The Rack: The Restored Edition, A.E Ellis, Ashgrove Publishing, 2010, £14.99 (paperback)

 

The Rack is a fugitive classic: a book that periodically reappears to great acclaim, only to lapse again into apparent oblivion. On first publication in 1958 it was unanimously hailed as a masterpiece; Graham Greene placed it alongside Great Expectations and Ulysses; Cyril Connolly ranked its author with Proust and Leopardi. It came out as a Penguin in 1961, and again in 1979. Yet each time it somehow failed to fix itself in public awareness as a modern classic. ‘Ellis’ (a pseudonym) remains the hero of a small coterie. And now here comes The Rack again, this time in an edition which restores some 25,000 words of text cut from the novel before publication, and with them (Alan Wall claims in his ‘Introduction’) some of its ‘human warmth and engagement’ and its author’s ‘darkly comedic talent.’

I should say at once that I am among the novel’s admirers. The Rack seems to me a unique and powerful work, and one that anyone interested in the twentieth-century novel should read. Not that it is altogether easy to read, or that everyone will enjoy it. It follows the fortunes, and inhabits the consciousness, of Paul Davenant, who after service in the Second World War has gone to university only to find that he suffers from a serious case of tuberculosis. As the novel opens he is entering a sanatorium in the French Alps for treatment. The Rack is sometimes compared to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, but the comparison is lazy. Mann’s characters are Olympians, their temporary exile from the world largely a symbolic device. ‘Ellis’ is a realist, and anyone imagining that life in a 1940s TB sanatorium consisted of gourmet meals alternating with philosophical conversation on a balcony overlooking a magnificent mountain panorama will be rapidly disillusioned. Paul Davenant’s experiences recall a series of medieval tortures. Treatments on offer include pneumothorax (a hole pierced between ribs, followed by inflation with an air pump, requiring re-pressurizing every two weeks); sternal puncture (a somewhat larger hole pieced through the centre of one’s chest with audible splintering of bone, followed by extraction of various fluids); removal of anything up to nine ribs, allowing the chest to ‘collapse’ onto the lung; washing the pleura with creosote; and the permanent insertion into the chest of a mixture of oil and disinfectant – most of these carried out with local (or no) anaesthetic.

‘Ellis’, a master when it comes to describing physical discomfort, takes us through many of these harrowing experiences, besides those of high fever, near-death from barbiturate overdose, and many more; but his narrative is not just an account of medical martyrdom. His grim comic gifts are exercised memorably, for example, on the sanatorium food:

supper consist[ed] of a single debatable and grisly sausage, a few lettuce leaves which, tired some days previously, were now in the last stages of exhaustion, and – unprovoked libel on an undistinguished city – a helping of pommes Lyonnaises (beneath the fat-smeared surfaces of which it could clearly be seen that they were rotten).

Some of the novel’s funniest passages concern the patients’ running battles over food with the management, who produce an endless stream of excuses (supplies have not arrived, a new chef is expected, the patients are unfamiliar with French cuisine, TB sufferers are notoriously fussy…) but steadfastly refuse to change anything because the sanatorium is one of a chain run for profit: any improvement in the food would result in patients deserting the more expensive sanatorium nearby where meals are marginally better.

The doctors are also vividly presented, with their pet treatments, their covert jockeying for position within the management hierarchy, their habit of chatting like jovial butchers across the bodies of their helpless patients (discussing the American comedy film they saw last night as they force needles in, or hack at ribs). ‘Ellis’ is good at depicting the surreal overlap between medical and social life; as when Paul watches two doctors return from sedating a female patient who has run amok in the last stages of ‘tubercular meningitis’ during the Christmas Eve party:
Dr. Bruneau walked into the room. ‘Maintenant tout va bien,’ he said to Dr. Vernet. In one hand he was carrying a hypodermic syringe with a long needle attached, in the other a false nose. He went straight over to a mirror, slipped off his white jacket and rearranged his costume. He was dressed as a Renaissance jester.

And there is a gallery of fellow-patients, rag-tag unfortunates of post-war Europe: the survivors of POW and concentration camps, the veterans of endless useless sanatoria, the eccentric, the downright loony. And – poignantly lightening the tone – there is Michèle, the delightful, naive and convincingly impulsive and inconsistent Belgian girl with whom Paul falls in love – an affair that screws the emotional rack several degrees tighter.

For the most powerful ingredient of The Rack is simply hope deferred. Paul’s temperature chart, and the contents of his chest cavity, fluctuate endlessly. Sometimes recovery seems assured; at other times physical agony supervenes, with the likelihood of messy and undignified death. Doctors intone their mantras, repeating sagely that nothing is certain, that given another three months the patient could be ready to return to England… The psychological tortures are worse than the physical. Nor is Paul especially able to bear them. A kind of ‘man without qualities’, he has lost his parents in early infancy (as did ‘Ellis’); his biography consists of boarding schools (financed by a distant uncle), university (briefly; and ‘Ellis’ never tells us what he studied), war sevice in the army and the sanatorium (in which ‘Ellis’ had himself spent several years). One suspects that he suffers, at least mildly, from what would now be called clinical depression. And ‘Ellis’ doesn’t avoid at some points implying the old view, whose history Wall traces in his Introduction, that TB is really the manifestation of a mental attitude. Paul, we are told, had been unhappy in the army; he had been promoted, but ‘The price for the suppression of his true [emotional] state was a form of nervous fatigue which, transferring itself imperceptibly from a mental to a physical plane, was the forerunner of future disorders.’

This particular passage, present in the ‘restored’ text, is missing from the first edition; and this brings us to an important matter. Alan Wall tells us that ‘When James Michie edited The Rack for Heinemann in 1958, he cut an enormous amount of the author’s manuscript. It seems that he wanted to emphasise the aspect of existential parable which the work undoubtedly exhibits’. There is no reason to question this. But putting the two versions side by side – I used the 1961 Penguin reprint, which I assume reproduces the 1958 first edition, to compare Chapter One systematically, and other parts of the book more sporadically – it is clear that what this new edition presents is not an author’s preferred text, cruelly cut at the last stage by a harsh editor, but simply an earlier draft, and not always a better one.

Some of the restored changes are inconsequential. For example, in this ‘restored’ text Paul Davenant is an Oxford undergraduate; in the first published edition he is from Cambridge. But we also lose countless stylistic improvements. To take a small but typical one, in the first edition Mr. James, a buffoon escorting the party of TB-stricken students on the train to the sanatorium, exhibits his relentless facetiousness in his opening speech:

‘We’ll be climbing soon,’ he said cheerfully. ‘The train turns round and then goes back-ways up. It isn’t half snowing outside.’

The restored text has him say

‘We’ll be climbing soon … The train turns round, then goes up in the other direction. It’s really snowing outside.’

Losing ‘back-ways up’ and the 1940s cliché ‘not half’ is to lose the character’s voice. It’s a tiny touch, but quite clearly a place where the author sharpened his style to focus a character. It’s hard to imagine Michie dictating this or many other small changes which, cumulatively, much improved the novel. A good deal of the ‘restored’ material consists of descriptive elaboration, philosophising of doubtful relevance, and the like. The writing is never bad; but one sees why Michie, or the author himself, might have wanted to cut and polish. I could find only one cut episode which clearly substantiated Wall’s claim that dark comedy had been lost. It’s Chapter Eight of Part Three, where Paul tells the paranoid joker Delmuth that he has never truly seen him as a friend. (The loss of ‘human warmth’ is harder to substantiate, since the revelation precipitates Delmuth into despair and self-harm.) I don’t understand why Wall fails to make the situation clear. It’s also puzzling that he tells us nothing about the nature or whereabouts of the manuscript he has used for this restored edition. Given the precarious prospects of this almost-forgotten masterpiece, it seems unwise to deprive critics, scholars and future publishers of such basic information. But perhaps ‘Ellis’s’ estate insisted on silence?

At this point I should declare an interest. I knew ‘Ellis’ – real name Derek Lindsay – slightly. He was a friend of my father, who had done legal work for some body of which Lindsay was a trustee. I visited Lindsay two or three times at his house in Chalcot Square (the same London square where Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath had once lived) and recall him as a gentle, reclusive man, so sensitive that he could not bear listening to the morning news on the radio because of the mass of human suffering it implied. He died in 2000, aged 80: knocked down by a bus near his home. Besides The Rack, his only published works seem to have been Grand Manoeuvres, a play about the Dreyfus affair which ran successfully at the National Theatre in 1974-5, and a few short stories. There were perpetual rumours that he was writing another novel, but it never materialised.

This doesn’t surprise me; for The Rack has all the hallmarks of what one might call the genre of ‘singleton classics’ – solitary great novels whose (mostly male) authors wrote nothing else of importance. Tristram Shandy, A Confederacy of Dunces, The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger’s other books hardly register), Canetti’s Auto da Fè, perhaps even Proust’s great novel… Each depicts the protagonist’s desperate and heroic struggle with a world which is, essentially, himself; all, whether comic or tragic, are ultimately very sad, for there is no escape from the self, and, when it is thus externalised, no victory over it either. The Rack was the novel Ellis had in him, and he wrote it with unsparing vividness and painful honesty.

Thanks to Alan Wall, readers now have a choice, and not an easy one. They can read this ‘restored’ version, with its slower pace and additional reflective material; or they can read the slimmer, sharper 1958 text, currently published by Valancourt with an introduction by Andrew Sinclair. Aesthetically, I think I prefer the latter. ‘Ellis’ buffs will of course want both. But it doesn’t greatly matter. The essential thing is to read this remarkable book.