{"id":143807,"date":"2020-03-24T11:00:15","date_gmt":"2020-03-24T15:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=143807"},"modified":"2020-03-24T10:11:09","modified_gmt":"2020-03-24T14:11:09","slug":"whats-it-like-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/03\/24\/whats-it-like-out\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s It Like Out?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her monthly column,<\/em>\u00a0Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn\u2019t be.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Turns out that watching an actual pandemic unfold in real time isn\u2019t enough for many of us. Steven Soderbergh\u2019s Contagion <\/em>is being streamed by droves across the globe, sales of Camus\u2019s The Plague<\/em> are through the roof, and I just received a message from a friend asking if Daniel Defoe\u2019s A <\/em>Journal of the Plague Year<\/em> was worth a read. Seems like none of us can get enough of stories that echo our current moment, myself included. Fittingly, though, as the author of this column, I found myself drawn to a scarily appropriate but much less widely known plague novel: One by<\/em> One<\/em>, by the English writer and critic Penelope Gilliatt.<\/p>\n

Originally published in 1965, this was the first novel by Gilliat, who was then the chief film critic for the British newspaper the Observer<\/em>. It\u2019s ostensibly the story of a marriage\u2014that of Joe Talbot, a vet, and his heavily pregnant wife, Polly\u2014but set against the astonishing backdrop of a mysterious but fatal pestilence. The first cases are diagnosed in London at the beginning of August, but by the third week of the month, ten thousand people are dead. Initially the government is more concerned with covering its own back than looking out for its citizens, so it\u2019s slow to take action: \u201cNo one in power grasped the danger because everyone was busy trying to find a scapegoat.\u201d Soon, however, it\u2019s impossible to ignore the bodies. The eerie \u201cglow in the sky\u201d above the city at night is evidence of vast makeshift crematoria. London is put under lockdown, cut off from the rest of the country. Joe gallantly offers his much-needed help in one of the capital\u2019s overcrowded, understaffed hospitals, while Polly, scared about her impending confinement and increasingly lonely, obtains a medical certificate verifying her health so that she can make the arduous journey to her mother-in-law\u2019s house in a distant, uninfected coastal town. Some enterprising journalist hails Joe as a national hero, but then another digs up a gay sex scandal from the selfless vet\u2019s adolescence and he becomes persona non grata.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Elements of the novel cut unpleasantly close to the bone right now. From the government\u2019s tardiness through the fear that spreads like wildfire through the city: \u201cSeven million lives pounding behind locked doors and twitching net curtains.\u201d Gilliatt even makes the point that comparisons with war\u2014then, of course, still a relatively recent memory for many Londoners\u2014are extremely unhelpful, the danger in this case being \u201chopelessly different,\u201d with \u201cnothing heroic about it.\u201d Such a warning is still important today. Here in the UK, where I live, both boomers and the elderly have needed reminders that the blitz spirit of \u201ckeep calm and carry on\u201d doesn\u2019t work when you\u2019re trying to fight a highly contagious pandemic.<\/p>\n

For some, these details will be encouragement enough to seek out a copy of this out-of-print book, but in all good conscience I can\u2019t advocate for One by One<\/em>\u2019s republication. The novel\u2019s balance is off; although it begins as an apocalyptic nightmare, there\u2019s a discombobulating and not entirely successful shift, about three-quarters of the way through, to cutting social commentary. Writing in the New York Times<\/em>, Martin Levin called it \u201ca curious muddle of a novel,\u201d the conclusion of which is \u201ca climactic non sequitur.\u201d Even Anthony Burgess\u2014who was a fan\u2014recognized its flaws: \u201cMore action and characters and ideas than the small space could carry.\u201d<\/p>\n

The shortcomings of One by One <\/em>weren\u2019t unique to it. Gilliatt\u2019s novels\u2014she published four more: A State of Change <\/em>(1967), The Cutting Edge <\/em>(1978), Moral Matters <\/em>(1983), and A Woman of Singular Occupation <\/em>(1988)\u2014were not to everyone\u2019s taste, and haven\u2019t aged particularly well either. She had, as Burgess put it, a tendency to focus on \u201cthe surface of life\u2014conversations, the taste of pears, facial twitches, ideas that offer themselves but are never pursued.\u201d As such, \u201caction is shunted to the margin,\u201d important events appear in otherwise throwaway sentences. Blink and you miss them. Burgess admired this approach, declaring that it \u201cowes something to E. M. Forster,\u201d but others were less impressed. In the New York Times<\/em>, Thomas Lask described Gilliatt\u2019s second novel as \u201cboneless\u201d and without structure. \u201cIt rambles from one conversation to another,\u201d he criticized, \u201cfrom one small scene to the succeeding one.\u201d But that which made Gilliatt an imperfect novelist was the same thing that made her such a fascinating short story writer. The terser medium lent itself well to her uneven, texture-heavy approach. I\u2019m much more confident championing her short fiction\u2014of which she published seven volumes\u2014in particular her debut collection, What\u2019s It Like Out?<\/em>, which was published in 1968 (appearing the following year in America under the title Come Back If It Doesn\u2019t Get Better<\/em>).<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Reading the stories in What\u2019s It Like Out?<\/em>, I can\u2019t help but think of the famous epigraph to Forster\u2019s Howards End <\/em>(1910): \u201cOnly connect!\u201d If there\u2019s one thing that unites the nine tales in this collection, it\u2019s Gilliatt\u2019s characters\u2019 abject failure to connect with those closest to them. As Marian Engel put it in her New York Times <\/em>review, \u201cAll the stories deal with separation and disintegration: marriages break up, partnerships split; people grow away from each other, even as they fear the pain of parting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Take the impressively capacious opener \u201cFred and Arthur,\u201d about a vaudeville duo whose lives are a double act both on and off the stage. \u201cWhen they went out on their own with girls, they tended to fix things for the same evening so as not to spend two nights separated where one would do.\u201d Their closeness is tested, however, when Fred decides to get married. The night before the wedding, Arthur takes the soon-to-be happy couple out to the Savoy Grill, where he tells Daisy, Fred\u2019s intended, that they\u2019re all going to drink Dom P\u00e9rignon:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve gone off beer since you decided to get spliced,\u201d he said, looking at Fred.<\/p>\n

\u201cFred <\/em>hasn\u2019t. We<\/em> always drink beer,\u201d said Daisy, collaring the \u201cwe.\u201d Then she regretted it, and touched Arthur\u2019s arm and laughed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other stories, marriages deteriorate to such a degree that the couples communicate only by means of letter. The elderly, aristocratic couple in \u201cThe Tactics of Hunger\u201d live all-but-separate lives under the same roof. The thorny, unkempt, cardigan-wearing Lady Grubb has decided to preempt the loneliness she fears will envelop her on the occasion of her rheumatism-ridden husband\u2019s death by ceasing all communication with the man. \u201cI hate her,\u201d Lord Grubb protests to his daughter. \u201cI\u2019ve written her notes and notes and notes and she\u2019s never answered one of them. Surely she could send me a message of some sort?\u201d As with many of the stories in the collection, what begins life as a tale of entertaining unconventionality ends with startling emotional resonance. Lady Grubb eventually repels her daughter and her daughter\u2019s boyfriend\u2019s rebukes with a rare outburst of sentiment. \u201cNo one understands loneliness if they haven\u2019t been married,\u201d she shouts at them. \u201cFor forty years \u2026 You two. Fly-by-night affairs. You risk nothing.\u201d Gilliatt doesn\u2019t spare her characters\u2014she portrays them warts and all\u2014but she sees their pain too, and doesn\u2019t shy away from that either.<\/p>\n

Gilliatt\u2019s at her very best when she\u2019s writing about oddballs. \u201cFor her, character is crucial,\u201d wrote William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker<\/em>, the magazine where eight of these nine stories originally found publication. As Engel writes appreciatively of the collection, \u201cThere is, best of all, a confirmation that the welfare state has not deprived England of its eccentricity.\u201d Harriet, the splendid protagonist of \u201cThe Redhead,\u201d joins the likes of Lady Grubb. She\u2019s a gangly, Victorian-born woman whose youthful heroines are Queen Elizabeth, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Edith Cavell. She becomes a suffragette, then a nurse during the First World War\u2014beautifully described as \u201cBoadicea with a bedpan\u201d\u2014and who lives on, \u201ctough as old boots,\u201d surviving both the Second World War and cancer, only to be ridiculed by those around her. There\u2019s that poignant sting in the tail, too: \u201cI put this down,\u201d reads the final paragraph, \u201conly because I have heard her daughter\u2019s friends call her \u2018mannish,\u2019 and her own generation \u2018monstrous.\u2019 This is true, perhaps, but not quite the point.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sentence by sentence, Gilliatt also offers up deliciously original descriptive passages. Lord and Lady Grubb\u2019s cold, unhappy home is \u201cdecorated almost entirely in weedy shades of green and looked to the children like a fish tank that needed cleaning out.\u201d She\u2019s a writer unafraid of a cruel but necessary detail or two. After the then-thirteen-year-old Harriet has her \u201cthicket\u201d of auburn locks hacked off, the Norland nurse (once a staple in any wealthy English home\u2019s nursery) \u201crobbed of her pleasure in subduing the hair, turned her savagery more directly on to Harriet and once in a temper broke both of her charge\u2019s thumbs when she was forcing her into a new pair of white kid gloves for Sunday School.\u201d The \u201csurface detail\u201d that could be so distracting in Gilliatt\u2019s novels comes into its own in her stories. \u201cShe celebrates the bittersweet human condition in prose that brings us her visions undistorted,\u201d wrote the Los Angeles Times <\/em>admiringly, while Shawn concluded his praise of the collection by declaring that Gilliatt \u201cdoes not turn away from the dark disorder of existence but defiantly brings to bear on it a powerful intelligence, a benevolent wit, passion, style and pure sanity. She leaves us exhausted.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Shawn began publishing Gilliatt\u2019s short stories in 1965. Two years later, he hired her as a staff writer, and she gave up her job at the Observer <\/em>to become The New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s film critic. This, if she\u2019s remembered at all, is what she\u2019s best known for today. Or, perhaps more accurately, she\u2019s known for not<\/em> being Pauline Kael. The two women shared the role, each working half a year on, half a year off. As the now much more famous Kael put it, they were \u201cships that pass in the night every six months.\u201d The two women had completely different writing styles. Kael\u2019s reviews were shot through with personal taste and \u201cunbridled passion,\u201d according to Slate<\/em>\u2019s Sarah Weinman, while \u201cGilliatt\u2019s enthusiasm came through in elegant turns of phrase crafted with the same care she took with her fiction.\u201d She sums them brilliantly up thus: \u201cGilliatt was Glenda Jackson to Kael\u2019s Barbra Streisand.\u201d And both were lured by Hollywood. Kael left New York for Los Angeles in 1979, becoming a consultant at Paramount Films, but she chucked it in and returned to the magazine after only a few months. Gilliatt\u2019s dabble with the industry came earlier, right at the beginning of her New Yorker <\/em>tenure, when she wrote the Academy Award\u2013nominated screenplay for John Schlesinger\u2019s magnificent 1971 film, Sunday Bloody Sunday<\/em>, the story of a London love triangle with, for the time, a surprisingly liberal attitude to queer relationships. Following the success of Sunday Bloody Sunday<\/em>, Gilliatt tried very hard to turn \u201cFred and Arthur\u201d into a film, but was ultimately unsuccessful, according to her friend Betty Comden, who wrote her obituary in the Independent.<\/em> \u201cIt kept almost happening,\u201d wrote Comden, \u201cand then not, a source of great disappointment to her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though she was only in her midthirties when she was hired by Shawn, and thirteen years younger than Kael, Gilliatt\u2019s contract at the magazine came to an end long before that of her esteemed colleague: in 1979, to be exact, when Gilliatt supposedly lifted eight-hundred-odd words from a piece in The Nation <\/em>for her profile of the author Graham Greene. Intriguingly, Gilliatt was publicly defended, albeit posthumously, by Mary Gilliatt, the second wife of her first husband. In a letter to the New York Times <\/em>in response to Gilliatt\u2019s obituary, Mary wrote that no one who knew Penelope Gilliatt or her work believed the accusation: \u201cGilliatt was altogether unlikely to plagiarize anybody\u2019s work and was certainly not known for inaccuracy in other profiles.\u201d Gilliatt was tricky to work with in the best of times, though, in part because of a drinking problem. In Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark <\/em>(2011), Brian Kellow claims that extra minders from the New Yorker<\/em> fact-checking department were sent to shadow Gilliatt at film screenings, to ensure she actually sat through the movie she was reviewing. And yet, perhaps because of their long friendship, Shawn continued to publish her short stories even after she was taken off the reviewer beat. And Gilliatt continued to drink. She eventually died from alcoholism in 1993, at the age of only sixty-one. It would seem that her addiction, coupled with the rather ignominious end to her career as a critic, has thrown a dark shadow over Gilliatt\u2019s reputation. It\u2019s unfair: her short stories, with their virtuosity and intelligence, should speak for themselves. For those of you who\u2019ve had enough of pandemic-related entertainment, leave One by One <\/em>aside and turn to those instead. They certainly make for wonderfully distracting reading right now, and are perhaps a reminder of how difficult it is for us all to connect, even in the best of times.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Re-Covered here<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the\u00a0<\/em>NYR Daily,<\/em>\u00a0The Financial Times,<\/em>\u00a0The New York Times Book Review,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Literary Hub, among other publications.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An eerily prescient pandemic novel \u2026 and a suggestion on what to read instead. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1670,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46439],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-re-covered"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat\u2019s It Like Out? by Lucy Scholes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 24, 2020 \u2013 An eerily prescient pandemic novel \u2026 and a suggestion on what to read instead.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/03\/24\/whats-it-like-out\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What\u2019s It Like Out? 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