Pitch Dark (21 page)

About the story, she had said, It’s glum. Now he said, It is glum. But he said so many other things. I said, That’s a lovable man though, really. He said, No, it isn’t. Long ago he said, This is what matters; what you don’t realize is that all the rest is only motion. I said, Emotion? He said motion. There we were. Then, you said, in that voice, It’s a love letter in a way. I said, What else is it. So here we are.

But the essential storytellers at the drab, frightening, but sometimes heroic, poetic hearth that is the court are, not the lawyers or the judge at all, but the plaintiff, the defendant, and their witnesses. And these, these almost never understand what is being asked of them, what answers are permitted, what is the point of what is being asked. And nobody in this place, least of all that strange audience that is the jury, understands this incomprehension.
Just
when plaintiff, defendant, or witness thinks he or she has the hang of it, begins to reply, sometimes, triumphantly, sarcastically, in what he or she takes to be the lawyers’ language, there is objection after objection from interrupting lawyers, reprimands from judges. Why is it, the lady in the divorce proceeding wonders, that her husband’s lawyer can ask her, in scathing and insulting tones, And on the morning of July twelfth, did you not buy three shirts at Bloomingdale’s? On the same day, did you not also buy sheets at Bloomingdale’s? And is it not true that on that afternoon you also purchased stationery at Bloomingdale’s? And he can do this by the hour, and the judge, having said a few times, Counsel, I don’t want to tell you how to run your case but I think your point is established, now appears to be asleep. As does the other attorney for her husband, as do her own two attorneys, while this man drones on in this terrible insinuating way, about what she bought and charged and where, endlessly. She is permitted, it seems, to say only Yes or No. After a while, she thinks she has it. She says, Yes, counsel, as I think I have already indicated to you. She looks to the judge for approval. Nothing. It goes on. Suddenly, again, she thinks she has it. But these don’t show, she says, flushing, these lists of my charges don’t show the items I returned. But she really does think she’s got it, the point, the language, they are trying to put something over on her and she will not have it. But, your honor, I object! she says. These do not show which, if any, of these items I returned! Nothing. She doesn’t understand it, doesn’t understand that she doesn’t understand it. After a while, the judge stops reprimanding her, she thinks the story is now going her way, keeps saying her charge account bills don’t show what she returned.

You said, We can live this way. You said all those other things. We do live this way. We just need something to tide us over the pitch, the daily pitch of not knowing whether one or the other is going to go. But now you said, again, Kate, I’ll change things, if that’s what you want. And, in that voice, It’s a love letter in a way. And I said, What else is it. So here we are.

The education and the language of judge and lawyer alike are so remote from the language of the story’s own characters that they have forgotten what it’s like not to know what is asked, what is permitted. And the jury, if there is a jury, doesn’t know either. And yet, the great doctrines of finality and
Stare Decisis
, that somewhere a story must end and may not be reopened, and that this story is dispositive for all stories that cannot be proven to be unlike it, mean that no stories, no stories at all, can be of more immediate, and sometimes eternal, interest than these. But stories they are. And their own eloquence grows up around them. The outcomes, surprisingly often, are wrong. You can see it. A hundred years later, the court sees it and reverses, not reverses, overturns, but comes about like a great ship. Never apologizes. Simply brings in another “It is well settled,” along with “What we decide today is nothing more than.” Everyone once intimately concerned is long dead. In the process, in the repetitions and formulas, the courts sometimes rise from their droning with a phrase so pure, deep, and mighty that it stays. It remains forever just the way to say that thing. More probably than not. Utterly without fault. Not my act. Beyond a reasonable doubt. Last intervening wrongdoer. Cloud on title. An ordinary man. A prudent man. A reasonable man. A man of ordinary intelligence and understanding. Wait, wait. Whose voice is this? Not mine. Not mine. Not mine. Res ipsa loquitur. A man must act somehow.

Jon’s run: The forward-directed attitudes, I think, are these: curiosity, ambition, love, courage, hunger, duty, rage. They may be backward-formed, but they are forward directed, moving toward the future. Fear, too, of course, is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday. Backward-directed are all the loss reactions. Grief, of course, and regret. Boredom is backward and forward, both. Hope. Wait, wait. Not here. Just stay.

But you won’t go? No. Never? No.

Do you sometimes wish it was me?

Always.

Pause.

It is you.

R
ENATA
Adler’s novel
Pitch Dark
, like her first work of fiction,
Speedboat
, is a genre unto itself, a discontinuous first-person narrative. Miss Adler’s mind is analytical and her style ebullient. She also has an old-fashioned real story to tell, a love story, although it is by no means told plain. You have to piece it together as you would if you had picked up a stranger’s private journal. You have to read between the lines (the lines themselves are another sort of entertainment) and snatch at hints and fragments until the whole becomes clear, and the character of the narrator is filled out by the honest expression of her feelings, her opinions and pensées, her daily experiences, always with an edge of desperation.

The narrator, Kate Ennis, is a reporter on a newspaper. She has had an affair for eight years with Jake, a married man inconsiderate and selfish, with whom she is still in love when she decides to break from him. At the beginning of the book, Kate, after traveling around the world and many transatlantic crossings, is still in the same state of ambivalence. Reminiscing from a small island in Puget Sound, she writes in the first person. “Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?” is one of the many telling refrains throughout the book. Sometimes she addresses her lover. “You are, you know, you were the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life” is another refrain. And sometimes she reproaches him at length—“What you’ve done, though, is to arrange your life so that all the things with a little joy or beauty in them were the things in which I had no part.”

It seems excessive for a very bright woman still to be in love with Jake. It does seem perfectly natural to the reader that in the end he apparently wants her back (on his own terms), for Kate has the advantage of displaying her excellent gifts, her eloquence and wit, to the reader throughout the other parts of her narrative. Kate tells of Jake’s final telephone calls: “You said, again, Kate, I’ll change things, if that’s what you want.” But these brief pleas are all we get from Jake.

The point I wish to make is that, in the modern novel, it is extremely difficult to create a character worth the reader’s caring about. In democratic times we find it out of key to put on show a personage of Aristotle’s “certain magnitude.” Art is not democratic. Miss Adler has succeeded with Kate in creating a character worth the trouble of writing and reading about, because of Kate’s lively ideas, her intelligent opinions, her funny narrative style, and her wonderful access to her own honesty. We feel for her plight, her broken heart, her love story. She is an elite person in spite of herself. But the reader isn’t induced to care a damn whether she goes back to Jake in the end. He is not given substance. He is the ordinary man, one of many. This doesn’t appear to be quite Miss Adler’s intention.

The anecdotes and theories, self-analyses and commentaries on world affairs that go to build up Kate’s character make up the first and third parts of
Pitch Dark
. The most imposing vignette in the first part is the story of a raccoon that comes daily to Kate’s country house near New York—“I thought he was growing to trust me, when in fact he was dying”—and its sad disposal. The raccoon, to my mind, comes off as a more effective character than Jake. Miss Adler gives it importance. The central section of the novel describes a visit to Ireland, part of Kate Ennis’s flight from Jake, which in its objective description is sheer authenticity and, where it reflects Kate’s distracted state of mind, is a convincing nightmare. Kate has accepted the offer to go and stay in a castle in Ireland owned by an ambassador she has met. She sets off, somewhat naïvely expecting the trip to go normally. It is lovely to read this prose, this dialogue, unexcitably put on the page, not in any way “Irish writing,” which depicts and tersely records the very scenes and the very voices, the faces and the attitudes that Kate comes across. Her experiences are dire. “Talk to them, the ambassador had said, they are a friendly people. Well, the hell they are. An occasional creature of great poetry and beauty; the others, suspicious, crafty, greedy, stubborn, incurious, stupid, devious, violent, and cruel. And, of course, that is what the history of the country is.” Kate, in a hired car, unfortunately grazes a standing truck. The owner sizes her up, notes the rental ticket on the car, and keeps her waiting around while he confers, apart, with a policeman. Kate rightly feels uneasy when they tell her it will all be taken care of. She feels framed. (Only a long while later does she realize that it’s the insurance company that has been taken, for the price of a whole lorry.) On to the castle she goes with her damaged car, brooding on her broken love affair, and with a sense of irrational Celtic guilt creeping over her. The domestics take stock of Kate, friendly and polite as she is. They treat her in an offhand way, they are obtuse, disobliging with an edge of hostility at her intrusion.

After meeting some local American residents, Kate decides to leave the country. But the fact of the damaged hired car and the incident with the truck are hanging over her. She feels, outside of all reasonable sense, a hunted woman. There follows a remarkable journey through the night across Ireland. Kate runs out of fuel, gets a lift from a truck driver, calculating his every move and word and carefully framing her replies in order to appear “innocent.” This is a superb piece of nightmare writing.

But there is a mystery, and it is a literary mystery, at the airport. Kate Ennis decides to change her name in order to make good her escape. She is convinced she is being watched, followed, so this is reasonable. Kate records: “Traveling under a false name might be a crime of some sort. I should make the name as like my own as possible to account for the mistake. Alder, I thought. But then that does happen so often. I was afraid they might make the same mistake and be on the lookout for just such an Alder. So I thought, Hadley, since no one would look under H. And then, in my new hilarity, I thought, Why not Haddock. But that seemed going too far.”

She settles on Hadley for a false name “as like my own as possible.” But her own name is Ennis, and Alder, Haddock, Hadley do not resemble Ennis, could not possibly pose as either a visual or aural mistake. If the “I” of the story, on the other hand, has suddenly changed from Miss Ennis to Miss Adler, the author herself, that would be understandable, but it is nowhere else in the book suggested that the identities of author and character have temporarily merged.

Does Miss Adler mean to suggest that she herself is Kate Ennis? Illogical characters are fine, but this has the effect of professional illogic. It breaks the fiction, and, for a brief moment, we have autobiography. One of the refrains that recurs throughout the book runs, “Whose voice is this? Not mine. Not mine.” The mystery of the false name remains. Whose voice?

The big question a work like this imposes on the reader is, What is a novel? There is no absolute definition, but certainly, to some extent, a novel is a representation of the author’s vision of life.
Pitch Dark
, like Miss Adler’s
Speedboat
, is a work of fiction mainly by virtue of the fact that it claims to be so; we take it for granted the “I” of the novel is a fictional character. In both books, the character is a journalist. And Miss Adler’s vision too is a journalistic one. In
Speedboat
the narrator claims: “I do not, certainly, believe in evolution. For example, fossils. I believe there are objects in nature—namely, fossils—which occur in layers, and which some half-rational fantasts insist derive from animals, the bottom ones more ancient than the top. The same, I think, with word derivations….I have never seen a word derive.”

This, I think, is the vision of life reflected in Miss Adler’s fiction. Nothing evolves, nothing derives. Effects do not result from causes. Episodes are recorded without any connection with each other. Fortunately, they are fascinating episodes.

—MURIEL SPARK
1983