A NOTE IN MUSIC - ROSAMOND LEHMANN

If there is one keynote in ‘‘A note in music ‘‘ it is that of emptiness, a sort of nothingness that emanates from inertia, the absence of desire and the fatalism that accompanies the death of desire as possibility. Grace Fairfax, at 34, having lost a child at birth, unhappily married to the kindly, portly but utterly conventional Tom fairfax, passes her days desultorily while Tom, wanting conventional matrimony and paternity, lapses into dour yet solicitous estrangement. Hankering for the south of england and the vicarage she was brought up in Grace experiences the industrial north of england as alienating. Her days are enlivened by Norah MacKay, an only friend who, after a lapse into unrequited romanticism and betrayal in her youth from Jimmy ( a voluptuary sensualist for whom desire severed from love is customary) is now settled into becalmed uxoriousness with Gerald MacKay, an irritable professor, and two sons. It is Hugh miller , who comes to their manufacturing town in the north and his sister Clare, from london, who become paradoxical agents of muted change in both couples . Hugh, homosexual, in love with a poet oliver, but baffled by oliver’s inscrutability, turns the incertitudes of romanticism into youthful exuberance , an exuberance whose vitality revivifies in Grace and Norah the latent romanticism within them which convention, ennui and middle age had submerged . Clare, modern, irreverent becomes for Gerald a portal of romance in him, overlain by fastidiousness and curmudgeonly middle age. ‘‘A note in music ‘‘ traces the ebbs and flows of nothingness and the slivers of possibility over one year .

At first sight it might seem ‘‘A note in music ‘‘ is an uncharacteristic lehmann novel . It was certainly regarded as less powerful in her singular oeuvre. But what it does compellingly is deal with the onset of middle age, the fear of the death of desire and the middling unfulfillment that is the only dismal prospect and of a life leached of meaning and thereby being. Both couples are incompatible. A gulf of incommunicability separates them . Tom finding Grace inaccessible, can only retreat to masculine bewilderment. Norah, determinedly resilient and matronly, disregards the unawakened romance in Gerald’s nature . Hugh miller , pining for a love that is unreachable, becomes the embodiment of the potentiality of what in desire is inarticulable but all pervasive. Some might find this excessive preoccupation with the absence of love in conditions of bourgeoisie complacency to be a form of privilege, a self indulgent mooning around in a life where larger harrowing realities are either immaterial or unacknowledged. But what Rosamond lehmann does poignantly is to see desire, not as corporeal but as a forcefield in the self whose quickening would release untapped facets of being and irradiate the self. To that degree desire’s absence isn’t just the loss of youth or a resigned coexistence with mediocrity but the pursuit of an unformulated absolute whose mainspring cannot be expressed but whose dimensions of self realization are interwoven with being itself. It is that abstraction that Hugh and clare embody while being themselves as confused and lost as other characters . A sub plot involves Pansy, a prostitute , with an autistic older brother who also experiences the outward effervescence of Hugh as infused with a space for self fulfillment , but foredoomed to unrealizability. The loneliness of unassuaged desire persists in ‘‘A note in music ‘‘ , inducing loneliness and yearning in all characters . Grace’s autumnal melancholy is commingled with nature - spring rejuvenates her momentarily , winter brings out illness and inanition - a holiday in the country by herself passes off as a dream, entered into with a desperation for reprieve from quotidian banality . Gerald tries to reanimate the subterranean romanticism in him with clare and has a fractious altercation with norah when confronted before accepting the inevitability of the marriage he does have . Tom’s one night communion with pansy , propelled by solitude and anguish at being unloved leads to guilt and compunction. Grace bequeaths to Hugh the unstated promise of a bid for happiness and jouissance as a safety valve to ameliorate unrelieved emptiness of the life that remains to/for her, a taciturn way of avowing a deep seated feeling without specifying its lineaments.

It is this fitful glimmering light of possibility, in the very face of its invariable extinguishment that is the concomitant of the blankness of unmet love in ‘‘A note in music ‘‘. The shadow of the aftermath of ww1 is suffused throughout the novel. It is this fidelity to an uncompromising romanticism that has led to the dismissal of Rosamond lehmann’s novels as being ‘women’s writing ‘‘ . But i tend to see in her romanticism a quality that is very atypical in the english sensibility. Romance is not mocked or perceived from a self deprecating distance , there is no irony that can subject the excesses of sentimentality and sensibility to critical scrutiny while surreptitiously reaffirming a semi sentimentality on its own. This doesn’t imply that Lehmann’s romanticism is unconstrained or bathetic or soppy. It is rather a concession of an irrecoverable purity of longing that is ineffable and incalculable. Feminists today would suggest that Grace and norah could always take up social work , intellectually stimulating hobbies, acquire new skills and cease from rumination on an ideal that is unworkable and futile. And while there is merit in such an exhortation it misses out the component of the archetypal and intensely feminine in desire that Rosamond lehmann understood so truthfully. For D.H Lawrence sexuality became a mythopeia that would unloose the wellspring of the elan vital which civilization, modernity and industrialization had curtailed . Lehmann’s settings are more sedate and middle class but i think what remains as a residue from ‘‘A note in music ‘ is that the tottering flame of desire can be sustained and prolong itself as an inextinguishable ache , despite any material or eventful peregrination of the busyness and overwhelming complexity of modenity. And that such desire is free floating and ethereal , circuitous and circular in its interplay of past and present. ‘‘A note in music ‘‘ is a novel in which nothing happens - it is about eventful interludes in the benumbing stasis of the everyday, the momentous keynote that might be ephemeral but becomes, in its compressed intensity, more than the sum of a life of which it is but an infinitesimal constituent. A consolation that has nothing but the conceit of ungratified romanticism finding ballast in moments of being. That is the conceptual receptacle that comes full circle in this microcosmic , circumscribed world that lehmann evokes with such perspicuity.