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Reve's Raleigh
[This article is a translation of the dutch article Reves Raleigh. Note that the quotes of Old and lonely in this English version are my own. As far as I know, there exists no official translation]
On some occasions, you have to be pointed at the sheer brilliance of something you were already acquinted with. This can even be the case with an episode of an artist whom you had admired for a long time. You knew his work was great, you had already read this particular episode, but you still hadn't fully digested its significance. You needed that extra reminder.
Inspired by a plea of Reve-connaisseur Diederik van Vleuten, I reread the 'Jane Raleigh episode' of Old and lonely (Gerard Reve, 1978). The story is about a stage actrice in London of the fifties, with whom the narrator has a short affair (chapter five to thirteen). I agree with Van Vleuten: the episode ranks among the best of Reve’s writings. It is a masterful blend of acute observation and big symbolism, of raw honesty and cliché, of things vulgar and divine.
Although the story is larger than life in some respects, it is still convincing on a deep level. Jane Raleigh is a Mother Mary figure, an angel. But an angel that has gotten a convincing human incarnation. Nor is the narrator a regular guy, with his perverse and possessed mind. For sure, the recipe for a sad history in which ‘no sane human being occurs’. And still, as in every tragedy, it is a triumph of greatness. Amidst all sadness Jane Raleigh is capable of a great deed.
The story’s narrator, whose name is Gerard, lives in a small London apartment in the mid-fifties of the twentieth century. He lives on a ‘small grant of Duchess van B.’ and was ‘employed as an assistant-grave-digger’ for a short period. Before commencing his story, he warns his readers: ‘I must confess that in all my memories falls an abundance of rain.’
Gerard often visits Jane, who shares for financial reasons an apartment with her inane collegue Jacky. He is a subordinate figure, who is characterized as follows:
| ‘I dont think he had any talent. Each time I saw him studying a role, it occurred to me that although he had learned to talk and walk funny, and indeed could express a sort of hysterical double of himself, he could not impersonate any other person in a convincing manner’. |
It is inevitable that Jacky will become object of the ‘fairly universally directed, ever vigilant horniness’ of the narrator. But this is only a side issue of the story. The heroine is Jane, for whom Gerard soon feels sympathy.
| ‘She was blonde, slender, and had a nice appearance, but I don’t think that she was a stunning beauty, although definitely much more attractive than most British young women of her age. […] One could tell from everything she did that she aspired for something more than this so-called decent room in a so-called respectable neighbourhood […] but her longing was not contorted or grim, as one often sees in circles of artists: she could also think of other things but her career.’ |
During one of the Saturday afternoons on which Jane receives guests, in Gerard’s eyes a ‘bunch of chattering faggots’, he watches her in amazement:
| ‘She listened to the most vapid nonsense with the most serene patience, and accepted with a beaming face the inevitable box of chocolates […] I don’t believe that this willingness was a pose, but that it really was her nature to be warm and respectful to everybody. ’ |
The fact that Gerard is attracted to men, doesn’t stand in the way of an affair between him and Jane. It does complicate matters, however. I will not quote the love scenes here – they are unsettling, to say the least.
The thread of the story are the rehearsals and performances of a play in which Jane has the lead role. We meet the director of the play, an enthusiastic but talentless figure, and Jane’s father, an anonymous man who loves his daughter to the point of devotion.
| ‘Seldom have I seen a man whose being was so completely full of dedication to someone else. One could not say that he was belittling himself in any pathetic way, as can be the case with parents who bring their children down by a terror of sacrifice. No, this was different: the man was happy because he was in the immediate presence of his daughter.’ |
The play is poorly staged, however competent Jane’s acting is. The première receives a modest applause, after which ‘the imbecile, obligatory visit behind the scenes’ takes place:
| ‘The crippling fear of the past hours had not completely left me, and I hugged her like this too was an act that could still go wrong.’ |
The play gets two more performances, for smaller crowds. The romance between Jane and Gerard is not viable, in his eyes. He has a bleak outlook:
| ‘What was I doing with my life, and what was I doing here, in this room? These were useless questions and useless thoughts, but I could not ban them. I heard Jacky in his room saying his lines, which he would never speak from any screen nor any stage, as he wailed them with his nervous voice, a little too fast and loudly. Wasn’t it all a movie that one performed in? A movie that was never recorded, let alone staged, however loudly the camera snored, because there was no film role in it. Jacky should die and Jane was sweet, but if it were the other way round, would it matter? I was going to be thirty-one this year and had written one book, that really wasn’t about anything. That was all. And I was a faggot, who thought quite something of himself because he could also do it with a woman – sure, if he invoked thoughts and images which he would never be able to confess to anyone, but which were the curse that rested upon his life.’ |
He had warned us… And still not everything is lost. Thanks to a grateful gesture of Jane, which impresses Gerard deeply, the story ends with hope.
The enchanting quality of the story is partly due to 'the ritual glow of the stage lights’ under which the events take place. The filmic staging of the scenes, the décor of rainy London city, it all is a beautiful film noir. The narrator is the despairing hero – a James Dean with some screws loose. Between his eyelids he can definitely see the goodness of his beloved woman, but he stands powerless in the face of destiny. Reve's craftmanship is that he uses these theatrical components to tell a really honest and touching story. He adds all kinds of unbelievable, grim details (at least it is hard to accept that reality was as bleak as the author wrote it down) without , strange enough, undermining the emotional core of the story.
Amazing are the stylistic grace and well-directedness. We are spared from all-too-much ‘mindless bullshit, blessed by the almighty'. In a space of seventy pages, two main characters and three by-figures are portrayed convincingly and their destiny is unfolded. It is remarkable how little dialogue Reve needs to achieve this. Although Jane comes to life convincingly, she speaks only a handful of sentences in the story. The things she says, however, are so well put and truthful, that the reader is left speechless. How many words does it take an angel to bring her message? Eight, in this story.
While reading we feel, behind the narrator Gerard, the presence of the writer Gerard. The narrator may be helpless, the writer lets us know who pulls the strings. The grand finale is the last page, where both temperaments are opposed in sharp contrast: the sardonic grin of the almighty writer/puppeteer versus the narrator’s truly felt love for a woman. First the writer rubs us in once more that it is all a story. Only to show, immediately after and coinciding again with his narrator, that he cares deeply about the whole situation. First we readers can't resist a chuckle, then we stare ahead in silence.
Some say that Reve has lost himself, after the letter books Approaching the end and Nearer to Thee, in decadent or corny writing about silk trousers and ‘boys’ hills’. It also seems fashionable to suggest that Werther Nieland is his 1949 masterpiece. Without deminishing any of Reve’s works, I would like to stand up for Old and lonely (which is a frame story which, by the way, also contains a brilliant and oppressive episode about a communist youth camp). It can compete with any work, also with other masters of world literature, as far as I am concerned. Isn’t it about time for a translation into English? Or – as a prelude, a translation of the Jane Raleigh episode – it could be a novel in its own right. Or would it be sacrilege to separate it from the book as a whole?
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October 2006
Links
Siegfried Woldhek: drawing of Reve
