The Pardoner's Tale by John Wain

First published: 1978

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The early 1970’s

Locale: Wales and an English cathedral town

Principal Characters:

• Giles Hermitage, a bachelor and established novelist
• Helen Chichester-Redfern, a dying lady who summons Giles’s help
• Diana Chichester-Redfern, Helen’s daughter and Giles’s lover
• Gus Howkins, a fictional character created by Giles
• Julia Delmer, Gus’s lover

The Novel

The Pardoner’s Tale is composed of two stories: a first-person tale about Gus Howkins, an aging Londoner contemplating divorce, and a third-person narration (the controlling narrative) about Giles Hermitage, an established English novelist, unmarried, who becomes involved with the Chichester-Redferns, a woman and her daughter, while he is working on the story of Gus.

The narrative begins with the character that Giles creates assembling his folding-canoe at an estuary on the coast of Wales. Gus, in his forties, has been separated for four months from his wife, whom he was pleased to catch in an extramarital affair. It provided the occasion for him to break up a boring marriage. He is vacationing alone, hoping for something better.

While canoeing, Gus spots a lovely but apparently dazed young woman sitting behind the wheel of her car on a sandy spit that is being enveloped by the tide. The car is lost to the sea, but not before Gus rescues the woman and brings her back to his rented cottage, where in time they make love. When Gus awakens the next morning, he finds that she has disappeared. He decides to search for her, sensing that the woman would provide remission from boredom.

Meanwhile, Gus’s creator, Giles, takes a break from his writing. On the day his story begins, he is agonizing over Harriet, his lover of seven years, who is at the moment somewhere in the air on her way to Australia with her new husband. Attempting to turn his mind away from Harriet, Giles decides to read three pieces of mail from his enormous pile of correspondence.

One letter is from Helen Chichester-Redfern, a woman who lives along the route of Giles’s daily walks. She knows him from his walks and she has read his novels. She is dying of cancer and wants to talk to Giles about his books, particularly the book he must be working on at the time. Through these talks, she hopes to use the writer’s insights to make some sense of her unhappy life. Grasping at anything to interrupt his thoughts of Harriet, Giles telephones the house and agrees to visit Helen.

It is there that he meets her daughter, Diana, a professional guitarist at age twenty-eight. They begin an affair. With each successive visit, Diana’s mother pushes Giles to discuss his feelings about love and marriage and to explain why his books seem to show an antimarriage bias. Gradually, over a series of meetings, she reveals her own bitterness about her husband’s long-ago desertion. In a deathbed request to which Giles reluctantly agrees, she asks him to take revenge on her husband by writing about a selfish person who comes to a mean end. Her wish is fulfilled in The Pardoner’s Tale, although Giles did not originally plan it that way.

Whether Gus ends well or ill, especially with respect to his erotic involvements, depends on how well Giles makes out with Diana. The resolution of one plot determines the resolution of the other. As the tale develops, Gus learns that the girl he rescued is Julia Delmer, a distressed actress who has fled her television-star husband after witnessing his gross sexual misconduct involving two prostitutes and another man. Julia’s unstable brother, Cliff, and soon the police, get involved when Cliff tries to swindle the husband with fraudulent ransom notes while his sister is away. Gus falls in love with Julia and wants to take her away from her husband, Jake, but this is not easy to do. She is a dependent woman, accustomed to centering her life on the man she married, and she has a sisterly, protective attitude toward her delinquent brother. Besides, Gus has his own problems: an estranged wife who seeks reconciliation and a daughter in nursing training whose good opinion of him means much. By the end, events have taken a sad turn. In Gus’s case, Julia returns to her husband. In Giles’s life, Diana suddenly leaves him for an acquaintance whom he never met. Giles returns to his former girlfriend Harriet, and Gus, brokenhearted, believes that his life is over.

The Characters

Giles is obviously the figure in The Pardoner’s Tale with whom John Wain is most intimately involved. He is a highly idiosyncratic figure with very recognizable weaknesses: He is easily depressed (there is an early thought of suicide), and he resorts to heavy drinking. The root cause of his death wish and drinking is loneliness. The early pages of the book, in which Giles meditates on his loss of Harriet, indicate this clearly enough. Like most of Wain’s heroes, Giles is very much a modern man: vague in his religious and humanitarian aspirations, rootless and alienated from the social life of the community in which he lives, and initially weak and confused in his relationships with women. Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontent, and a sense of inner emptiness, he seeks peace of mind under conditions that increasingly militate against it. Add to his problems the ever-growing urge toward self-destruction, and one begins to recognize in this novel a truly contemporary pulse beat. Like the protagonist of Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1942), Giles is a stranger in a world that does not make sense.

Unlike Wain’s earlier heroes, however, Giles tries to make sense of the world through the medium of his writing, by stepping back into what he calls “the protecting circle of art.” That is, the hero of his novel is a mask for himself. He is creating in Gus a character who is in his own predicament, and the agonies Gus endures provide a catalyst which enables Giles to express his deepest feelings about life. Gus, like Giles, suffers from meaninglessness and boredom. Both men are victims of the past. In each case, the afflicting circumstances involve a woman and unrequited love. Giles, like Gus, finds some comfort in a second woman, through whom, for a time, his sense of rejection and defeat is overcome. That Giles’s own initials (G. H.) match those of his hero may indicate his sympathy with the sentiments expressed, too. In Giles, therefore, Wain presents a character who tries to create, as artists do, a new existence out of the chaos of his life.

Also of interest is Giles’s life as a novelist. The reader sees him as a detached observer of those around him (even his name, Hermitage, suggests the life of a recluse). He is outwardly passive; the reader catches him at times overhearing conversations, watching people from a distance. Part of his separateness is his sensitivity, his unusual response to nuance and detail, to implication; he is almost hyperobservant. Yet he has also a great curiosity about other people, and he is an inveterate theorizer about their behavior. He has the notable gift for symbolic condensation through fragments of incident, bits and pieces of action, that seem to contain the meaning of a personality in a few words or gestures. By the end of the novel, the reader knows how a novelist thinks and feels, and experiences not only the writing but also its moments of inspiration, of perfected expression.

The other characters in The Pardoner’s Tale bear family resemblances to those in Wain’s other novels. If the part of the lonely, alienated hero so effectively carried in The Smaller Sky (1967) by Arthur Geary and in A Winter in the Hills (1970) by Roger Furnivall is here assigned to Giles, the role of the manipulator is assigned in this novel to Helen. Although she is much less ruthless than either Adrian Swarthmore in The Smaller Sky or Dic Sharp in A Winter in the Hills, she is a manipulator just the same, seeking to exploit the hero.

The process by which Helen is gradually revealed to the reader through Giles’s eyes is subtle and delicate. At first only a stranger, she comes to seem in time a calculating and educated woman, the innocent victim of a man who deserted her, a seventy-year-old woman grasping for answers to some vital questions about her own life. In a way that is unusual for him, Wain introduces his initial description of the woman in a letter addressed to Giles. Through the hero’s scrutinizing eyes, the reader learns that she is respectable (the quality of stationery and handwriting connotes that), conservative and affluent (the address on the envelope indicates that), and well-read. These early hints about her character, however, hardly prepare the reader, or the hero, for what is to come.

In her ruin, Helen is a saddening picture: depressed, helpless, terminal. Wain heaps images of deadness one after another to convey the total barrenness of her existence. The dying woman’s face resembles “candle-wax,” the skin is “tight over her cheekbones,” her head is “fleshless,” her body seems “as weightless as that of a dead heron,” and her hand is like “the claw of a bird that had died of cold.” The repeated references to Helen’s eyeglasses as “hollow” or “dead discs” call to mind the eyes of T. J. Eckleberg in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). Like Eckleberg’s eyes, Helen’s see in life only a wasteland, the absence of love, faith, and the capacity for regeneration. Like the doctor’s picture in Fitzgerald’s novel, she looks out from the ashes of her past and onto the hopelessness of her future. Clearly, this image further defines her situation.

In addition to the alienated, lonely hero and the manipulator, most of Wain’s fiction has in it a comforter. Here the comforter is embodied in Diana, but unlike earlier characters, she offers only temporary happiness. In this novel, love is reduced to a meaningless mechanical act: Diana, also, is living in a wasteland.

The basic tension of this novel is a simple and classic one—the life force confronting the death force. As surely as Helen is the death force, Diana is the active and life-giving presence. She is depicted as an abrasive, liberated, sensual, innately selfish woman, who stands in positive contrast to the deathlike grayness of her mother. Diana’s physical description emphasizes her “restless vitality,” her “preference . . . for the sunshine of life.” In her company, Giles finds himself moving away from “the devouring presence-in-absence of Harriet,” away from death to “sparkling life.” Diana is earthy and fulfilled, accepting and contented with her music, her faith, and her sexuality.

Yet Diana’s chief defect is that she is shallow. She lacks the imagination and compassion either to understand Giles’s need for her or to comprehend the older man’s misery. Her own emotions are always well under control; her affection swings easily from Dr. Bowen (who is caring for her mother) to Giles, then later to an anonymous man for whom she deserts both men. In many ways, Diana is like a scientist. All her adult life she has been a collector of men. She looks at them, handles them, acquires them, but she never establishes a human relationship with any of them. Nor does she establish a human relationship with her mother. Diana is too busy to dwell for long on her mother’s death. It is simply one of many things with which she must deal as she forges ahead. “Hers was not one of those natures to which compassion comes naturally.”

Critical Context

Commentators have noticed that The Pardoner’s Tale clearly belongs to the main tradition of Wain’s fiction and has a value apart from its subject and technique. Yet in helping to define that tradition, its dark agonies make it his best and most serious achievement. Although several reviewers had reservations about its tedious, somewhat forced combination of two narratives, they all recognized its genuine power. Through Giles, Helen, and Diana, the reader gains a sense of contemporary England as a wasteland. It is a world in which the action of the novel—wasted lives, debased sexual encounters, and destroyed moral selves—reflects a tragic vision of futility and sterility. Such traditional certainties as love, faith, and the capacity for regeneration have become remote and inaccessible. Alienation is the result. It is alienation in many forms: isolation from the community, estrangement from those who were once closest to one, and loneliness in the midst of the universe itself.

At the same time, Wain is also close to offering one of the major twentieth century solutions to the chaos of life: salvation through art. Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf all offered this as an answer to the conditions Wain presents in The Pardoner’s Tale. Giles’s theory is an artistic vision for ordering experience similar in nature to Proust’s vision in the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), when the narrator of that novel decides that only by re-creating his experience in a work of art can he make it meaningful. It is tragic that Wain’s narrator has not had, and never will have, this final vision.

Bibliography

Flaherty, Roger. Review in Chicago Sun-Times. April 8, 1979, p. 34.

Jones, D. A. N. Review in The Times Literary Supplement. October 13, 1978, p. 1140.

Moynahan, Julian. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXX (March 25, 1979), p. 14.

Salwak, Dale. John Wain, 1981.

Sheppard, R. Z. Review in Time. CXIII (April 2, 1979), p. 100.

Stewart, Ian. Review in Illustrated London News. December, 1978, p. 123.