ROSE TREMAIN: THE STORY RESTORED

 (RESTORATION, 1989; SCEPTRE BOOKS, 1990)

LIDIA VIANU

 

Rose Tremain’s Restoration is a delightful island of story telling, apparently without much ulterior motive. Most Desperadoes have an agenda when they look back. Their ambition is to rewrite. Rose Tremain seems to reinvent for the pleasure of re-experiencing. Consequently, her novel is fresh and does not require rereading. It does not rely upon comparison with other texts as heavily as novels by Byatt, Ackroyd, Amis and so many, actually most of the others. Tremain writes for the sake of story-telling, while most Desperado novelists conjure up the whole of literature, thus counting on the reader to remember other texts while reading their own. Rose Tremain is a self-sufficient writer, which is a welcome, and also singular attitude in this age of agglutination. To her, literature is all about stories, while to most Desperadoes it is all about the telling/the language of these stories.

You need not be a sophisticated reader to follow the plot of Restoration. On the other hand, it would be mistaken to conclude that the plot is all the novel has to offer. It is first and foremost a very sensual novel. It is not just a set of (mis)adventures ending happily. It is a recreation of direct sensuous experience (T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative cannot be far behind), rendered irresistible by the fact that the experience returns from centuries ago. It is a trip back in time, reminding us of the technicalities imagined in SF texts or films in order to enable a citizen of the earth in the twenty-fifth century, let us say, to live exactly like an individual born and dead in the sixteenth. We feel the smell of unwashed bodies, experience their discomforts, eat their food, taste their pleasures.

But sensuousness is not the only important feature of the book. Restoration is also a dream about a philosophy of life. The hero begins in innocence, and ends in the light of understanding. He begins as a profane, sensuous male, and ends as a responsible, wise physician, friend to the king and father. On the way towards the happy end – which the novelist is wise not to deny her seemingly traditional story, Robert Merivel acquires an understanding of his existence, his profession, his place in society and his emotions. He begins as a tortured rudimentary being, and ends up all polished and serene.

The adventures of Robert Merivel are not many, and they do not last long. The story begins in 1664 and ends in 1667. The places it takes the hero are: Cambridge (where Merivel studies medicine), the court of the restored king (Whitehall – where Merivel is first the doctor of the king’s dogs and then the king’s fool), Bidnold Manor in the County of Norfolk (given to Merivel in return for marrying, only for the sake of appearances, the King’s mistress, Celia Clemence), Whittlesea Hospital in Earls Bride, in the Fens (where Merivel manages to feat of getting pregnant a crazy woman, Katharine, after being chased away from Norfolk and his manor taken away from him by the king, for having tried to make love to Celia), London during the plague and the great fire, and finally a return to Bidnold, where the king (coming back to Merivel as a friend) makes him a present of one room ‘until my reign is over and another age comes’.

The happy end is allowed Merivel for the sake of ‘the man you have become’, the king tells him. The end of the novel asks of the reader:

Do you see me now?

I am in the room. (p. 381)

If it were not for the nastiness of these adventures, the discomfort which becomes very real to us in these pages, as if we were experiencing it first hand with the hero, Restoration could be viewed as a romance. It is actually a mock-romance, just like A.S. Byatt’s Possession, from which it differs because Byatt is interested in words about experience, while Tremain in the almost physical experience. Byatt chooses the language over the plot (meaning that the plot hangs on lost, retrieved, haunting words), while Tremain focusses on sensation. Both draw their sap from the stream of consciousness. Both create heroes who analyse their lives step by step, and verbalize what they see. Both make ample use of suspense: we read their novels panting with excitement, with eagerness to learn the end of the story. Both endings are fulfilling, even though one (Byatt’s) is mainly insecure and flitting (like all words), while the other (Tremain’s) is just too close to death (like all matters connected with the life of the body).

Restoration is a first-person narrative. The narrator is always Robert Merivel. No change of perspective, no games of mistaken or misplaced identities. He is comfortably (to the reader) himself from beginning to end. He does however something that most Desperado heroes ignore: he changes. Byatt’s Possession plays with centuries, yet in it nobody has the slightest intention to change or at leas the understanding that they may be different from what they once were. Within a mere three years, Tremain’s hero fills the gap between sensation to awareness, from physical tragedy to a wise bliss of the mind.

The novel has in fact one hero only, as all the others – in good Desperado tradition – are mere props, which throw light on him, help him advance with his story, carry him part of the way, make his adventures real and suspenseful, if the word exists. The secondary heroes are the following:

1. John Pearce is Robert Merivel’s fellow student. A Quaker, he goes to care for the lunatic in the small hospital in the Fens, where Merivel takes refuge when the king dispossesses him. Like all the others, his psychology remains unknown, in spite of the fact that Merivel often quotes and tries to explain him. Like all the others, he is in the end just another unsolved mystery. Pearce believes in God and medicine, needs nothing for himself and frowns on physical well being. He dies of lung disease at Whittlesea, leaving Merivel his copy of a medical treatise, in which Merivel also finds Pearce’s “own prophylactic” against the plague, and uses it to make money during the plague.

Pearce’s part in the story is threefold. First he is an ascetic counterpart to the sensuous delirium of Merivel’s existence. Second, he offers the pretext for the advancement of Merivel’s story when the latter needs a change, a place away from Bidnold. Third, he brings Merivel back to his medical profession. What binds the two physicians together is the memory of the man with a visible heart, a wonderful image which allows Merivel to find out that the heart feels no pain. Neither Merivel nor the reader takes this image for granted. We are inevitably aware this is just imagination. On the other hand, we like the message, which is that there are worse pains than the physical ones, so the visible heart becomes a symbol for the whole book. The body is all we know, the mind might be cured (see Katharine, who dies in childbirth, but not mad, as she was before Merivel tried to cure her and, to his dismay, succeeded), but the soul (whose physical embodiment might be the heart?) can cause atrocious and incurable suffering. The moral of the book, as far as Pearce is concerned, is: cure (help) the body (if you can, as far as you can), but beware of the soul.

This revelation of the visible heart – which Merivel touches and feels pulsating, but Pearce dares not hold – is the best expression of the message of this book. Tremain gives us Merivel’s heart, but withdraws his soul. We learn what goes on inside his soul for several years only, and, in typical Desperado tradition as far as the reader is concerned, we desperately want to know more, to linger, to find out the rest, to force the author to continue writing. Actually, we almost become the author in this eagerness to prolong the text.

2. The two women, Celia and Katharine, ought to be discussed together. They are both impenetrable, because Merivel has absolutely no idea what is going on in their minds. Celia is hopelessly in love with the king, and wants to be the only woman in his life (besides his wife). She wants a son from him. He marries her to Merivel, then sends her to Bidnold, to sober up and then come back to Court and accept what she can get. Eventually he finds another love and tells Merivel he might marry Celia to some young man, to help her forget what she has lost (the king’s affection). Celia is no more than a portrait, and her exit leaves behind no regret, no curiosity.

Katharine, on the other hand, is much more alive. She is crazy, and taken care of by Pearce and his Quaker friends when Merivel first sees her. If, at that moment, and also later on, he thinks he is in love with Celia, he feels nothing but temporary lust for Katharine. Not even that, to begin with. First he learns her story: her husband left her, and she lost her sleep, and eventually her mind. Merivel – known as Robert here (while he was Sir Robert to Celia) – hates her looks, smell and pitiful state. She gains in importance when it occurs to Merivel that she could be cured: he manages to make her sleep by pretending to give her love. She falls in love with him. They have sex, and are thrown out of the small Quaker community of lunatics and caretakers when Katharine becomes pregnant. They go to her mother’s house, where she ends up having a caesarean (performed by Merivel himself). A girls is born. The mother dies. Merivel is not greatly moved.

At some point in his existence, Merivel ponders that it is much worse to be loved than to love. He loves Celia (who loves the king) and Katharine loves him. Considering that he can feel affection (for the king, for his servant William Gates, for Pearce), Merivel’s lack of reaction versus females might be an instinctive withdrawal of his author from the idea of romance: no “boy loves girl” story. This, again, is in good Desperado tradition. His exclusively physical awareness of females (Rosie Pierpoint, Violet Bathurst, Meg Storey) hides an unwillingness to stand for the young prince in love (he is almost forty when the plot ends, anyway). Everything he does and says about himself is meant to dispel any possibility that he might use his shining armour for any damsel in distress (which he actually does, for Katharine, before she is killed by his child). All that he wants is a good time. I find here a gap in the plan of the story. I think the author, running away from preconceived plans of “lived happily ever after”, willingly deprived her otherwise moving and endearing Merivel from an important dimension of his soul. His heart is not visible as far as mating is concerned. It is promised, though never delivered, to friends. The only character who has access to the beatings of Merivel’s heart is (said to be) the King himself.

3. The King is not really a character, but an emblem. Merivel is first overwhelmed by the King’s presence, when his father (‘appointed glovemaker to the restored King in January 1661’, p. 18) takes him to Whitehall, while he is still studying medicine. He can hardly utter a word or even see straight. Later on, having hired Merivel to take care of his dogs, the King takes him into his confidence (more or less), ‘smacks’ kisses upon his mouth and marries him to his mistress, making him a nobleman with an estate. Most of the time – the time of the novel – this king is absent. Merivel ardently wishes he could be with the king again. This only happens when Celia is discarded by the king. After the great fire of London, the king manages to find Merivel only when the latter feels he must revisit Bidnold once more, for old times’ sake. His former servant, William Gates, is instructed by the king to let him know when Merivel turns up, and when Merivel does go – as the story is sure to take him – there, the king is waiting, and offers him a room of his own.

The king is not really a person. He is the glow of power and bodily luxury, the appeal of safety. But we must not forget the novel is entitled Restoration, which reminds us of the king’s fall. The same as the king, Merivel is restored to grace and well being (more or less), and the words ‘until my reign is over’ are a hardly audible memento. After a fall of his own, after poverty, illness, plague and a fire, Merivel still believes in happiness. He has a daughter, Margaret, to ensure his survival after death. Tremain’s book is not so much a book about true Restoration, as a hymn to human hope and endurance.

 If the novel is not really intent on reviving the figure of the restored king, it is more than eager to make us experience his age as if we were forced to live in it. The text is so captivating and forceful in so far as details that recreate the atmosphere are concerned, that we feel prisoners of the story. We climb, fall and are restored with Merivel (whom one minor character calls, by mistake, but significantly, Merry Vale...).

When the story begins, Merivel is a thirty-seven-year-old man,

 erratic, immoderate, greedy, boastful and sad (p. 13)

 as he himself puts it. He likes women immoderately, he loves to eat – and an unbelievable variety of foods that enter his stomach are described, he enjoys bright colours, he is in love with his mare (Danseuse) – given to him by the king, accompanying him (with a brief interruption) till the very end of this story, he is fond of art although he is no good at painting or music. Merivel never says so about himself, but from his deeds we see him as a generous man, who can take care of the lunatics, save a life in the fire, operate on Katharine in hopes of saving her life (although he knows he would be better off without her), protect a former enemy (the poor painter Elias Finn spied on him at Bidnold, and hoped, even managed partly to bring him down, but, when he comes to Merivel during the plague, Merivel takes him in and gives him the idea of painting simple men in simple surroundings, which makes him relatively well off).

As he progresses across his own life, Merivel comes closer and closer to his own pulsating soul. He learns – or is forced to realize – that he cannot live only for sensations (warmth, well being, satiety, a night in the hay, a secure tomorrow), he must transcend physical adversity. He is plunged into the cold, hunger, horror, tragedy. In short, he is made to experience the very opposite of what he cherishes. While doing so, he finds his inner self, the pulsating heart, which this time is totally invisible. He realizes he can be a physician if need be, he can live to help others, he can do without physical comfort, he can take refuge in his soul. When he holds Margaret in his arms at last, the king’s restored gift no longer means much. Merivel has found inner riches, which are of infinitely more use to him than whatever the king may offer. He has rendered the king powerless, actually. Thus, Restoration is a contest between the two sides of Merivel’s nature: a doctor or the king’s fool? A man on his own or a (favoured, disgraced and then restored) subject? Margaret is the answer. He is a father now, he must give. He has given life, he has given love (even though he does not seem to be aware of that). Nothing that the king gives him can make him any better than that. We cannot help but wonder: was it Tremain’s secret wish to convey that no king can ever change his subjects’ lives? That it is far more exciting to be Merivel – who finds himself, and has the privilege to see himself restored to humanity (changed, or at least revealed) – than to be the king?

The language Merivel uses in telling his own story – or writing his diary, as it seems – is as colourful as the details he gives. He speaks as he eats, the words having the same taste and colour of his time as his food or clothes. He addresses us from his 17th century. Behind his apparent lack of knowledge, we cannot fail to guess his author’s knowledge at bay: he finds a cure for madness by music and reflexes of the sole (very much used today, in the 21rst century), for instance. He narrates alternately in the past and in the present. This alternation gives a poignant immediacy to his narrative. It places him in the middle of it, heightening suspense, making us anxious to know more, to accompany him wherever it is he goes. Tremain plants in us a desire never to leave Merivel, this colourful anti-hero who proves in the end far more alluring than the real king.

In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles flirted with the idea of giving his book more than one ending. Rose Tremain offers five beginnings, but her device is not so spectacular as Fowles’s, because it is too early in the story for suspense to support the device. We take these beginnings as a chronological description of the hero’s life so far. They are:

1. His first dissection, of a starling, when he was nine – a “glimpse of my own future” as a physician (p. 15).

2. His once-in-a-lifetime encounter with the man whose beating heart is visible, wherefrom he learns that the heart does not really feel physical pain.

3. His first acquaintance with the king, when he was struck dumb: “I had been within a glove’s length of obtaining power, and I had not taken it”. And before that, Merivel says: “I am not now the Merivel I was that day” (pp. 21-22).

The story has two presents: one is the present of the moment it is being written (when the author may or may not know the ending, depending on whether she had a plan or found out her denouement as she went along); the second is the trick used by the narrator to make us feel what he feels, thus switching from the estranging ‘I was’ to the more forceful ‘I am’. The latter present makes us part of the story. The former makes us part of the author’s mind. Actually, we have two authors in this novel: Merivel (the first-person narrator), and Tremain, whose tricks we sometimes notice as she makes him slip out of his age, into ours.

4.  His parents dying when his father’s workshop is destroyed by fire, the king summons him to Whitehall and makes him physician of his dogs.

5. The king marries him to Celia: “The dogs were to be taken from my care and in their place was to be put the youngest of the King’s mistresses” (p. 30).

From time to time, Merivel stops and wonders at his future. We feel as if Rose Tremain herself stopped short and asked us what she should do with her character. We feel ill at ease. The same as we felt quite cheated when John Fowles took us into his confidence. We expect a book well planned (at the back of his mind every reader wants to read a book which its author took great pains to plan and write). Can it be just a random sequence of incidents? Its being random would diminish the pleasure of well-built suspense. Actually, this wondering as to the future is a trick Tremain uses to make us want that suspense even more intensely, and wait for an intense ending – which she amply gives us.

The interesting thing about Merivel, the failed physician and the failed fool, is that he is also a frustrated artist and musician. He has the feeling that he fails in everything, but behind those statements of failure we feel his authoress (Tremain) pointing us in the direction of his achievement to come. That achievement is becoming himself. Besides that, however, in the obstinate and repeated description of his failed efforts to paint and play the oboe, of his need for a ‘technique’ (p. 48), we can also read a frustration of the writer who takes pains (and uses a consummate technique) so that we may find the story natural and to our taste. Sometimes words can fail, too, and this must have crossed the writer’s mind more than once while she was writing this apparently effortless story of Merivel’s apparently easy glide through existence.

Here and there we are led to expect more of the narrative. We expect Merivel to become a great musician or painter and he does not. We expect him to find a famous cure for madness, and he does not. We also expect him to find his mother in the great fire, and once again he does not. This is another element of Tremain’s technique: she offers false leads. It is the opposite of the part played by forebodings in Hardy, for instance. We are by now used to expecting, foreseeing the next move, looking over the author’s shoulder. She overthrows our expectations and shows us that, if we mean to embark upon the author’s boat with her, we may well end up drowning. She actually stresses here the secret, the mystery of her creation. And she does so by rewriting suspense, by making it simple again, after Woolf or Joyce, who suffocated it with the semblance of “everyday”, common, uneventful narrative, just like life. Life is eventful, she seems to say. Every minute of it is an adventure. Merivel is living proof of that.

The constant change, from one paragraph to another within the narration of the same incident, from past to present, makes Merivel’s story intriguing. We are trying to find out where the point terminus is – namely where the living stops and the writing begins. Tremain has us fooled quite a number of times, as on page 121 (out of the 382 of her novel), when, considering the pages that remain to be read, we cannot expect the story to end at all:

Here I am, then, in my crimson suit, as I described myself at the beginning of this tale. You have all too clear a picture of me now, have you not? And, as you see, I am hedged about with events. I am, precisely as I suggested, in the middle of a story, but who can say yet – not you, not I – how it will end? It is too soon, even, to say how one would wish it to end. The delight or disappointment lies in all the surprises yet to come.

It feels as if Tremain were looking over Merivel’s shoulder as he writes, and we have to look over her and his shoulders, twice remote from reality. The book might be regarded as a diary, but it feels more like a picaresque novel, with the only distinction that its hero is fully aware he has to communicate his experiences, not just to live them. The awareness of the act of writing, the convention of the novel – which weighs heavily on Merivel’s shoulders – is what separates Robert Merivel from Lazarillo de Tormes, first picaresque hero who lived a century before the fictitious time of this novel (anonymous, 1553). The real difference is one between innocence (the freshness of adventure) and experience (in putting stories down to paper). Merivel is not only full of surprises and in love with his own life; he is also a refined narrator of this apparently naive peregrination across England and across a restoration, a plague, a fire. This refinement of the text, of the narrative style, as a matter of fact, is what lets the cat out of the bag. Rose Tremain takes great pains to hide, but her own art in doing so makes her visible. Merivel speaks, Tremain prompts, and we judge both – adventure and art – as we read along.

Restoration is a book about feasts, written by a thirty-seven-old man (and a few years older later on) who is obsessed with the fear of cold and poverty. The images of physical misery abound. Merivel is either cold (“I am drowning in cold”, p. 182) or insensitive to the weather. He is either in front of a table laden with dozens of dishes (venison, cakes and the rest – all described with gusto) or he does not really care what he eats. There is one thing that he always notices with dread, and that is poverty. He begins poor, has a year of wealthy life, returns to poverty (the poverty of most people in the kingdom, but the others do not matter), and finally the king promises him a “room” for as long as restoration lasts. A restoration (of Merivel’s ease) within another (historical) restoration. Rose Tremain is very fond of these parallels and suggestions, which keep the reader’s mind alert to the subtleties of her apparently picaresque, in fact technically sophisticated, text. What she really does is feed us crumbs of the denouement as we go along. Sometimes they are forgotten – just like fortune telling – and sometimes they are followed through. If we read the text a second time, we could easily discern the true from the false leads. The question is, would we appreciate a second reading, given the fact that this novel relies so heavily on suspense?

The suspense in Tremain’s novel is not just one of incidents. It is not entirely one of narrative technique. We do want to know what Merivel’s future holds in store for him. But there is a gourmet suspense of the style, of Merivel’s language, which would afford pleasure to anyone who reads the text the second time round. If his life experience is happy (if there is a happy ending), then his words will be about love, good food and warm beds. Tremain teaches us the pleasures of the body in her style. It is good to be reminded you are alive when you are reading about someone else, someone who lived four centuries before you. Merivel keeps saying, or being told, that he is a man of his age. That sentence allows us to catch a glimpse of the real hand which is writing his words: does he mean only his time, or ours as well? Because we like what he likes, and withdraw in fear from what he dreads. Rose Tremain has thus taught us a major lesson: history is today. When we read, we make the restoration happen today. Merivel lives with us, and, what is even more interesting, he does not leave us at all when the novel ends. Which means his time is not past. Tremain has then created her own history.

Apparently, again, for Tremain’s novel is full of deceiving words and appearances, the text lacks humour and irony, not trying to rewrite/ rival with any other texts. Actually several connections (besides that with Fowles), whether desired or not only the author knows, can be made. Merivel the Fool resembles Falstaff faintly, and anyway, it is just for a short time, even though this novel expands time and makes a few years seem like a lifetime. Several fragments (such as the words about Merivel’s loss of faith) remind us of Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor; so does the way Tremain plunges into history, bringing it back to us as if it were today. Only, with Ackroyd, the distinction past-present is far blunter; he has a passionate love for the remoteness of the historical past, while Tremain is in love with its immediacy, with its here and now. As far as Byatt’s love of the past is concerned, it is obvious that Tremain’s physicality and discreet technicalities never meant to compete with the absolutely masterful verbal stage that Byatt performs on. Willingly or not, Tremain rewrites. Again, willingly or not, she is ironical when compared to the other texts, because she takes a stand, and does not take it in the conventional way, because she does have a lot to say. And, last but not least, her mock-romance is – in spite of very earnest appearances – steeped in a delicate, fragile, comfortable humour, which stays with us (especially in the guise of Merivel’s endearing modesty) long after the last word on the last page has been read.

  

ROSE TREMAIN: RECUPERAREA ISTORISIRII 

Rezumat

Spre deosebire de mai toti autorii Desperado si post-Desperado, autori obsedati de distopie si de moartea povestirii rotunde (care pur-si-simplu nu mai e credibila în viziunea lor), Rose Tremain scrie despre istorie si idealizeaza toate spatiile pe care le descrie. Ea iubeste prezenta trecutului, concretul imaginatiei. Concretul e punctul ei forte. Tehnica e sfioasa si reticenta. Ca toti autorii de-o seama cu ea, inevitabil Tremain rescrie. Tot inevitabila este si prezenta ironiei în ceea ce scrie, în felul cum rescrie alte texte – fiindca are o pozitie de exprimat si nu e deloc vorba de una conventionala. Rose Tremain are prea multe de spus pentru a se încurca în conventii. Ceea ce scrie ea în Restoration este un text condimentat cu ironie romantioasa, umor fragil si retractil si o mare putere de a-l bântui pe lector dupa ce a citit ultimul cuvânt de pe ultima pagina romanului.