The Snow Ball by Brigid Brophy
By Brigid Brophy, with a foreword by Eley Williams
224 Pages. Faber & Faber. $12.95.
Had I heard of Brigid Brophy before I saw the Faber & Faber re-issue of her 1964 novel The Snow Ball? I feel as though I must have; her name has a familiarity to it (though perhaps I was confusing her with her initial-sharing near-contemporary Beryl Bainbridge) and she was a long-time friend and possible lover of Iris Murdoch (though Iris Murdoch had so many long friends who were possible lovers that one needn’t memorize them all), and most crucially, The Snow Ball is possibly the finest post-war British novel I’ve read.1
Strangely enough, the post-war British novel has quite a large, unsettled canon. Along with Brophy and Brainbridge and Murdoch, the major names include Muriel Spark, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Comyns, Angela Carter, Penelope Fitzgerald, Olivia Manning, Sybille Bedford, Penelope Mortimer - and that is a list just of the female novelists born in the 1910s (or thereabouts), but even restricting ourselves to those parameters gives us a plethora of writers. From an American vantage point, there seems little in the way of a consensus of who are the best, who are the lasting novelists of the Second Elizabethan Age.
What puts Brophy’s The Snow Ball above what I’ve read of those other novelists (admittedly, I haven’t read a whole lot of those other novelists) is almost unbearably simple: the vividness of her characters and the quality of her prose.
First, the prose. It is a delicate mixture of immaculate, velvety sentences that can break into dry wit - British writing at its most exemplary. Here is a sampling, a description of the cherubim statues that adorn a large manor:
In other parts of the house they were made of stucco; or—like the big Cupid looking down the grand staircase—wood; or again, shrinking now in scale, porcelain. In porcelain they took on the alabaster half-translucence of sugar just touched by moisture. The half-translucence was a hint, like half-nudity: it hinted that something irresistibly desirable was just on the point of being dissolved on the tip of a tongue
Yet everywhere, in every part of the house, when you looked at them in detail, they were hideous.
These cherubim are decorations at an 18th century dress-up ball on New Year’s in the mansion of Anne, a wealthy woman married to a man only referred to as Tom-Tom (her fourth husband). Anne’s best friend, and the main character of the novel, is Anna. During the ball, Anna meets an alluring stranger with whom she has an immediate connection based on their choices of costume: she is dressed up as Donna Anna and he as Don Giovanni from Mozart’s opera. The two partygoers share a kiss, Anna runs away, and through several more small obstacles their courtship commences during the early morning hours of the first day of the year.
Adding to this cast are Ed and Ruth, two young lovers, and Myra and Rudy Blumenbaum, Ruth’s parents. This is a novel about love, and the four couples gives us a picture of first-time love (Ed and Ruth), love of convenience (Anne and Tom-Tom), love of a long-time stable marriage (Myra and Rudy)... and the love of Anna and Don Giovanni - a new love, but a love of maturity and middle age.
Anna is divorced and seems to be in her late 30s or early 40s, but these facts do not make her cynical or disillusioned. In fact, it is Ed and Ruth who are the much more cynical ones - they are not infatuated with each other, and they use each other almost coldly to gain experience. Anna, by contrast, is something of an erotic aesthete: her goal is not just a one night stand, but a brief, pure romance unburdened by the weight of her past. Her story is the reverse of Donna Anna’s: instead of her sexuality being totally outside her control, Anna initiates and dictates the terms of her tryst with Don Giovanni and cares little as to what the outside world thinks.
Like many a polished romantic comedy, the characters in The Snow Ball are almost too witty - their dialogue consists in the kind of back and forth which us mortals can only achieve at precarious moments.
“I’ve remembered where all the people must be. In the supper room. Anne said she was going to give them bacon and eggs and champagne.”
“The breakfast room, then.”
“The breakfast room.”
“Are you thinking of wedding breakfasts,” he said, “which aren’t really breakfasts, either?”
“Yes.” She looked at him. “Of Anne’s wedding breakfasts.”
For all their light-hearted banter, the relationship between Anna and Don Giovanni in The Snow Ball does have moments of tension - not spiritual torment, but more like the dissonance at the center of a work by Mozart. The conflict lies in the fact that Don Giovanni wants to know more about Anna, but Anna wants to remain anonymous. What motivates Anna to embrace secrecy?2 Maybe she realizes that romance is fundamentally a performance, an artifice, and the burdens of everyday reality can impair it.
Don Giovanni’s key quote in The Snow Ball is “Obsessive thoughts about death are in inverse proportion to the frequency of sexual intercourse.” Is The Snow Ball, in its lightness of spirit, its embrace of wonder, hiding something more sinister? Is it, when looked at in detail, hideous?
The secret to The Snow Ball may lie in its most entertaining side character, the Swedish musicologist Dr. Brompius, who is a lonely attendee of Anne’s new year party. He gives Anne and Anna a scholarly perspective on Don Giovanni, but his is a scholarly perspective full of philosophical and historical theories, and one that ventures to speak of music “without going into musical technicalities, which are so boring.” The Snow Ball is a great novel because to speak of it one must go into literary technicalities.
Reading Eley Williams’s introduction, I realized I had heard of Brophy: she authored a book entitled Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without - a book I have seen referred to here and there, but of which I had known little of besides the title.
A critic with a different intellectual pedigree than mine - and perhaps a more adventurous temperament - would here compare Anna’s motivations with Erica Jong’s concept of a “zipless fuck” - coined only nine years after the release of The Snow Ball.