By Margaret Kennedy
288 pages. McNally Editions. $18.00.
Some weeks ago, I reviewed Han Suyin’s Winter Love, the first book from the new publisher McNally Editions, which launched with the pledge to release “hidden gems.” Winter Love, I found, could in no way live up to that designation - it was a deeply flawed, highly forgettable novel. This, combined with the fact they were also publishing a book by David Foster Wallace (whose work cannot be described as “hidden”) made me worry that there was no truth to the ad copy that had accompanied McNally Editions’ launch.
Fortunately, Troy Chimneys, the 5th book put out by McNally Editions, is a novel that can be classified as little else but a hidden gem. A forgotten novel about a forgotten man, with an intricate form and antique style, it is full of small delights but is never flashy. The author, Margaret Kennedy was once fairly well-known for her novel The Constant Nymph, and Troy Chimneys did win the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (which tends to go a bit farther from the mainstream than the Booker Prize), but she seems not to have left much of a mark on the course of literary history. It is fitting, then, that the subject of Troy Chimneys is the life of a peculiar man who, for all his advantages and talents, cannot quite fit into the course of history.
Troy Chimneys is a novel of Regency England. Its main character is Miles Lufton, a country parson’s son who rises to become an MP and well-connected political figure. Long after his death, his papers are discovered by some amatuer historians: they include an autobiography of the most unusual type - an autobiography of his private, concealed life.
Specifically, Lufton divides his character into two, and gives each part a different name. In his public-facing life as a politician and socialite, he calls himself “Pronto,” after a nickname he had early in his career. Lufton only gives us a rough outline of the life of Pronto - it seems to have largely involved dull aristocratic formalities and byzantine political machinations. But for his private life - his concealed passions and desires - Lufton refers to himself simply as “Miles Lufton,” and it is the life of this Miles Lufton that we are given in the novel.
Another author would have made Lufton into a great poetic mind or esoteric philosopher who hides behind conventional social norms; or a more transgressive writer would have had him conceal a series of ghastly crimes beneath a genteel exterior. Kennedy takes neither route: instead, Lufton is merely a man who felt and thought and suffered like any other human being, but who, from his own failings and from the stifling norms of his era, was denied the kind of human sympathy - the recognition of selfhood in the eyes of others - that makes life worth living for most people.
And what, exactly, comprises the life of Miles Lufton? He has a few close friends, but he fails to establish any sort of lasting intimacy with them: one is a family friend for whom he has an extreme fondness but does not have a truly mature relationship with; another is a fascinating and very wealthy aesthete, but one who cares more about memorizing a sonnet than comforting a companion; and his truest friendship is with a commoner, who eventually is separated from Lufton due to the unjust forces of society. Twice he falls in love; each time, he misapprehends the nature of the woman, leading to bitter disappointment. It is not much of a spoiler to say that the titular Troy Chimney, the fine manor house Lufton purchases, is finally a symbol of the life he wants but never has.
The manners of the characters in Troy Chimneys, like many other novels set in its time period, are complex and hinge on fine subtleties of tone and conduct. At the same time, Kennedy shows how crude, even base they can be. In one of the more telling moments, Lufton is told that he has only been invited to a manor in order to act as a certain nobleman’s “dry nurse” - to keep a bothersome person out of the way while the real business is attended to. Infuriated, Lufton leaves the presence of this nobleman, and encounters, in the garden outside the manor, one of the ladies of the house:
“What a talent you have for turning up at the right moment! You can carry this basket for me.”
Pronto bowed and took the basket.
Miles could not have done less, but he would not have done it with so much alacrity.
Troy Chimneys is a bitter, melancholic novel, all the more so for the fact that it does not wallow in self-pity. Miles Lufton is forthright about his failings and shortcomings. Though he cannot be taken as an especially unreliable narrator, you can sense the moments in his story when he is deceiving himself - particularly when he is deceiving himself about women. He reifies his mother as an angel, and delights when a woman seriously takes on the duties of 19th century bourgeois womanhood which were beginning to be developed at the time. He values the domestic role of women as a refuge for men from the dirt and difficulties of the world, but cannot imagine any reason, save perfidy, a woman would feel discontent at this station. “All women are alike,” he tersely declares towards the end of his autobiography, but this really means all his disappointments with women are alike.
Is Troy Chimneys a great novel? No, I would say it is not. While Kennedy performs a wonderful imitation of the vocabulary and cadences of Regency, she never quite brings the language to great heights of the best authors of the period. All the same, I appreciate the novel, as both a sympathetic portrayal of a man stymied by the currents of his age and as a sharp, feminist critique of that same man. It seems to reflect what I consider the finest aspect of English fiction: a refusal to make fictional worlds conform to a simple summary or single concept; Troy Chimneys is as many-sided as life itself. Of course, a refusal to conform often leads to neglect, and I am sorry to predict that Troy Chimneys will remain neglected.