James Lasdun in Italy is best known for writing The siege, the story from which Bernardo Bertolucci drew his 1998 film. It speaks of a pure and limitless love that an English pianist feels for an African girl who works at his home. And, perhaps – but less has been said about it – he is also remembered for a 2013 memoir entitled Give me everything you have, in which, at the antipodes of The siege, love does not even begin, and an initial spark of desire gives birth to an impressive progression of hate. And since it is a memoir, the target of all this hatred is James Lasdun himself, who tells in the first person the persecution he was victim of for years at the hands of a former student who tried in every way to destroy his life. This is to say how, over time, Lasdun has truly covered all the excursion allowed when dealing with the subject of the other: from giving without conditions to tormenting without scruples; and certainly, reading this latest novel, The afternoon of a faun (translated by Vincenzo Mantovani for Bompiani), one thinks that the persecution suffered by his experiences in the field of pure love was more useful for him.
Let’s face it right away: we are at the heart of the problem – by problem, meaning the theme today so central to the impact on the present of remote sexual behaviors whose nature is now impossible to establish with certainty. Certainly there is no love in the vicinity of those behaviors: there is sex, yes, but suddenly, after twenty, twenty-five, thirty years, it becomes necessary to establish whether that sex was really consensual or it was not rather the result of coercion. There is no more topical issue than this: at least judging by the attention paid to it and by the consequences it produces almost every day, this (of the sexual violence perpetrated or suffered in the past, I mean) seems far more topical than the topic sexual violence short. In certain circles – cinema, publishing, journalism – it even seems to have become the most important theme of all, especially in America – even more than Vietnam, now, even more than the Holocaust. And the element that makes it so exciting, we are all aware of it, represents further violence to the detriment of those who have really suffered violence, but in the face of such a time delay it cannot fail to exist: it is uncertainty.
Lasdun therefore goes straight to the heart of the problem and stages from the first page this exciting mechanism: the narrator, a middle-aged Englishman transplanted to America, a literature teacher and occasionally writer, is set apart by a longtime friend of his compatriot who has become a celebrity of investigative journalism of a mange huge that hit him: a former assistant of his is trying to publish an autobiographical book in which she tells of being raped by him more than thirty years earlier. The narrator, who also knows the woman, also English, and who had even been attracted to her in his youth, when she frequented her mother’s living room, is not called out of this story as it would have been wise to do but, on the contrary, he gives himself to the confidences of his friend, he gives him the advice that is asked of him, and this automatically sets his conscience in motion, since we have entered the most delicate playing field of all, where disputes, once they become public, lead disgrace and certain affliction a little at all, and no truth. Indeed, there is only one truth, one, certain and incontrovertible, and Lasdun reports it immediately, on page 28, in a line of the narrator during one of the first conversations with his friend: “There are no grounds for an objective judgment , which means that the burden of believing weighs entirely on those who believe in it ». The burden of believing. The onus of belief. It could be the title of the novel. It could be the title of every article, comment, investigation, study and trial on this issue, from MeToo to cancel culture, from the Woody Allen case to the Blake Bailey case – cases that exploding in public today, after so many years, have caused enormous damage to people and even to the works that are located in the even more peripheral surroundings of the explosion. Equidistance, a basic legal principle in modern legal systems, no longer exists: whatever we end up believing, at the end of any path, however rigorous, makes us accomplices of violence or slander.
That’s enough. We said what the playing field is. We said about the two contenders, and we have said of the narrator taking the role of referee. The development of the novel should be left entirely to the reader’s discovery, also because Lasdun is a master of short stories, as well as a poet, and his writing advances with truly exemplary precision and traction, without digressions but also without neglecting the details, without manipulation and without reticence: only this “burden of believing” postponed from page to page by the investigation private activity carried out by the narrator, who inevitably, given the links between him and the protagonists of the story, corrodes his impartiality on both sides, sucking him into damage. We observe instead that the recourse to this narrative convention, that of the friend who tells, belongs to the great English tradition, and has in Strange case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde his point of maximum expression: a fact so enormous that to tell it you have to distance yourself from its protagonists – just enough to be able to resist its shock wave but not enough not to be deeply disturbed by it. And it is Stevenson himself, in an essay entitled A gossip on romance, to trace the path that Lasdun seems to follow from the first to the last page: «The right thing should end up in the right place; then another right thing should follow; is […] all the circumstances of a tale should respond to each other like notes in music. The various threads of a narrative sometimes come together and create an image in the warp; the characters occasionally run into certain attitudes – among themselves or with respect to nature – which mark the story as an illustration. Crusoe who recoils in front of a footprint, Achilles who shouts against the Trojans, Ulysses who bends the great bow, are the culminating moments of the legend, which everyone has forever imprinted on their minds. Other things we can forget; we can forget the words, however beautiful; we can forget the author’s comment, even if it was perhaps ingenious and truthful; but these epoch-making scenes, imposing the definitive mark of truth on a story and filling, in one fell swoop, our capacity for enjoyment, we adopt them in the depths of our minds so that neither time nor events can cancel or diminish them. the impression. This is therefore the plastic part of literature: embodying a character, a thought or an emotion in an act or an attitude that deeply affects the mind’s eye ». Lasdun proceeds exactly in this way, only this time the plastic part of the literature becomes even liquid, gaseous, because the unforgettable image, this scene that “marks the epoch”, is not there. In its place there is an irremediable absence of truth, a black hole, which makes this novel as disturbing and difficult to assimilate as Stevenson’s masterpiece thanks to the famous transformation.
It remains to mention the context, that environment of journalism and New York publishing so excited by these issues, liberal and politically correct, that it floats in the background of the story. The novel ends close to the 2016 presidential election, the last scene is set during a party that takes place on the occasion of the first televised confrontation between Trump and Hillary Clinton. The spectacle we witness is disgusting in the eyes of sincere Democrats gathered in front of the TV, since it includes a near physical attack by Trump against his rival, and yet – with a final stroke of genius – Lasdun does not make them fall into despair and into fear that that show should have produced in them, but, on the contrary, it portrays them in the depths of their patrician dullness, of their inability to get their eyes dirty until they see what is really happening in the country. After such a confrontation, this is the assumption, Donald Trump could no longer win the elections, and “the nightmare of his possible presidency slipped mercifully into the realm of dodged bullets, averted disasters”. Despite the shocking end of the story linked to the accusations against his friend, of which he has just learned, the narrator lets himself be infected by the reassuring thought suggested to everyone by what has just been broadcast, according to which “the arc of the true story he would have continued to describe, in his imperfect way, a curve towards justice. ‘ That is, in a context in which we went ahead blindly, crushed by the “burden of believing”, the common belief said that Hillary Clinton would win the elections, and this – these are the last three words of the novel – “was a consolation” .
On 11 May the Book Club dedicates a web meeting to him
Poet, writer, screenwriter, James Lasdun (London, 1958) made his debut as a novelist with The unicorn, released in Italy by Garzanti. With Bompiani he published The siege, Give me everything you havee Fracture. A The afternoon of a faun the online appointment of Bompiani Book Club is dedicated (Tuesday 11 May, 9 pm) with Beatrice Masini, director of the Bompiani division (to register, contact your trusted booksellers or bompiani bookclub@giunti.it).
May 7, 2021 (change May 7, 2021 | 13:11)
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