Educated at Shrewsbury
School and Balliol College, Oxford, Francis King (1923-2011) began
life from a position of privilege, but a spell of agricultural labour
as a conscientious objector during the Second World War did
differentiate him from young men destined for an easy passage into
the Establishment. So did his homosexuality. That said, by developing
a career with the British Council, working for them in Italy, Greece,
Finland and Japan, he retained access to the upper reaches of British
society throughout his life. Although the Establishment has never
been too keen on artists, even the fact that he was a novelist did
not prevent this. King would eventually become chairman of the
Society of Authors, president of International PEN, a fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature; and he was awarded the OBE in 1979, the
CBE in 1985.
The Man on the Rock
(1957) was the seventh of his novels to be published, one of them
under a pseudonym. (By then he had also published a collection of
poems.) The emotional core of the novel is provided by its central
relationship between the American Irvine Stroh and the book’s Greek
narrator, Spiro Polymerides. Irvine is a repressed homosexual, and
Spiro is a bisexual who is not completely unwilling to take things to
the next, physical step. In that sense, theirs is a homosexual
relationship, albeit an unconsummated one. It is precisely the fact
that they have not slept together that gives their bond both its
tension and its weakness. In an early passage, Spiro says: ‘It’s
odd that he and I never slept together; everyone in Athens was
certain that we were lovers, and since he knew that, obviously the
fear of what people would say could not have deterred him.’ Spiro
is not averse to the idea of a sexual relationship with the older
man; and, indeed, he has had a certain amount of relevant experience:
‘If he had wanted me to sleep with him, I suppose I should have
consented: after all, when I was down and out in Salonica, I slept
with men far less attractive, to whom I was under far less of an
obligation.’ The sense of obligation is the point: he feels Irvine
ought to be getting more than his does for his side of the bargain,
and this makes him uncomfortable: ‘Yes, I could have slept with
Irvine if he had wanted it; I think I should have preferred to do so,
for then I should not have felt myself under so much of an obligation
to him.’
As is often the case
in King’s novels, love is shown as involving a good deal of
voluntary self-abasement. This is especially so when an older person
of either sex is in love with a younger. King also generally regards
love as being a condition conducive to the manipulation of one
partner by the other. Money is often involved. The relationships he
depicts often end up in a state where each partner feels imprisoned
by the other. (Spiro: ‘I feel as if—as if I were suffocating. One
seems to be living in a prison all the time.’ Helen: ‘Oh, no. I’m
the one that’s in a prison, I’m the prisoner.’) For just a
moment’s freedom, a quick breath of air, lies have to be told,
recriminations endured. Moments of piecemeal reconciliation are
mistaken for the restoration of intimacy. Copious tears are shed, as
if required by way of proof. But proof of what? Not love itself so
much as what W.B. Yeats once called, disapprovingly, ‘passionate
intensity’. Throughout the book, while he narrates it, Spiro is
living off his wife who, although heavily pregnant, has to go out to
work to keep them both. Yet it is he who feels the more trapped by
this arrangement, wasting his days in their shabby home.
The book’s
historical context is that of the Cold War and the decolonisation
movement. Greece is being closely watched by the Americans in the
aftermath of its civil war. And mention is made, from time to time,
of the developing crisis of armed struggle against British rule in
Cyprus. (Independence would be achieved at last in 1960.) While
trying to annoy Irvine, Spiro affects to be concerned that ‘people
are being shot and hounded and whipped’, but such concerns about
public events are apparently only skin deep.
I have two
reservations about The Man on the Rock: its narrative voice
and the content of its second chapter. Having worked for the British
Council in Salonika and Athens, King had garnered a decent education
in Greek history and culture. But he shows no appreciable effort to
make the narrator, Spiro, sound convincingly like an uneducated Greek
for whom English is a second language. Neither the diction nor the
syntax offers any concession to the creation of this character, who
merely sounds like an Englishman of the author’s own background.
This is very lazy writing. I do not mean to suggest that the whole
book should have been written in broken English, but neither should
his English be so full of the idioms of the English Establishment; or
not without some explanation for Spiro’s facility with his borrowed
tongue.
Also, Spiro looks at
his own country as if he had recently arrived there from from
Kensington, and at his own countrymen as if he had never been one of
them. For instance, speaking of his own brother, he says: ‘Stelio
threw himself down on to the bed which we had shared for as long as I
could remember, and lay there, silent, in the thick woollen vest and
underpants which Greek peasants wear even in summer’. And when the
peasant boy Dino excitedly puts on a nylon shirt, Spiro says:
There was something at once ridiculous and touching in the contrast
between the heavy, sun-burned, muscular, peasant body and the vulgar
powder-blue cocoon which appeared to have been spun in sugar around
it: something ridiculous and touching too in the Greek’s childish
preening, as he gazed either down at himself or at his extended arm
with a smile of idiotic beatitude on his features.
This problem arises
almost every time Spiro uses the words ‘Greek’ or ‘Greece’.
My second main
reservation about the book concerns its second chapter, which opens
with a sequence of atrocities about which it is hard to care, even
though it happens to the family and home community of the narrator.
This deadness of effect is not merely because Spiro himself is numbed
by the events but, structurally, because the reader has not yet heard
enough about him to care much about what happens to him, let alone to
family members to whom we are introduced even in the very moments of
their deaths. This chapter would have served the book better if it
had been moved further into it, perhaps as a flashback to explain and
add nuance to Spiro’s character. By that point, at which the reader
would be familiar with him, it would be easier to sympathise with
what once happened to him and his family. As the book continues,
there is little sign that Spiro’s wartime experience has a
significant bearing on what he does after it. These are not
insuperable obstacles to the reader’s enjoyment, however.
The narrative is
rounded off with a moral crackdown. The Cold War era saw many
clean-ups carried out by the Americans or, on their behalf, by their
allies, on the pretext that the Soviets were systematically
undermining the West with acts of moral subversion, intentionally
leading to the blackmailing of insiders into handing over crucial
information. Surveillance was carried out by both sides for the
slightest sign of an opportunity of this kind. Homosexual men were
thought to be especially liable to entrapment, and were therefore
especially likely to be spied on by their own governments. Every now
and then, arrests would be made—for sexual transgressions far more
often than for espionage, which actually had its main roots
elsewhere.
Speaking of his friend
Jock’s mother Helen, with whom he starts an affair, Spiro says:
I was astonished that a woman who knew so much about everybody did
not know that I stayed in Irvine’s flat. Or was she being
disingenuous? Weeks later I asked her, and she replied: ‘Oh, I’d
heard gossip about that, of course. But I never believed it. It never
struck me that Irvine would do anything so foolish. Especially since
these purges have started.’ It was typical that Helen should have
heard about the purges long before Irvine or I or any of our American
acquaintances.
By the end of the book,
such a crackdown has indeed been carried out by the Americans:
there had followed a general ‘clean-up’: a marine was sent off to
Naples for ‘psychological treatment’; an army major disappeared,
almost overnight; two or three Greek clerks were suddenly without
their jobs at the Embassy...
But moral panics tend
to work on great cities only cosmetically. The Americans may have
cleaned up their act to some extent, or at least to the extent of
satisfying their masters back in Washington D.C., but Athens is still
Athens. It still plays host to what Spiro calls ‘that strange
life—predatory, furtive, feverish—which quickens in all parks at
twilight’.
Francis King once
acknowledged his ‘profound, if resigned, pessimism about the
world’. It is this outlook that he applies, so unsparingly, to the
relationships he portrays in The Man on the Rock. The
single-mindedness of the approach is impressive. By absenting himself
from the country of his own upbringing—the Britain in which
novelists were expected always yo concern themselves principally with
matters of class—and by writing about other people, from a range of
cultures, in another land, he felt able to address one of his pet
topics, the corruption of love, without compunction.
At the heart of the
story he tells is the heartlessness of Spiro Polymerides. Once
exploited himself, Spiro has become an exploiter in his turn,
meanwhile forgetting that there might have been better ways of
behaving. If he survived a tragedy as a child, the nature of that
survival must be called into question. His lack of emotional
intelligence turns out to be the scab over a wound, after all. King
is not in the business of making excuses for his more unpleasant
characters, but he does give us the material with which to diagnose
their moral weakness. And King’s sceptical view of love’s
possibilities has the incidental effect of highlighting the futility
of political interference in personal morality. The authorities—any
authorities—can purge anyone they choose, whether because of the
gender of his sexual partners or the kind of dive he frequents; they
can impose an approved course of psychiatric rebalancing; they can
even (as so often happened in that period) apply electrodes. But in
the Francis King universe no amount of conformist interventive
treatment can reduce love to a benign condition. Moral or not, it
hurts. That is why he takes it so seriously.
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