Gotham Diary:
Enduring Love
7 May 2014

One thing leads to another: I read Nina Stibbe’s Love, Nina, a collection of letters that Stibbe wrote to her sister when she was nanny to the two sons of Mary-Kay Wilmers.

Mary-Kay Wilmers is the editor of the London Review of Books. The London Review of Books operates a bookshop (or perhaps it’s the other way round) that served as the set for a scene in Roger Michell’s Enduring Love (2004), a movie that I saw a long time ago.

The recollection of this scene kindled a desire to visit the bookshop, which I did on my last trip to London, in 2012. It is in Bury Place, close to the British Museum.

Now that I’d not only been to the bookshop but learned all sorts of fascinating things about Mary-Kay Wilmers (she is dry and droll), I wanted to see the movie again.

But when the DVD arrived, so did the novel, by Ian McEwan. I hadn’t read the novel, either when it came out or later, which was very odd; but there was an explanation. I was still angry with Tina Brown for excerpting a particularly lurid bit in The New Yorker. Out of context, the violence of the scene was shockingly gratuitous; the whole point seemed to be to make the reader jump. Why I should take this out on Ian McEwan, I don’t really know. Interestingly, the movie itself did not make me want to read the book. The movie made a very muted impression on me, actually — as indicated by the fact that what I remembered most was the London Review Bookshop. When I saw the movie the first time, I don’t think I really believed that there was such a thing.

Well, of course I remembered the beginning. Everybody knows the beginning of Enduring Love. (A man dies in the attempt to restrain a helium balloon with a little boy in its basket.) But as I read the novel, I found that I had no idea how the story ended. So I read Enduring Love in a day, in a blaze of grim suspense.

(Needless to say, there is no London Review Bookshop scene in the novel. I wasn’t expecting one.)

***

What struck me early on was the tone of the novel, which is largely narrated in the first person by a science journalist called Joe Rose. His idiom is contemporary, but his manner and pacing go way back, to the “accounts” of travel and exploration that began to appear in the Eighteenth Century, in which the detailed pursuit of accurate description is lightened by wide-eyed wonder.  Joe’s absolute faith in his own reliability as a narrator (and, of course, as a witness) sparkles like a lake on a sunny day. He regards the doubts of others as perverse, as if there could not possibly be a good reason to question him. This offended obstinacy, of course, drives his friends to doubt not only his story but his sanity. Meanwhile, reading along, we have to ask what sort of games the virtuoso novelist might be playing with our credulity. Enduring Love, a briskly-told tale to begin with, is therefore something of an infernal machine.

But, if there is no putting it down, that’s very much because Joe’s account is not only richly comprehensive but also morally sound. Here he is, walking up to the body of the man who has just fallen hundreds of feet from the end of a rope drifting from the rising balloon.

Not until I was twenty yards away did I permit myself to see him. He was sitting upright, his back to me, as though meditating, or gazing in the direction in which the balloon and Henry had drifted. There was a calmness in his posture. I went closer, instinctively troubled to be approaching him unseen from behind but glad I could not yet see his face. I still clung to the possibility that there was a technique, a physical law or process of which I knew nothing, that would permit him to survive. That he should sit there so quietly in the field, as though he were collecting himself after his terrible experience, gave me hope and made me clear my throat stupidly and say, knowing that no one else could hear me, “Do you need help?” It was not so ridiculous at the time. I could see his hair curling over his shirt collar and sunburned skin at the top of his ears. His tweed jacket was unmarked, though it drooped strangely, for his shoulders were narrower than they should have been. They were narrower than any adult’s could be. From the base of the neck there was no lateral spread. The skeletal structure had collapsed internally to produce a head on a thickened stick. And seeing that, I became aware that what I had taken for calmness was absence. (25)

Is it right to call this naive? And if so, with regard to what? To the self-conscious awareness of everyday psychopathology, perhaps, that might motivate a sophisticated observer to attend more to the propriety of approaching a corpse than to its description.

The novel is not about that corpse but about the Joe’s encounter with another man who, appearing out of the blue, as they all did (as did the balloon itself), to try to prevent the accident, seems unable to walk away afterward. At a strong moment, Joe smiles at this fellow, and that warmth engenders, he soon suspects, an inappropriate, possibly psychotic response. The man, Jed Parry, attaches himself to Joe, much to Joe’s dismay. In the course of the ensuing story, Jed makes three claims over and over, beginning the moment he arrives at Joe’s side by the dead body. (1) He is responding to Joe’s offer of love, (2) he represents the love of God, and (3) Joe is no longer free to ignore him. As Jed’s subsequent harassment becomes insupportable — he loiters outside Joe’s flat, he leaves strange messages on his answering machine, and he sends Joe disturbing letters — Joe rummages through his science lore and realizes that Jed is suffering from a rare erotomania known as de Clerambault’s Syndrome. That’s all well and good, but, because Jed times his appearances so that only Joe sees him, and because Joe makes the mistake of erasing the messages, Joe’s wife, Clarissa, gradually comes to believe that the whole business is sheer fabrication on Joe’s part.

Enduring Love is tense with narrative ironies. As a successful author and journalist working in a field noted for its “objectivity, Joe is cannily aware of the role played by persuasion in the success of his writing. But when the subject of his report is his personal situation, and not some body of facts for him to bone up on, professional shrewdness takes a back seat to an almost self-righteous ingenuousness. Believing himself to be under attack by a madman, he also believes that the rest of the world ought to respect this belief as conclusive. Such candor is the very opposite of convincing, and the dawning realization that no one is going to help him intensifies the appearance of a mania. When Joe decides that he needs a weapon, the reader cowers.

I think that it was the name “Clarissa” that first tipped me off to the novel’s debt to the English literature of Jane Austen’s day. Clarissa is very beautiful, and very loving, too, but she is not a goddess; she makes mistakes, and to some extent they’re the mistakes that a modern professional woman would be likely to make. After Jed’s illness has come to a crisis and Joe has been vindicated, Clarissa cannot simply repent her lack of faith in her husband. No, she has to blame Jed on Joe, by claiming that, had he handled the matter differently, Jed’s madness might have been defused without violence. There is no reason to think that this is true; Clarissa is simply yielding to the cant of emotional counselors and other problem solvers. She is also resisting the full recognition that Joe came to her rescue at the climax. That he came to her rescue by acting alone (as heroes always do) constitutes an offense in itself — one smells the resentment of “male chauvinism.” The real question is whether this modern marriage can survive the irruption of a very old-fashioned evil.

Now I can watch the movie. But I already wish that it were Vera Farmiga, and not Samantha Morton, playing Clarissa.