Nile
Shadows: The Improbable Art of Edward Whittemore
What to make of
a book like Nile Shadows, or an author like Edward Whittemore?
No matter how determinedly catholic we like to think
our literary tastes, there are some works that leave
our inner critic feeling uncomfortably at a loss when
it first encounters them. "Yes, but is it any good?",
it keeps asking with tireless persistence as the rest
of us answer that question by happily turning page after
page. Like many authors belonging to that large and
unfortunate caste, "the unjustly neglected",
Whittemore suffers from being an embarrassingly good
read. He also suffers from a bigger crime, in that he
is almost impossible to pigeonhole. Reviewers' comparisons
bounce from Pynchon to Nabokov, Greene to Calvino and
Fuentes to Vonnegut, only to hastily assert that he
is, of course, very much his own man. Reading Whittemore,
I found myself adding my own - a touch of Hesse here,
I thought, a dash of Robertson Davies there, yet without
what could be termed a debt to either of them. Each
new reader will inevitably supply more.
So what is it that
makes Nile Shadows, and the rest of Whittemore's works,
so infinitely flexible? Are they simply baggy monsters
into which one can throw whatever one wants? In a sense
they are, and it's not a criticism to say that Whittemore
is probably one of the baggiest writers this century
- his books represent that most vain of ambitions and
the downfall of more than one literary great: a complete
explanation of everything. Nothing less than a unified
theory of human history is what Whittemore is after,
and it's a sign of his mettle that he realizes such
an ambition is doomed from the start, yet undertakes
it anyway. Nile Shadows is set in an anxious Cairo of
1942, awaiting the arrival at any moment of Rommel and
his Panzer divisions from out of the desert. The distant
rumble of gun fire and armored vehicles is the rumble
of history itself, bearing down on Whittemore's characters
as they engage in their desperate machinations to avoid
defeat. And yet what do those characters do in the face
of such pressure? They talk, is what they do, and they
talk and talk and talk. Each conversation leading on
to something else, which in turn leads to something
else, and suddenly a new character is introduced - a
thumbnail sketch surely, a literary prop, no more -
but no, suddenly he starts growing in front of our eyes,
acquiring a languorous history stretching out over pages
and pages while we think, Quick! Do something! The enemy
is coming!
At times there
is something outright perverse about this compunction
to hold forth. When Joe O'Sullivan, the novel's protagonist,
encounters the mysterious Ahmad, undoubted possessor
of vital information about the man he has been sent
to uncover, we get the following:
Well now, so
you've come from America, have you?
Yes, murmured
Joe his eyes drifting around the room in a trance.
Well now, isn't
that a strange coincidence? The world is really very
small. It just so happens I once was given a complete
edition of the collected letters of George Washington,
some thirty-odd volumes in all, and they certainly
added up to some fascinating reading.
They did?
Oh very. Let's
see now. Did you know, for example, that Washington's
false teeth were made from hippopotamus teeth? He
also used teeth made from walrus tusks and elephant
ivory and even cow teeth, but he always preferred
Hippo. He claimed it gave him a superior bite and
chew. With Hippo, he said, even peanuts and gumdrops
were possible.
Even peanuts
and gumdrops? murmured Joe. President Washington?
So he stayed
with Hippo whenever he could.
And this sixteen
pages into a conversation that has already touched on
Ethiopian nationalism, the history of Cairo's sex trade,
the Ahmadmobile (Ahmad's failed fish and chip enterprise)
and Ahmad's even greater failure as a poet.
The conversation
can be serious, too, taking on the form of a grave philosophical
discourse as the characters take turns to expound their
views of life. When Joe finally comes face to face with
his elusive prey, Stern, the chit chat gives way to
pure oratory:
Revolution, said
Stern. We can't even comprehend what it is, not what
it means or what it suggests. We pretend it means
total change but it's much more than that, so vastly
more complex, and yes, so much simpler too. It's not
just the total change from night to day as our earth
spins in its revolutions around a minor star. It's
also our little star revolving around its own unknowable
center and so with all the stars in their billions,
and so with the galaxies and the universe itself.
Change revolves and truly there is nothing but revolution.
All movement is revolution and so is time, and although
those laws are impossibly complex and beyond us, their
result is simple. For us, very simple.
And yet, this is
where Whittemore's great strength comes in: just as
we are beginning to accept that this is more a philosophical
treatise than a spy story, a pleasant meta-fiction,
Whittemore suddenly pulls the strings taut with a dramatic
piece of action worthy of Le Carre (more comparisons).
When Joe first arrives at the dubious Hotel Babylon,
for example, there is this description:
The door burst
open under his hand and Joe went flying across the
room, hurling his valise at the screen in the window.
The screen and the valise disappeared and he dived
after them, landing with a roll on the soft earth
behind the hotel as a dull thud went off in the room
above him. He was on his feet at once, in a crouch,
but there was nothing to see. He was standing in a
small courtyard strewn with debris. A door behind
him led back into the hotel. Another door faced him
from the far side of the small courtyard. Joe picked
up his valise and crossed to the door in the far wall.
He tried the handle and the door opened. Stairs led
down to the basement.
This heady mixture
of the philosophical and the dramatic runs throughout
the book, the one underlying the other, and the result,
unlikely though it may be, is a seamless unity rather
than an awkward tugging of opposites. Life is talk,
after all, lots of it - crude, bawdy, serious, occasionally
transcendent - and that's what Whittemore gives us.
It's also a world of action and of unthinkable violence
- in this century particularly like no other - and Whittemore
gives us that, too. Because of the stream of conversations,
memories, theories and thoughts that make up so much
of the book, it's easy to overlook the significant amount
of violence contained within it. The book begins with
an act of extreme violence, in fact, a hand grenade
casually tossed into a bar that instantly kills one
of the main characters, setting off a chain of events
linked in almost unimaginable ways to this moment. Then
there's Stern, the elusive agent O'Sullivan is sent
out to hunt down, who may or may not be giving secrets
away to the enemy. Stern, a Christ-like figure who seems
to have taken all the woes of humanity upon his shoulders
(he even has a stigmata of sorts), is haunted in particular
by the memory of his having once slit a dying girl's
throat as an act of mercy, a grisly scene that reemerges
repeatedly throughout the book, bubbling up from Stern's
tormented mind, as fresh for him each time as it is
for us.
Something else
apart from this heady fusion draws us in to Nile Shadows,
though, and that's a certain compulsive quality that,
as in all great novels, appears to be beyond the author's
control. On the one hand Whittemore is the master story
teller, weaving his tale of good and evil with its great
cast of characters over its great span of time, while
on the other he is also telling a much simpler story,
a story about himself, one feels, and telling it again
and again. If every fictional character is unavoidably
a portrait of its author, then Whittemore seems to have
taken this to a pathological extreme. Young or old,
good or bad, male or female, they're all flat-out Whittemores
on the page, unabashed author substitutes. You don't
need to be aware of all the biographical details of
the author's life (there are plenty in the prologue
and epilogue of this new edition) to realize that something
is afoot here. This is a book in which every character,
literally or metaphorically or both, is a secret agent,
presenting one face to the world and another to themselves.
There's Joe and Stern, who between them in their lifetime
have disguised themselves as endless apparitions, from
gun runners to beggars, antiques dealers to morphine
addicts, and more besides. There's Liffey, the jovial
chameleon, not coincidentally named after Dublin's famous
river, and like that other great Everyman, Bloom, also
a Jew. And there's the mysterious Bletchley, his face
hideously disfigured by a bullet during the First World
War, who's every facial expression is a grotesque inversion
of his true feelings. "It's all a matter of man
seeking his true home . . ." as Joe says.
Once again, Whittemore
escapes what might be a fatal mistake in another author.
Far from the funhouse hall of mirrors one might expect
from such endless fracturing, the compulsive replication
of this same idea only intensifies the book, turning
it into a single mirror and magnifying the image. What
is the true nature of man? How close can one ever come
to it? Is there something worthy and strong enough inside
that will outlast our more barbaric impulses? The repetition
of these themes by so many voices exerts a hypnotic
sense in the end, like listening to an endless choral
chant. It might almost be called "the poetry of
self-exile", if that didn't strike too pretty a
note for a book that for all its abstract bent is so
firmly planted on the ground of historical fact and
place.
And here we come
to the deepest concerns of Whittemore's mind, for historical
fact and place are as much his obsession as his loftier
flights of imagination, indeed they are inextricably
linked to them. The real protagonists of the Quartet
are surely the parched and beautiful deserts of the
biblical lands, with their oases and ruins, and above
all the Holy City of Jerusalem itself. Whittemore is
profoundly in love with these, and it's a love that
shines forth in all the books. Much of the "talky"
nature of the book comes not just from his characters
endless speculations and declarations, but from their
loving memories of past nights spent idling by the Nile,
or the magnificence of the pyramids at dawn, or the
smell of a scented garden during some long-ago secret
assignation. What you come to realize as you read, unconsciously
at first, and then with growing awareness, is that these
are not really digressions at all, but rather the very
meat of the book. The land speaking to the people, and
the people speaking to each other in an endless cycle
is the closest definition of what it's all "about",
if one needs to pursue its meaning into some final corner.
The book, and the whole Quartet, is a monument to digression,
to the necessity of the circuitous and the roundabout
as the only way to truth. Certainty of vision, unquestioned
clarity of purpose, leads only to oppression - as the
ruthless and single minded Nazi presence hovering in
the background serves to remind us.
What this amounts
to, and what makes the critic with his nose for genre
and structure so nervous, is that by all accounts this
shouldn't be a good book at all, should in fact be a
really terrible book, and the Quartet a rambling, self-indulgent
mess. It's too clogged up with words to be straight
forward action adventure, it's too in love with the
power of old-fashioned story telling to be a safe member
of any experimental literary camp, it's too bawdy to
be a tastefully controlled work of the intellect (what
other work about the primacy of Man's soul contains
a sizable section on the history and art of prostitution?),
and it's combination of travel and digression, action
and introspection, while they remind one in flashes
(those comparisons again) of writers like Chatwin and
Theroux, are too loose, too much under the sway of Whittemore's
pack-rat, constantly changing focus of attention. In
the end, against all odds, the book works because something
binds together its lofty ambitions and disparate parts
and makes it, if not a whole, then at least the tantalizing
shape of something about to come into being at any moment.
That something is the force of Whittemore's integrity
of vision.
© Ben Gibberd
New York City, 2002
Ben Gibberd is
a freelance writer and editor who lives in New York
City. He is currently working on a book about Manhattan's
shoreline with the photographer Randy Duchaine.
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