'Life Which Is Spent in a Kind of Limbo'

A reader has taken my suggestion that she read the fiction of the English writer Francis Wyndham (1924-2017), and reports she’s enjoying herself. “I see a little Henry James in his stories,” she writes, “but he’s really not like anybody else.” Exactly right.

 

Wyndham’s writing career was peculiar. In his late teens, when he was invalided out of the army after contracting tuberculosis, he wrote the stories that make up Out of the War but was unable to get them published. Only in 1974, after working in publishing and journalism, were the stories published as a book. In 1985 he published Mrs. Henderson and Other Stories, and two years later a brief novel, The Other Garden. All are splendid books, charming, funny and haunting – the best English fiction I have read in years. New York Review Books published The Complete Fiction in 2009. In a 1988 interview with Alan Hollinghurst, Wyndham says:

 

“In a way, the theme of those books and of the early stories is a side of life which is boring and vacant, but which was rather dramatised by the fact that the war was going on. People like myself were immobilised in one way or another. So that’s a ready-made paradoxical situation. I think what I’ve always wanted to do in fiction is to write about that – the hours and hours and hours, the enormous proportion of life which is spent in a kind of limbo, even in people’s active years. It seems to me that isn’t sufficiently celebrated in fiction. The obvious reason why it isn’t is that it’s so terribly boring.”

 

Readers often equate fiction with what we might call “adventure” or "action" – crime, war, aliens, even marriage, the prefabricated conflicts of literature and life. But think of Proust (yes, I know, German zeppelins over Paris in the later volumes) and James (marital betrayal in The Golden Bowl). No one thinks of those novels as action-packed or escapist. War hovers silently over Wyndham’s early stories but his focus is on seemingly average, undistinguished people doing nothing heroic or supernatural. Like at least a few other writers, his people are recognizably like ourselves – holding down jobs, flirting, going to school or the movies. There’s a vast reservoir of human experience out there that seldom gets touched. Even the commonplace can be fascinating, depending on the writer's gifts. I have previously quoted an excerpt from an email the late literary critic D.G. Myers sent me in May 2013, a little more than sixteen months before his death from cancer:

 

“I’ve been thinking how much of life is absorbed with ‘small cares’ that seem overwhelmingly important at the time--or at least disabling--which are forgotten in the sequel: the headaches, stomach aches, the traffic jams, the appointments which are late. Do these take up the majority of our time? They almost never make it into literature, and in fact literature seems an unstinting propaganda on behalf of the dramatic occurrences of human life. I may try to write about the ‘small cares,’ but I'm not sure yet what I want to say.”

 

You'll find this in Anthony Powell’s A Writer’s Notebook (2001): “One of the most difficult things to realize when one is young is that all the awful odds and ends taking place round one are, in fact, the process of living.”