Rewind the clocks
Poet WH Auden stars in time-hurdling novel – as a life coach to a lonely mum.
Ialways feel a little queasy when faced with novels that introduce real canonical writers as main characters. Such novels seem to be aiming for a ready-made intellectual respectability. If you dislike them on their own merits, you might be accused of being a philistine. “What! You mean you thought Michael
Cunningham’s The Hours was a load of old rope? But it has Virginia Woolf in it!” That sort of thing.
I particularly feel that way when the canonical writer in question is one whose works I know fairly well. Polly Clark’s debut novel, Larchfield, has WH Auden as a main character, and he is such a writer. Not that I prejudge the novel for this reason.
For about the first half, it bubbles along quite satisfyingly.
In the early 21st century, newly married Dora comes with her husband to the small town of Helensburgh, on Scotland’s west coast. Fresh from Oxford, she hopes to settle down to writing poetry. But her baby is born prematurely, domestic life becomes a chore, the neighbours are nasty, judgmental people who make her life hell and it’s hard to make friends with the cagey locals. Loneliness overwhelms her.
Then she discovers that in 1930, when he was 23 and fresh from Oxford, Wystan Hugh Auden spent two years teaching in
Helensburgh, at a boys’ prep school called Larchfield.
Cue chapters alternating between Dora in the present (written in the past tense) and Auden in the past (written in the present tense). They are implicitly soulmates.
Young Auden gets on well with the schoolboys (Clark is careful to invent an episode that differentiates him from a paedophile). But as a closeted homosexual, he, too, is crushed by loneliness. He looks forward to holidays with his pal Christopher Isherwood in late-Weimar Berlin, where they both cultivate pretty rent boys. But, as the novel would have it, he yearns for True
I suspect WH Auden would have greeted this novel’s sentimental view of his younger self with gales of laughter.
Love as he tries to write his second volume of poems, The Orators.
There are some good things here. While noting most of the episodes in schoolteacher Auden’s life are pure fiction, the narrow,
gossipy life of a small-town school is conveyed vividly. Ringing true is a scene in which Dora’s unattached university pals visit her and basically despise her for being married and having a child.
But the novel jumps the shark a little before halfway. By magical means (don’t ask), Dora makes contact with young Auden and he becomes her guru in Finding Herself. Okay, late in the novel there’s a suggestion that this is Dora’s hallucination brought on by a nervous breakdown. Even so, it makes for icky reading, filled with self-expository or moral-pointing dialogue and easy lessons for readers.
I suspect the real, mature and mellowed WH Auden would have greeted this novel’s sentimental and idealised view of his younger self with gales of laughter. For the record, Clark is a published poet who lives in Helensburgh. Further for the record, this novel has on its cover an enthusiastic endorsement by Louis de Bernières, who wrote
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.
That may indicate its intended audience.
LARCHFIELD, by Polly Clark (Hachette/riverrun, $34.99)
Nicholas Reid is a writer, poet and historian who blogs about books at Reid’s Reader.