LIDIA VIANU

Alan Brownjohn and the Desperado Age

FICTION

A FUNNY OLD NOVEL IN A FUNNY OLD YEAR

During one of my conversations with Alan Brownjohn, he sadly mentioned having been told by someone close to him that his 2001 novel, A Funny Old Year, was a bitter book, a cold one. His concealed disappointment at that judgment preconditioned my reading the novel a month later. I started looking for emotion and sympathetic communion and, as it has always happened in his case with me, I did not fail to find both. They were there all right. You just had to dig deeper.

This loveless story about love at various ages is indeed a funny old novel, written in a funny new year, maybe: a new age for the novel, the Desperado age, when old conventions die and the novelist claims the book is not convention but life itself. This particular book is half a diary, half a suspense story with unexpected revelations on the last page. It begins with Mr. Barron having his eyes checked and the first thing we read is, ‘ ‘Tell me. What do you see?’ ‘I can see nothing.’ ‘ The patient has both his eyes covered by opaque lenses, Dr Koning, the ophthalmologist apologizes and the novel goes on. Whatever it will disclose from now on will be better than ‘nothing’, and we will be grateful for the least shred of meaning.

Brownjohn has a picturesque sense of names: we have in this book a Koning (close to king, even though a German one), a Barron (though only in name and possibly in his inner hidden life), a woman called Rosie (by any other name would smell as sweet?), a girl nicknamed Flamingo without her even knowing it (Rachel’s sister, Victoria), a friend called Stedman (all along we have had reason to think Stedman was a loyal friend, and Rosie a loyal lover to Barron). Michael Charles Barron is confronted by the wisdom of his eye-doctor, who tells him,

 

‘Old age has made you a far-sighted fellow, but you need a clearer picture of the things under your nose.’ ‘ He is fifty-eight, called by the doctor conclusively, ‘middle age.’

The patient talks to us when he explains:

That was at the end of July last year. What follows is the story of the twelve curious months between that visit to ‘Dr C. Koning: Ophthalmic Surgeon’ and the present. And in some ways I am surprised to be still alive and writing it down for you to read.

You already know my name is Barron. In full, it’s Michael Charles Barron. I am, as Dr Koning established, fifty-eight years old, and still an active man. And if you think that implies an interest in women, you would be right.

I shall be giving the story of my arrangement with Rosie, which will have come to a conclusion by the last pages of this account. And covering a  number of other matters. I shall tell you about my friend Geoff Stedman, which will bring in Dr Hulzer the Director, Reginald Torridge his dancing Deputy, Dave Underhill, Head of HELSACS, and Dennis Frostick; all of these being figures at the Polytechnic where Geoff and I taught for so many years, and from which we were successively fired. There are also younger persons, like Jane and Bill Bramston and their teenage children, Zilla and Rory. Jane, a former student of mine at the Polytechnic, now a University, no less, and (yes) a very good friend, was a special reason for my choosing to live where I do, in this small English holiday town, during my ‘year of trial’.

When a character is not important for the emotional life of the novel, its name is common, not suggesting an image to be attached to the person. It is a sense of names that comes instinctively to the most various writers, from Dickens to Joyce and beyond. In this particular novel, this gift of the suggestive name adds to the liveliness of the picture, which shows life in a small seaside resort, mostly alive in summer, yet agreeably populated at all times. The writer of these recorded memories or one-year-long diary makes a home for himself here and deliberates whether to move in with recently widowed Rosie or not. It is a narrative more than a diary, because the plot does not progress by diary entries. On the other hand, each new day pushes the story forward, brings new characters or reveals the true face of old ones. Rachel, the young soon-to-be writer (so she hopes) turns out to be slightly crazy. Her sister Flamingo moves into the attic of Barron’s flat. Jane was a former fling. There is something to be found out – thus keeping suspense alive – about each of them, yet nothing much changes as far as Barron himself is concerned. He comes to town a middle-aged man and that is the way he leaves the novel, neither older nor younger, neither more nor less in love with Rosie (not much passion spent between the two), neither more nor less hopeful of what tomorrow might bring. Barron is probably the real reason why the book might seem bitter to some. The last sentence is like a dagger to the reader: he has been having a long-standing affair (‘two or three years’) with his best friend’s wife, and now that Stedman is out of the picture, he cannot even make up his mind whether he really wants her. Life is cruel even though the people who live it may be gentle and well-meaning, like the hero of this book.

Having agreed with Rosie that they both need a year apart (a ‘Funny Old Year’?) to find out ‘whether we wanted or needed each other enough to make a life together, possibly in marriage’, the two separate for a year, deciding to send no letters, unless there was some emergency, make no phonecalls, in short forget about each other. We have no idea what Rosie does in her inner precincts, but Barron keeps pretty busy, very much interested in the younger females of his place of supposed reclusion. He begins by meeting Rachel on the beach, in a faint parody of Joyce’s equivalent chapter to Nausicaa. Brownjohn mentions, points out a mechanism of the Desperado novel, he talks about a ‘small thing’ that ‘matters later on’, and insists on our remembering it. It is a Desperado technique, indeed, to impose upon the reader a mnemotechnic reading, and if he fails then he is punished by the fact that the first time round the text may not make sense to him. Brownjohn will not risk that, in good tradition of his already well-known clarity. His novel could not be more limpid. The author would hate the idea that it might need decoding. Not even piecing together, since the narrator takes care of that. All we have to do is read on and remember. This is what most Desperadoes require us to do, leaving aside parallelisms, symbols, hidden hints. From this point of view, Brownjohn is a typical Desperado, even more relaxed than most, which makes this novel easy to read, yet hard to live with after we have closed the book.

HELSACS may be a real name, but it does sound like both ‘hell’ and ‘sacks’, the former describing the environment, the latter the way out of it, the two being more or less ‘sacked’. The meaning is ‘...the Faculty of Human, Educational, Linguistic, social and Contemporary Studies’. Academic life is not spared. Lodge and Bradbury do a very good job of grudgingly outlining the premises of a university, not necessarily English. It occurs – rightly – to Alan Brownjohn, though he never utters the very words, that academic life is universally frustrating, full of gossip, malicious secrets and unfair competition. As a foretaste of the end, Barron remembers Stedman in the following terms: ‘...he was my friend (I don’t think I was adequately his friend)...’ When the novel begins, Stedman is already dead, but Barron recollects now and again his being made redundant because of Torridge (maybe suggestive of the violent torro). Academic life seems to be, indirectly, the cause of Stedman’s death, and anyway the cause of his helpless fury. The pages about professors and students, about surviving as an academic, are highly realistic and anger-inspiring, unlike the rest of the novel, which focusses on emotion, or, more aptly, the lack of it. The painful lack of emotion, this is Alan Brownjohn’s discreet theme in this novel about vulnerable people, whose only fault is that they are insensitive to one another’s charm. Isolated and doomed to live within solitary souls, Brownjohn’s characters bravely go on with their incidents, carrying this novel to the bitter end.

Barron is the central knot of all stories, all characters. He knows them all and they all have something or other to do with him before the novel ends. He is the recording conscience that must test all life, the maker of the diary, the creator of life. The first character he brings to our notice is the first person he meets, chronologically speaking, as soon as he settles down for his trial year. The long description of their first encounter is a shower of small details, which, unmistakably, will all come in handy as we go along with the story. Knowing Desperado fiction, or at least knowing the other novels by Alan Brownjohn, which are every bit as meticulous with details, we pay close attention and try to recompose the narrator’s mood from his apparently random description, not unlike Joyce’s on the beach, but how ironically similar (irony of the second degree, since Joyce himself exercised his irony versus Homer’s Nausicaa):

‘I took the glasses off, and re-focused my gaze with my improved far-sightedness. And saw a solitary, intriguing female dot on the huge stretch of utterly yellow sand. She-who-was-to-be Rachel was sitting about two hundred yards away to my right.

Female, immediately? No. When I first saw the figure it could have been a piece of sea-wrack, or a lump of brick and concrete of the kind on which I rested. But then it moved. And it was human, and uncontrovertible female in the way it repositioned its legs. In its loneliness I was drawn to it. I was lonely myself.

I ambled in that direction as if I was any idle summer stroller. Yes, this was a bent, intent female figure which once or twice stretched its arms out in front of her (I could see it well enough to say ‘her’ now) as she sat cross-legged in her shorts on the sand. Tall; I guessed that from the prominent jut of tanned knees as she sat there with head down over something she was writing.

Raising my head, I crossed between this tall blonde of about twenty and the ebbing water, in a space ten yards wide. I was an intrusion on her field of vision, but this was better than if I had walked, less reassuringly, behind her. She now looked up. Not at me, I was sure, an unremarkable fifty-eight year old, but at the sea. Or so I thought until much later. I took in the crotch of her shorts, and her sweater. You may not like me for saying this, but I wanted her.’ (A Funny Old Year, Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2001, p. 15)

If there is anything Brownjohn is not – as a Desperado, he tries his hand at everything a writer can think of – it is vulgar. Many Desperadoes use vulgarity as an experiment or just plain defiance, in the attempt to make the text identify with/ actually be life. In the case of Mike Barron and Rachel (alias Nausicaa in Homer and then the young girl with a limp in Joyce, with all due irony), a small twitch of vulgarity merely opens the painful series of emotional failures which make up this novel, this funny old year, surrounded by young females, all engaged elsewhere (see Flamingo or Jane), or discouragingly mad (Rachel, whose father is not very sane either, as he is ‘looking for buried treasures’, p. 33). Mike is lonely and will stay that way. He will welcome Rosie at the end of the book in hopes of escaping his loneliness, but she merely reminds him of their betrayal of his old friend, and, when she announces that after the wedding she would like going on using her former husband’s name, which Mike can hardly bring himself to utter, the enthusiasm leaves the relationship altogether. The book shows its true emptiness, which Mike has been fighting all along, trying to approach one person or another, saving a woman (Flamingo) from drowning, sheltering a young girl in his rented apartment, listening patiently to a former lover’s confession, the story of an illicit love affair, the sort which he no longer has. He used to have a ‘reputation’ with young girls, but that was in the good old years when he was still teaching. His world narrows down to Rosie. He welcomes her back into his life, resigned and at last willing to compromise. He has never been married, but will do it now. This retired bachelor who is on the verge of entering marriage is an exasperatingly discreet male. There is hardly anything the novelist will reveal about his inner life – his friendliness for young females does not really count – so, when we leave him, we have a bitter sense of having left everything ‘unsaid’. The poet Brownjohn prevents the novelist from playing surgeon with his characters. The poet’s respect for other people’s privacy protects and also dulls the heroes. We only know what will never harm them. This secrecy might easily harm the novel, though.

In good Desperado tradition, Brownjohn debunks the idea of the happy couple or the expected happy ending. He did that in his first novel (To Clear the River), which was a slow dismantling of teenage love; in his second novel (The Way You Tell Them), which actually focussed outside love altogether; in his third novel (The Long Shadows), which, though focussing on love, managed to undermine it (discredit it) from the inside; and in this fourth novel (A Funny Old Year), which is the closest in concern, yet the remotest from love in its general conclusion. Couples come and go. Mike and Rachel never actually become one; Jane (ex-Melanie) and Mike were a couple while she was a student, and we learn all about it; Jane married Bill Bramston, around whom she weaves a weird story of pornography, in order to divert Mike’s attention from her affair with Trevor; Flamingo and Greg are together on and off; actually the sisters Rachel and Flamingo with Mike are two manqué couples; what ends the book is the very fragile couple Mike-Rosie, rather devoid of romance. This is Brownjohn’s hiding strategy. If he does not spell love out in as many letters, it does not mean that the feeling is absent from his pages. What we perceive piercingly is the hero’s desperate need for love, his huge sensibility, his delicate tactfulness, all of his reactions crying out for companionship and a little bit of romance. The narrator denies him the romance. Whenever Mike is on the brink of a possible love affair, short lived and imperfect as it might be, the plot is dead set against it. Love just does not work for Desperadoes, not unless it is a mere echo from a grotto. The Desperado decency of emotion – in spite of the indecency of the style – prevents Mike from plunging into a sea of feeling, of female companionship. Frankly speaking, judging by Mike’s state at the beginning and also at the end of the novel, there is no companionship whatever. It is each for himself and the only main hero paces the plot dejectedly, disappointed and bitter. That should be the Desperado taste.

Like most Desperadoes, again, in spite of carefully avoiding all realistic descriptions of the background, in a few words or sentences, Brownjohn creates a memorable atmosphere, which adheres like a label to the mood occasioned by a certain incident:

‘Reaching the beach I strolled along until I could see no one between myself and the land horizon. (...)

Out above the sea the pilot of a tiny plane, a craft smaller than anything mechanical I had ever seen flying, might have had the same feeling as I had, poised on a vantage point over life past and life to come. But I didn’t have to fly to feel it. I was an old and stable man contented on an old and stable dune. And alone here.’

This is the mood of the whole book: the age when you have learnt to be happy with what you have, in fragile balance between have and have no more. The fear of the third age looms ahead. The novel darkens. In Donne’s words, ‘Love is a growing or full constant light/ And his first minute after noon is night.’

Joyce is evoked with well-meaning self irony by Mike, who, we learn within the same chapter, is bald-headed and resents his baldness being hinted at. Asked what he has been doing since he came to live for a year by the sea, he muses: ‘Brooding, fantasizing in a dreadful rented house about lonely girls on beaches.’ (p. 25) He answers Jane with these words, after she has told him about the funny pictures her husband Bill has been taking of girls (everything being made up by her), on the point of meeting her lover Trevor Ridyard, who also turns out to be exceedingly bald:

‘I have nothing about bald men. For some time I have almost been one, though the hair loss has apparently halted, leaving me with enough thin strands across the crown of my head to claim that I am not bald. What I think I am saying is that there are those whose baldness you can’t sense when they wear something on their heads, and those whose baldness you can.’

We have here the old fear of ridicule that T.S. Eliot fought, much more noisily and painfully, in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Unlike the former half of the century, the latter-half Desperadoes deal with ridicule by using irony as a defence weapon. Self-irony, in Mike’s case. Both as a poet and as a novelist, Brownjohn would not survive without irony. His irony is maddeningly tactful, discreet and yet all the more harmful. His mind’s and soul’s eye winks continuously and the fact that we are taken into the author’s confidence does not make the world any less funny. It is not only a funny old year, but a funny old universe, just as Brownjohn’s poems state again and again. We share a smiling space which slowly munches us to bits. The Desperado text is far from being comfortable and relaxed. The Desperado reader is dead the moment he forgets he needs to be on the look out.

Eliot once complained (and Virginia Woolf put the remark down in her diary): ‘The critics say I am learned and cold. The truth is I am neither.’ Brownjohn, similarly, might disown the accusation of writing a cold text, and he would be right to do so. In his case, irony should not be mistaken for indifference. His hero Mike disapproves of ‘self-pity’ while noticing that ‘the exhilaration gave way to sadness and worse’ (p. 34), while noticing a ‘despondent mood of my own’ (p. 35). The smile that accompanies this heartache – because this is what it boils down to, just good old romantic suffering in the guise of modern mockery – is the smile of Eliot’s young man in Portrait of a Lady: ‘where had my time gone? Why had there been so few chances? To think that there was a period when any one of four women would phone me and say, ‘Hi! It’s me!’ and I would have to guess from the voice which one it was’ (p. 40). This whole novel is a huge sad smile, which accompanies the hero’s determination to make the best of a bad job. As Mike himself puts it at some point, fairly early in the story, ‘My excitement faltered, my mode of resignation began to take hold’ (p. 43).

Mike Barron is at a turning point in his life. He has had to give up his job before it is taken away from him by his colleagues, and the whole novel is pervaded by a vague, uneasy, depressing feeling of uselessness, of life waning towards old age – this being the hidden, very real and brutal theme of this book. He puts it this way:

‘I deserved to be ejected from the Polytechnic much sooner than Geoff Stedman, and with good reason. But I lasted beyond him. In effect I was ‘fired’ not long after he was, but in fact it was simply suggested to me that in view of certain complaints about me an early retirement might be arranged to avoid problems.’

Academic life is left behind with relief, viewed as a nest of hornets, a web of gossip, arguments, irritation and injustice. Academics never play fair and the smaller their real intellectual value is, the higher the rank. Lodge and Bradbury concealed their dissatisfaction with the human quality of academics in humour, while Brownjohn does not feel any obligation to hide at all. His bitterness speaks plainly. His academics are more humans than representatives of a closed world, a class in itself. Brownjohn stumbles upon this area by chance and does not mean to exhaust it, like Bradbury or Lodge. He merely turns it into an age, that age – long years – when one works for one’s living. The working age being left behind for good, Mike Barron can go on with his life, and think of a ‘future’ (p. 60). Unlike his younger years, when he always wanted more and more, he muses now: ‘How little it takes to make you feel a little happier...’ (p. 61).

Following the vein of The Way You Tell Them, the novelist cannot leave politics out of his text altogether. Mike tells us:

‘My mother, who was the political activist in the household (I had gravely disappointed her by becoming just a lecturer in Politics instead of a member of parliament)...’

So the main hero used to make a living teaching Politics, and consequently his whole education revolves around the state of the world, even though he never mentions it any more these days, during the time of the novel. Actually, politics is a lost field, the same as two more things, as announced by the two mottos: love and the sense of future. The first motto comes from Love’s Labour’s Lost:

‘Come sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day,

And then ‘twill end.’

Brownjohn confesses: ‘ ‘Barron’ is a name I chose as it resembled ‘Berowne’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost.’ At the end of one whole year ‘and a day’ love has to settle for Rosie, whom the last revelation debunks of all glamour. She is the wife of the friend Stedman and does not see anything wrong in cheating on him with Mike, so she decides she will marry the latter but stick to the former’s name, as in an endless coexistence of the two in her life. Time never heals, the book seems to say, it merely aggravates whatever is happening. But, the motto concludes, ‘then ‘twill end,’ so there must be a sense of closure, we hope. The second motto kills that hope, too:

‘Sleep well – and wake up to sunshine –

There’s sunshine – tomorrow – for you!’

It comes from an ‘old song’, which is sung on page 67 of the novel by a pathetic small gathering, people who have been watching two old comedians’ show, among whom the narrator claims to have been ‘almost sick with sadness.’ Sadness is indeed intoxicating in this book. Brownjohn calls it, in Mike Barron’s words, ‘my shabby, lonely conspicuousness.’ His birthday is Valentine’s Day, but he is no more than an ‘old Romeo,’ and the promised sunshine of the motto is just an artificial, empty promise. The hero himself muses: ‘at my age the experience of uncomplicated physical well-being is rare enough...’ (p. 85).

All through the first half of the book, Mike flirts with the idea that love is waiting, Rachel will be seduced and he is still young and immersed in his future. As it turns out, Rachel is just another personality for a mentally ill young girl, Katie (Kathryn – a name Brownjohn attempted using in The Long Shadows, too), who is actually older than she claims to be (she is twenty-four). No other female in sight (Victoria, Jane alias ex-Melanie, even Rosie) has emotions to spare. The novel relies more on a suspense of incidents that one of emotions. Something keeps happening on every page, yet nothing can make Barron retrace his life into youth:

‘Jane’s head was now on my shoulder. I stroked the slightly wiry, now greying hair that I had run my fingers through so often so long ago, and not nearly enough in the intervening years. So much of that enthralling past, evoked by remembering the crazy months of my involvement with ‘Melanie’, now seemed to be stirring inside me again. Could it really be that my year here was bringing me to this, not to Rachel or Flamingo, or Rosie, but to the oldest remaining love I still had in my life?’ (p. 135)

Mike comes to a point where he feels his ‘age suddenly’ when walking too briskly. He reviews his plans for the future, and here is what he can come up with:

            ‘...marry a handsome widow rather younger than myself, whom I’d known for some time, who had considerable savings of her own and had been prepared to allow me a year to make up my mind, which was how I had come to live here...’ (p. 143)

He has a recurrent pattern of secret love affairs. One is with Rosie, Stedman’s wife. Bill bluntly asks him if he has one with Jane, his present wife. He even tells him angrily, ‘Congratulations on your third adolescence’ (p. 167). Actually, Mike does remember his childhood as if it had happened yesterday. He has this feeling of life simultaneously present, because he cannot afford letting it go ahead too fast, because the end might come in sight. All this while, other lives go past him, other affairs, and the bits of the puzzle are put together again in the last pages of the novel, when we learn that Jane and Trevor had an affair, while Bill, the husband, suspected Mike. Odd details – a familiar bike planted in an unexpected place, flashes of light in the lighthouse – come together. Not that the plot matters in the least. Betrayed husbands sometimes die in airport accidents, like Stedman. The plot swallows more and more facts. You do have difficulty in retelling it. Nobody could accuse Brownjohn of neglecting the narrative, although it all boils down to ‘Rosie, herself, after this funny old year quite unchanged...’ (p. 177), and Barron returning to that minute at the eye doctor’s when he can see absolutely nothing. The enigma of incidents is perfectly woven and utterly irrelevant. What matters is, once the emptiness of fact has been got a clean breast of, the tenderness left unexpressed. Here we come to a capital question: is this 190-page narrative a hovel or just a long poem, written one interlude a day, along the funny old time of a heart that refuses to grow old?