The Hothouse by the East River: extract from Chapter One
If it were only true that all’s well that ends well, if only it were true.
She stamps her right foot. She says, ‘I’ll try the other one,’ sitting down to let the salesman lift her left foot and nicely interlock it with the other shoe.
He says, ‘They fit like a glove.’ The voice is foreignly correct and dutiful.
She stands, now, and walks a little space to the mirror, watching first the shoes as she walks and then, halfturning, her leg’s reflection. It is a hot, hot day of July in hot New York. She looks next at the heel.
She looks over at the other shoes on the floor beside the chair, three of them beside their three open boxes and two worn shoes lying on their sides. Finally, she glances at the salesman.
He focuses his eyes on the shoes.
Now, once more, it is evening and her husband has come in.
She sits by the window, speaking to him against the purr of the airconditioner, but looking away – out across the East River as if he were standing in the air beyond the window pane. He stands in the middle of the room behind her and listens.
She says, ‘I went shopping. I went to a shoe store for some shoes. You won’t believe me, what happened.’ He says, ‘Well, what was it?’ She says, ‘You won’t believe me, that’s the trouble. You aren’t sure that you’ll believe me.’
‘How do I know if you don’t tell me what it is?’
‘You’ll believe me, yes, but you won’t believe that it really happened. What’s the use of telling you? You don’t feel sure of my facts.’
‘Oh, tell me anyway,’ he says, as if he is not really interested.
‘Paul,’ she says, ‘I recognised a salesman in a shoe store today. He used to be a prisoner of war in England.’ ‘Which P.O.W.?’ ‘Kiel.’ ‘Which Kiel?’ ‘Helmut Kiel. Which one do you think?’ ‘There was Claus, also Kiel.’ ‘Oh, that little mess, that lop-sided one who read the books on ballet?’ ‘Yes, Claus Kiel.’ ‘Well, I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about Helmut Kiel. You know who I mean by “Kiel”. Why have you brought up Claus Kiel?’
Paul thinks: She doesn’t turn her head, she watches the East River.
One day he thought he had caught her, in profile, as he moved closer to her, smiling at Welfare Island as if it were someone she recognised. The little island was only a mass of leafage, seen from the window. She could not possibly have seen a person so far away down there.
Is it possible that she is smiling again, he thinks; could she be smiling to herself, retaining humorous reflections to herself ? Is she sly and sophisticated, not mad after all? But it isn’t possible, he thinks; she is like a child, the way she comes out with everything at this hour of the evening.
She tells him everything that comes into her head at this hour of the evening and it is for him to discover whether what she says is true or whether she has imagined it. But has she decided on this course, or can’t she help it? How false, how true?
It is true that in the past winter he has seemed to catch her concealing a smile at the red Pepsi-cola sign on the far bank of the river. Now he thinks of the phrase, ‘tongue in cheek’, and is confused between what it means and how it would work if Elsa, with her head averted towards the river, actually put her tongue in her cheek, which she does not.
And Paul, still standing in the middle of the carpet, then looks at her shadow. He sees her shadow cast on the curtain, not on the floor where it should be according to the position of the setting sun from the window bay behind her, cross- town to the West Side. He sees her shadow, as he has seen it many times before, cast once more unnaturally. Although he has expected it, he turns away his head at the sight.
‘Paul,’ she says, still gazing at the river, ‘go and get us a drink.’
Their son, Pierre, came to see them last night. He said, while they were discussing, by habit, in the hall, the problem of Mother: ‘She is not such a fool.’
‘Then I am the fool, to spend my money on Garven.’
‘She’s got to have Garven.’ He uttered this like a threat, intensifying his voice to scare away the opposition that he knew to be prowling.
Garven Bey is her analyst. Pierre is anxious that his mother should not go back into the clinic and so upset his peace of mind. Moreover, Pierre knows it was not his father’s money that went so vastly on Garven, but the surface-dust, the top silt, merely, of his mother’s fortune.
Last night, Paul said, as his son was leaving, ‘What did you think she looked like tonight?’
‘All right. There’s definitely something strange, of course …’ in reality it is a segregated activity. In its place I advocate the arts of satire and of ridicule. And I see no other living art form for the future ... I would like to see in all forms of art and letters, ranging from the most sophisticated and high achievements to the placards that the students carry about the street, a less impulsive generosity, a less indignant representation of social injustice, and a more deliberate cunning, a more derisive undermining of what is wrong. I would like to see less emotion and more intelligence in these efforts to impress our minds and hearts . . . The only effective art of our particular time is the satirical, the harsh and witty, the ironic and derisive. Because we have come to a moment in history when we are surrounded on all sides and oppressed by the absurd . . . The rhetoric of our times should persuade us to contemplate the ridiculous nature of the reality before us, and teach us to mock it . . . To bring about a mental environment of honesty and self-knowledge, a sense of the absurd and a general looking-lively to defend ourselves from the ridiculous oppressions of our time, and above all to entertain us in the process, has become the special calling of arts and letters.”
I wonder what Spark would do with the world of 2017 and 2018; I wish she were around to answer that.
The short, spiky books Spark wrote in the late 1960s and early 1970s show her following her own advice as posited in The Desegregation of Art. The absurd becomes key; fate deals harshly with characters such as Lise in The Driver’s Seat; the mood and the satire darkens perceptibly. This is a world where an actress wants finally to direct her own universe
(The Public Image), where victims seek their murderers (The Driver’s
Seat), and where mourning precedes death (Not To Disturb). Meanwhile, in The Hothouse by the East River, life haunts the deceased in a Manhattan described as a ‘mental clinic . . . where we analyse and dope the savageries of existence’. The inversion evident here is well suited to a world that seems to have been turned upside down by social, political and economic events.
Spark had said earlier, in the 1960s, that the French Nouveau Roman writer Alain Robbe-grillet would become the decade’s most important novelist. She did not, however, share his philosophy. For Robbe-grillet, the world is “neither meaningful nor absurd. It quite simply is,” while for Spark the world remains both meaningful and absurd, its “meaning” tied to her Catholic faith and belief in an all-powerful God. She famously said that she converted to Catholicism on the “nevertheless” principle. Despite everything, she couldn’t not believe. Yet she remained wary of the Church, and in later years attended Sunday service only after the sermon had finished. She also remained wary of the novel form, endlessly teasing and probing it to see if it was doing its job properly – and never more so than in these “problem” novels of her mid-career. The critic David Lodge proposed his theory of the “problematic novel in his book The Novelist at the
Crossroads (published in 1971, the same year as Spark’s Desegregation
of Art). He writes of novels which make the reader “participate in the aesthetic and philosophical problems the writing of fiction presents, by embodying them directly in the narrative”.
Spark, of course, had been doing this from her very first novel,
The Comforters, where the main character Caroline Rose knows she is a fictional construct and can hear her creator typing away. In her second book, Robinson, the first-person narrator January Marlow tells the reader: “I thought perhaps they had never existed, that Robinson and his household were a dead woman’s dream, that I was indeed dead . . .”
Fast-forward just over a decade and the main players in Hothouse really are dead, playing out their psychodramas in a kind of limbo until their various issues are resolved and they can journey elsewhere, which is why the story ends with one last mention of Elsa’s shadow, described as “her faithful and lithe cloud of unknowing”. The Cloud of Unknowing is the title of a religious text dating from the fourteenth century, in which the cloud is a realm where the soul can be reunited with God after death. So God, it seems, really is watching over everyone, no matter how absurd and meaningless their everyday existence has seemed. One of Spark’s later novels, Reality and Dreams, opens tellingly with the line: “He often
wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams.” It is a question Spark mulled over throughout her life and her career.
The critic Bernard Harrison once stated that “the loss of any assurance of reality . . . is the underlying theme of all Muriel Spark’s fiction”. Spark’s task is to persuade us that our postworld War Two beliefs are superficial and, in the end, absurd. But the absurd can also be hysterically funny, and Hothouse contains one riotous scene that would have made playwright Joe Orton proud. As Garven the analyst arrives at Elsa’s apartment he is greeted by a maid who has tried to throw herself out of the window, while Paul is wrestling off Elsa’s shoes because he believes there is a code written on the soles. To add to the madness, Elsa’s friend Princess Xavier has been incubating some silkworms in her bosom and they decide to hatch under Garven’s gaze. After all of which, he decides to become the family’s butler, the better to study these extraordinary people.
After Elsa returns from a tryst with the shoe salesman/german POW in Zürich, she declares to her husband: “It was you with your terrible and jealous dreams who set the whole edifice soaring.” So are they all biding their time in the afterlife until Paul can come to terms with his wife’s wartime intimacy with Kiel? After all, Paul and Elsa died when a bomb hit their train, leaving him unsure as to whether she had been unfaithful or not. Elsa knows she is dead; Paul has refused to acknowledge it. “You started it,” she tells him. “Your suspicions, your imagination.” So Manhattan really has been an “unreal city”, and the echoes of Eliot’s Waste Land early in the novel – ‘I came to Carthage’; ‘The river moving past a moored barge’ – were not without justification.
It is interesting that a novel so filled with 1960s New York high society should also be filled with Spark’s wartime experiences, but these experiences were absolutely crucial to her journey as a fledgling writer. In 1944, as well as working for the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, Spark met a young woman on a train while heading to London. The woman took her to a house she was visiting. The owner was not home, but Spark soon realised he was the renowned poet Louis Macneice. She would write later that this was the beginning of her life as a poet. She felt it was more than mere chance that had taken her there at that particular time: poetry was to be her vocation. (She wrote a short story loosely based on the experience, ‘The House of the Famous Poet’, in which a poet is killed when a bomb hits his home in London, in 1944.)
Her life had altered immeasurably by the time she got to work on
Hothouse, but she still retained a sense that the war had changed everything. Indeed, the ending of her novel The Girls of Slender Means (in which a murderous and apparently motiveless attack takes place during the V-J Day celebrations) hints that there are plenty more horrors still to come. The political, economic and social turmoil of the 1960s stirred her to write books that were harsh as well as witty and which would ridicule the age and the milieu in which they were set. In a 1970 interview she stated: “I don’t believe in good and evil so much any more . . . Now there is only absurdity and intelligence.” This philosophy is to the fore in
Hothouse, and Spark gifts her own world view to the son Pierre: “There isn’t any war and peace any more, no good and evil, no communism, no capitalism, no fascism. There’s only one area of conflict left and that’s between absurdity and intelligence.” Of course, Pierre is another boy who can never grow up, because he never existed in the first place. Elsewhere in the book, another psychoanalyst lists thirty-seven problems to be found in Manhattan, from ‘the youth problem’ to the ‘entertainments problem’ – without mentioning the daddy of them all. It is left to Elsa at the end of the chapter to note, “She missed out the mortality problem”, the one these characters are living with, the one we all must live with.
When Hothouse was first published, it was reviewed alongside Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince by Michael Ratcliffe in the Times . He quoted the hero of Murdoch’s book: “Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other . . . Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death.” This points to Spark’s imperative in The Desegregation of
Art. Novels can – and should – provide laughter in the dark and intelligence amidst the absurd.
The Hothouse by the East River
is as strange and dislocating as anything Muriel Spark wrote, a book absolutely right for its period and setting. She saw through the Manhattan social scene and discovered an Unreal City. She had journeyed a long way from childhood Edinburgh and wartime England, but she had more travelling still to do.