murdering to create
by Douglas Messerli
Wyndham Lewis The
Roaring Queen (New York: Liveright, 1973)
Even within Wyndham Lewis’ eccentric
oeuvres, The Roaring Queen is a
curiosity. Episodic in plot, flat in characterization, and seemingly without
structure, the novel—which might be more properly described as a Menippean
satire—appears to deserve and even invite attack. Robert T. Chapman (in his
book Wyndham Lewis: Fictions and Satires,
1973), for example, has called it “a loose baggy monster which comes to life
but rarely”; even Hugh Kenner (in Wyndham
Lewis, 1954), one of Lewis’ most ardent and brilliant spokesmen, described
the novel as a failure:
Force of nature, for the first
time fails; and reading Lewis chapters un-
quickened by Lewis prose one is
aware as never before that he has in
this book no characters, no plot,
and no theme but the ubiquity of
Nothingness.
Timothy Materer, in the most recent
book-length study of Lewis (Wyndham Lewis
the Novelist, 1963) describes it in a dependent clause as “the triviality
of his satire on book-reviewing.” It hardly seems surprising, accordingly, that
the book—withheld from publication in 1936 by Lewis’ publisher, Jonathan
Cape—seems doomed to be forgotten.
Some of these questions can be answered by recognizing the book as a
satiric attack aimed at one man—the powerful book critic, Arnold Bennett, whom
Lewis was determined to denigrate. The animosity between Lewis and Bennett was
deep and had been years in the making. According to Lewis it began in 1928 when
Bennett took a disliking to Lewis’ Tarr,
which, in turn—if one is to believe Lewis—led to a “boycott” of his work. Just
four years before The Roaring Queen
Lewis had bitterly complained in Time and
Tide of Bennett’s “critical dictatorship of the Anglo-Saxon World,” a
complaint which was not without some justification. Bennett’s influence upon
readers on both sides of the Atlantic was enormous. And, as Lewis was later to
admit in his Blasting and Bombardiering,
Bennett’s response to Tarr and others
of his novels indeed hurt Lewis’ reputation:
This John Keats would have had
much more porridge if this particular
Hitler had not taken a dislike to
the cut of his hair.
The Roaring Queen, then, is a
direct attack on Bennett as “book dictator,” as a man of “blurb and puff.”
Strangely enough, however, although the novel begins strongly with the Bennett
figure, Samuel Shodbutt, it is soon weakened by presentations of seemingly
unrelated caricatures. A few of these figures have connections with Shodbutt
and the literary world, and are easily recognizable as members of the “Bennett
circle.” In Rhoda Hyman, for example, we are presented with a caricature of the
“highbrow” novelist of the “Jane Austen-Virginia Woolf type” (Walter Allen, in
his introduction to the 1973 volume of The
Roaring Queen, argues that Rhoda is, in fact, based on Virginia Woolf). And
characters such as Lilli O’Stein, Marcel Taxi, “old” Mrs. Boniface, and
“little” Nancy Cozens are equally at home in this literary scene. But other
major characters such as Mrs. Wellesley-Crook, Baby Bucktrout, and Osorio
Potter seem to belong to another book, are almost of another realm, so to
speak. Their relationships to this literary context of the book are tenuous to
say the least.
These tenuous connections, however slight, are nonetheless important. If
Mrs. Wellesley Crook, for example, seems primarily to be a caricature of a
wealthy social-climber of an earlier generation, we must remember that she also
plays the roles of “patroness” and “promoter” of the literati. The book focuses
on her role as a nouveau riche
American who has learned how to use literature
and its creators for personal gain.
Similarly, Baby and Ossie have also learned to use literature: Baby (a character based, apparently, on Lewis’s
former lover Nancy Cunard) reads for titillation, Ossie for pseudo-anarchistic
theories and self-justification. These last two may use literature, but are also compulsive products of the literary
world around them. Having read Lawrence’s Lady
Chatterley, Baby is compelled to seduce the Tool House gardener, without
success, again and again.** Ossie, in turn, suffers from what his friend
Charlie Dolphin calls “advanced Bovarysme";
and, as an admirer of Detective stories, Ossie romantically attempts to take on
the roles of murderer and detective.
Between these two extremes of using literature and being used by it lies
Donald Butterboy, the author of It Takes
Two to Make a Bedroom Scene. Butterboy is perhaps the most stereotyped
figure of Lewis’s book, but he is also, oddly enough, at the novel’s center,
his existence acting as a centripetal force—one is tempted to say
“vortex”—which brings all of the users of literature and the products of this
literary world together. Butterboy’s centrality to the book is suggested by the
book’s very title, for he is gay, a roaring queen whom Lewis sees as
symbolizing the devitalized effeminacy lying at the heart of
Shodbutt’s-Bennett’s literary scene. The
Roaring Queen is primarily an attack on a sham literary world that Lewis
felt persisted in 1936, the year of the book’s creation, a world which Lewis’
friend Ezra Pound had described as a “general floppiness” (Pound’s term was
applied to describe the poetry of the American Edgar Lee Masters). If this is
the case, however, I might go no further, simply agreeing with Kenner’s conclusion
that the failures are not “technical shortcomings,” but “issue with Euclidean
exactness from an attempt to multiply by zero—the nullified outcome of a pure
conviction that the artist has to deal with a null world.” In other words, if
this is Lewis’s major theme, one must conclude that Lewis failed due to the
fallacy that to write about boredom an author must write boringly, or, in this
case, to write about a literature of “devitalized effeminacy” the writer must
evoke a devitalized art.
Lewis, however, does not stop here. He was not satisfied, evidently, to
merely create types. It is almost as if for Lewis even these types retained too
many human characteristics, as if he were interested in draining his creations
of all human features. For he converts even his caricatures into things and/or
gives them additional roles, processes are more telling than the primary
stereotyping.
Examples of this savage eradication of human features are numerous; a
single passage must suffice:
…There was a great crowd gathered about Lilli
O’Stein, the great Austro-
Tcheck lady novelist and
international log-rolling champion of Middle Europe.
Lilly was more rolled than rolling,
but she was universally admitted in England
to be the best Good Champion and Jolly Sport of the lot, who would never leave
a fellow-roller in the lurch….
Here one witnesses the first
appearance of this particular caricature. As with almost all the stereotyped
figures presented in this book, Lewis gives a name that itself typifies the
figure and which informs the reader of the satiric basis of the type. In this
case, by naming her Lilli O’Stein, Lewis parodies her Irish-Jewish heritage
and, perhaps, by extension satirizes a literary character such as James Joyce’s
Leopold Bloom and the whole Gertrude Stein “circle.” But Lewis extends that
type by calling Lilli “the great Austro-Tcheck lady novelist,” which obviously
reinforces his bi-cultural literary dig, but also, in extending it, displaces
it, a process which he takes even further by describing her as the
“international log-rolling champion of Middle Europe” (a “log-roller” is one
who praises others in order to receive praise in return), which so overladens
the figure with satiric intent that it utterly removes the possibility of this
being a flesh-and-blood character, a possibility which always remains in successful
satire. Lewis, in short, has converted an absurd literary type into a
linguistic figure which no longer sustains any mimetic dimension. Accordingly,
we are hardly surprised when in the very next sentence Lilli is “more rolled
than rolling,” or, in the next paragraph, that she is “rolled up and down by
all the crowd of penmen and pengirls.” What has begun as a stereotype of a
human being has become an abstract series of nouns which are set into verbal
action. The fact that behind these new actions lie other puns sustains the
linguistic confusion, permitting her/it to become, in the next sentence,
another noun which is interchangeable with nearly any other epithet such as
Good Champion or Jolly Sport. By paragraph’s end not only have we lost sight of
the possibility of Lilli O’Stein existing as a satiric character, but we have lost the potentiality of her existing as a
particular type, as she has been
transformed into a complex of “things” interchangeable with other things. Time
and again in The Roaring Queen Lewis
works in patterns similar to this, eradicating not only character but
stereotype.
Very early in the novel one observes, moreover, that the author is not
the only one involved in this reductive act. Lewis’ “creations” act out this
process upon one another. In one of the very first scenes of the book, Ossie
Potter awakens to find his “room-mate,” Charlie Dolphin, still asleep. “Get up,
you besotted cop, firebrand and early bird!” Ossie shouts. And in the next
paragraphs he continues the assault, calling the sleeper “detective,” “sleeping
sleuth,” and “beastly policeman.” At this point these epithets only hint at the
type who remains sleeping beneath them—both metaphorically and literally. But
when he awakens, Charlie repeats Ossie’s final epithet, “The Sleeping Sleuth”—which Lewis italicizes, suggesting the
destructive potential of such epithets, that they can transform human types
into objects, that such names can convert a type of being into something else
such as the title of a book. This manipulative process is repeated when the two
men join one another for breakfast in the coffee-room. Their
conversation—centered around a discussion of national, cultural, and religious
stereotypes—begins when Ossie calls his friend a “policeman.” But now, awake,
Charlie corrects his friend: “…private inquiry agent please.” Ossie, however,
persists, and riffs on his own romantic associations of policeman, alternating
the discussion with comments on “mystery Crime Club detectives” and the
“sawed-off shotguns of Chicago” gunmen types. Charlie plays along, supporting
the British police against all of Ossie’s assaults. Near the end of the
conversation, however, he once more reasserts his own being-as-type:
“I am a private inquiry
agent. I secrete myself in cupboards, and seek
to unloosen by foul means or fair the
unholy bonds of matrimony that
eat into the flesh of my
deserving clients.”
Momentarily defeated, Ossie
recognizes his friend’s true type, and asks Charlie, in his “professional
capacity,” to kill someone. Immediately, Charlie comes into his own, so to
speak; linguistically he becomes “the private inquiry agent.” Ossie is addressed
as “sir” and “Mr. Potter”; the colloquial disappears; the tone, even Charlie’s
manner, becomes formal.
“I’m afraid it’s not very
much in our line, to be frank, Mr. Potter,” he
said with dignity. “Not much in our
line, really, you see. We do, it is
true,
for clients of long and
honourable standing, occasionally undertake such
matters. But we don’t like
it: we don’t really care for it! There it is. As
Englishmen we experience a
natural distaste, if you understand me, for
these rather messy
transactions. No, sir, I am sorry; I think you would
do well, under the
circumstances, to consult someone else.”
One cannot help but to note the
shift. Charlie’s language has radically altered; his sentences are more
subordinated, his subjects qualified; the pronoun has changed from I to the general we. So one discovers that Charlie is not imprisoned in his type. As
he stands, dramatically emphasizing his role for Ossie, Lewis describes him as
gazing down upon his “fellow-player,” suggesting that Charlie sees this role
from a perspective, that he recognizes it as an “act.” Ossie does not. He hurls
another epithet: “You’re a blackguard, Charlie, and you know it!” Charlie bows
as if the epithet was reward for the performance, and it is: Ossie has been convinced by the play. Now reassured of
his acting skill, Charlie takes on another role: becoming the “professional
pater-familias,” he places “a hand upon the shoulder of his ‘young friend.’
‘You are too romantic, Ossie,’” he exclaims. By the time he utters the next
line he has returned to the role of the private inquiry agent—“We do draw the line”—and, by the middle of
that page, his language is that of the earlier conversation, as he now
communicates as Charlie’s friend: “You are so romantic you will never be happy
until you’ve gone to goal!
The transformations we have just observed are crucial to the whole book,
for in this scene we have witnessed what we will never encounter again in the
fiction: a character has played more than one type. Ossie does not change
throughout; he remains scowlingly, seriously true to his type. But Charlie
Dolphin has show us that he is able to perceive the existence of something
outside of his own being, that he can become someone else, proving that he is a
character, not just a type. Ossie obviously cannot cope with the discrepancy.
The moment Charlie returns to the earlier linguistic pattern, Ossie betrays his
relief and simultaneously tries once again to impose upon Charlie his own
vision, his own variations of the type: “Good old policeman!” he calls out.
Fearing further confusion, he attempts to escape. Indeed these insights help to explain the
sudden paranoia which follows, as Ossie is suddenly convinced that the man next
to him is not “old Charlie” but is a “stranger subtly masquerading” as him.
This, in turn, gives new meaning to the final epithets Ossie hurls at Charlie:
“mad detective,” “Jack the Ripper,” “lunatic,” and the final shout of
“Murderer!”—which leads us further into the plot.
In Charlie, in short, one sees
perspectives of reality unavailable to Ossie and to those others who leave
civilization to visit the Wellesley-Crook house. Once in the country, as in
Peacock’s satires, the reader has entered a world inverted from the one in
which Charlie exists, for the characters gathered in the country are literary
figures in more ways than one. These are not only types who trade in
literature, but are figures who, without any insides, have no being other than
the reality created through language with words and pen. In that sense, these
figures are merely things of
language, and the ways in which they interact are entirely linguistic. It is
only language that makes these “machines” run.
As in most Mennipean satires, what these machines do is speak. Lewis
describes their collective presence, in fact, as a “puffing machine” made up of
puffers “quite ready to discourse about puffing at any moment.” Even Shodbutt
understands that “the magic [lies] in the puff.” What Shodbutt means by “puff,” however, is “praise”—he is speaking
of the critical acclaim he will give Donald Butterboy’s novel. But what Lewis
implies is that the “magic” of Shodbutt and his associates lies in the ability
of their language to puff up their identities, to enwrap their vacuous selves
within something like a pastry shell. All their words, moreover, represent no
more than a “puff,” a blast of air; it is meaningless. Finally, at the center
of all this “puffery,” this empty language, is Donald Butterboy, a “puff,” a
pun on "pouf/poof," which in British slang means a homosexual.
Even those characters not directly involved in this “puffing machine”
are dominated by language. I have already suggested that it is language as
literature which defines Ossie Potter’s and Baby Bucktrout’s types. Charlie
mentions early in the novel that he has seen Ossie “slicing up” a book of
poetry, and his desire to kill Butterboy has something to do, one suspects,
with his hatred of literature—in particular Butterboy’s novel. And Baby
Bucktrout’s physical seduction of Tom is played out not through action—in her
actions she is as direct and coarse as an animal, even mounting Tom—but through
language, which Lewis parodies through the use of inappropriate and inflated
nouns such as “cuirass” and “trapezius.” In short, it is language alone that
brings these hollow types to act; and their acts are generally performed in
talk.
In The Roaring Queen one has
entered a world of dialogue, not of dialogue that might communicate but rather
one that wards off others and redefines them. In a world already defined by
surfaces, a world where people have created fronts—just like the first and last
pages (the only pages Shodbutt ever reads) of a book—the greatest danger is
being read, is being seen through or found out. Stella Salt terrorizes Shodbutt, for example, because, having
known him from a time “before the flood,” she recalls his other roles before
that of “Book Dictator”; she sees through is “tartuffian betrayal,” knows him
as a “humbug.” Stella may have beaux veux,
but, in her ability to “see through” him, Shodbutt knows she is a dangerous
woman. “Well let’s be toddling along, Jolat,” says Shodbutt to escape. “Stella
will be scratching my beaux veux out
in a minute, I’m afraid.” So is the “stately vessel of God’s literary judgment”
escorted off, a type become object, but still intact.
In order to ward off such assaults, the figures of this fiction seek out
their own kind, coming together to be with others who also live at the surface,
who have no insides. Still, there is danger, and these types, accordingly,
become aggressive—just as we have seen Ossie Potter turn on Charlie and the
author behave toward Lilli O’Stein, hurling epithets upon one another to
displace their types. Baby Bucktrout describes her guardian Corse as “an old
wretch,” “old beast,” “old worm,” a “Cossack”; Donald Butterboy is a “quean,”
“a roaring quean,” “the world’s quean”; Baby’s mother is a whole epoch, “the
Nineties,” the “Naughty Past,” some “thing” to hurl a book at.*
Lady Saltpeter may mildly protest—“I am not a period after all!”—but she, in turn, tosses just such epithets at
others; the gardeners in the Tool House are “agricultural robots”; Donald
“Butter—Something” is a “genius,” a "Book of the Week Prize-Winner-to-be."
In such a world, where stereotyped characters are so easily transformed
into things one almost sympathizes with Lady Saltpeter’s confusion when Baby
claims that Donald Butterboy is an American Queen; and we almost believe that
she is serious when she asks of her daughter, “But you are not a bee, are you?”
Baby’s answer is one of the most perceptive statements in the book—although she
has such little character that she cannot comprehend the implications of her answer:
“No, that is the trouble—I am not. …It
is because I’m human that I am
treated in this revolting way!”
To characters without insides, without a soul, these epithets, however,
do not really hurt. But other forms of language can be very dangerous.
Adjectives, such as “Romantic Ossie” for example, terrify these hollow types.
Since they are associative, they require a noun and a reality behind the noun
to which the adjective can attach. Puns such as “puff,” in their
multi-dimensionality, moreover, can penetrate the outer surface and expose the
empty inner self.
Accordingly, these figures must reject multi-dimensionality and all the
suggestiveness inherent in language. Lady Saltpeter is unable even to digest
the idea of an “American queen.” Later in the novel, to give another example,
Lewis presents us with a dialogue between Butterboy and Shodbutt that reveals
their literal interpretation of all language:
“I’ve read your stuff,
Butterboy!”
“Oh please, Mr. Shodbutt—don’t!
Not before all these people!” he hissed in
a horror-stricken sotto-voce.
“What?”
“I know I shall simply blush and
go all to pieces if you do—I do feel I’ve
done something terribly indecent. I’m heartily ashamed of
myself, I really am.”
“Indecent!” Shodbutt frowned. He
looked at Joan. “Is there anything
the censor…?”
“No! I mean a book—just any book!”
“Oh—ah—not yours, Butterboy.”
“Yes! Yes! Yes! Mine!”
“Oh! Yours.”
“Mine. Yes I think it is the
world’s most indecent thing—to write a book.”
Shodbutt looked relieved and
Joanie gave a sunny smile.
Were Shodbutt to have understood the
meaning of “indecent” to be something other than what the censors might not
pass, he would have to apply to himself, to his own actions; it would
penetrate. A similar thing happens two pages later:
“Mr. Samuel Shodbutt! How can I ever thank you? I am dumb.
“Nonsense, Butterboy.”
“I mean I cannot speak.”
In the context of his world,
Shodbutt is quite right; in a world where all is language it is absurd to
expect someone to say that he cannot speak.
For the same reason, words are severed from associations as figures in
Shodbutt’s society use meaningless expressions and abstractions, words that so
diffuse language they cannot turn back upon their users. “Genius,” “famous,”
“great,” are common expressions throughout the book. “Your book, Butterboy?”
exclaims Shodbutt, “…is absolutely first-rate!” “Gaboriau was a genius!”; L’Affaire Lerouge is “a work of genius,”
a “masterpiece!” Time and again Shodbutt and others punctuate the air with
exclamation marks, keeping people, books, and places at a distance.
It’s little wonder, therefore, that the book is without plot. As soon as
anything comes near to transforming actions, the figures scurry away in fear
and terror. Accordingly, scenes are episodic, relationships between characters
often remain unexplained. The reader might well ask what Baby Bucktrout and
Ossie Potter are doing at this party? Why do Baby and Ossie meet? What is
Ossie’s relationship to Donald? Who kills Donald? These and questions like them
underscore the absurdity of attempting to unearth a coherent narrative.
At least three times at the Wellesley-Crook house, however, something
does happen. Out of the barrage of words an association, a memory, something
from the past, comes forth to reclaim their talk from mere babble. The first
occasion occurs during the Baby Bucktrout-Lady Saltpeter dialogue already
mentioned. Baby is talking about being a “bee” instead of a human, when
suddenly Lady Saltpeter’s mind free associates:
Lady Saltpeter dreamily closed
her eyes—the dramatic flight of the Queen
Bee flashed across her mind, as
reported by Maeterlinck, and next she was
off to Convent Garden, beside
the stage-lagoon with Pelleas and Melisande.
Recalled to a sense of duty,
she opened her eyes again, mildly alert.
The second incident is more complex.
Ossie and Nancy Cozens have been talking about plot—the Gunpowder plot—which
reminds Nancy of Guy Fawkes Day and the firecrackers associated with it. With
the word “crackers” Ossie’s mind is diverted from the conversation as he thinks
of a previous conversation with Charlie “in which crackers played a prominent
part.” The important thing in this scene is his remembrance of Charlie’s
description of “creative hatred”:
“What we are talking about is
one manifestation, however disguised, of
the theory of ‘creative hatred.’
You are acquainted with the theory? It
does not matter. It is the
outcome of the Commune. Haine creatice—what
does it signify but that
destruction is creation? You give birth in killing—
the philosophy of the
Evolutionary struggle, where all is
battle and death,
and the ‘birth’ (the ‘creation’)
is a pious hope, no more.
Ossie continues his remembrance of
this conversation, and ends by wondering about the change that had overcome
Charlie:
The more he thought of Charlie
and the way he had been taken in by him,
or taken him rather to be other
than he was...the more he felt a certain
uneasiness. Were other things as
subject to progressive transformation or
self-contradiction?
These two scenes are central in coming to terms with the structure and
meaning of the book. First of all, the scenes are parallel. It is not merely
that they both are about linguistic association; what is important is that they
are both about the process of
association. What Lady Saltpeter is thinking about in recalling Pelleas and Melisande is the highly
impressionistic drama in which meaning is conveyed through suggestion, through
pieces and fragments which repeat words, phrases, and motifs. It is a play that
relies upon something very much akin to the “progressive transformation” about
which Ossie wonders. More importantly, however, is the connection between the
play and the Queen Bee. Lady Saltpeter’s thoughts concerning “the dramatic
flight of the Queen Bee” are quite obviously associated with the chapter in
Maeterlinck’s Life of the Bee
entitled “the Nuptial Flight,” which describes the impregnation of the Queen Bee.
There the major theme is presented in the following passage, which occurs
immediately after the description of the male and female bee’s “hostile madness
of love” in flight:
Most creatures have a vague
belief that a very precarious hazard, a kind
of transparent membrane, divides
death from love; and that the profound
idea of nature demands that the
giver of life should die at the moment of
giving. Here this idea, whose
memory lingers still over the kisses of man, is
realized in its primal
simplicity. No sooner has the union been accomplished
than the male’s abdomen opens,
the organ detaches itself, dragging with it
the mass of the entrails; the
wings relax, and, as though struck by lightning,
the emptied body turns and turns
on itself and sinks down into the abyss.
(Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, trans. by Alfred
Sutro, 1908)
This particular passage is probably
the connecting link between Lady Saltpeter’s remembrance of the flight of the
Queen Bee and Maeterlinck’s drama, for in Pelleas
and Melisande, the major theme is that the loss of innocence must end in
death so that innocence may be reborn. Once the castle doors are locked,
Pelleas and Melisande, having admitted love by the “stage lagoon,” embrace and
kiss, thus losing their innocence; accordingly they must die. Pelleas is killed
outright; Melisande, already pregnant by her husband, dies soon after giving
birth. These two themes are repeated in the philosophical concept of Haine creatice as described by Charlie
Dolphin.
Two very different moments in this novel, then, are special because they
are dynamic, moments in which characters and the mind of the reader come
together and associate with experiences outside the book. These two special
moments, moreover, are similar. Lewis is obviously trying to tell us something
by that fact. Only one other instance in the fiction can compare, and that is defined
by an act: the “roaring queen,” Donald Butterboy, is murdered in his bed. If
the novel is to be made meaningful one must discover the pattern which connects
the first two dynamic moments with the last, which also entails the discovery
of who committed—or perhaps one should say “accomplished”—this act. In short,
the reader is being asked to solve the case. For once Charlie Dolphin has entered
the country, he is as ineffective as all the others. Like them, he too becomes
a type without dimension, acting out episodes that seem to have no inter-logic.
His investigation of Ossie and his accusation of Shodbutt are, like everything
which precedes them, meaningless; they make no sense. The reader, accordingly,
must replace Charlie, become the sleuth, a private inquiry agent who can solve
the crime—and simultaneously comprehend the fabric of Lewis’ problematic work.
Before we proceed, however, we should remind ourselves that we are
reading about characters of the written word, and if Lewis has made anything
clear it is that, within the context of the literary figures gathered at this
country house, it is a world in which nothing can be trusted. As Charlie has
told Osorio, to get to truth one has to read in reverse, backwards, white for
black and black for white; one has to read in between the lines.
With this in mind we can now examine the suspects. Was it Shodbutt?
Probably not. Even while being confronted by Charlie he remains a man true to
his type: a surface being, an outer shell, vacuous inside; he doesn't have the
“guts” to act. “Sir, oblige me by confining yourself to what your functions
prescribe,” he warns Charlie. To the very end this “Book-Dictator” demands that
people remain true to their types. Besides, he has the perfect alibi. It is
almost inevitable that he and Baby should share an evening, for they are both
in search of “the goods,” however differently the “goods” may be by each
defined. Whether they found “the goods” in each other is questionable. In her
testimony Baby implies that Shodbutt’s goods weren’t the right kind:
You must be off your
rocker to accuse Mr. Shodbutt—of a crime—
of that sort. He’s as
gentle as a lamb! It’s perfectly disgusting!
One may wonder whether it is
Charlie’s accusation or Shodbutt’s lamb-like behavior that Baby finds
“perfectly disgusting,” but one can be certain that Shodbutt is innocent—of at
least the crime of murder.
Ossie Potter is certainly a prime suspect. Not only did he come to the
country with the intention of murder, armed with his gat, but, as I have
suggested, he is violently affected by literature, slicing pages of poetry from
a book. Thus, in a world where people are
language, he has, in effect, already committed such a crime. His gat, however,
according to Charlie, “couldn’t stop a field mouse.” More importantly, Ossie
also remains too true to his type throughout the novel to be able to act, to be
able to commit the “real crime.” To be fair Ossie has grown in awareness by
fiction’s end; he has begun to think somewhat associatively. Accused by
Charlie, he almost seems to be playing different roles—as he has previously
seen Charlie play different roles—moving in his dialogue from postures of
innocence to anger and then to cool reproach.
But if Ossie has murdered Donald Butterboy, it is Charlie, not Ossie,
who has pulled the trigger, who has motivated the act. For it is only through
Charlie’s example that Ossie has discovered that one can play roles, can be
more than one thing—that a figure, in
short, might be a real human being. Charlie is the true murderer, I would
argue, for other reasons as well. First, he is the only human being in the
book. He is alive; even his face is described throughout as being “red.” In
that early scene in London, one recalls, Ossie was disturbed to be with Charlie
because the private inquiry agent existed “in the flesh!”
It was…flesh that he found so disturbing. It is one thing to meet a highly
dramatic personage in a book and
quite another to have him come rolling up
in the light of common day.
Even in the country house, where
Charlie seems to lose his reality, Mrs. Wellesley-Crook reprimands him because
he is a “person.” “I must apologize to you for the conduct of this person,” she accusingly says. As a person, as a character in the flesh, Charlie is free to act. It
is no wonder he is described as a “murderer” already in London, before he
arrives in the country. Ossie, having failed to hire Charlie to commit the
murder, still recognizes him as a threat, describing him as “the murderer” even
as he questions Ossie in the country house.
Ossie’s epithet is based on Charlie Dolphin’s multidimensionality; he
can play all those roles, become a “mad detective,” be something inside and
something outside at the same time. The dangers of such a creature let loose in
a world of “puffs” is obvious. Like a pun, he can puncture these cut-out
figures language shields, can penetrate and prick these puffed-out beings, letting
the air inside escape.
We quickly perceive this ability as relating to the themes swirling
around the idea of Haine creatice,
and we cannot help but comprehend that the murder of Donald is a creative, a
salving act. By destroying the vortex to which these empty literary types are
attracted, Charlie has diffused this vapid world and permitted the possibility
for a new vortex of creation. Just as in the flight of the Queen Bee, and as in
Pelleas and Melisande, now life can
now enter the world. In killing, Charlie Dolphin (the “dolphin” savior) has
brought about a birth.
It little matters that such a murder is impossible, that it doesn’t fit
into the fiction’s plot. For, as Ossie has discovered, Charlie is not in the
“book.” He lies in the white, not in the black; like Lewis himself, who as the
writer has murdered his figures,
emptied them of any being—and possibly even diminished the effects of the real
“Book Dictator,” Arnold Bennett, who lives outside the book—Charlie has played
the role of a creator, murdering to create.
The Roaring Queen,
accordingly, should be understood as a fiction of purgation, a work of
literature which demands that the reader participate in order to accomplish a
transformation of the word from black to white, a transformation of the word
from the printed page to life.
*It’s interesting to note that in
the very process of metamorphosing humans into objects, the objects themselves
become animalistic and alive. The book Baby hurls at “the Nineties” is likened
to a “goose in flight.”
**It is almost mean-spirited that
Lewis portrayed Baby as following the example of Lady Chatterley’s Lover
since—although Cunard was sexually voracious—she was also, according to
biographer Lois Gordon, almost prudish when it came to sexual matters in literature,
refusing to publish Lawrence’s novel through her The Hours Press
College Park, Maryland, 1979
Revised Forio,
Ischia, July 6, 2007
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (October 2008).
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