Live, Live!

We left off seeking answers to the question, “What Am I Doing Here?” which is posed in the first story in David Szalay’s linked story collection All That Man Is. Each story in this book covers different men who progress in age from youth to old age, so in this first story where the protagonist, Simon, is seventeen, the question is, what is a seventeen-year-old doing here in his life?

Last time, I mentioned the influence of the British poet Philip Larkin on this story and there’s plenty more evidence of this as we continue to read, although Larkin is not explicitly mentioned. Henry James is, as is T.S. Eliot and James Joyce.

“They (Simon and his traveling buddy Ferdinand), are in love with Eliot, with his melodious pessimism. They are in awe of Joyce. He is what they want to be, a monument to them. These are the writers whose works made them friends…”

We learn that “Simon is plowing joylessly through the works of Henry James, hoping to start at Oxford in the autumn.”

And he is obsessed with Karen Fielding, a young woman he has only seen at his school, never spoken to. She is fantasy.

“He would like nothing more than to spend the entire afternoon talking about her, or just hearing her name spoken aloud again and again, those four syllables that seem to hold withing them everything worth living for in the whole world.” What am I doing here, indeed.

A strong theme in this story is of desire, of wanting what you don’t have. Another is of searching for authenticity when you don’t feel authentic, the tension created between what you want and what you actually have. Youth is the time for exploration, for taking chances.

Simon is reading Henry James’ The Ambassadors and marks a passage as the “main theme.”

Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had? I’m too old—too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses, one loses, make no mistake about that…Do what you like…Live, live!

But Simon is afraid that he is not living his life to the fullest as evidenced by his constant ruminations over, “what am I doing here?”

“What am I doing here?

What am I doing here?

The train whacks over points.

What am I

The train slows

                                    doing here?

into a station, open to the air —Warschauer Strasse. Windy platforms, a wasteland all around.

A waste land.

April is the…

Warschauer Strasse. Trains move among the lusty weeds. Spring showers strafe the peeling boardings, the overpasses spilling the sound of unseen traffic.

Karen Fielding.”

It’s easy to see from this passage how the story is not a conventional prose piece. It attempts (successfully, I think) to capture a human’s inner thoughts, the stream of consciousness of a particular human, Simon, a seventeen-year-old man.

The guys journey to Prague and decide to attend a performance that night of Mozart’s Mass in C Minor. That day, they go to a pub near the venue and see two young women. Simon’s companion, Ferdinand, invites the women to join them.

“Simon is irritated by Ferdinand’s manner. He thinks of it as a sort of mask that his friend puts on for encounters with strangers, as if there were somehow an intrinsic hypocrisy to it, and thinks of his own silence as a protest against this hypocrisy.” This is classic adolescent ideation, best B.

Ferdinand invites the women to join them at the concert, but the women do not appear. An interesting textual maneuver occurs when the guys settle down to listen. “The music starts.”

The chapter ends, and the next chapter consists of only two words: “The Music.”

The all but blank page seems to be an effort to use space to communicate meaning, something that Lawrence Sterne did during the seventeen hundreds in Tristam Shandy. A different maneuver would be to try to express in words the guys’ experience of the music.

After the concert, Simon is moved and remains irritated by Ferdinand’s seeming distraction over the young women not showing up. The guys return to the place they’re staying—a hostel with a lascivious landlady, who is… “somewhat negligent with her dressing gown, and it is not clear what—if anything—she is wearing underneath it…She sits down…and lays a hand on Simon’s knee… ‘And girls?’ she asks. ‘You like girls?’

The question embarrasses Ferdinand less than it does Simon, and he says…’Of course we like girls.’

She laughs again. ‘Of course!’

She is staring at Simon, who is staring at the table. She says, ‘You will find lots of girls in Prague.’”

‘Kay.

So we have the classic scenario in this story of the young men who are hormonally excited and unattached encountering a slightly older woman who seems more than receptive to their maleness. What happens?

After the concert and the unsuccessful rendezvous, the guys stay up late with their landlady, drinking.

She addresses Simon: “’When I was young,’ she says. ‘I would very much like to meet handsome boy like you.’”

The next morning, the guys return to the city to try to find the young women they’d met the previous day. Simon ruminates about their failed connection:

“A simple failure to mix perhaps…And love?

            Karen Fielding

Well love, he thinks, would be something like this—a flicker in the middle of the liquids, that mingle so that they seem to be only one transparent liquid

            Karen Fielding

the flicker steadying to a point, which strengthens slowly until the whole mixture emits a soft, steady light.

            Karen Fielding

Yes, he thinks, that is love.

                                                                        And the day slips away.”

Again, here we see the poetic textual effects, poetic as opposed to typical prose paragraphs. This passage shows his thoughts, his innerness, as he thinks about a possible love and continually shifts to at least repeating the name of his fantasy object.   

When the guys return to their friendly hostel, the landlady’s efforts at seducing Simon are rejected.

“’Stay with me,’ she says quietly…her hand moving around to the front of his thigh.

‘Please’ he says, seeming nearly tearful. ‘I’m sorry, I’m tired.’

And then he just leaves, and follows his friend into the dark…”

The next day, Ferdinand encourages Simon to have sex with the landlady, but Simon says he’s not interested; she’s too old, he’s not attracted, he says. That night, Ferdinand leaves their room after Simon has fallen asleep, and has a tryst with the landlady. The next day, the guys depart for Vienna. Simon muses: “There is a strange sense of loss, a sense of loss without an obvious object.”

“He takes his seat (on the train). He looks at his friend, sleeping opposite him, and for the first time, he feels a sort of envy. That he…With her…If Ferdinand was willing to…and saw her.

Her dressing gown, there on the kitchen floor.

The Ambassadors makes him sleepy.”

There’s a sense here of a young man being ambivalent about adult sexuality, of being intimidated by it and running away but then feeling curious and wanting what he doesn’t have. The Ambassadors, that text that promotes seeking experience while you’re young, makes him sleepy; he retreats from its voice into unconsciousness. He’s sleepy in the same way he was with the landlady.

What’s the point, Walter?

The point, best B. is that this story captures something about being a teenager on the edge of being an adult but still reluctant to abandon childhood, and that it does so by using textual effects derived from poetry. There is a gulf between existence and asking the question, What am I doing here?

Next time, let’s look at a different story in this collection, a different story and a different stage of life.

Till then.

#AllThatManIs #DavidSzalay #AlanBray