Velvet Underground
"The Warlow Experiment" by Alix Nathan
A book review
A
reward of £50 a year for life is offered to any man who will undertake to live
for 7 years underground without seeing a human face: to let his toe and
fingernails grow during the whole of his confinement, together with his beard.
Commodious apartments are provided with cold bath, chamber organ, as many books
as the occupier shall desire. Provisions
will be served from Mr Powyss’s table. Every convenience desired will be
provided
Herbert
Powyss, Moreham House, Herefordshire, January 1793.
The
premise of this novel would have been incredible, were if not for the fact that
it is based on facts which actually occurred. In an Author’s note at the
end of the book, Alix Nathan quotes an extract from the Annual Register for
1797 which describes the terms of the experiment more or less as reproduced in
the introductory quote and adds that “it appears that an occupier offered
himself for this singular residence, who is now in the fourth year of his
probation, a labouring man, who has a large family, all of whom are maintained
by Mr P.”
This
nugget of curious information is all the more tantalizing, because there
appears to be no account of the aftermath of this real-life experiment. Nathan, intrigued by the narrative
opportunities of this episode, wrote two related short stories: An
Experiment, Above and An Experiment, Below, reflecting,
respectively, the point of view of the ‘scientist’ and ‘subject’. These stories eventually formed the basis of The
Warlow Experiment, in which a wider canvas allows the author to enlarge her
cast of characters and dwell longer on the historical backdrop.
We do
not know the motivations of the real-life “Powyss”. Nathan’s is a recluse who prefers the company
of his books and music at his residence, Moreham Hall, to the idle entertaining
which seems to be expected of him. With no
family, a frosty relationship with his servants and just one more-or-less
like-minded friend, his only dream is of being recognized in scientific circles. This is what he sets out to do with his
unique experiment. Shockingly, he does
not seem to take into account the fact that, his subject being a human being,
this would raise ethical issues. Powyss’ dogged determination is not tempered
with enough humanity to make him realize that the consequences of his actions
could be tragic. This seems to dawn on
him only when he gets to know better Mrs Warlow, whom he supports during the
course of the experiment. Not unexpectedly, he becomes attracted to this
woman, so different from himself in class, background, education and temperament
– this, ironically, makes him question the correctness of the “experiment”
whilst only complicating an already explosive situation.
Nathan
has drawn a compelling story out of the bare bones of the Annual Register
account. The three-part narrative arc of
the novel is satisfying (although some of the scenes, especially the final one,
feels contrived) and I particularly admired the different voices and points of
view which are very well brought out. The
contrasting ‘narrators’ obviously reflect the origin of The Warlow
Experiment as two short stories, but the novel also includes the voices of
other characters, including Mrs Warlow.
The characterization is complex – in this respect, one of the figures I liked best was the housemaid Catherine, whom we see developing from a frankly
rather unpleasant young woman to a steely, determined and big-hearted figure.
The
novel also works wonderfully as historical fiction. The late 18th Century was a period
of philosophical and scientific inquiry but was also – possibly for the same
reasons – a period of social turbulence, with revolutionary ideas sweeping
across Europe. This backdrop serves to highlight
the ‘social’ themes of the book.
Indeed, the experiment brings out the inherent
injustices of a classist and patriarchal society. Powyss seems to expect that a ‘gentleman’ of
his background would be interested in becoming a hermit for science. He does not stop to consider that the only
person who might wish to give up his liberty for a ‘pension’ of fifty pounds
would likely be someone more financially desperate. Despite Powyss’s attempts at being humane, the
nature of the experiment itself turns Warlow into a dehumanised subject, and
only serves to accentuate the divide between classes.
Moreover, it is suggested that, at all levels
of society, it is women who suffer most: the educated and enlightened Powyss, his
‘progressive’ friend Fox, the firebrand
Abraham Price with his dreams of equality – all become selfish and rapacious
where women are concerned. At the same
time, woman are portrayed as the instigators of hope and redemption. In this
respect, this is a worthy addition to a number of recent historical novels with
a feminist streak, including just to mention two I read in the past year: Michelle Paver’s Wakenhyrst and Susan
Fletcher’s House of Glass.
Kindle Edition, 288 pages
Published July 4th 2019 by Serpent's Tail
 |
| Image of Wilton House, 1810 (British Library website) |
_______________________________________________________________________
One of
the luxuries provided by Herbert Powyss for his prisoner’s delectation is a
chamber organ. Such organs were quite
popular in both sacred and secular context from medieval times up to the 18th
Century. Unlike their larger
counterparts, they had a degree of mobility and could also be used in smaller
spaces, which meant that they were an instrument quite often found in stately
homes. This brief video gives us a taste
of the chamber organ at Kew Palace.
In the
novel, the chamber organ becomes a symbol of the folly of the experiment. Powyss, in an idealistic flourish, furnishes
the subject’s quarters with the type of objects he would enjoy. It is a magnanimous gesture, but one which
underlines how out of touch he is with reality and with the stratified society
he was living in. John Warlow, in fact,
has no idea what to do with the organ or how to play it:
‘Couldn’t
never do that.’
‘Mm.
Well, you can sing, can’t you? You could pick out the notes of a tune with one
finger.
I
sings in the Dog. The others’d laught at this!...looks
away sheepish.
It is
hardly surprising that when things go awry, the chamber organ is one of the
first things to bear the brunt of Warlow’s frustration.
The
piece in the Kew Palace video is the Sarabande in D Minor by George Frideric
Handel (1685-1759). Born and trained in
Germany, Handel eventually travelled and worked in Italy, before settling down
in London, becoming a naturalised British subject in 1727. Handel was a favourite
of the royal family and the nobility, writing music for royal occasions and
setting up opera companies for the performance of Italian opera, particularly
for the higher classes. Eventually, he
moved on to the composition of what would become a particularly “English” form
– the oratorio. These works, the most
famous of which is the Messiah, combined elements of the German and
Italian styles with English texts and a novel use of the chorus. When Powyss is demonstrating the organ to
Warlow, he plays a few bars from See the Conquering Hero Comes, from one
of Handel’s oratorios – Judas Maccabeus.
Here’s a full version of the piece, including the introductory
recitatives
Handel
was just one of several foreign composers based in London at the time. Another was Giovanni Bononcini
(1670-1747). At one point, the rivalry
between the two composers was so great (and publicly known) that it inspired an
epigram describing them as “Tweedledum and Tweedledee”, the first known use of
the names which would inspire both a nursery rhyme and the characters in Lewis
Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.
The
scores on Powyss’s chamber organ included, apart from Handel and hymns, works
by Johann Christian Bach (1735-1782).
J.C. Bach was the great Johann Sebastian’s eighteenth child, and the
youngest of his eleven sons. He followed
the same career trajectory as Handel, moving first to Italy, then to the
English capital, where he became known as “the London Bach”. Born well after Handel and Bononcini, his
music is clearly in a later galant style. Here are, quite appropriately, pieces he
wrote for organ and orchestra.
Classical
music has often been criticised – sometimes rightly, often wrongly – of being
an elitist affair, the domain of middle-aged white men. A book review is not a place to be drawn into
controversies about diversity in classical music. Suffice it to say though, that these debates
are far from new. And there’s hardly a
better example of this than John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, a “ballad
opera” in three acts dating from 1728.
The germ of inspiration for this opera came from Jonathan Swift who, in
a letter to Alexander Pope, toyed with the idea of “a Newgate pastoral, amongst
the thieves and whores there”. Their
friend Gay developed the idea into a satire on the upper classes, Italian opera
and the English public’s fascination with the genre. The work’s protagonist is no Greek god but
Macheath, a captain of a gang of robbers and the characters are all drawn from
the city’s low life. As for its
melodies, they are arrangements of well-known folksongs and, ironically,
popular Handel arias – in other words, tunes which John Warlow might well have
tried to sing…
No comments:
Post a Comment