(Front cover of original 1958 edition (left) and restored edition (right)
The Rack, by A. E.
Ellis (Derek Lindsay)
Restored Edition, published by Ashgrove
Publishing/Zephyr Books, UK, 2016
Peter Anastas
“There
are certain books we call great for want of a better term, that rise like
monuments above the cemeteries of literature: Clarissa Harlowe, Great Expectations, Ulysses. The
Rack to my mind is one of this company.”
– Graham Greene
Some
books remain with us. Even after
subsequent readings they amplify rather than shrink our understanding of
them. One such novel is The Rack, published in London by William
Heinemann, Ltd., in 1958.
I discovered the 1961 Penguin Modern Classics
edition of The Rack in its
characteristic orange and white jacket in the bookstall of the railroad station
in Florence, Italy. It was December,
shortly before Christmas, and I was on my way to England. Opening the first pages, I learned that The Rack was a novel about a young
Oxford student and former captain in the British Army during the Second
War. I also discovered that the
protagonist, Paul Davenant, was suffering from tuberculosis and was traveling
with a group of British students to a sanatorium in the French Alps, where they
were to be treated under the auspices of an international student
organization. This brought to mind The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann’s novel
of life in a Swiss sanatorium. However, once I began to turn the pages, I
found myself in the hands of a far different writer from Mann: a writer whose
first sentences were as sharp and clear as the air his protagonist and I were
soon to breathe on our very different passages through the mountains.
I
had been ill during the unusually cold and wet Florentine winter. Though I felt well enough to travel, and
would by no means have given up my first opportunity to experience London, I still
felt feverish in the overheated train compartment I occupied, especially after
I began reading about the state of health of the British students making their
way to the mountains. Paul Davenant, who
was among them, was scarcely able to get around he was so incapacitated by the
disease he hoped to get some respite from in the French sanatorium.
I
was drawn equally into the obsessive routines of temperature taking and sputum
checking, as, having settled into sanatorium life, the patients shuffled from
their rooms to the service medical for
their x-rays. Reading further, I would
learn more about the array of interventions available to tuberculosis patients
at the time, each stage of which became potentially more painful and, all too
often, less effective.
By
the time we had reached the Italian-Swiss boarder I simply could not put the
book down. As novelist Alan Wall writes
in his superb introduction to this restored edition of the novel, for whose
important restorations he is also responsible, The Rack, “is the greatest novel of medical confinement in the
English language.” Even without coming
to that conclusion during my reading in the stifling compartment, I clearly
felt the sense of the novel’s projection of confinement, not only between the
walls of the sanatoria where the patients were confined, but also in the book’s
interconnected stories about several of the patients, many of whom represent
the major countries of Europe not long after the close of the war.
And
the war itself is not far from the confines of the hospital, or the lives of
its inmates. Each in some way, including
Paul, has suffered from the conflagration.
Paul, who saw combat as a captain, might well be suffering from
Post-Traumatic Stress as much as from the effects of TB. It could also be ventured that his physical
illness is a function of his depressed emotional state, which often causes him
to strike out verbally against the person he most loves and to express his own
growing self-hatred.
While
I concur with Wall’s discerning introduction that the subject is confinement in
all of its senses (one can actually feel claustrophobic reading about the
characters who spend their days in bed, or navigate the narrow hospital
corridors in shabby robes and slippers), I also feel that the trope of
confinement, along with novel’s multiple images of malaise, can be extended to
Europe itself after a war believed by many to have brought on the collapse of
the Old World order. In other words:
Europe has become the sanatorium and its people are now patients in an uneasy
post-war recovery. In fact, some, like
the Dutch inmate and fantasist, Delmuth, also have troubled consciences, which may well be emblematic of a general European guilt over the war and its exterminations.
Nevertheless,
Paul’s case is central to the novel’s development. He will learn that he is a very sick
man. We already know, and will learn
more, about his early life as an orphan, about his shifting residence from one
family member to another, about his having been bullied at a provincial public
school, and his underachieving years as an Oxford undergraduate, all
contributing to his depressive state, as does his physical illness. We will also learn that he is a reader, when
he is well enough to be; and that his preferences are for Stendhal, Dostoevsky
and Proust, especially Proust. One
wonders if these writers are not also the preferences of the novelist himself,
and if he is not signaling to us his influences in composing a novel that while
eminently contemporary in subject, tone and language, also pays homage to those
19th and early 20th century novelists of the grand subject—war, the conflict within
the human soul, and life in society as it etiolated (Proust), told by a writer
who had been an invalid himself.
Like the classics with
which it has been compared, The Rack
is one of those novels that continue to yield rewards upon each successive
reading. Subtleties of characterization
emerge, especially the dynamics among the doctors in charge of treatment, along
with the politics of the sanatorium culture of Brisset, the Alpine mountain
community where the sanatoria are located, and the conflicts among the patients
themselves. At the vital center of the novel,
whose narrative tensions can often feel excruciating, is the story of Paul and
the woman he comes to love and will sadly lose, the young Belgian patient
Michelle Duchene. Doomed by deteriorating health, their age
differences, and Paul’s diminishing prospects, yet alive to each other in the
ways only young people in love can be, their story, narrated in unsparing and
utterly unsentimental detail, takes its place among the great love stories of
contemporary literature.
Shortly after the publication of the
first British edition, Atlantic Monthly Press issued an American edition,
followed by a larger format Penguin Edition with a cover illustration from a
1926 painting by Ubaldo Oppi of three surgeons standing austerely in white
coats. The illustration itself is
reflective of the three often competing doctors, who attempt unsuccessfully to treat
Paul’s condition.
The new Ashgrove/Zephyr
edition restores 25,000 words from the original manuscript, cut by the book’s
first editor, James Mitchie, who hoped to present a novel in the
“existentialist” mode, in keeping with Continental fiction of the era. A decidedly existentialist cast to the novel
remains, even as restored, reflecting the underlying hopelessness and despair
in Europe after the war, growing anxiety about the emerging Cold War, and the
very real fear of nuclear holocaust.
Though these concerns may lie under the surface of the narrative they
are often acted out by the characters. It
is my belief that the restored edition presents the novel as Ellis/Lindsay
originally wrote it and would have wanted it to appear, in the same way that
the restorations to the texts of D. H. Lawrence’s major novels in the Cambridge
University Press editions give Lawrence to us undiluted and in all his narrative
and linguistic brilliance.
Alan
Wall’s judicious restorations present us with a more ample narrative, a deeper
sense of characterization, a comic spirit, often black but still bracing, and a
more discerning sense of place; for place itself, not only in the confinement
of the two sanatoria in which Paul becomes a patient, but also in the
surrounding mountains, and the town of Brisset itself, is as much a character
in the novel as are Paul and Michele, the other patients we come to know and
care about, and the attending doctors, Vernet, Bruneau, Dubois and Roussel,
whose bravado may often exceed what we view as their competence.
Then
there is the disease itself, barely able to be confined if not cured, even as
the new antibiotics, in the form of streptomycin, are beginning to be tried and
tested, only to discover that the subjects of the trials are often resistant
to them. Amply documented from the
author’s own suffering are the horrors of the other modes of intervention,
under oddly aseptic names like pneumothorax or plombage.
The
new edition itself is in an attractive paperback format, designed by its
publisher Brad Thompson, and illustrated with a front cover portrait that might
well be Paul Davenant himself, hand on book, eyes on the surrounding mountains,
the two poles of his life, inside and outside, confinement and freedom, the
life of the mind and that of his gradually diminishing body constantly
oscillating under his, and our, anxious gaze.
Derek
Lindsay (1920-2000), did not publish another novel during his lifetime, though
he is said to have been at work on a sequel to The Rack, and also to have written plays. While
one might have wished for more from this clearly major novelist, it is enough for
him to have written a single masterpiece.
(I wish to thank publisher Brad Thompson for
providing me with a copy of the novel soon after publication and for his
assistance in helping me to understand the extent, nature and importance of
Alan Wall’s restorations to the original text)
