Utopians
On Tom Crewe's The New Life, and its recent literary ancestors (Alan Hollinghurst, Damon Galgut, Colm Tóibín)
I reviewed Tom Crewe’s The New Life for the most recent issue of the New Yorker. My editor had, valiantly, to dig out the published version from the near-monograph I first turned in, because I had so much to say about it. Crewe has as his two main characters fictionalisations of two Victorian figures in whom I’ve long had an interest: John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis. The two men collaborated on a book, Sexual Inversion – their word for homosexuality – the composition, publication and public reception of which give Crewe the outlines of his plot.
His novel also features – and I had a good deal of envy to overcome here – a man evidently modelled on Henry Sidgwick, the original subject of my doctoral thesis. I have tried for many yars to turn the Sidgwick story to fiction, but from some combination of talentlessness and a recognition of the story’s essential sadness, I’ve never managed to get very far with it. Maybe Crewe’s was the only way to do it: to turn away from the genius, Sidgwick, brought to a Hamlet-like state of inaction by his intellectual and moral probity, and work instead with Sidgwick’s friend, Symonds, a man less able to contain feeling and desire, and consequently, likelier to take a (personal and political) risk that might be worthy of a novel.
At one point in the review, I contrast Crewe’s use semi-fictional figures to the technique adopted by his precursors in this genre:
His way into the history avoids the riskier project exemplified by such novels as Damon Galgut’s “Arctic Summer” (2014) and Colm Tóibín’s “The Magician” (2021), which fictionalize the desires and repressions of, respectively, E. M. Forster and Thomas Mann. The use of the men’s real names makes the authors straightforwardly accountable to the known facts of the historical record in a way that Crewe is not. At the same time, Crewe’s project is distinct from that of, say, Alan Hollinghurst in “The Stranger’s Child” (2011), which traces the life and shifting posthumous reputation of a minor First World War-era poet who is evidently inspired by the handsome, bisexual Rupert Brooke but is ultimately very much an invention.
Going back over the scrapbook, I re-read, with no small embarrassment, my original reviews of these books. In retrospect, Alan Hollinghurt’s The Stranger’s Child (2011, review here) has greatly risen in my estimation, but at the time (2011), I rather took it to task for its excess of knowing irony. This may have had something to do with the fact that my commission was not simply to review the book, but to write about it in relation to the argument of a recently published polemic by the critic Gabriel Josipovici, who saw much contemporary English fiction as a betrayal of the promise of modernism. My own concern was with the effect of the pervasive irony and knowingness on the novel’s capacity to express sincere feeling. I’m now inclined to think my rhetoric was rather hyperbolic – I was 24 when I wrote it! – but I don’t think I’d repudiate the substance.
Perhaps it will turn out in some future reckoning that the cultured classes of England in the early 21st century were not, as they sometimes fancied themselves, in the vanguard of human civilisation; their persistent irony and sardonic self-awareness, insofar as they define them as a class, were symptoms of their decadence. The great English novel of the 21st century, when it comes, will risk banality, risk credulity, risk passionate, unembarrassed, un-ironic sincerity. In a word, it will have heart, and heart will redeem it . . . from its cleverness, its Englishness.
I had different reservations about Alan Hollinghurst’s most recent novel, The Sparsholt Affair (2017, review here), but I thought the handling of the story’s ethical register was less overwhelmed by Hollinghurst’s corrosive knowingness. The scenes in that book that are set in the 21st century are, I said,
written with the big-hearted generosity Hollinghurst has always brought to modern life, marked by that rare and unfakeable capacity for the connoisseurship of every kind of pleasure, high and low. . . . There is little explicit sex, but this is of a piece with Hollinghurst’s growing fascination with the appurtenances of sex over the act itself: frustrated yearning, chastity, and the persistence of desire long after one has ceased to be desirable . . . There is pathos here, and pity, and a flinty honesty . . . Hollinghurst sustains a prose register alive to the ethical dimension of his story. He achieves this without the any hint of the finger-wagging moralist disappointed in the shallowness of the young, not least because his old men have been just as shallow in their time.
Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer (2014, review here), on the writing of Forster’s A Passage to India, was disappointing for different reasons:
As psychobiography and literary history, this is riveting stuff, but Galgut’s prose has a fatal unevenness that somewhat undermines its novelistic claims. . . . He is a hyperactive explainer, unwilling to leave much unsaid. Forster’s fiction, by contrast, ever a negotiation between what he wanted to say and what society and law allowed him to say, acquired a wonderful internal diversity of moods, styles and voices. In Galgut’s telling, Forster’s multitudes are simplified into a monochromatic pathos. There is little in Galgut’s ‘Morgan’ of Forster’s celebrated irony, and only a hint of the healthy sense of the absurd that left him untouched by the 20th century’s most poisonous ideologies. Something of Forster is lost in the transaction, but his life’s pathos is convincingly evoked and the atmosphere of an Arctic summer adroitly sustained: “nothing moving, nothing alive”. For those overwhelmed by the gloom, there is always Forster’s own early fiction to return to, where, for once, the head and the heart speak in one voice.
And last year, I reviewed Colm Tóibín’s The Magician (2021, review here), where the ethical questions raised by the story are addressed in a prose style equal to them.
In Tóibín’s telling, Mann’s reluctance to be an ideologue had its origin in many things: his views about the autonomy of literature, his commitment to a certain idea of Germany, and a prudent assessment of the risks to himself and his family of being more outspoken. But he shows that reluctance also to have come of the deeper patterns of his psychology, his gift for concealment often hard to distinguish from simple cowardice. A braver Mann, Tóibín suggests, would not have been the same writer. His writerly virtues were bound too deeply with his personal failings.
It’s only in putting together this post that I see how writerly courage, and the lack thereof, have been preoccupations of mine for a while. This paragraph about the tragic dilemma that faces the Symonds character in the book – be open about his sexuality and risk a gaol sentence and ignominy for his wife and daughters, or continue to live (as we now say) ‘a lie’ – comes closer than anything I’ve written before to expressing fully my thoughts on the subject.
Authenticity, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks that it involves, in accepting it in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror and hate.” It “demands courage and more than courage,” Sartre went on. “It is no surprise that one finds it so rarely.” Where does that leave Crewe’s tortured characters? Outside of occasional moments of self-pity, Addington, by Sartre’s reckoning, has already passed the test. Whatever he goes on to choose, he will do so in full and excruciating awareness of the essential tragedy of the situation. His actions will hurt and wrong people he loves. The existentialist motto was “existence precedes essence”—roughly, what you do is what determines who you are. The Victorian invert would have been, as the Danish sociologist Henning Bech put it, “born existentialist”: [the celibate] Sidgwick and [the sexually active] Symonds were alike in their decision to be tragic heroes or tragic villains or simply tragic victims. But they had decided that they would, in any case, be tragic, in the classical sense: they would confront, head on, a conflict between ethical imperatives. The proper response to their decision is not blame for the choice they made but pity that they had to make one at all.