By Patrick McGrathBloomsbury USA, 2013
The novels of Patrick McGrath are peopled with mad artists, broken doctors, and pompous psychiatrists, all of them tormented or deluded by inner demons. His first-person narrators spin intricate webs of self-justification or self-mortification; they construct elaborate fantasies of wish fulfillment that collapse into bitter fragments. Obsessive, doomed love is a recurring theme. Suicide is not uncommon.McGrath’s new novel, Constance, takes a narrative shape familiar from his earlier work. There is the slow revelation of a psychological “trauma story,” overlaid with elegant gothic flourishes. There are deep, destructive familial hatreds rooted in a buried secret, an original sin. Yet in this late period of McGrath’s career it is interesting to find him developing new tendencies. Surprisingly, this master of the morbid has taken a sentimental turn. Not to a cloying extent (he is far too good for that), but just enough to allow for the possibility of a happy ending. This is a slight but significant deviation from the rigorous logic of tragedy he has perfected in the past.To return to McGrath’s early novels is to encounter a tremendous richness of both prose and perversity. First came the devious, floridly delusional narrations of the “gentleman naturalist” of his 1989 debut novel, The Grotesque, and the paranoid fantasist of Spider (1990), a brilliant synthesis of a Beckettian tramp and a Freudian case study. Both novels mine a deep, subtle seam of coal-black humor.Or consider Dr. Haggard’s Disease (1993), perhaps McGrath’s masterpiece—the tale of a doctor undone by a brief, furtive love affair, addicted to morphine and Romantic poetry. This sentence from that novel might serve as McGrath’s credo: “Wherever my eye fell, wherever I saw disease, or injury, or death, I also found hints or glimpses of beauty, and the difficulty lay in keeping my attention on morbidity when all my soul cried out to love.” In Edward Haggard, sentiment is intensified and inflamed by a sensitive Romantic temperament, and turns into obsessional delusion.Then there is the powerful diptych of Asylum (1997) and Port Mungo (2004): twin studies of the dark spaces where madness and love and artistic obsession overlap. The opening sentence of Asylum dryly encapsulates these concerns: “The catastrophic love affair characterized by sexual obsession has been a professional interest of mine for many years now.” In each novel there is a drowned child, the terrible consequence of a parent’s heedless, narcissistic pursuit of emotional or aesthetic transfiguration.Given all this lurid pathology, it is easy to overlook the fact that McGrath is essentially a historical novelist—and a great one. All of the above-mentioned novels are set in the decades around World War II. Dr. Haggard’s Disease is structured by the approach of the war, and reaches its climax with the Battle of Britain. Spider captures the grim bread-and-dripping austerity of a 1930s East London slum. Asylum, set at the end of the 1950s, deceptively begins as a sort of country-house society novel, albeit one set on the extensive grounds of a Victorian-era, high-security psychiatric institution not unlike Broadmoor Hospital, where McGrath’s father was medical superintendent. McGrath has also produced one full-dress, pre-20th century historical novel: Martha Peake (2000) is a tale of the American Revolution, and a novel of ideas in which the Enlightenment rationalism of John Locke mixes with the monstrous Romanticism of Mary Shelley.McGrath gained early notice as a leading exponent of a literary Gothic revival, and one good reason for this, apart from his psychological themes, is his handling of architectural detail. As in the Gothic novels of the late 18th century, McGrath uses the uncanny presence of decayed, imposing buildings to heighten and symbolize the atmosphere of psychological tension. In Dr. Haggard’s Disease, the doctor’s degeneration is expressed—and somehow hastened—by Elgin, the old gabled house he occupies in the faded seaside town of Griffin Head: “Oh, it was a romantic house, a profoundly romantic house, it didn’t suggest repose, no, it suggested the restlessness of a wild and changeful heart…”Architectural metaphor is particularly prominent in Constance. The novel is set in New York during the drawn-out 1960s demolition of the old Penn Station, a grand Beaux-Arts railroad cathedral whose razing soon came to be recognized as an act of wanton civic self-mutilation, spurring the preservation movement. The slow, depressing progress of the demolition is noted like a dirge every time the characters take a train: “Three years it took them to strip it down to a skeletal structure of steel girders and dump its columns and statuary in the New Jersey Meadowlands, where you could see it from the Philadelphia train and weep.”For Sidney Klein, one of the narrators of Constance, Penn Station’s demise signals the moral collapse of the city. In Klein’s Manhattan, quite unlike today’s heavily sanitized version, the Upper West Side (where he lives) is something of a slum, with screaming and gunshots in the night; Central Park is a danger zone any time of day; and psychoanalysis hangs as thick in the air as the (now banned) cigarette smoke.Klein is an Englishman, “an authority on Romantic poetry” struggling with his current writing project: a book, entitled The Conservative Heart, about “the apparent paradox of romantic conservatism.” In all this—a man of the Old World, an academic committed to European culture, confronted with a New York seemingly in the throes of barbarian invasion—there are echoes of Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet. (And in his intellectual’s midlife crisis there are shades of Herzog, though with his English reserve he never indulges in such a full-on meltdown.)With two failed marriages in his past, Klein becomes involved with a much younger, high-strung woman, Constance Schuyler, an editor at a publishing house. She hates her father, a stern doctor from an old Hudson Valley family who never seemed to love her, though he adores her younger sister, Iris. Their English mother died when they were young. The sisters grew up at the family manse, Ravenswood—“an old gothic horror house” perched on a bluff high over the Hudson, complete with peeling columns, a tower, even a room full of stuffed crows. “It was a romantic cliché, the whole thing,” Constance says.Switching between the perspectives of Constance and Sidney for different chapters, McGrath sometimes reenacts events or conversations from each point of view, an occasionally tedious repetitive technique that slows the narrative momentum. But repetition is integral to Constance’s psyche. After initial hesitation, she agrees to marry Sidney for a perverse reason: “Daddy never gave me what I wanted and I felt it was my fault…. From the moment I’d met Sidney I’d wanted him for a daddy so I could start over.” This is, she explains, a manifestation of her “repetition compulsion complex.” (The book’s epigram, and perhaps some of the inspiration for her intense father-hatred, comes from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy.”)As a sibling pair, Constance and Iris are familiar opposites, like the brothers in McGrath’s last novel, Trauma (2008): one cerebral and introverted, the other all heart and cherished by the parental love denied to the other. Constance scoffs at Sidney’s admiration for Iris: “She possessed what he called a robust personality. He said she had messy vitality. He meant she was loud and had appetites…”Soon after moving to the city, Iris throws herself into an affair with a seedy lounge pianist lubriciously named Eddie Castrol, who soon switches his attentions to Constance. In another McGrath novel, Castrol might have become an important character, a dangerous and seductive artistic type like Edgar Stark, the mad sculptor in Asylum. But here he is a mere bit player, “a man in a shabby tuxedo” whose only function is to plunge Sidney into “the hell of sexual jealousy.” Perhaps the author was wary of repeating himself, but this neglect of a potentially fascinating figure is one reason why Constance never quite achieves the heights of McGrath’s best work.As for Sidney, his reasonable tone and facility with Freudian jargon are reminiscent of other McGrath narrators, such as Peter Cleave, the cultivated psychiatric administrator who is the suave, confidently omniscient voice of Asylum. Of course, omniscience has its inevitable comeuppance in McGrath’s novels, and Constance is no exception. The difference is that Constance is continually chafing at Sidney’s patriarchal complacency, complaining of his didactic impulse and interrupting his narration with her own version of events. Her unruly presence disturbs the usual McGrath formula, the deliberate development of the “clinical picture” through the careful surfacing and assemblage (and cunning withholding) of psychic material.On a visit to Ravenswood, Constance is stunned by a “shattering revelation”—a disclosure concerning her true parentage. The romantic setting suddenly turns sinister and haunted; the “gothic horror house,” no longer a quaint cliché, lives up to its billing. As Sidney says, “Morbidity clung to that place and to that family like dank river fog.” The Hudson must be irresistible for a latter-day gothic novelist, with the timeless precedent of Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow in mind. Constance says, “Sidney asked me if I believed in ghosts and I told him I did. I said the Hudson Valley was infested with them, positively swarming with them.”Sidney is troubled by Constance’s odd habit of often seeming to listen to a ghost: at these moments she has an abstracted air, and her lips move silently: “she had such a tricky psyche, all turned in on itself like a convoluted seashell, like a nautilus, and at times I caught her talking to herself as though in response to what she heard in that seashell.” (McGrath has always had a nice touch with italics.) But it is not herself she’s talking to: “I watched with astonishment as she communicated with this unseen being.” This disturbing tendency crops up regularly in McGrath’s novels: among the other characters afflicted by it are Edgar Stark in Asylum and Jack Rathbone, the haunted painter of Port Mungo (and it is reminiscent, too, of that great gothic tale The Turn of the Screw).Constance’s mental state, already fragile, is thrown into severe disequilibrium by the shock of her father’s spilled secrets. Sidney takes it as his moral duty to help her through it, but his efforts are clumsier than he realizes: he is given to pseudo-psychoanalytical utterances such as, “I didn’t know how long it would take her to assimilate this news.” His amateurish attempts at a homemade talking cure merely exasperate Constance.For his book on romantic conservatism, Sidney has “taken for his text those lines from Wordsworth: “Sweet is the lore that nature brings; / Our meddling intellect / Misshapes the beauteous forms of things; / We murder to dissect.” Constance says, “He was always trying to make sense of me, always dissecting me.”Glancing at the manuscript of Sidney’s unfinished book, on which he has idly sketched a grandiloquent cover illustration of “an eagle perched on a crag,” Constance asks him:
—What’s the opposite of a conservative heart?What a strange question. I thought about it.—A fatherless child.That stung her, as it was supposed to. The fatherless child is the radical, the revolutionary: the one who tears down the institutions that conservatism reveres. For Constance of course it meant something quite different.
But the political analogy still holds: “I was aware that in Constance’s mind I represented a patriarchal principle she felt she must attack.” Even so, he says, “I took on Daddy’s role as best I could. I tried to be the source of order in her life.” His friend and lawyer Ed Kaplan, another Bellovian refugee, had earlier told him he needed a wife, because “where else besides marriage can you find yourself in a moral predicament on a daily basis? You’re one of those men who’s got to be forever choosing to do the right thing so as to silence the voices in your head.”Yet for all his love of order, Sidney early on declares, “I am a sentimental man,” a judgment confirmed by Constance. Of course, conservatism and sentimentality often go hand in hand: nostalgia resists change. But in Sidney’s case, sentiment is the key that allows him to overcome his insidious jealousy. It even brings him a passing insight into his own behavior, into the perniciously cold and controlling operations of his meddling intellect: “And then for the first time, I don’t know why, perhaps remembering the night I met her and the promise I felt then, the anticipation, it occurred to me that I might share some responsibility for what had happened to us, was this possible? I mean that some part at least of our trouble was my doing?” Here is a flash of self-awareness and humility rarely given to a McGrath narrator; yet even as the thought crosses his mind, he finds it doubtful: was this possible?Even while Sidney’s moral certainties crumble, and as Constance is consumed by patricidal revenge fantasies and seems to be fast disintegrating, his young son Harold offers a way to save their marriage and escape from repeating past tragedies. Harold and Constance develop a strong bond, and Sidney hopes she will serve as the boy’s surrogate mother. The question is whether Harold will be another sacrificial victim of adult obsession and self-absorption, as with the drowned children in Asylum and Port Mungo.Devotees of McGrath may regret a sentimental softening which permits at least the contemplation, if not the assurance, of a happy ending, rather than the accustomed pitiless plunge into the abyss. They may also miss the elegance, even the occasional excesses, of his early style. Constance extends a trend evident in Trauma, toward a subdued, even flat, new affect in his prose—a lamentable development, but one that perhaps reflects the impatience of a mature writer with mere stylistic concerns.Yet even if Constance falls short of the very high standard set by McGrath’s best work, its hard-won traces of sentiment and mellowed, battered wisdom have their own virtues. Not least of these is the light they throw on his earlier novels, which reveals that the signature gothic element is just one part of his exploration of what a Romantic sensibility might mean, how it might live or die, or be twisted into some grotesque new form, in the seemingly inhospitable environment of the 20th century.Underlying all the anguish and madness and hauntedness of his characters is a desperate yearning, such that the quickly extinguished love affair in Dr. Haggard’s Disease lives on as emotion recollected in anything but tranquility; it is feverishly exalted, rather, as “the direct erotic manifestation of our spiritual communion.” And this exaltation leads to crippling despair. As Edward Haggard also remarks:
Suffering leaves its mark; what is it Wordsworth says?Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,And shares the nature of infinity.”
If McGrath’s novels of psychological distress up till now have been monuments to that idea of infinite suffering, Constance marks a departure. This new novel reflects, even in a dark Gothic mirror, the enduring hope in Wordsworth’s next lines in “The White Doe of Rylstone,” lines left unspoken by Haggard:
Yet through that darkness (infinite though it seemAnd irremoveable) gracious openings lie...
---Joshua Lustig is Managing Editor of the world affairs journal Current History and an Open Letters Monthly Contributing Editor.