Edward St. Aubyn: 'Some Hope' and 'Mother's Milk'

British novelist Edward St. Aubyn's trilogy of novels published together by Open City Books under the title 'Some Hope' is a fictionalized portrait of the writer's own life, of his traumatized childhood and dramatic descent into drug addiction and self-loathing, a condition from which he has struggled to free himself with only partial success, as the continued toxicity of his social commentary in a follow-up novel, 'Mother's Milk', attests. St. Aubyn is often compared with Evelyn Waugh, probably because both writers use irony to expose the spiritually and emotionally defunct nature of English upper-class society, but St. Aubyn's work is both more youthful and more extreme. Its contemporary themes of victimization, debasement and recovery develop within the writer's own larger project to discover in language and artistic work something approaching salvation; it does not examine (in the manner of 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man') the enterprise of developing an artistic credo as such, but there is within its character development a sort of X-ray of the writer's own quest to make a space inside literature where some hope might be discovered.

If all of this sounds top-heavy and confessional, be encouraged. Earnestness is positively forbidden to the English. If personal problems can't be resolved in private, they must be processed with great flourishes of self-deprecating wit, or sanitized and distanced with a controlled use of irony. Anything less disciplined is a matter for the tabloids, and people of a certain class do not wish to be associated with that sort of thing. St. Aubyn is himself an aristocratic product, hailing from the landed gentry of Cornwall, and he is better schooled than most in the vicious arts of ridicule and cynicism, wielded by virtue of his considerable wit to great effect in dialogue. Part of what makes the books so interesting is the author's (and the character's) struggle with the damage his strengths in these areas inflict, not so much on others, who we see cheerfully demolished by a steady barrage of snide remarks, but on the self which suffocates inside their poisonous atmosphere. We as readers are afforded a privileged seat on the front line of a brilliant mind as it confronts the curse which accompanies its own dazzling gifts for irony and invective. We enjoy the benefit of the gifts, and the satisfaction of witnessing their self-conscious deconstruction. It is a delicate balancing act which the writer is able to pull off mostly because his facility for language itself is so exquisite. St. Aubyn is a prose-stylist of the first order - there really is nobody writing in English today can compare with him. The precision and elegance, the exhilarating novelty and outright perfection of his metaphors are nothing short of miraculous. I was tempted to do an entire post of St. Aubyn metaphors and leave it at that, so prodigious is his talent in this area. But there is so much more to consider in his work, not least of which is this way he dovetails the theme of personal discovery (contained within the work) with his literary practice (or the work itself).

The critical moment of the entire narrative arc occurs early in the first novel ('Never Mind') when the five-year-old Patrick Melrose is raped by his father. This cataclysmic event, described in coolly detached tones and with great psychological acuity, bears witness not only to the boy's initial episode of mental bifurcation (an involuntary response which conditions the man he is to become), but also and simultaneously to the metafictional origin of its author as author, in the sense that Edmund Wilson means when he speaks of the wound from which the creative project springs. When Patrick lances his concentrated attention into the body of a gecko and proceeds to leave through the window and escape up into the eaves of the roof, while his abandoned body remains pinned to the bed, he is projecting the part of himself that cannot understand what is happening, but he is also in a sense creating a fictional self with which to navigate the crisis from a safe distance. It's open to interpretation, and I don't mean to suggest that all literary art originates in a cataclysm of this sort, but the autobiographical nature of the material means that the writer haunts events in a way which constantly invites speculation along these lines.

The first novel centers on a day in the life of the Melrose family as they endure one another's company in their summer home in the south of France. The rape scene is central, but it occurs within a wider context of moral stasis which defines the family and its social milieu. Patrick's mother Eleanor is a drunken victim on the verge of collapse, unable to really engage with the son who is himself the product of a marital rape, hardly capable of noticing let alone protecting him from the vicious attentions of his father. David Melrose is especially repugnant, a study in self-loathing and the idle cruelty it engenders, but the friends who surround him for dinner are as remarkable a collection of snobs and the buffoons who idolize them as any assembled in English literature. It is a theme which is picked up in the third novel, where the adult Patrick attends a party of similarly contemptuous types, including the vapid Princess Margaret as well as a host of other dignitaries at a lawn party in the English countryside, "hard, dull people who seemed quite sophisticated but were in fact as ignorant as swans." Patrick is by this point a confirmed member of their ranks, marinating in his own cynicism and despair, but with the crucial difference that he is searching for a way out. The way out is not neatly delivered, but there are faint glimmers of its presence in the details; specifically, Patrick tells his secret, not entirely without ironic embellishment, to a friend; he is also informed towards the very end of the narrative that his father had once acted with great kindness and sensitivity toward a friend in need. With these exchanges we witness a slight softening of what had been an implacable knot of hatred in Patrick, such that he is able to glimpse the possibility of living, finally, with the enforced ambivalence of his experience. It is a massive advance from the nadir of his trajectory, chronicled in book two ('Bad News'), where he wallows in the kaleidoscopic nightmares of his dangerously drug-addicted mind over a two-day period spent scoring, shooting up, and coming down from insane combinations of quaaludes, speedballs, coke and pure grade heroin in a hotel room in New York. This painful episode is occasion for some of the best and worst of St. Aubyn's writing. His dense and elaborate metaphors are intensely beautiful, as he trains his imaginative eye on the hallucinatory effects of drugs and the physical sensations they induce. Here is one extraordinary moment:

Heroin was the only thing that really worked ... Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that it matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favorite cushion. It was as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon, or the splash of sealing wax onto a page, or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm.

But it is also the place where he becomes most ungoverned and self-absorbed, so much so that he loses control of the monologues here and there, monologues which, though meant to be madly proliferating suffer a little in the translation and threaten to undermine our sympathy for the character, who is about to lose himself completely in contemplation of matters absurd. Patrick is in a considerably more hygienic condition by book three ('Some Hope'), having succeeded at last in kicking his habit, and St. Aubyn's control of the material is back to its crisp and corrosive best as he returns to the business of eviscerating the people he abhors. But there are tender gestures as well, hidden in beautiful surfaces not entirely subverted by cynicism.  The final scene beside a lake in the snow is like this: we wonder whether the swans are the same ignorant beasts we encounterd earlier, going nowhere, gorgeously, or whether there is some hope in the perfection of the image, something to do with form giving shape to experience;

A pair of swans rose out of the fog, concentrating its whiteness and giving it shape, the clamor of their wings muffled by the falling snow, like white gloves on applauding hands...(they) flew over fields renewed and silenced by the snow, curved back over the shore of the lake, spread their webbed feet, and settled confidently onto the water.


Revisiting Patrick in a later novel, 'Mother's Milk', we find him married and with two sons, ornery and self-conscious as ever, but engaged in the difficult process of trying to separate his responses to his own children from the polluted legacy of his ancestors. Its examination of family dynamics and the imagination of children is an extension of the theme he initiated in 'Never Mind', and it is the theme in which he is most audaciously brilliant. He is able to achieve the baffling range and sweep of a child's colorful thought-experiments with an ease and familiarity of tone that is quite incredible, considering what is for most of us the opacity of the material. Despite their preternatural intelligence, his child-characters appear credible, child-like, even when they are recounting their experiences of being born, and especially when they are describing their plangent state of consciousness before language seized and sorted it all into its iron grid. Here is Robert contemplating his baby brother on a sunny afternoon:

... he could remember exactly what it was like being in that crib, lying under the plane trees in a cool green shade, listening to a wall of cicada song collapse to a solitary call and escalate again to a dry frenzy. He let things rest where they fell, the sounds, the sights, the impressions. Things resolved themselves in that cool green shade, not because he knew how they worked, but because he knew his own thoughts and feelings without needing to explain them. And if he wanted to play with his thoughts nobody could stop him. Just lying there in his crib, they couldn't tell whether he was doing anything dangerous. Sometimes he imagined he was the thing he was looking at, sometimes he imagined he was in the space in between, but the best was when he was just looking, without being anyone in particular or looking at anything in particular, and then he floated in the looking, like the breeze blowing without needing cheeks to blow or having anywhere particular to go.

This is way beyond the pleasure principle. St. Aubyn's understanding of the blissful state of an undivided self is a projection, along the lines of his earlier scene with the gecko, into a realm of pure, embodied enlightenment. I haven't read anything wiser or more wistfully imagined outside of ecstatic poetry or the literature of mystics. The story dwells in these delightful spaces a lot, but its action proceeds over the course of four successive summers, during which Patrick and his wife and sons must come to terms with the loss of their summer home in France, which the stricken and disabled Eleanor has bequeathed to a New Age quack who has deceived her with his spiritual mumbo-jumbo. We get more of the writer's scathing wit as he unloads upon this new foe; it is a subject he has pursued in two other, unrelated and more experimental works on consciousness and the scam of the New Age. When he tires of Eleanor's shaman he turns his weapons on fat Americans; there are some precarious moments when we once again begin to lose touch with our sympathy for the character, as Patrick's diatribes devolve into cheap shots and general carping. But St. Aubyn is too interested in deconstructing the mind and the parent-child relationship to linger too long in these waters, and he manages to resurrect the clear-eyed and self-reflexive analysis of his own worst impulses that we saw in the earlier work and which bring his caustic pronouncements like stray sheep back into the fold of his grand project - just. The novel is ironic and quite funny, occasionally brittle, wholly unsentimental and utterly unique. Its ending is subtle enough to be inconclusive, even anti-climactic, but word has it that St. Aubyn is busy writing the fifth installment of this saga at a writer's colony somewhere in the States. It will be interesting to see where the expectations of his growing readership will push this most extraordinary of writers.