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Max Porter’s Lanny and second works: Porter, M., (2019) Lanny London, Faber & Faber

If every reviewer of Grief is The Thing With Feathers, Porter’s (2015) debut work, praised, but was amazed too, by its innovations in the genre of writing delivered and inventiveness of form, they also loved its ‘lightness’. There were many references to ‘wings’ to indicate its flightiness amid the sombre themes of bereavement, separation, loss and transitory psychosis. The metaphor is the given of the book, its use of Ted Hughes’ development of the theme of the Crow was part of its narrative as well as its visionary mediation of grief and transitional relationships between parents and children.

The bereaved Dad is writing a ‘wild analysis’ of the Crow poems, attempting in doing so to remove himself from what he sometimes thinks of mere biography, and especially reference to the marriage of Hughes and Plath. The book gets reviewed and ‘the review’ by Dad on p.107.

At its heart is a confrontation with transition in life and with life as a transition and facing up to the idea, which gets called ‘Moving On’ (p.99 Dad). It’s a ‘wild analysis’ exactly in the terms defined by Freud. As Oxford Reference [online] has it:

to denote amateur attempts at psychoanalysis based on ignorance or misunderstandings of its fundamental ideas, such endeavours being characterized by attempts to rush the process of analysis through premature interpretations conveyed to the patient without proper working through and without regard for resistance and transference.

https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803122507573

The ‘thing with feathers’ is precisely such ‘a deeper, truly wild analysis’ (p.107) in which the amateur psychoanalyst with his plethora of interpretations and wild dreams about their consequences is Crow himself.

On pp 29f., for instance, Crow is clearly cast as an inadequate analyst who deserves the cooking the abused boys give him at the end, at least in Crow’s wild dream. He leaves the novel only when the family learn humour and the lightness necessary to write about and place the absurdities of Crow’s guesses about their grief. Crow has poor methods in dealing with intrusions from a past pain, which take the form of a demon in a story he tells on p.54ff. His method is a violent ‘disassembling of the demon’:

And Crow stands thrilled in a pool of filth, patiently sweeping and toeing remains of demon into a drain hole.

Porter (2015:57)

Now this first book is a rich thing but I spend some time on it here to look at some similarities in the thematic content of Lanny. The amateur dismemberment of the children’s past by Crow is suggested too in Jolie’s (Jolie is Lanny’s mother) response to the death of a hedgehog in a painful early sequence of Lanny. She dismembers it. You can’t avoid the idea that to dismember is to dis(re)member – a strategic forgetting.

… I kept on going. I rhythmically chopped and poked at the hedgehog until it seemed likely that I could rinse it away. … I remembered passing the abattoir in the small town where I grew up, where blood-pink water would run down the street marbled with occasional shocking crimson. … It took two more kettles and ten more minutes jabbing through the drain to erase all trace of the thing. It was gone.

Porter (2019:62f.)

It’s all there. The violent cutting into pieces and the drain. It is as if Porter’s second work is still hacking at a theme that has not been satisfactorily exorcised or exercised in his first. A drain is a central locus in Lanny, among its many fantastical endings that defy any real attempt at psychological or other closure. Indeed I think Lanny is the better book because it refuses to close everything up by just banishing the demonic  features at its heart. In the second book the ‘transitional object’ (to use Winnicott’s term) is not Crow from the earnest readings of a young poet – Dad or Porter himself – but a folkloric entity based not only on nature but on the cyclical vision of excremental rebirth. His name is ‘Dead Papa Toothwort’.

We know that it was the early loss and death of Porter’s father rather than his mother that was the psychological germ of his first work, and that a father (Dead Papa) of immense symbolic importance is at the centre, rather than that fragile creature called Robert who is Lanny’s biological father. To go further with this however would be our own ‘wild analysis’.

And we learn that this father Toothwort (p. 200) is also a child – he is the focus of changes in and between lives that just continue through time all of the time, whatever the fate of feeble units of mortality.

… in his various skins, wearing a tarpaulin gloaming coat, drunk on the village, ripe with feeling, tingling with thoughts of how one thing leads to another again and again, time and again, with no such thing as an ending.

ibid:9

It is like the force of Gawain and the Green Knight rather than Ted Hughes’ Crow, however forceful the latter is. Even critics who liked this work more than the first tend to dislike its fantasies of endings. But they are the point of the work – a piece that is all change and is not closed by a comfortable, or even uncomfortable, closure point at ‘the drain’ where all reading stops. It is a tremendous step forward for an artist I believe.

And the other innovation is the decision to make this novel, for so I prefer to see it, as a more reflexive instrument for the telling of stories, in which many origins of fiction get mixed up, including the effect of vicious gossip and rumour feeding off thin readings of the meaning of human sexuality and wild analysis of their presence (pp.140f.). That is the story of the central gay character, ‘Mad Pete’, an older male artist who will be thought even by the police, despite hard evidence to the contrary, to have disposed of Lanny as a result of a supposed paedophilic obsession linking sex and death, beds and graves.

And then the word Pete started bursting like blossom on the branch of the evening. the word Pete rising up aberrant and abnormal

+

Duh, Mad Pete’s just tucking him into a shallow grave, LOL.

ibid:118

Lanny and Pete are the core of the novel’s reflections on artistic making and its response to a world of universal mutability. Lanny learns to draw from Pete and his drawings are restored and corrected by Pete in one of the final teleological fantasies of the novel – a drawn man is disassembled and re-assembled (pp. 181ff.).

But Lanny also writes in his book stories of unclear sequence that yet evolve into meaning – even meaning about the origin of stories and their assembly into wholes. In this, he is like Papa Toothwort, made of bits of rubbish and found shapes – waste – that is transformed into design. Hence the central symbol of Lanny’s bower, which his mother finds him actively still constructing in something that might be a dream:

The walls come up around them, Lanny packing and fiddling, tweaking, knotting and tutting, whistling and chatting, ….Lanny is darting in and out between her and Toothwort, adding snail shells and chalk, fitting nuts and hard berries, dead insects and interesting twigs into every possible gap ….

ibid:192

Toothwort has already described this work of Lanny’s: ‘Everything stitched together for the good of the overall design, for the depth of the welcome.’ (pp190f.) Within it Toothwort keeps on decaying, his smell though is itself the cycle that falls into excrement and out again into birth: ‘He smells like natural truth, like sex and death’ (ibid:193). But that smell is redemptive, isn’t it?

The patterns that Lanny weaves so erratically and that are so difficult to perceive also work at the level of language, not only language as semantics and syntax (but these are inventively used too) but even its formal appearance.

These are Toothwort’s poems, which are in fact also Lanny’s poems, made up from otherwise wasted phrases and stories from the community that are not capable of sequence and sometimes make each other unreadable (p. 89). But an earlier example will suffice because the Guardian review provides a photographed form of it:

This is a thing made up of rags of speech: circumlocutions in shape as well as content, a kind of ‘fancy netting’ (to quote one of its phrases), that is like the stitching of Lanny’s Bower later in the novel. It invokes a community of conversation – often literally about nothing  but quotation from mundane discussion (what we say to each other when doing nothing much (‘solar panels my arse’)).

Such talk is often insulting – things that show the acme of disrespect individuals in bourgeois communities can have for each other – like the backpacker who is as much a ‘twat’ on his return as on leaving. That very phrase loops around much else. These phrases are fragments but heard and rewritten. They seek some kind of network – however criss-cross. At the core of this paragraph, if we can call it this, is ‘trust him with your kid’, one of the conversations that make the story and cast onto innocence (and the accidental contingency of events and things) nasty teleologies of distrust. The latter are ‘senses of ending’ that imply our deepest fear about the links between sex, death and dirt. That story is the assumed issue that Pete’s sexuality will inevitably involve a threat to innocence, especially innocent boys.

In this personal blog review I’ve tried to show how a second work gets deeper into themes that are already beautifully, but differently, treated in a first work. I end feeling tired and not satisfied with having really said what the true joys of this wonderful work are. However, I feel I’ve enabled in myself a first stage of understanding my response to this novel that future readings will deepen.

Steve