The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘A violence so complete, it is like air’
This terrifying dystopian vision of a divided population is disturbingly close to our own world, says Sam Leith
than 100 posters Broutin created, his favourite was this mini-poster design for Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959). brothers fighting brothers, new generations rising up to revenge the crimes of the old. The fall of the Caliphate is, Verini argues, no occasion for triumphalism. New cycles of violence grind into life. This incarnation of
Isil might have been defeated, and American forces might be extricating themselves from the battlefield, but for the people of Mosul and Iraq, the Forever War rumbles on.
TTHE DIVERS’ GAME by Jesse Ball 227pp, Granta, £14.99, ebook £14.99
he poet and novelist Jesse Ball’s fiction has been compared by critics to Kafka and Calvino – and has been accused by James Wood, in a slightly eccentric phrase, of failing to “escape […] the fatal shadow of the weightless Paul Auster”.
There’s something in those comparisons: he’s elliptical, poetic, pretty spare in diction, and his work has the dream-feel of allegory even though it’s not exactly allegory as such. The events of The Divers’ Game are not standing for something else: the world it describes is a world in which things are what they are.
And what they are, it should be said, is terrifying. This short book – which is arguably less a novel than four linked short stories – is set in a dystopia in which the population has been divided in two. There are the “pats” or “citizens”, and there are the “quads” – descendants of a refugee population who do not enjoy the same rights; indeed, do not enjoy any rights. The whole social order is structured around the idea – launched in the wake of an uprising – that “anything could be done to those without rights […] things done to those beneath are not properly violence”.
“Quads” are branded on their faces and all have one of their thumbs lopped off so they can be told apart from ordinary citizens.
The name “quad” also refers to the guarded ghettos in which they live. They’re free to leave the quads whenever they like – but they do so at their own risk. In the wider world they have no rights. Only “pats” have rights; and within the quads nobody (including pats) has any rights at all.
The balance of power is maintained by poison gas. Every pat carries a gas mask and a canister of gas, and from speakers in public spaces there blasts a “joyful chorus”:
A citizen
For the life of him
Or her or he or she
That keeps a mask
On the belt or arm
Need never fear the streets. If trouble comes
Like quad scum –
Your mask put on!
Your mask put on!
The gas shall flow A cloud to grow
And lay them low
The lowest at our feet.
The first section follows the stories of two adolescent pats, Lethe and Lois, who travel to a zoo with their teacher (spoiler: it has only one living animal in it, the world’s last hare), before one wanders off and finds herself in a quad, where she is both threatened and – with her canister of gas – a threat. The second section is set in Row House quad, where a girl called Lessen is being prepared for her role as “Infanta”, centrepiece of a riotous and sinister misrule festival: will she be tyrant or sacrifice? A third section follows the story of another missing child who has been involved in the titular Divers’ Game, where children dare each other to swim through an underwater tunnel connecting two bodies of water. The final section is the suicide note of a “pat” who has had what you might call a moment of clarity.
The set-up may seem on the face of it a little too morally schematic. Tribalism, dehumanisation and propaganda are taken, here, to a caricatural extreme. And the narrative voice is oddly fussy (“If we look for Lethe, we shall do so in a different way”; “If we go there to that moment, we can see it from every angle”) and sometimes sententious. “Do the places we inhabit confine us by their very nature?” it helpfully prompts us to wonder. “Are we always imprisoned, eternally imprisoned, in body, in place, in community, do even our minds imprison us?”
But the stories are so involving and so pregnant with menace, the telling largely so fresh and the idea of the gas – be it mechanism or metaphor or both – is so startling and apt that you barely register these hesitations. And where Ball’s story really bites is in the way it shows up the dynamics of almost invisibly vast disparities of power and empathy at an individual level. Lois summons an elderly quad passer-by, casually, to scare and insult him: “Lethe burst out laughing, but Lois kept a straight face, staring right at the guy.” Lessen, learning that when she is Infanta everyone must obey her absolutely, immediately thrills with childish cruelty.
Those to whom evil is done…
Here really is a world, thrillingly imagined and under the surface entirely like our own, in which, as the narrator of the final section puts it: “We are maintained by a violence so complete, it is like air.”
Call 0844 871 1514 to order from the Telegraph for £42
Call 0844 871 1514 to order from the Telegraph for £16.99
‘Quads’ are branded on their faces and all have one of their thumbs lopped off
Call 0844 871 1514 to order from the Telegraph for £12.99
The writer and composer of such classic songs as Let’s Do It, You’re the Top and Anything Goes, Cole Porter was ultrasophisticated, outrageously witty and ingeniously filthy-minded. So his letters, many of which have been collected in this enormous book, might have been expected to be a great treat. Alas, they are not.
I could find only one real corker, written from Paris in March 1918, when Porter was 26, to his dear friend Monty Woolley. He was in France with the US army, although the editors note that it “is far from clear… what his duties might have been”; Woolley described him “strutting up and down the boulevards in uniforms ranging from a cadet’s to a colonel’s”.
Porter tells Woolley about a female acquaintance whom people are “nearly convinced… is one of the young intellectuals, when suddenly she gets a relapse and bites some woman she just met, on the arm”, and he conveys the startling news that he has fallen in love with a woman: Linda Lee Thomas, a rich divorcee eight years his senior, whom he would soon marry.
He also begs Woolley to inform Woolley père, whom one imagines to have been eminently respectable, “that I’ve found a wonderful new perfume called Le Moment Passione, that I’ve been given a marvelous dressing-gown made of an old Persian material and lined with purple and orange silk, and that, every evening at sunset, I undress, take a bath in the perfume, put on the dressing-gown and read Baudelaire aloud to the concierge’s pink young son. It may please him.”
That is the sort of letter we expected, but instead we are given hundreds of dull ones. “He never wrote long letters,” Porter’s secretary observed towards the end of his life (he died in 1964), “but now they are less than short.”
There are many complaints, in the manner of rich people, about the inconveniences of wealth. In January 1944: “Mr Morgenthau [Secretary of the US Treasury] wants $90,000 bucks from me on March 15th for my first quarter + it’s a bit too much.” And that September: “Linda is in wonderful form in spite of almost constant butler trouble.”
“Ole Cole”, as he sometimes signed himself, or even “Cole Enema Potah”, had lovely manners, and there are any number of thank-you letters – for hospitality, theatre tickets and other gifts and even for Christmas cards.
There are wistful notes to lovers, such as this to Boris Kochno in
September 1925: “We went to the theatre this evening + instead of watching the piece I watched you, all the time – I didn’t listen to anything, I was before you, you smiled at me, you spoke to me, but it’s folly, isn’t it?”
Mainly, though, there are brisk business letters, such as this to his agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar in December 1954: “Thanks for your wire to Philadelphia. When I wired you last I had forgotten that the producers had already made a picture deal with Metro, so there is nothing to be done.”
Very occasionally there is gossip, as in June 1951 when the valet of the Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue tells Linda about his master’s relationship with the Duchess of Windsor: “‘After he has been out with her, I always find lip-stick on his shorts.’ Linda adds ‘Tricks she learned in China, I presume.’”
The editors of this book are academics at British universities, specialising in musicals, and to justify their colossal effort they claim that Porter’s “life and works remain comparatively unexamined”, which is odd, as their bibliography includes at least six biographies.
They frame the letters with accounts of his life. Cole was the only surviving child of a rich family in Peru, Indiana. The money came from his maternal grandfather, who thought him extravagant, and used to drive him out into the Indiana countryside, rein in the buggy and point out the county poorhouse: “That, Cole, is the place you will end up.”
He was sent east to boarding school in Massachusetts; then to Yale, where he was “Gilbert & Sullivan crazy”, joined the Whiffenpoofs glee club, and composed football songs that are still sung today; and then to Harvard Law School, where the dean told him, “Porter – don’t waste your time – get busy and study music.”
His spectacular career was underwritten by a lavish trust fund, which enabled him to buy a grand house in Paris, and to rent palazzi on the Grand Canal in Venice and an apartment in the Waldorf in New York. And he always employed two valets; when one of them died, he continued to pay his wages to his widow.
But he also suffered some spectacular bad luck. In 1906 the Peru Republican reported that Cole Porter, a “Popular Young Peruvian”, had broken a leg falling through a barn floor in Maine, and
Call 0844 871 1514 to order from the Telegraph for £19.99
He notes the Duchess of Windsor’s lipstick on the Woolworth heir’s shorts
this turned out to be an ill omen. While he was out riding in 1937 his horse threw him and then fell on his legs, both of which suffered compound fractures: “the whole leg looked like a flowing mass of lava,” he wrote to Woolley, “and it sorta made me sick.” He was in constant pain thereafter, endured some 30 operations, and relied on crutches and wheelchairs for the rest of his life.
The editors quote extensively from newspaper interviews, which throw light on his working methods. “My sole inspiration,” he told one paper, “is a telephone call from a producer.” He swore by rhyme dictionaries, Roget’s Thesaurus and Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and claimed to have “done lots of work at dinner, sitting between two bores. I can feign listening beautifully and work.” When the horse fell on him, “I was too stunned to be conscious of great pain, but until help came I worked on the lyrics for the songs for You Never Know.”
The editors also include a generous selection of reviews. An “ecstatic” one from the New Yorker in 1928 sums up his enduring appeal: “His rare and satisfactory talent makes other lyrists [sic] sound as though they’d written their words for a steam whistle.”
This book will prove a great resource for scholars, but offers disappointingly few glimpses of the gaiety and charm so abundantly evident in the songs.