FICTION: Dangerous PityBy Elizabeth Wassell, Liberties Press, 237pp. €12.99
THE SOUTH of France has long been a bohemian hang-out. Nice, in particular, was a retreat for artists throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Some of this cachet, however, has been lost in the era of cheap flights and package holidays.
Elizabeth Wassell’s graceful and artfully conceived new novel is a moving homage to the city. The colour and drama of its streets are precisely captured, as are the sustaining pleasure of Mediterranean sunlight and warmth and the lure of ever-mutating seascapes. In addition, the civilised rituals of everyday life, as embodied by meals in restaurants or lingering aperitifs in cafes, are vividly rendered.
But idylls are only interesting to the degree that they are threatened. Wassell's novel is no mere travelogue. Rather, it subtly interfuses different genres, including the Künstlerroman, American émigréfiction in the manner of F Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Nightand the existential novel à la Simone de Beauvoir or Jean-Paul Sartre.
The plot centres on Sebastian Clare, a successful Irish novelist who has spent his life in the south of France and cultivated the role of the artistic exile. His carefree existence in a Nice hotel may seem to supply the ideal conditions for the pursuit of a writing career. Yet, we quickly learn, he is consumed by anxieties.
Clare is in mourning for his wife, whose death a few years earlier has left him bereft. His uprooted lifestyle is as much a result of his loneliness as of a determination to avoid bourgeois responsibility. More damagingly, the recent demise of his domineering mother, who had been querulously dependent on him, leaves him guilt ridden and troubled.
The most immediate crisis of the novel is precipitated, however, when a former student, Ursula, who took a creative-writing course with him in Dublin, shows up unannounced and insinuates her way into his life. Initially, she seems merely to be a needy acolyte, but as things unfold it is intimated that she may be a sinister stalker whose designs on him will have disastrous consequences.
Dangerous Pityis a meditation on the métier of the writer and the price that it exacts. It also probes the consequences of literary celebrity. On a wider level the novel considers the nature of human relationships. Through the often dysfunctional friendships that Sebastian Clare has established in the course of his life, it focuses on the limits of human involvement. The ability to respond to the neediness of others can turn into the dangerous pity of the title. Indeed, the phrase sums up the problematic stance that an author must cultivate: to remain open to experience while also keeping it at a remove.
All of these serious themes, however, are depicted by Wassell with a consummate lightness of touch and a gentle irony.
Clare is torn between the need for withdrawal and the desire to establish human links, which then invariably turn sour. The real friendships with other writers that sustain him are also curiously unreal. He introduces Ursula to the literary circles that he inhabits. Wittily, they are populated by the wraiths of well-known artists whom Wassell adroitly redeploys as part of her plot but are immediately recognisable. At the weekly salons held by Trudy and Alice (Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas) we encounter Katherine (Mansfield) and Antoine (Anton Chekhov), among many others.
The seemingly tangible reality of modern Nice proves to be a ghostly domain haunted by the irrepressible presences of former artists; Colette, Somerset Maugham, Guillaume Apollinaire and Isadora Duncan are all skilfully reanimated and woven into the action of the novel. These revivified figures move to protect Wassell’s hero when his student betrays him and threatens to undermine the precarious security of his carefully confected world.
The artistic values of bygone eras seem to be a defence against the worst aspects of contemporary life, in which instant success and celebrity are prized above the slow labour of achievement. Elizabeth Wassell’s poised, archly post-modern and compelling novel refuses any easy resolution, however.
Like her hero, we are left uncertain about whether art will indeed win out or whether the parasitic culture of celebrity will finally win the day.
Anne Fogarty is professor of James Joyce Studies at UCD and editor with Luca Crispi of the Dublin James Joyce Journal
