not impossible to live with:
 
 
 
 
 
 
https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/29672  

 
 
 
 
 
Grateful acknowledgement is made to LEWIS MANALO and PETRI LIUKKONNEN for publishing the online articles from which much of the biographical information included in this post was obtained.  Any factual errors it contains are entirely my own. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
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Last updated 23 September 2021 §