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An invitation to the examined life


This is Claude Houghton a selection of whose novels have been re-published by Valancourt Books part of whose mission is to allow over-looked authors a second run at being noticed and (re) appreciated.

For it is undoubtedly true that Houghton was appreciated in his time (the1930s-50s) most especially for his early novels where psychological insight and a sense of metaphysical inquiry unfolded against a background of mystery. He was praised by such as Graham Greene, Henry Miller and J.B. Priestley and, I think, now having read two - 'I am Jonathan Scrivener' and 'This was Ivor Trent'  https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2019/08/who-is-jonathan-scrivener.html deservedly so.

Ivor Trent is a novelist who on the cusp of starting a new work tells everyone that he is going abroad to write but, in truth, goes to a lodging house in Chelsea, where he keeps a quiet upstairs flat. It is, he finds, the only place he can write - a 'superstition' that proves self-reinforcing. On his way there, however, he encounters a mysterious figure by the Embankment whose countenance throws him into confusion. He arrives at the lodgings on the point of collapse and falls into delirium.

This fact reported in the next day's newspaper brings Rendell, a successful mining engineer, who has read one of Trent's novels and felt strangely moved by its contents, to reside in the lodging house out of a lively curiosity to understand the author and his current malady.

A now familiar trope unfolds where Rendell is visited by, and becomes involved with, several of Trent's acquaintances - all of whom are somehow affected by his new state - and a contradictory picture of Trent begins to emerge. Was he a saint or a devil? A brilliant reader of souls or a confidence trickster? Who is Trent and why do people harbor such varied perceptions of him? These varied perceptions being both filtered through their individual and different psychologies and, it is implied, by Trent's own willed difference in response.

Houghton is obviously fascinated by the notion that we adopt myriad masks as we address the different people and contexts in our lives. Our name is Legion! Yet too is there a common core, a singular identity that each person possess if they would only look at themselves in the right way, balance the competing personalities and typologies into a coherent whole?

As the narrative unfolds, knowledge of Trent appears to recede the more information about his relationship with others accumulates. What can be believed by second hand report?

Nothing much, the denouement suggests, when Trent reappears by his own hand, as it were, in a written text to Rendell that seeks to set the record straight and describe 'Ivor Trent' to his inquisitive 'follower'. This device, Trent's own didactic autobiography, is perhaps less successful than the more embodied implication of Jonathan Scrivener in the lives of others found in that novel. Nevertheless it has the import of providing quite a different picture to the one that either Rendell or any of the other characters have compiled (or loosely thrown together in the urgency of life).

Into this picture is, also, thrown the metaphysical question - because the figure Trent encountered on the Embankment is, in his conviction, a person from the future, a new being, whose difference from ourselves is hauntingly both a challenge and a terror.

It is a fascinating device that throws into relief all the foregoing because it asks a simple, but not simplistic, question - what would a coherent self look like? What would genuine freedom look like? Are its sources simply psychological or coming from yet something other, a metaphysical dimension? Houghton is one of those figures - Priestley would be another - who find themselves asking what are we to believe if both conventional religion and morality have collapsed for us (it is often implied in both cases by their traumatizing experience of the First World War - one of the characters, mockingly asks another here, "Do they think they can go back to 1914?").

But, unlike, say, Aldous Huxley, Houghton does not appear to go beyond asking the question and implying that there might be a solution (and a dimension to the human where such a solution lives); thus, there is an element of too easy repetition. 'I was Ivor Trent' is not so much a continuance of where Jonathan Scrivener left off as simply a different form of asking the real question - who am I and what does it mean to be free (and look at all the ways I might distract myself) but I expect the reader must go elsewhere for 'an answering activity' and that leaves a certain air of disappointment lingering. This said to be so reminded of the question in such an engaging form and capture a moment of suspension into which the question neatly falls and invites you to a more examined life is, in itself, no mean achievement.

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