The Pammy premise....
Jonnie Comet
23 June 1999
‘Merit should be chiefly placed
In Judgement, Knowledge, Wit, and Taste;
And these, she offer’d to dispute,
Alone distinguished Man from Brute.’ –Vanessa
More boldly than is usual I have been initiating discussions of a
new work in progress from my hand; a novel with the working title of Pamela;
or: Virtue Reclaimed. Deliberately to be
like Richardson’s
1740 Pamela; or: Virtue Rewarded, probably my favourite book of all time, it is
a fictional diary of a young lady ‘in service’. Mine is an updated version of
the story, where instead of the cruel manipulating master whom she must
forgive, my Pammy has a much more insidious problem within herself. The story, then, shall deal with how she
comes to face her own temptations and rise, like the Mr B of Richardson’s book,
to a new level of propriety, respectability, and Godliness.
The heroine’s father abandoned the household when she was two and
her deceptively celibate mother forced her own man-hating precepts upon her all
her life. The narration starts just as
Pammy, an effervescent prodigy with 170+ IQ, and the sweet, good-natured Vicki,
the youngest of a good Catholic family and Pammy’s childhood ‘blood-sister’ and
soulmate, come to America from Australia as exchange students to the Cs in
Delaware. Inspired by the recent
acquisition of a Macintosh computer, which seems to accompany her everywhere,
Pammy has begun a very detailed, honest, and startlingly introspective journal
which may apparently be her life’s one great opus.
The Cs (you never hear their last name, as in Richardson’s book, in which the diarist
endeavours to keep ‘Mr B’ anonymous– as if she could) are the most enigmatic
part of the story– a very contradiction in terms. The father, not known as John
Paul Caprici, is an old character of mine of whom I wrote in the 1980s and then
gave over but have since resurrected as an adult. Born on a Wednesday, he is ‘full of woe’–
Pammy will call him ‘the man of sorrows’.
He was a member of a rock band on Long Beach Island in the late 1970s
but lost a beloved fiancee in a tragic plane crash in 1980 and, distraught,
sold off the beachfront property intended for their honeymoon cottage, broke up
the band, made a few enemies in the process, and fled to London to immerse
himself in music-production work and a rakish lifestyle. Following the death of his father he met Lisa
in New Jersey,
who is an angel. Eager to leave his
spate of recklessness behind, he retires to a gentleman’s country life at a
very nice authentic Colonial-style spread on the bay beach at Lewes.
Lisa embodies everything good and Christian about women, and as
the mother of the two little girls whom Pammy and Vicki are to mind as live-in
exchange students, becomes a very good influence on the heretofore ill-guided
Pammy. Vicki feels homesick and departs one December leaving Pammy alone, who
chooses to not return to her mother but to attend high school and then UD in Delaware. Her mother, acknowledging Pammy’s reasons,
recognises that her daughter’s academic prowess and literary demeanour would be
better served here than at UQ, where at home ‘everyone’ goes (Queensland has a mundane English literature
programme), and signs her over as ward to the Cs. Gradually the humble, dutiful, scholarly
Pammy achieves a somewhat ambiguous relationship in the household, something
akin to a younger sister to Mrs C, an older one to the girls, and a niece or
almost daughter to Mr C; she admits often that she feels like she’s living with
her ‘faery godparents’.
The conflict Pammy faces is over her own sexuality. Seduced by a
deceitful female school-friend at age 14 she has never been fully confident
since. She readily recognises that
having been intimate with the Catholic Vicki, who was too remorseful with guilt
to allow it to continue, was morally wrong, but it is like an addiction that
she cannot help and it undermines her self-worth. Over the second third of the story she
develops an abject fear of being ‘found out’ and losing the respect the Cs have
for her, and the trust they have in her with their two little girls. In at
least one way however she is far stronger than she believes. She embodies my own view that most of what
liberals call ‘sexual preference’ is just that– a matter of choice rather than
a natural (as in genetic) determination.
Whether the inclination is adopted freely or under subtle, chronic
conditioning, as on an immature intellect, is not the issue. Pammy insists that
if properly motivated, she can leave behind her corrupt ways and ‘go
straight’. Therefore she repels all
‘politically-correct’ labels for herself, even when reflecting her innermost
thoughts in the privacy of her own diary.
Whether this is out of philosophical nobility or denial she cannot say,
but despite her profound haughtiness in writing the reader will surmise Pammy
is deluding herself.
Lisa contracts some unnamed blood disorder in the summer of 1998
and dies unexpectedly in October. Upon
her deathbed she tells the weeping Pammy, ‘I have always believed you were
capable of much more than you have done.’ As she labours on in mourning Pammy
slowly realises she had never really deceived Mrs C, who probably always
suspected her inclination and yet as a true Christian chose to love her anyway,
in ways Pammy’s own mother never could have.
Inspired by the faith of a friend she had long underestimated, she must
rise out of the moral mire of her sinful existence and endeavour to deserve her
keep, both by the decimated C family and by the Shepherd of us all.
Therefore the real core of the story is the tedious household
arrangement during Mr C’s widowhood, when Pammy, set up with her own apartment
in Newark, attends UD with 15-18 credits per term, carries a GPA over 3.7,
drives the 75-mile distance between Lewes and Newark every Wednesday afternoon
to make dinner and help the little girls with homework, and then returns each
weekend to do washing and other chores.
Mr C takes up quarters in the attic to be away from his wife’s room
which is kept intact until he must enlist Pammy to clear out her wardrobe. Under the weight of what’s been lost, Pammy
reports, ‘I would rather have spent the same two hours in a nuclear reactor.’
The departed Lisa has now become a saint to her, and though she dares not say
so directly, she wishes to emulate her as a Christian and woman in general. The
fact is that she does, much more than she realises.
The most obvious and yet troubling criticism of the premise of
this love story is the hasty assumption of many that no ‘normal’ man could
endure in a household with a ‘nubile’ young woman for long after his wife’s
death without ‘hitting on her’. In fact
this is exactly what Pammy’s mother cautions her about, prompting Pammy to
promise to the heartbroken Mr C– precisely as Jane Eyre promised Rochester– ‘I would stay
with any friend. I will stay with
you.’ But I submit that the belief in an
inevitable, irresistible consummation of two people thrown together in
adversity is too low a view of human potential.
The great problem with modern society is that sexuality has come to the
fore and is generally claimed to be the most important influence on our
lives. This belief is Romantic– the idea
that one’s own personal perceptions and sensory satisfaction can be more
important than absolute truth or absolute good. But I am no Romantic. I am only concerned that so many seem to be.
My criticism of the world today is that people have grown too
trusting of what we see and feel round about us, which is anti-intellectual and
subjects the God-given power of Reason beneath the perceptions of inherently
flawed physical feelings and senses.
Modern people are no longer interested in the ‘irrelevant’ thought
processes of the past, if they are even aware of them. As a scholar of literature from before the
Romantic period I can attest that, whilst in 1999 it may be implausible to
expect that a young single woman and an unattached, lonely man can coexist in a
household, observing all prior rules of propriety, without their quickly
developing a sexual or at least overtly passionate premarital relationship,
before 1799 the story I am writing would not only have been perfectly
plausible, but the public would have demanded it develop precisely as I do
develop it.
It is logically and morally dangerous to claim that the
capacities of human nature have changed so much since ‘then’, that we know so
much more about mankind now, that we were naïve and clueless ‘then’ but are not
now. St Paul says we see in a mirror dimly–
meaning all of us, in every time of life, in every time of man. Not one of us has any better clue about the
true capacity of human nature than another.
This is where so many go wrong– they claim, for example, that the Bible
reflects a way of thinking then, but is irrelevant now. That claim is Romantic– it assumes that what
is right for one man or one age may not be right for another, totally
disregarding the possibility of an absolute truth. What God has deigned is universal– it cannot
change. What must change is the way
mortal and mutable Christians view it, so that we can be more in line with how
God would have us think. In this way pure Romanticism is anathema to true
Christianity.
Emerson would justify Pammy’s transgressions in saying that so
long as she felt personally satisfied by it there could be no judgement of
‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in being intimately involved with her childhood friend. Fortunately I have read enough chivalric and
moralist literature to have something to base my arguments on. After Richardson’s 1740
masterpiece in which Pamela reforms her rakish master and marries him
respectably, the public raved over it and demanded a sequel just to have more
of it. Preachers praised it as the epitome of Christianity put to good earthly
use. The Catholic poet Alexander Pope
boldly stated that priests could do far worse than to base sermons on the
openly Protestant Pamela– and many took the advice. Ben Franklin published it in 1744 as the
first novel printed in America.
Austen, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, and even Hardy were profoundly influenced
by it; but by the time Romanticism had done its full damage at the close of the
19th century only the most moralistic literati cared a whit for it.
What I am attempting is to take a major problem of our time– the
inane argument over whether any alternate mode of sexuality or morality can be
personally prescribed and justified– and put it into a context which leaves
little room for doubt. Pammy has always
been a good little girl and has always gone to church and with the Cs, at least
at first, she merely follows what she’s been taught. Like many mainstream Anglicans (a minority in
Catholic Queensland) she takes it all for granted. But following Mrs Cs death
and searching for some clue about what to do, she discovers the Bible
again. Passages like ‘You are the light
of the world’ and ‘Whosoever will not take up his cross and follow me, cannot
be my disciple’ haunt her– she knows there is guidance in there somewhere. So she explains to Dani, her eager young
‘protegee’ (as it were) in Delaware,
that she will end their intimacy cold-turkey– and does. With the understanding Dani’s blessing she begins a single-minded
crusade to do nothing for herself and to be the best nanny she can be under the
circumstances, caring for the two little lambs who have lost their mother,
taking every example of their mother she can.
She denies herself in order to serve others. She loses half her friends who don’t get it–
but recalls Helen’s words to a sceptical young Jane Eyre: ‘If all the world
hated you, you would not be without friends.’
Deliberately, the very ironic part is that Lisa is 33 when she
dies– the perfect angel, the one without blemish, the one whom everyone should
look to as a paragon of virtue, who essentially says to Pammy on her deathbed,
‘Love one another, as I have loved you’.
Despite all her book-learning, Pammy will only accept the full gravity
of the symbolism when a full year afterwards, at nearly 20, she accepts Mr C’s
serious, sober proposal of marriage, which he actually suggests as an expedient
way to keep her in the family (and country) after she has become to him the
best teammate and the most loyal of friends.
But they both know better. They
are of the same mind on so many things– but are also, after all, flesh and
blood too. It is only that there are
procedures to follow for propriety’s sake.
In church that Sunday, as they anticipate speaking to the priest about
it, there is a baptism service and the whole concept of rebirth and being
‘sealed as Christ’s own forever’ comes back to Pammy like a boomerang from the
Outback. In a sudden revelation she gets
it, and there is a very moving moment when she begs the priest for a penance–
having learnt too much from going to Vicki’s church, no doubt– and his only response
is to read to her about Jesus at the charcoal fire from Acts and then say that
her penance is to ‘feed the lambs’. Pammy knows who the lambs are. She has been serving them all along.
I put everything I know into this story. It is part Jane Eyre, part
The Sound of Music, part Emma, and partly Swift’s Cadenus and Vanessa. It has begun to appear to me more eminently
publishable than anything else I’ve written, if only for the incredible breadth
of its market (I should love to publish it in installments in some mass-market
periodical) and so I am not really working on anything else at the moment. It is a modern Christian fairy tale, in which
the good people are obvious and no-one’s flaws are so awful that they cannot be
corrected and forgiven. Pammy ends up
marrying the only one suited for her in every way, a gallant and respectable
gentleman of means, the only male role model she has ever known, and her very
best friend, in a largely intellectual union of two kindred souls separated by
23 years, but the admiration and affection between them is sincere and there is
no doubt they will be well matched till at last one of the loves of Mr C’s life
will outlive him.
The character of Pammy is a deliberate paradox. Truly beautiful, she gets called ‘Barbie’ because
she looks like a bimbo, but her beauty is juxtaposed with a formidable
intellect– as with Vanessa in Swift’s comic epic mentioned earlier (which Pammy
quotes from in fact). Young men hate her– they cannot get past her looks to
care about what she thinks and so misjudge her.
When they discover how brilliant she really is they can’t reconcile such
stirring beauty with such daunting brain power and so are at a loss as to how
to deserve her. She goes through high
school and college in the US
like Frankenstein’s poor monster, out of place, out of time, an 18th-C
Absolutist in a 20th-C Romantic world.
People ask me why I made her so physically striking– it’s simple when
you think on it. In the modern sensory
world, for a woman to be both intelligent and beautiful is a liability, even a
curse. Either attribute alone would be
easier to take. But as Pammy writes in a sophomore sociology thesis, men are
primarily visually stimulated and judge women first on their appearance. As a man myself I have studied this at great
length and have come to be able to put mere looks aside– honest. It is true that many women are pleasant to
look at, but I don’t care. A
beautiful-looking woman is like a work of art– you can take it home and admire
how it looks, but you can’t have a satisfying conversation with it. And good
conversation ability can last a lot longer than than good looks.
Therefore Pammy is fodder for the modern Romantic male-centred
misconception that worth is equal to looks– that is, appeal to the senses rather
than to the intellect is most valuable.
Pammy appeals both ways and is actually the very best ‘catch’ a rational
man could wish for. The sad thing is,
there are precious few rational young men. Thus she represents another of my
long-standing beliefs that the dumbest thing a modern girl can do is marry an
immature idiot her own age with an earring in his nose. The only truly sensible
choice of husbands for an intelligent young woman is an adult who is already
established in his station in life and comfortable with being himself. This is only what everyone believed up till
that damnable book Wuthering Heights and the whole
Romantic movement in fiction, when emotion took over logic throughout
society. I lament that, for its negative
aspects are still with us and show no signs of abating. This is why I study the 18th century, because
it was the middle period in which the good aspects of Passion and the good
sides of Reason were melded successfully.
Such a perfect blend is not likely to ever happen again– more to pity.
All I am trying to say is that I haven’t made anything up here
that’s implausible. This book is founded
on all the precepts I have learnt in school, studied on my own, and lived
myself, for all the years I’ve been thinking.
It is not intended to be scholarly, but realistic– the character at
times nearly bores the reader with what appear to be trivial details (a trick I
got from Dickens, Austen, and even Billy Joel).
What she does not say is as important as what she does. She is struggling and occasionally admits it,
but what she is struggling about does not occur to her till nearly the very
end. She is human and fallible and knows
it, and her failings are as authentic as her strengths. Above all she realises the power of free
will, which she must accept and harness in order to follow the will of
God. She does not know the eventual
outcome and eventually stops asking God to tell her, leaving it all to Him and
reconciling herself to whatever fate He determines for her. When at last she can do this completely, she
will have earned the best reward imaginable.
I’m sorry if this is trite and boring; but I can’t abide the
‘film noir’ genre of literature.
Hemingway does not impress me with his tragically hopeless, permanently
scarred anti-heroes. I think the entire
premise of that Naturalist, amoral outlook is dangerous to impressionable
minds, especially today. It must be remembered that all literature by
definition has a teaching component, whether admitted or not by the writer,
because the net effect of all reading is that the reader comes away changed in
some way from having read it– the same as the definition of education. My primary concern is how that reader
changes. A good story is not the goal–
that is Romantic, to please through perception.
The good story is the means to the end, which is an important
lesson. Failure to accept this on the
part of the writer has led to exactly what we have now– an entire culture built
on gratifying false ‘needs’ as perceived by flawed people and forgetting more
profound issues of life. Any book which seeks to gratify the reader in the
‘here and now’ at the expense of a valuable lesson for posterity abandons the
morality of mankind for a quick quid for the writer, which is, of course,
socially irresponsible. Any writer that does so is therefore part of the
problem, no matter how materially
wealthy he becomes.
This is the belief of mine I have long wished others to
understand, though often I worry that no-one ever will. Yes, write– never fail to write– but always
place yourself beyond the work, not only into the chair of the reader, but into
that of the critic in posterity. What
has your book taught? What effect does
it have beyond the first few readers who say they like it? Why is it worthy of being remembered after
you cease to collect royalties on it?
What will a professor say about it in 200 years? For as sure as you and I are sitting here the
printed word will endure and come back one day to affect someone in a very
different time than ours. Literature by its whole definition is not intended to
be transitory or ‘for the moment’. If
all you mean to do is please an audience at a sitting and make 6.95 into the
bargain each time, you had better hold a lecture up at Loveladies, tell your
story, and forbid notes, rather than to ever take out a pen or switch on your
computer. The whole premise of writing
it down and publishing it is to make an impact on posterity. Otherwise, why bother?
* * *
epigram - Merit should be... Vanessa -
J Swift, Cadenus and Vanessa; 1713
