The Lady and the Minister

It would be easy to write off Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s Incense to Idols as a bad cheque. The academic critics will do that like a shot. I remember Grigson’s long, careful, destructive analysis of Dylan Thomas’s work, in which he proved by algebra to his own satisfaction that Thomas was writing crap: obscure, bombastic crap. The point about Thomas, of course, is that he was writing up to his neck in a bog, the bog of his own instincts, with speech wrung out of him by the knowledge of a birth behind and a death to come. The speech carries the electric charge of the situation. And the obscure creative anguish that lies behind Thomas’s work is not so very different from that which lies behind Spinster and Incense to Idols. I began writing about this book in the Grigson style (it is a habit I slip into easily from hearing the sound of my own voice too often when I talk for money to Adult Education classes) and then repented my error and burnt the bad words. I will not count the adjectives, check the cross-references, compare it adversely with Flaubert, in the college staffroom game of eeny-meeny-miny-mo. No, it may be misshapen, but it is a genuine birth. I will enumerate the things I think Sylvia Ashton-Warner has managed to do in this strange, makeshift, crude, showy, sophisticated, magnificent book.

She has thrown away the best part of Spinster, the intricate classroom relationship of the woman teacher with her Maori kids, and developed a new book from the cloudier part – the relationship of the woman teacher to the men in or out of her life. I do not suggest that Germaine de Beauvais is the same character as the heroine of Spinster. She bears the same relation to her prototype that the fully fledged butterfly does to its horny pupa. Where thepage 448 spinster schoolteacher has no mask but the brandy bottle and a knowledge of music, Germaine wears the mask par excellence: brandy and music certainly, but wit and courage and youth and the full resources of the make-up box as well.

It is in the creation of Germaine’s Mask-Self that the author shows her finest subtlety. I think the critics who have tagged Germaine as nymphomaniac are totally mistaken. A man’s love means, for Germaine, his belief in her Mask, her magical totem; and the Minister baffles and frustrates her above all by his refusal to believe in it. Coition, when it occurs, is an aid to Mask-worship, never vice versa. The clue is given clearly in the title of the book.

In a way, the author has spiked the critics’ guns in advance, by the ruthless simplification of letting Germaine tell her own story, with no back-chat from the bystanders. At no point do we see her through the eyes of her lovers, friends or acquaintances. But supposing the Minister, Brett Guymer, had kept a diary, and noted down –

Friday the 13th. Called on Mrs Jones. At least she calls herself Jones, though her real name is de Beauvais. A Minister’s life can be tough. She met me all dolled up and seemed to want to entice me into bed. Potiphar’s wife without a husband. Her trouble is brandy, hysteria and too much introspection. Grief at the death of her husband, perhaps? Unpromising ground. Must be charitable to the stranger within our gates. But hysteric cases are very difficult. Help me, Lord, to shoulder this cross also . . .

It would have smashed the fascinating subjective web of Germaine’s meditations as a flowering shrub is smashed by a boulder. The author has chosen the right course. We see Germaine’s world solely through her own eyes. The profound validity of the novel lies in its subjective truth. The creative monologue is Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s natural medium, as it is Henry Miller’s or Samuel Beckett’s, and while she could perhaps polish it more, she would be a fool to abandon it.

It would be unwise, though, to consider the book a study in abnormal psychology. Certainly Germaine does not resemble the vegetable sheep and whimsical nonentities so dear to the N.Z.B.C. But her amorality does not seem to me to amount to any real abnormality. She tends to reject the Reality principle as a peculiar and obstructive creation of the masculine intelligence. This is not new. One can imagine Eve’s original conversation with Adam – ‘Adam, dear, the apple tastes lovely. I have felt much more at ease with myself since I swallowed it. If you really loved me, you would take that prim look off your face and have a bite too. I know it’s good; and no intellectual guff will convince me otherwise . . .’. There is no doubt a Germaine in the heart of even the best-behaved suburban housewife. One cannot quarrel with the author of Incense to Idols for her thorough exploitation of such a basic theme. When Germaine has procured an abortion, or stolen another woman’s husband, she says in effect – ‘It’s all right because it’s me that’spage 449 doing it’ – and subjectively her view is sincere, though objectively erroneous. Since the narrative is subjective, it would falsify the account if Germaine were unduly self-critical.

The Mask is the central creation, Germaine’s lifework; and I suggest that it is an entirely normal feature of female psychology. It is noticeable that none of Germaine’s boyfriends speak to her without at least a minimum of courtesy; and while such forbearance is not likely among the Lotharios of New Zealand society, it is subjectively correct, since discourtesy would imply disregard for the Mask, and Germaine would suppress the knowledge of any such event as unbearable. Furthermore, though her affairs are frequent and tangled, she never makes direct reference in her narrative to the act of coition itself. Such decorum would be true to character, since coition is the one point in a love affair when the Mask is most in danger, from the grating of conscience and above all the sense of being dishevelled and not wholly mistress of the situation.

Germaine, as we all do, warps reality to fit the pattern of her strongest desires. As a result she is the only complete character in the book. But what a character! We have become used to the rogue male as commentator in the New Zealand novel (Sargeson, John Mulgan, Davin, Cross) and here is the rogue female commenting on life behind the woollen curtain. Germaine is a French exile who settles in a New Zealand town. It could be Hastings. I do not think the objective identification of the character or the place is of much importance; though the academic boys will probably spend all their bullets on that target. Within the limits of the interior world of the heroine one can accept her self-identification with the symbolic city of Babylon and the nature-god Baal. Her fascinated and tragic pursuit of the non-conformist Minister is seen wholly in her own terms of reference. He too must be fascinated: he must accept the Mask as the true key to her personality. He may of course be repelled, by the threat to his brittle purity. But the third alternative of charitable indifference is unthinkable to Germaine. She is a practising solipsist. The only Power which she recognises as greater than herself is situated in the Church Puritan and its Spokesman. And this Reality principle is inimical to her very life, since she would be forced, if she accepted its domination, not only to recognise herself as a being subject to spiritual laws, but also to demolish the Mask, her adored second Self. In a sense she is the woman-who-tries-to-seduce-God; and her failure is her catastrophe.

Incense to Idols expresses in dramatic form an Outsider’s comment on New Zealand society. It is suitable that the comment should be made through the mouth of an ex-Parisian. The Kiwi, stripped of his feathers, is seen through her eyes as a most ungainly bird. Brett Guymer, for example, is a typical Hawke’s Bay steer, a small-town Gideon who derives his spiritual strength from the confusion of inhibition and virtue. Germaine is captivated, poor girl, by his mellifluous preaching voice. He is in fact a prophet of the samepage 450 calibre as Ibsen’s Brand, leading his congregation from their safe fiord towards the ice-fields of transcendental moralism. In the country of the blind the one- eyed man is king. He is able to dominate the lives of others to an alarming extent. I do not think that Sylvia Ashton-Warner exaggerates the danger of the situation. A false answer, for Germaine, proves more disastrous than no answer at all. A man truly skilled in spiritual direction might have been able to help her; but such men are found rarely, if at all, among the Guymers of this world.

The minor characters – a boy drunkard, a violent musician, a pillar of the Kirk who does not mind sleeping with Germaine while his wife is in hospital, a local doctor – make their contribution to Germaine’s life-pattern. They rarely step out of their places in the dance. Their conversations are perhaps too often set pieces. But I must stress finally the strong element of wit and satire which saves the book always from incoherence and puts a skin on what the author has to say. I raise my hat to her. She has given us the fullest, clearest, most precise document of a woman’s interior life to appear yet in New Zealand literature.

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