Fireside Tales for Nasty Weather

This January Tale, by Bryher. Harcourt, $4.50 A House in Order, by Nigel Dennis. Vanguard, $4.95 The Scorpions, by Robert Kelly. Doubleday, $3.95

HERE ARE three novels by very particular craftsmen. Bryher (born Winifred Ellerman) dedicated her autobiography, The Heart to Artemis (1962), “to the memory of my master, Stéphane Mallarmé,” who, if novels are read in Elysium, must delight in so worthy a disciple. Nigel Dennis, whose Cards of Identity came out eleven years ago, seems to write a novel a decade. And Robert Kelly, one of the best of our modern poets, is turning to the novel for the first time. Bryher’s This January Tale is another of her intimate stories about common people whose lives are changed by those forces that are chronicled so neatly and impersonally by the history books. This January Tale is about an English soldier at the time of the Conquest. Bryher allows us to see the kitchen, the forge, – the marketplace, where the heroics of the battlefield are translated into the misery of shortages and a blur of gossip. By following the agony of a single refugee family from 1056 to 1068, Bryher can suggest the quality and tone of the anguish that the Norman armies brought to England. “The popular but incorrect view,” she says in a preface to the novel, “is that Norman culture in 1066 was superior to that of England.” This is a plausible theory if we can find a way to discount Mont St. Michel and the Normans in Sicily, and if we see what Bryher is thinking of when she says culture. Her novel shows that she means civilization. The English were not yet medieval; they were something quite different: a people who were cultivating all the arts of staying at home and minding their own business. They were a free people, closer in spirit to Scandinavia than to the cultures of the Mediterranean, and Bryher discloses much of the bent of their hearts when she shows us an emigration to Ireland to escape Norman bureaucracy and (to them) barbarity. Bryher even suggests that her description of the havoc and demoralization of William’s invasion is something like what would have happened if the Germans had crossed the Channel in 1940. But the value of Bryher’s novel is not its historical thesis but the beauty of its writing. There is a severe, archaic grace to her descriptions, and an unfailing understanding of grief and misery. Nigel Dennis’ A House in Order is amazingly close to Bryher’s themes. It is also about war and simple people and the strength to endure. But it is a stranger and darker fable. A soldier in some recent war, we are told, was inadvertently not captured with his company. He tried to be, not wanting to be parted from his companions, but could not get the attention of the enemy. He does the best he can: he asks to be captured when he comes to an enemy headquarters. But he is too small an entity to be reckoned with, and is put in an abandoned greenhouse until he can be seen to. Then he is forgotten. An amateur horticulturist, he spruces up the greenhouse. Guards bring him minimal food. Occasionally officialdom questions him and writes him up, but nothing happens. He survives an awful winter, and keeps his plants alive as well. Without his knowing how, his greenhouse becomes a station in an escape route from the concentration camp nearby. An educated officer begins to amuse himself with the strange prisoner who has, like Robinson Crusoe, made himself an island in the midst of a busy and hostile world. When higher echelons get wind of the prisoner, there are hearings and courts martial, disgraces and inquiries. So difficult is it to explain the harmless, well-behaved prisoner and his greenhouse, that an officer ferrets him away and secretly takes him to his own army. A more meaningful fable of the inviolable uniqueness of the individual has not been written since Kafka prophesied what a private citizen would feel like in a totally authoritarian state.

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Guy Davenport

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This January Tale, by Bryher. Harcourt, $4.50 A House in Order, by Nigel Dennis. Vanguard, $4.95 The Scorpions, by Robert Kelly. Doubleday, $3.95

HERE ARE three novels by very particular craftsmen. Bryher (born Winifred Ellerman) dedicated her autobiography, The Heart to Artemis (1962), “to the memory of my master, Stéphane Mallarmé,” who, if novels are read in Elysium, must delight in so worthy a disciple. Nigel Dennis, whose Cards of Identity came out eleven years ago, seems to write a novel a decade. And Robert Kelly, one of the best of our modern poets, is turning to the novel for the first time. Bryher’s This January Tale is another of her intimate stories about common people whose lives are changed by those forces that are chronicled so neatly and impersonally by the history books. This January Tale is about an English soldier at the time of the Conquest. Bryher allows us to see the kitchen, the forge, – the marketplace, where the heroics of the battlefield are translated into the misery of shortages and a blur of gossip. By following the agony of a single refugee family from 1056 to 1068, Bryher can suggest the quality and tone of the anguish that the Norman armies brought to England. “The popular but incorrect view,” she says in a preface to the novel, “is that Norman culture in 1066 was superior to that of England.” This is a plausible theory if we can find a way to discount Mont St. Michel and the Normans in Sicily, and if we see what Bryher is thinking of when she says culture. Her novel shows that she means civilization. The English were not yet medieval; they were something quite different: a people who were cultivating all the arts of staying at home and minding their own business. They were a free people, closer in spirit to Scandinavia than to the cultures of the Mediterranean, and Bryher discloses much of the bent of their hearts when she shows us an emigration to Ireland to escape Norman bureaucracy and (to them) barbarity. Bryher even suggests that her description of the havoc and demoralization of William’s invasion is something like what would have happened if the Germans had crossed the Channel in 1940. But the value of Bryher’s novel is not its historical thesis but the beauty of its writing. There is a severe, archaic grace to her descriptions, and an unfailing understanding of grief and misery. Nigel Dennis’ A House in Order is amazingly close to Bryher’s themes. It is also about war and simple people and the strength to endure. But it is a stranger and darker fable. A soldier in some recent war, we are told, was inadvertently not captured with his company. He tried to be, not wanting to be parted from his companions, but could not get the attention of the enemy. He does the best he can: he asks to be captured when he comes to an enemy headquarters. But he is too small an entity to be reckoned with, and is put in an abandoned greenhouse until he can be seen to. Then he is forgotten. An amateur horticulturist, he spruces up the greenhouse. Guards bring him minimal food. Occasionally officialdom questions him and writes him up, but nothing happens. He survives an awful winter, and keeps his plants alive as well. Without his knowing how, his greenhouse becomes a station in an escape route from the concentration camp nearby. An educated officer begins to amuse himself with the strange prisoner who has, like Robinson Crusoe, made himself an island in the midst of a busy and hostile world. When higher echelons get wind of the prisoner, there are hearings and courts martial, disgraces and inquiries. So difficult is it to explain the harmless, well-behaved prisoner and his greenhouse, that an officer ferrets him away and secretly takes him to his own army. A more meaningful fable of the inviolable uniqueness of the individual has not been written since Kafka prophesied what a private citizen would feel like in a totally authoritarian state.