This rite of dotage called Late Style is peculiar to artists of one sort or another. Airline pilots and hepatologists are, thankfully, among the undeservedly excluded. This is an almost exclusively aesthetic matter. What it signifies is, however, moot. As a subject for disputatious inquiry it has been posthumously divvied up between the shades of Theodor Adorno and Edward Said and their packs of enthusiastic yes-persons who may consider that Late Style is as involuntary and inevitable as a grande dame’s wisp of light moustache, or perhaps see it as a critical conceit carried with the full diffidence of British boastfulness.
Does it amplify what we already dread or anticipate? It is all exceptions and no rules, wobbly explanations and multiple vaguenesses which are seldom called upon when we usually subject artistic creation and its makers to scrutiny. A work can be described as, say, neo-realist, plangent, pastoral, melancholy, mauve, belligerent, mocking, cuddly, gormless, cyclopean, sickening, Biedermeyer… All these mean something more or less. They are devices for seeing, pigeon-holing, anatomising screeches, distinguishing a willow’s bark from a Labrador’s.
These are veneers, a colourist’s province, chromatic patterns for the coming season, “styles” in the debased sense of an add-on, a surface superficiality, applied post hoc. And Late Style should on the face of it belong among them. But it doesn’t. This epithet belongs to a different gamut, determined by the calendar and the infirm body’s deliquescence — which are in tune. Beethoven’s late quartets were welcomed by his friends and admirers with “We knew he’d gone deaf… now he’s gone mad.” And when Op 131 turns into a jug band’s singalong of a century later we can see their point. So this is what he’s been hiding all these years.
Does “late” have any place in a variegated inventory of, inter alia, moods and passions, tempers and humours? Is it merely tagging along, clutching at an elbow as a reminder of its presence in a world sated with competing qualifiers? And can it be allied to such qualifiers? Is, for instance, “late pastoral” anything more than portmanteau clumsiness possibly representing mutton with scrapie, and a shepherd’s despair? The old have a lot to be frightened of — just look at them — just look at the face I see in the mirror.
It is surely Late Style which Buffon had in mind when he wrote “the Style is the very man / the man himself”. It is the quintessence of the artist arriving at the threshold of decrepitude, disintegrating. The earlier tendencies of the career are abandoned. They are not in terminal earnest. They derive from the Pantone guide to life or, for those that don’t drop their aitches, the Farrow and Ball Formula For Fulfilment. The Late Comer is different. Late Style works derive from its maker’s core. It is sooner identified by instances than by a generalised programme. We can follow a maker’s creations over a career of many decades but never understand it till the four last things menace and it all becomes clear. Or not.
I can still summon the puzzlement of half a century ago. It was with delight that I realised I had been had. The sensation was electric. I had been Cruyffed by a double-take after a few sentences of Transparent Things. The septuagenarian author was heading apace into his Late Space, which had remained fallow since childhood and was now ready to be cultivated. This marvellous novella, a proxy amulet of a mere 100 pages, was the work of an old man impersonating the young man he once had been, a young man looking forward to being an old writer yet bereft of the old man’s achronic knack of whizzing forward and back though Time. Yet page after page proclaimed a lack of bereavement. And with it a mastery of legerdemain. Although he shared the name of the writer of the greatest novels of the century, this was a previously mute Vladimir Nabokov whose choice of Late Style was unfamiliar, may not even have been a choice… This was Late Style not just as reheated leitmotifs but as entire divergence from the great accumulated oeuvre which was now shed. The burdens of genius and high expectation could be abandoned without reference to them. In his and the century’s late Seventies it appeared that he was reinventing himself, almost provenantlessly, taking as his model without prior example the contemporary French writer he most admired, a generation his junior. He was all of a sudden dressed as Alain Robbe-Grillet. This was evidently a popular choice: Muriel Spark was kindredly togged at the same moment for The Driver’s Seat. Had they listened too attentively to their critics: Émigré purple… Lush and arid…
“He was all of a sudden dressed as Alain Robbe-Grillet.”
Transparent Things is a puzzle set, one guesses, by a teasing trickster who has already forgotten both the clues and the solution. It is dense with precise detail. Things happen: and then more things. It is quite unlike the bland featurelessnesses of the current fiction in which dull creative writing students chat to dull creative writing students (there is today a generalised fear of imaginative invention and giving offence). Transparent Things is a treasury of hotel fires, murders, mangled colloquial English, a heart attack caused by a struggle (probably unmatched in all literature) with trousers in a fitting booth, bogus allusions, the shadow of God, infidelities, unremembered strangulation, arch narration by a voice or voices whose owners are never fully disclosed — are they even human? The worst thing a great work can be accused of is that it has taught us something, like a self-help booklet. Don’t believe them, whoever they are — cassock, beard, hijab, forecourt suit etc. The more instructive and pedagogic art intends to be, the lesser its worth, for it is a sort of mental trap which gives the reader or spectator no option but to follow the writer. Transparent Things only rarely makes “sense”, only rarely vouchsafes any explanation of its protagonists’ behaviour.
When it broaches the most profound of all matters it is skittish, evasive and improbably avuncular — as though this were not the most profound of all matters.
“….the mysterious mental manoeuvre needed to pass from one state of being to another.”
“Easy, you know, does it. Son.”
The book suggests to me, upon my 15th or 20th reading, that it is a chalice void to the brim: the valley of the shadow of death where we laugh and dance in amity, not fearing the chummy hand that will, inevitably, grip our shoulder.
I rather fear that the hand is closing in.
