A Quality of Mercy by Paul West

First published: 1961

Type of work: Comic grotesque

Time of work: The late 1950’s with flashbacks to World War II and earlier

Locale: Rural Connecticut, England, wartime Italy, and Manhattan

Principal Characters:

• Camden Smeaton, the protagonist, age fifty-three, a retired schoolmaster and currently a short-story writer living in Connecticut
• Brenda Smeaton, his unmarried niece, age forty-seven
• Merula Smeaton, his sister, age eighty-two
• Huntley Fisher, who was graduated magna cum laude in electrical engineering, honeymooning in Connecticut
• Wendy Fisher, Huntley’s voluptuous young wife
• Linda Panton, Camden’s wife, who died in 1946 of uterine cancer

The Novel

Paul West’s first novel begins with a family quarrel and ends with all members of the family dead (including the dog), three by murder, the last by suicide. Yet the dominant tone of the novel is not morbid, but comic. The entire present action occurs in a Connecticut hamlet distinguished mostly by its lack of eventfulness. This novel’s three primary characters—Camden, Brenda, and Merula Smeaton—are not only in isolation but also in retirement, from civilization, from work, from life.

Each Smeaton is not only well beyond maturity but also significantly beyond hope: bitter at or resigned to the ways in which existence has failed. A major part of the novel’s development works backward to explain each failure; suspense and drama are achieved by the introduction of the young honeymooners, the Fishers, into this environment of decay.

At the root of the decay of each Smeaton is loss of, or lack of, love. In search of some version of love in a New York hotel, Brenda Smeaton had “strutted into the bar and at twenty-seven years clumsily and vainly twitched her eyelids at the barflies and at the itinerants she saw through the plate-glass wall.” Having failed to connect sexually at twenty-seven, Brenda at forty-seven still searches for love, a meaning to life, and men; she fastens, temporarily, on Huntley Fisher. Brenda’s failure is the most poignant, the most bitter, but the reader learns that others have contributed to it. Her mother spent her twenties involved in a scandalous love affair with a musical genius in an Italian villa. Abandoned by him, she fled to marriage and a religious puritanism that excised romance and sexuality.

Camden’s failure in love is the most complex and most critical. It is traced both in the chapters that recount the action in the present time of the novel and in the alternating chapters that recount his earlier life, each episode framed by the poignant and inevitable intermingling of death with sex. For example, while recuperating in an Italian hospital from his war wounds, Camden falls in love with his nurse, Linda Panton. Once back in England, he abandons her until she writes that she is pregnant. He reluctantly marries her, then falls in love with her. She turns out, however, to be terminally ill rather than pregnant. Their last weeks reiterate the novel’s tone of inevitable disaster, of bittersweet pleasure: “I noted the irony. . . that death gave the right to come together unchemicalled and unsheathed precisely because the coming-together would in the eyes of the world prove fruitless.”

Camden’s attempt to regenerate life in the dead world of his family coalesces in a dance party, to which the Fishers are invited. Brenda dances with Huntley, then misconstrues his polite compliment as a pass. She kisses him several times, embarrassing all. The last Smeaton attempt at love has failed miserably, grotesquely.

The bitterness at all these failures and at botched lives culminates in the violence of the novel’s climax. Brenda garrotes her dog, strangles her mother, then tries to commit suicide by drowning. Mercifully, however, her uncle shoots her first, then turns the gun on himself.

Before dying, Camden has willed house and grounds to the Fishers, ironic emblems of love and hope. Yet Huntley is completely apathetic about the tragedy and unconscious of its motivations.

The Characters

Camden is a realistic character given a fairly straightforward development in a series of interchapters. Like West, Camden grew up in the mining country of Derbyshire, later moving to the United States. Camden’s life, however, is strewn with almost mythic deaths, to which he responds with lack of emotion: the sudden death of his father in a mining accident (recapture by the earth), the death of his mother while he is still a child, the near-suicide by drowning of his friend “Guppy” over romantic sorrow, and the death of his wife, Linda, from a mysterious cancer at first mistaken for pregnancy. Camden, educated in literature and philosophy, develops a gradually darkening attitude toward life, regularly redeemed by brilliant wordplay: “We took no breeches-buoy from desolation to the promised venusberg. Instead, we sat and got our buttocks damp.”

Brenda is an appropriate foil for Camden. Educated at Sarah Lawrence College, she is witty and intelligent but much less perceptive, less emotionally controlled. While Camden perceives the need for illusion and distraction and takes his dying wife to films, Brenda lives illusion and daydreams of romantic husbands and a life in Singapore or other exotic locales. Seeing herself as loveless, Brenda blames her situation on her puritanical mother, who in senescent rages, often beats her with a cane. It is out of mingled love for and hatred of her mother, as well as some desperate hope for freedom, that Brenda eventually kills her.

Merula functions primarily as a near-comic prop, the best Smeaton emblem of death-in-life. Asleep most of the time, she wakes to moments of brilliant observation or cantankerous “caneplay”; she tries to liven up the dance party by dressing in her bridal gown and setting off fireworks.

By contrast, the Huntley Fishers, both by their name and by their situation, suggest a return to a more natural and fertile humanity. They are young, in love, polite to the Smeatons, but essentially uncomprehending of the suffering of their neighbors or even of the concept of suffering itself. For them, sex is only pleasant play that leads to desired pregnancy.

Critical Context

West’s first novel, A Quality of Mercy, is markedly different from his later works. Its plot line and characterization are traditional, though it employs the modernist technique of fragmentation, by interpolating chapters of Camden’s past between those of the novel’s present action.

Reading backward, however, one can see themes of his later fiction contained here in embryo. The portrayal of an irrational universe, inhumane and often terrifying, of characters whose eccentric behavior transcends ordinary insanity, is also reflected in his later Alley Jaggers trilogy, as well as his novels of the 1980’s, The Very Rich Hours of Count Von Stauffenberg (1980) and Rat Man of Paris (1986).

The cleverly turned sentences and brilliant wordplay seen here metamorphose into the complex intellectual schemes and patterns of these later novels. Because of these novels, in the 1960’s and 1970’s West came to be linked with a group of experimental American novelists, such as John Barth and William Gass, and particularly with experimental Latin American novelists, such as Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Bibliography

Busch, Frederick. “The Friction of Fiction: Ulysses Omnirandum,” in Chicago Review. XXVI, no. 4 (1975), pp. S-17.

Gunton, Sharon, ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 14, 1980.

McLaughlin, Brian. “Paul West,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 14, 1983. Edited by Jay L. Halio.