©2004 Jeff Percifield
Minnesota Review 2004

 

 

 

MORDREN GRANGE

 

This is a novel, and I am writing it to amuse you.

—Anthony Trollope

 

 

I will set it in a Victorian manor house. This is a trope so filtered and distilled through modern entertainment that it feels archetypal, seems to spring from the collective unconscious.  I will utilize the usual cues: fogs, butlers, parlour maids, arcane construc­tions, narrative props as alien to your waking life as they are embedded in the genome of popular culture.

            She stepped down from the hackney, into a vapour of snowflakes and exter­m­i­n­a­tion…

            This, a reference to the ill-gotten nature of the Mordren fortune, the particulars of which I may only hint at, ambiguity – though hardly characteristic of Victorian literature – being a particularly contemporary malady.

            The Victorian gothic is a myth, a fabricated past, a harsh world which neverthe­less seems innocent in the gas-lit haze of nostalgia. It’s a decadent, late-phase fantasy that appeals because it portrays a society that for all its rigidity and shortcomings seems predictable and well-ordered in a way that modern life is not.  It has the faux-atavistic appeal of Tolkien.  The well-dressed 19^th Century characters seem noble, in that they are by definition innocent of the unimaginable crimes of the 20^th Century; they inhabit a steamy, well-tended conservatory where the serpent of relativity still waits among the palm fronds to lisp E=mc². 

            These are not contemporary characters in costumed finery, they are another species, their viewpoints alien and antithetical. You would have more in common with a contemporary Eskimo than with these pre-modern, pre-Freudian Britishers.  You imagine that they long to burst their stays, but it’s you who long to corset yourself against the horror, the soulless freedom of modern life.

            She stepped down from the hackney, into a morass of mist and metaphor. Well, maybe not.

I will view my antiquarian subject through a lorgnette of postmodern detachment. I will carry an intrusive flashbulb deep into those yellow-lit interiors of guttering tallow and smoking paraffin, I will probe deeply in my gynecological excavation of Victoriana and my squirming characters will have no escape; they are at my mercy.  You are complicit, you have a voyeur’s thrill in knowing that I am going to strip away their emotional petticoats against their will…

            Or maybe not. Maybe it’s I, the writer, who simply longs for a story, that most atavistic of conceits, a long thread that defies our fractured and fissured reality[1].  And yet, ever disingenuous, I must dress it up in the self-conscious fripperies of metafiction.

            I see your hesitation. You want to know if there will be real feelings here, or if it’s to be a cold and elegant étude, as chilly as a Victorian garret; you’re wondering if I have real feelings.  Reading a novel is most intimate, you want to know if you can trust the author to accompany you to the most tremulous part of yourself.  The writer is always present in the act of reading – poststructuralist bores aside – and you don’t want to spend the journey with some lonely misanthrope, say, marooned in his apartment, writing stories to invent companions for himself…

Art is a suture; art is a cicatrix. A book, after all, closed and contained between two covers, is an attempt to organize our feelings, to make sense of our experience of life in a way that the real world can never make sense.

Note that the governess arrives in a hackney, a pun that expresses my ambivalence about the genre, to say nothing of my buried rage at putting words on paper for the approval of strangers, some of them editors.  My equivocation creates a surface tension between reader and writer, a static electricity that may repel or attract.

            And: The ferret-eyed, badger-necked footman thrust a sputtering lamp at her. Behind him, the blue-black silhouette of the Hall, like a horned beast…

            The wintryng reflects the emotional permafrost of the Mordren family. Note also the feral description of the footman – who could tell you a thing or two about Newgate Prison – and the archly chosen verb. You know your cues. I have already palmed into your subconscious the image of our slightly soiled governess and the baby-fat footman planting the poker.  You have every right, it’s a long book, and sex is as omnipresent in modern life as it was covert among the Victorians.[2]      

            Her ghostly face, Her ice-blue face, Her translucent pallor…

            To write is to bear the existential onus of infinite possibilities.

And. So. She arrives, the Hall pullulating with insecti­vorous servants, the dilapidated grounds treacherous with overflowing cesspits (an entire carriage disappeared into one last autumn), the park located on an exposed knoll where the caroling winds blah blah blah.  You get the idea.

One of the team, nibbling hopefully at her bonnet, exhaled hotly down her neck…

Horses were omnipresent in Victorian life in a way unimaginable to modern readers, comparable only to automobiles today. They were utilitarian, a means to an end; hence, people barely noticed them. How many triple-decker novels show steaming green nests of equine feces, or comment on the pervasive barnyard reek? Not that our governess would notice the latter, she’s lucky if she manages a bath a week, and a cold one at that. Under her faded bonnet, her hair is conspicuously matted, and if you were to wrap her up in your twenty-first century arms, you’d get a heady whiff of nineteenth century odeur. Not exactly Merchant/Ivory.

kievrent apartments kiev

And there, behind the glass of that pearwood bookcase: a voodoo artifact which – unknown to the Hall’s residents – is made from human body parts.  Perhaps I’ll add a chapter from the debauched nephew’s Caribbean journal, showing how globalization is as old as the New World. Or again: I’ll cut to the Mordren family cemetery, now threatened by a highway, where amid the overgrown brush and bracken, the ghosts of the clan quarrel and comment on the fractured chain of events I call a novel.  I am, after all, a modern writer, I can do whatever I want.  After the labored experiments of Joyce, which shattered the novel forever – well, for about five minutes – I can arrange the pieces however I like.  To be modern is to crave limits.

Note also the governess’ frayed, powder-gray, three-button kidskin gloves.  Or the pearled vial of arsenic which Lady Mordren keeps in her reticule, subscribing to a popular belief that it cleared the complexion.  I have piles of research, ammunition to show you, the reader, that I’m in charge, I’m the alpha cur here. It’s absolutely necessary to pin the squirming reader right away, by force if necessary, stare her down until she submits to the writer’s authority. (Not that you’d know the difference if I fudged the details; I can get away with a lot and I intend to[3].)

She was wrapped in a white morning dress, her hair falling on her shoulders and her large eyes fixed and without light.  Lovely, eh?  No wait – that’s Vanity Fair.  Sorry.  It’s a slippery slope from homage to pastiche, to outright larceny.

I may throw in a little ectoplasmic emanation, some speculative pseudo­scientific blather which, given the ambiguities of modern physics will seem to have come full circle.  And the caste strictures of the Victorians will allow me to make some trenchant and tedious observations about the role of women in culture, all rather obvious, but my readers prefer a bit of meat with their carbs, they like to feel they’re getting something entertaining yet important, if not too terribly challenging.  (It would be interesting to examine whether the Victorians were in some respects moral superiors to early twenty-first century postmoderns, but that could be dicey and frankly confusing.)

This will all be stirred into a fine bitter-chocolate prose crammed with delectable nougats of chewy, erudite words.  Crepuscular. Susurrus.  Milorad Pavic, a Serb who pens opulent puff pastries of novels sticky with imagination and entirely devoid of narrative drive, compares the reader to a circus horse, who must be rewarded with a lump of sugar every time it acquits itself well. Exactly.

What else? I’ll toss in some explicit sodomy, some opium ravings, white slavery, whatever the repressed Victorians couldn’t write about so it’ll seem transgressive.  (Yawn.)

The ewe-like androgyne paused, a petal of paper corkscrewing to the floor. Miss Dimity, the spinster poetess. Which means I’ll have to write a poem.  I’d rather read a seven-hundred-page novel than a twenty-line poem.  What I hate about poetry is how irrelevant it is.  Rap music, maybe, but poetry?  Some two-color chapbook gathering dust in the back of a struggling bookseller, you’re kidding, right?  Poets, like leftists, are idealists resigned to having no influence.

Extraneous characters: The Macassars, a rival sugar house, purveyors of Macassar Rum.  Mr. Twaddle, an egregious liberal philanthropist.  Reverend Belfry.  Lady Harrow­ing.  It’s fun to think up names for Victorian characters. Try it.

And don’t let’s forget the servants.  The Victorians didn’t have appliances, they had servants.  The governess, who belongs neither up- nor downstairs will be my eyes and ears, but I will allow you crucial information I will withhold from her.  A bit cruel, I know.  Then again, perhaps I underestimate you; perhaps you see through me: like her, I have dreams I daren’t mention to such a brutal audience, I must cover them with crinolines of cynicism, to masque the self-hatred of a man who reimagines himself a Victorian governess.

            Irony is less revealing than wonder.[4]

And now that I think of it, let’s rewind, so that our governess floats back up into the carriage. There: a nest of wet, soiled wool, unwashed bodies, and acrid snuff, a couple of mysterious companions.  A gorgon in mourning – just off the top of my head – who stares through a monocle like a grinning basilisk, insinuating they’ve met before.  A cadaverous eel shivering with ague, who recoils when our heroine drops a handkerchief embroidered with the initials M.V.

Does our governess have something to hide?  In an authentic (and not a faux-) Victorian, such clues would be important, but with me they might be empty flourishes, peacocking, examples of what I can toss off. It doesn’t matter, you will allow me liberties with these characters you would never tolerate in a contemporary novel, which I suppose is the point. We read to experience people whose lives have possibilities ours don’t.

And wait again, let’s pull her all the way back,the book not on the Mordren estate, but in smoky old London, the nucleus, the G-spot, the beating heart of that long-lost world.  Drum roll please:  She stepped down from the hackney, into a midden of mud, a swarm of ashy snowflakes batting at her like frozen blackflies.  The footman, bundled and hooded like an executioner, thrust a paraffin lamp at her.  ‘You the new guv’ness?’ he growled.  She nodded. ‘Hope you fares better than the last two,’ he leered, then tossed her bag into the hansom like a bundled corpse.

Information, she remembered, is always valuable.  ‘What do you mean?’ said she.

But he just grinned, a necropolis of teeth.  ‘It’s a long ride, luv…’

            And so it begins.