The Sharp Side

I get that leaving feeling
This time it's here to stay

The Sharp Side terminates here.

Farewell.

The shadows are long at this time of year. And one by one the bloggers drop away.

It seems a long time since we lost The Apostate Windbag, The Bionic Octopus and Dead Men Left. Ed Champion has recently departed, and now Uncle Zip is leaving us (with some kind and generous words for the Sharp Side). Thanks, Uncle. Sorely missed...

The only bright spot on the horizon is that apparently Unstrung might be back soon. Unstrung is particularly worth paying attention to for posts on the politics of Africa.

Has anyone calculated the average life span of a blog? I have the strange feeling that it’s exactly three years.

To my mind, the three great strengths of Patricia Highsmith’s writing are her prose style, her characterisation and her unconventional but powerfully compelling narratives. She was a genre writer but her novels are every bit as good as many of those books which are recommended as literary fiction. Her prose is plain and to the point. When she does use figurative language it seems organic, consistent with her fictional universe; there are no encrustations of fine style intended to impress the reader. Her characters always seem entirely plausible and her skill is to show how easily the ordinary and the banal can slide into derangement and obsession. Sometimes the slide is into violence and murder; sometimes her plots fizzle out and in the end nothing happens.

In one telling moment in The Cry of the Owl, one of the leading characters reflects on an incident which now seems

less real than a scene in a story of violence on television. Had he been one of the real characters? Robert wanted to smile.

Orthodox representations of crime are, Highsmith implies, misleading. Crime is a much messier matter, which fails to conform to culturally-induced expectation. Highsmith gives us amoral characters but they are never evil in the simplistic sense of tabloid journalism. She shows how human weakness and the right set of circumstances can have unexpected consequences. And the world she creates is a bleak and cheerless one. There isn’t a lot of happiness at the end of a Highsmith novel. In The Cry of the Owl one of the characters, it turns out, is Death - but in a very subtle, understated way.

The Cry of the Owl is a stalker novel, first published in 1962. It is Highsmith at her very best (which sets me at odds with Barry Forshaw, whose list of ‘The top five Highsmith books’ in The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction doesn’t include it). As such, it is interesting to compare it with Enduring Love. Highsmith’s prose and compulsive-readability seems to me every bit as good as McEwan’s. Her world is a drab American working class world rather than that of affluent English professionals. However, the key difference is what happens. In McEwan’s novel the book’s sympathies are with the hero who is stalked. The crisis is finally resolved with the incarceration of the stalker and acknowledgement that the protagonist was correct all along in perceiving himself under threat. It is a deeply conservative text. At the end, civilised values and knowledge are restored; the threat to those values is placed under restraint.

Highsmith is on the other side. The Cry of the Owl begins with the stalker and encourages the reader to sympathise with him. We are invited to understand stalking. From this unconventional opening the story moves in a series of quite unexpected directions, which are hard to discuss without spoiling the surprises. In the end, though, ‘plot’ doesn’t really matter for Highsmith. What interests her is human psychology in all its perversity. The stalker emerges as by far the most humane person in the story. This makes The Cry of the Owl a disturbing and surprising work of fiction.

Please, please tell me that this isn’t true.

The key to Alfred Hitchcock's oeuvre is, of course, Leytonstone. He was born at 517 The High Road on August 13, 1899. Some time after 1907 the family moved (Hitchcock biographies are vague about when). Hitchcock was, like Shakespeare, a shopkeeper's son. Both were born literally above the family shop. They both worked in a new and expanding medium of public entertainment, they both produced great art inside a form which was often populist and trashy, and their work contains traces of their origins. Gloves, wool and tanning have a personal frame of reference for Shakespeare. Shops, and particularly fruit and veg, have a special significance for Hitchcock.

In Hitchcock's case there are a cluster of obsessions in his movies which can all be traced back to his childhood in Leytonstone. Notoriously, there is his interest in the theme of wrongful imprisonment and police who are intimidating or sinister and often not very bright. This, according to Hitchcock, resulted from him being locked up at the age of five in the police station close to the family shop. That terrifying experience marked him for life. One of my favourite early Hitchcock movies is Sabotage, which offers a fantasy reconstruction of High Road, Leytonstone, with a grocery shop next door to a cinema. In one droll scene the plain clothes cop, who is working undercover as a greengrocer, is harassed by the local plod. Another officious cop is instrumental in the detonation of a terrorist bomb by not letting a child cross a road.



















A related Hitchcock criminal obsession is Jack the Ripper and serial murder/sex crime. No Hitchcock biographer seems to have noticed that the Hitchcock family shop was a short stroll from the Catholic cemetery where one of the Ripper's victims is buried. In Hitchcock's oeuvre it ties in with that other theme, the odd, sometimes voyeuristic son and the weird, smothering mother, which also has discernible biographical origins.

And lastly there is the theme of public transport. Trains and buses are always important in Hitchcock, sometimes underlined by those cameo appearances where he has difficulty boarding. Horse trams went by the family home, and in 1906 the electric tram came to Leytonstone, with a massive junction at Knotts Green, by the police station where he was locked up. Hitchcock spent many happy hours travelling all over London on trams and trains.




















The Hitchcock grocery store on High Road, Leytonstone. The boy on the horse is conventionally identified as young Alfred but it may well be his brother. There is a tiled version at Leytonstone tube station:
























Hitchcock's birthplace survived until the 1960s, when the local Labour council, shrewdly realising that a Hitchcock birthplace museum would be of no interest to anyone, gave permission for it to be demolished to allow the construction of a garage. Four of the neighbouring houses still survive. The shop in the middle of the three in the photograph below is the one which today most resembles the Hitchcock shop. Compare its upstairs windows with those in the tiled depiction.



















And now here's a short movie of the fruit and veg man and his interests.

I wrote about the grapefruit scene. If you like Noir, check out the shots and script extracts
here.

In his Introduction to The Age of Wonders, Gabriel Josipovici writes that ‘Implicitly, the way this book is written is a condemnation of those authors, Jewish and Gentile, who, in the past few years, have made use of the events of 1940-45 for their own private purposes.’

To turn the concrete facts of Nazi genocide into fiction is to debase them; Appelfeld, by contrast, does not speak of the unspeakable. He demythologizes genocide.

As an argument about fiction and the Holocaust this is persuasive. Writing fiction set in a concentration camp risks both trivializing the historical reality and producing bad art by supplying the false comforts of story and meaning. Although written from the perspective of someone who was there, who suffered, and who was ultimately destroyed by the experience, a realist text like This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen strikes me as the wrong way to write about the Holocaust, in exactly the sense that Josipovici means.

But something Richard Crary wrote in his two reflective posts on Appelfeld (here and here) persuades me that Josipovici is wrong to absolve Appelfeld from an agenda. Richard writes:

I think there is a tendency to think that because the Holocaust did happen, that it or something similarly horrible was inevitable, given the centuries of entrenched European anti-Semitism. I think it could be argued that Appelfeld's fiction, undeniably powerful as much of it is (The Age of Wonders is particularly remarkable), in a sense contributes to this line of thinking. For in his fiction, the lives he depicts are doomed, are they not? We know the Holocaust looms, either a few years away, or perhaps decades. We know that their daily struggles will amount to nothing in the face of such an enormous, monstrous historical inevitability. For in the novels, the Holocaust is inevitable: don't they rely on our knowledge of it?

In this sense I think it could be argued that such works are, implicitly, Zionist fictions. They represent assimilated Jews as doomed by their own folly. European anti-Semitism is omnipresent and its consequences inevitable. And two points can be made about this. Firstly, it is historically untrue. Not all Jews were doomed. James Park Sloan’s fine biography of Jerzy Kosinski tells the remarkable story of how the Kosinski family survived the war years in, of all places, Poland. Kosinksi’s father was smart enough to see what was coming and managed to hide his family before the Nazis came looking for them. Secondly, the idea that Europe is a repository of timeless and virulent anti-Semitism is one of the basic theses of defenders of Israel.

I don’t want to get into an argument about whether or not Appelfeld is a great novelist Let me simply register some small dissatisfaction with The Age of Wonders. The train symbolism and the other intimations of what is to come seem to me less than subtle. The writing also seems to me at times clichéd. That train ‘belching billows of steam’ in Chapter Nine, for instance. Trains always belch in genre fiction; I don’t think John Updike would ever use a lazy verb like that. Or how about

Father kept his literary delusions to which he continued to cling even when everything teetered on the edge of the abyss.

To me, that sentence is full of lazy writing. Of course, this is a translation, so perhaps Appelfeld has been let down by his translator.

The scene in which Stark punches the anti-Semitic guard in the face seems to me against the grain of the book. It reminds me of those comforting scenes in Hollywood movies where bad people unexpectedly get their comeuppance.

We climbed on the train with the feeling that justice, when accompanied by a certain amount of strength, will eventually triumph over stupidity.

This can be read ironically, of course. But that inclusive ‘we’ embraces, and solicits the assent, of more than just the characters, I think. Just as ‘strength’ perhaps has a wider resonance – an intended one, even - in that sphere where Appelfeld is, in Toby Lichtig’s words (TLS, November 30) , “a mensch… a ‘good bloke’.”