Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) by Julian Barnes Page A
Authors: Julian Barnes
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contrast, declares, ‘I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it.’ He is also highly intelligent, with an encyclopedic memory – ‘the most brilliant man in England’, as we are frequently assured in the opening book,
Some Do Not
. This may be an advantage in the Imperial Department of Statistics, where he number-crunches for England; but isn’t such a good idea in the world he inhabits.
There, intelligence is viewed as suspect and chastity weird; virtue as smugness, and saintliness a direct provocation. It is a great audacity for a novelist to begin a long novel with a main character whom very few other characters like, let alone admire. Tietjens is socially awkward, and emotionally reticent to the point of muteness: when, in the book’s opening action, hiswife Sylvia, having left him four months previously, asks to be taken back, he ‘seemed to have no feelings about the matter’. He is ‘completely without emotions that he could realise’, and ‘had not spoken more than twenty words about the event’. Later, he is said to have a ‘terrifying expressionlessness’. Men sponge off him for both ideas and money; women on the whole find him rebarbative – ‘his looks and his silences alarmed them’. In the course of the novel he is variously compared to a maddened horse, an ox, a swollen animal, a mad bullock, a lonely buffalo, a town bull, a raging stallion, a dying bulldog, a grey bear, a farmyard boar, a hog, and finally a dejected bulldog. He is also likened to a navvy, a sweep, a stiff Dutch doll and an immense feather mattress. He is ‘lumpish, clumsy’, with ‘immense hands’. His wife constantly imagines him constructed from meal-sacks. Even Valentine Wannop, the spiky suffragette who is eventually to bring this Anglican saint a kind of salvation, initially finds him ‘as mad as he is odious’, with hateful eyes ‘protruding at her like a lobster’s’; she takes him for just another ‘fat golfing idiot’. Still, for all his apparent ineptness, there is one thing always to be said for Christopher Tietjens: he is very good with horses.
Tietjens’s notions of love and sex – which you would not expect to be conventional – are summed up at one point as follows: ‘You seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks to her.’ Which is the exact opposite of one conventional male view, in which ‘chatting up’ with luck leads to sex, and afterwards you wonder what to talk about. (Tietjens’s idea is a less engaging version of what Ford himself believed. As he put it, rather more sweetly,
in propria persona
: ‘You marry to continue the conversation.’) In Tietjens’s mind, it is ‘intimate conversation’ which leads to ‘the final communion of your souls … that in effect was love’. The sort of woman such an Anglican saint requires should be ‘passionate yet circumspect’. The second adjective is richly inappropriate for Sylvia, who first seduced him, very uncircumspectly, in a railway carriage.
For Graham Greene, Sylvia Tietjens is ‘surely the most possessed evil character in the modern novel’. A wife who is bored, promiscuous and up-to-date, tied to a husband who is omniscient, chaste and antique: there’s a marriage made in hell. Christopher is a mixture of chivalry and masochism (if it hurts, I must be doing the right thing); Sylvia a mixture of recklessness and sadism (if it hurts him, I must be doing the right thing). Christopher believes that a gentleman does not divorce his wife, however she behaves; though if she wants to divorce him, he accepts it. He also thinks of Sylvia as a ‘tremendous discipline’ for the soul – rather as being in the French Foreign Legion would be for the body. Sylvia for her part cannot divorce Christopher because she is a Catholic. And so the couple are bound together on a wheel of fire. And the torments she devises for her husband are of exquisite accuracy. When she was thirteen (we learn only
Some Do Not
. This may be an advantage in the Imperial Department of Statistics, where he number-crunches for England; but isn’t such a good idea in the world he inhabits.
There, intelligence is viewed as suspect and chastity weird; virtue as smugness, and saintliness a direct provocation. It is a great audacity for a novelist to begin a long novel with a main character whom very few other characters like, let alone admire. Tietjens is socially awkward, and emotionally reticent to the point of muteness: when, in the book’s opening action, hiswife Sylvia, having left him four months previously, asks to be taken back, he ‘seemed to have no feelings about the matter’. He is ‘completely without emotions that he could realise’, and ‘had not spoken more than twenty words about the event’. Later, he is said to have a ‘terrifying expressionlessness’. Men sponge off him for both ideas and money; women on the whole find him rebarbative – ‘his looks and his silences alarmed them’. In the course of the novel he is variously compared to a maddened horse, an ox, a swollen animal, a mad bullock, a lonely buffalo, a town bull, a raging stallion, a dying bulldog, a grey bear, a farmyard boar, a hog, and finally a dejected bulldog. He is also likened to a navvy, a sweep, a stiff Dutch doll and an immense feather mattress. He is ‘lumpish, clumsy’, with ‘immense hands’. His wife constantly imagines him constructed from meal-sacks. Even Valentine Wannop, the spiky suffragette who is eventually to bring this Anglican saint a kind of salvation, initially finds him ‘as mad as he is odious’, with hateful eyes ‘protruding at her like a lobster’s’; she takes him for just another ‘fat golfing idiot’. Still, for all his apparent ineptness, there is one thing always to be said for Christopher Tietjens: he is very good with horses.
Tietjens’s notions of love and sex – which you would not expect to be conventional – are summed up at one point as follows: ‘You seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks to her.’ Which is the exact opposite of one conventional male view, in which ‘chatting up’ with luck leads to sex, and afterwards you wonder what to talk about. (Tietjens’s idea is a less engaging version of what Ford himself believed. As he put it, rather more sweetly,
in propria persona
: ‘You marry to continue the conversation.’) In Tietjens’s mind, it is ‘intimate conversation’ which leads to ‘the final communion of your souls … that in effect was love’. The sort of woman such an Anglican saint requires should be ‘passionate yet circumspect’. The second adjective is richly inappropriate for Sylvia, who first seduced him, very uncircumspectly, in a railway carriage.
For Graham Greene, Sylvia Tietjens is ‘surely the most possessed evil character in the modern novel’. A wife who is bored, promiscuous and up-to-date, tied to a husband who is omniscient, chaste and antique: there’s a marriage made in hell. Christopher is a mixture of chivalry and masochism (if it hurts, I must be doing the right thing); Sylvia a mixture of recklessness and sadism (if it hurts him, I must be doing the right thing). Christopher believes that a gentleman does not divorce his wife, however she behaves; though if she wants to divorce him, he accepts it. He also thinks of Sylvia as a ‘tremendous discipline’ for the soul – rather as being in the French Foreign Legion would be for the body. Sylvia for her part cannot divorce Christopher because she is a Catholic. And so the couple are bound together on a wheel of fire. And the torments she devises for her husband are of exquisite accuracy. When she was thirteen (we learn only
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