Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford he was ‘surprised to find’ that Proust ‘was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.’ (Joke, given the novel’s title?) ‘He can’t remember anyone’s age. In the same summer as Gilberte gives him a marble and Françoise takes him to the public lavatory in the Champs Elysées, Bloch takes him to a brothel.’
Well, I can’t remember just where all this comes in A La Recherche, but suspect that either Waugh or Scott-Moncrieff, whose translation he was reading, made a confusion of tenses. Be that as it may, time is a problem for the novelist, especially one writing a ‘roman fleuve’ published over the years in successive volumes, or one who employs the same character or characters in a succession of books.
Agatha Christie, for instance, got herself into a mess with old Hercule Poirot, though she never seemed to mind and sailed serenely on. All the same, on his first appearance in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1917), old Papa Poirot, as he refers to himself there, has already retired from the Belgian police. So one may assume that he is over 60 at least. Yet he was still solving murders 50 years later.
Nobody, I suppose, minds about such oddities. Other novelists who aim at accuracy of representation may get into more serious difficulties. Even Anthony Powell, scrupulous in having friends check that he got things right, sometimes apparently muddled his chronology.
In A Buyer’s Market Mr Deacon’s death (from a fall down the stairs of a nightclub) seems to have taken place no more than a matter of months after Jenkins encountered him at the coffee-stall. Yet, when Jenkins meets him with Moreland and the music critics in the Mortimer at the beginning of Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, their ‘renewed acquaintance’ appears to have lasted longer. Jenkins remarks, for instance, on the ‘regular autumn exhalation of eucalyptus, or some other specific against the common cold (to which Mr Deacon was greatly subject).’ ‘Regular’ suggests years rather than months. Is Jenkins’s memory at fault, or did Powell find that, having killed off Deacon a couple of books previously, he had more use for him?
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Richard Newby
January 9th, 2009 4:06pmAllan Massie's notation that "novelists aim at accuracy of representation" reminds one of Felix Frankfurtur's claim that his book on the Sacco and Vanzetti case will be "a disinterested summary of the record of a protracted trial." Frankfurter's 1927 book has misled three generations; and editors of responsible publications in the UK (and in the US) have made no effort to keep readers up to date on the Sacco and Vanzetti topic. The TLS and THE SPECTATOR must be cited for neglect. THE SPECTATOR should take a look at the 2008 book on Sacco and Vanzetti published by AUTHOR HOUSE, which cites a new primary document on Vanzetti's revolver. This is a self-published book that has earned respect from professional historians.)
Frankfurter, a law professor at Harvard and later an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court,did not mention Dexter, Maine, the hometown of two defense witnesses on Vanzetti's revolver. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes chided Frankfurter two times (letters of March 18, 1927 and Sept.7, 1927)for his failure to exonerate the convicted defendants. Good effort, says Holmes, but your book did not persuade me Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. Holmes told Frankfurter he did not "quite see the need of making heroes of them."
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Martel Tamerlane
January 9th, 2009 12:25amDeacon, as Jenkins clearly states, was a friend of Jenkins's father. Jenkins knew Deacon from a young age. When they encounter one another at the coffee stall they are already known to each other.
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Bill Corr
January 8th, 2009 12:11pmIs Allan Massie inviting us to submit lists of howlers in fiction?
You know: the London Season set at the wrong time of year and so on? Anthony Burgess' work has quite a few, but so do many other very fine works of fiction.
How much realism do we demand? It perplexed me that the Famous Five and the Secret Seven and Rupert Bear never needed to, er, 'use the bathroom' but do we draw the line at wanting to know about Jane Eyre's menstrual periods?
And who can confidently identify the settings of 'My Secret Life?'
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