Household Ghosts: A James Kennaway Omnibus - James Kennaway Canongate Classics

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in his instability. Jock’s relationships with the novel’s two women characters – his daughter Morag and his mistress, the failed actress Mary Titterington – both founder on the rocks of male sexual jealousy, and their breakdown ultimately precipitates the events of the tragedy.

      Less straightforward are the not infrequent hints of homoeroticism which ripple through the text. It is present in Barrow’s repressed ‘love’ for Jock’s heroic past and Jock’s ritualised and theatrical final tribute to Barrow; it is present as farce in the parodic spectacle of the soldiers dancing with each other in the opening chapter, and it will re-surface as tragedy in a crucial episode in the novel, when Jock and Mary arrive at a moment of short-lived mutual understanding and redemption in the symbolic confines of her dilapidated theatre dressing-room. Mary’s agonised confession of her love for Jock contains the novel’s most candid allusion to the repressed sexual ambiguity which Jock is unequipped to acknowledge:

      He held her stiffly, and with hard lips he kissed her brow, by the border of her hair. He asked innocently, ‘Are you saying that you love me, Mary?’

      It was agony for her. ‘Jock, of course I am. Of course I am. Like any other woman that’s ever known you,’ she said and she looked up at him for a second. ‘And I’m no sure it isn’t every man, too.’

      He laughed at that. He tried to make it all a joke. ‘Here, here, now. That’s a very sophisticated sort of notion. That’s too complex for me.’

      Earlier, she has told him: ‘… it’s you that doesn’t see the half of your men’, in an exchange where she cannot decide whether Jock is ‘a child’, ‘a lovely man’, or ‘a bloody king’. Jock cannot see the other potential ‘half’ of himself, only the reflection of the ‘sad soldier’ reflected in the mirror in the couple’s final embrace. The sad soldier is conditioned through the military code to suppress the ‘lovely man’ through a ‘childish’ reflex to order and control the world as the ruler with blood on his hands. It is as much Barrow’s predicament – the other missing ‘half’ in the mirror in this psychologically and symbolically dense scene – as Jock’s.

      The subtextual gestures towards issues of gender and sexuality in Tunes of Glory suggest a prelude to Kennaway’s more direct approach in the subsequent novels, where decisive, and assertive, women characters suddenly occupy centre stage. Mary Ferguson’s tortured quest for fulfilment is at the centre of the classic Kennaway love-triangle in Household Ghosts (1961), the novel that reveals most about the author’s ambivalent perspective on his Scottish background and shows an increasing attraction to allegorical frameworks. The household in question is that of a decaying aristocratic Perthshire family whose fortune rests precariously upon the ‘ghosts’ of past disgrace and degradation: the shadow of widowed Colonel Ferguson’s past indiscretions, and his late wife’s lurid working-class past and alcoholic self-destruction.

      The combined legacies of myth-making and dysfunction haunt and control the destinies, and relationship, of son and daughter – Charles Henry Arbuthnot Ferguson, known, unforgettably, as ‘Pink’, and Mary, whose turbulent relationships with her impotent husband Stephen and her lover David Dow drive a spare and brittle narrative which contains some of Kennaway’s most taut writing, much of it in anguished and nervous dialogue. Once again, the plot centres on rivalry and self-deception. The central struggle is between the ruthless and self-confessed Calvinist scientist David, whose accusatory and amorous letters to Mary form a subsidiary narrative, and the strangely allied Pink and Stephen, for the love of Mary. ‘They christened her Mary. I cast myself, perversely, as Knox’: David attempts to drive a fissure between Mary and her complex loyalties to the nursery world of parody, mimicry and private language to which she and Pink escape in denial of their destructive behaviour, and their probable incest (implied with extreme subtlety), and to her collapsing marriage.

      The effect on the self-effacing Stephen is abrupt: he attempts suicide. It is in the sophisticated portrayal of Pink’s gradual disintegration into dipsomania and drying out in ‘a baronial nut-house’, however, which is the novel’s triumph. As his emotional hold on Mary weakens following their father’s death and the fabric sustaining Pink’s dependency collapses, the writing fluctuates between increasing extremes of tortured parody and barely repressed mania, culminating in Pink’s final bathetic invocation of Rousseau’s last words as he is driven off to the nursing home: ‘T-tirez la whatsit, Belle,’ he said. ‘La farce est jouée.’ Pink is a brilliantly original creation, and he is also the author’s most consummate fictionalist in a novel whose principal concern, paradoxically, is the deadly power of invention itself.

      While Household Ghosts wears its archetypal trappings of Anglo-Scottish tensions lightly, it amounts to a disturbing vision of a Scotland so inimical to transcendence that imaginative escape is both inevitable, yet inevitably thwarted. Pink’s, but also Scotland’s, ‘predestinate tragedy’, the novel finally warns, is to be doomed to the plight of ‘the permanently immature’. Only in Mary’s final ability to settle for compromise does this bitter novel offer a glimmer of light.

      In a wilfully accelerated and frenetic career, the next seven years saw Kennaway produce a further six novels, a play, and numerous notable film screenplays. He had completed a fourth draft of the novella Silence just days before his death. It is a shocking and startling coda, and so compressed and pure a narrative that one wonders how the author could possibly have followed it. The scale of the work belies the enormity of the subject it tackles: racial violence in urban America. Kennaway’s bittersweet years in the USA as a scriptwriter were to find an extraordinarily potent artistic distillation.

      Silence represents the ultimate refinement of the author’s fascination with the dynamics of power. Larry Ewing, a mild-mannered white doctor, finds himself ineluctably drawn into a mission of self-appointed revenge following the ostensible assault of his daughter Lillian by a black youth. The deputation into the ghettoes of Harlem by Ewing, his son, son-in-law and professional associates goes disastrously wrong as a race riot erupts, in which his son, it is subsequently learned, is lynched. Suffering from a stab wound, Ewing flees and takes shelter in a dilapidated room, only to discover that he is not alone. It is inhabited by the near mythical, Amazonian figure of a dumb black woman – named ‘Silence’ – who first abuses, but then protects, contrary to her own prejudices, her traumatised captive.

      Kennaway’s fixation with entrapment reaches its peak. The confined couple develop an intense relationship by turns tender, violent and childlike, playing out a sequence of allegorical pairings as Madonna and child, Adam and Eve, Christ and crucifier. In the revelation of their shared humanity, Ewing’s fundamental beliefs and his very identity are challenged, to the point that when he discovers that Silence is implicated in his son’s murder, his love for her supplants grief and hatred. When their retreat is discovered, Silence assists Ewing to escape, but recognising the enormity of her sacrifice, he returns to attempt to save her from her martyrdom to the black extremists who attempt to crucify her. The couple are eventually discovered by the police, who ironically laud Ewing as the avenging white hero. It is when Ewing realises that the authorities intend to torture Silence into ‘talking’ that he commits the final existential act of grace: a symbol of the revelation that ‘it is only in our impossible love for each other that we can defeat the carelessness of God.’

      In a fashion which is strangely reminiscent of Tunes of Glory, the novella makes sophisticated use of symbolic polarities which might, in less artful hands, appear groaningly ponderous – in this case, the narrative’s shifting patterns of allusions to the colours black, white and red, whether

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