Marie-Jeanne, Tregnum, Tappit Hen
The people demand to know what the best novels of the decade were, and nobody but me can tell them. You will recognize many of these titles from my last year’s Year’s Best. Well: last year was a particularly good year, and he who falsifies quality for the sake of numerical symmetry had better bake his thumbs in an eggshell omelet and invite the Devil to breakfast, as fond Achitophel likes so well to say in Achitophel Achitophel Achitophel Achitophel. Bringing this list down to a scant 17 was hard—very hard!—easier to tear out my own liver than to rip Wouldst Thou! Hast Thou? Thee Shouldn’t Have from the canon, yet to do it left me room at the end to include certain critical notes about the Manthony novels (excerpted from the forthcoming Monographs for Manthony (2020)) that I think, gentlemen, you will find most illuminating.
The Decade’s Best Novels
17. The Blistered Apiary (The Wax Hierophant)
16. It’s Dark in the Forest Where I Murdered You With My Soft Paralegal’s Hands
15. Parliament of Scowls
14. Achitophel Achitophel Achitophel Achitophel
13. Yesternaught
12. Frost on the Bathysphere / Squirrels of Wessex [tie]
11. Peg and Awl About Eve
10. Manthony is Falling, Falling, Falling Down Into the Dark
[U.S. title: Manthony of the Isthmus / Canada: Ride Like the Devil, Manthony]
9. Black Rubies for the Barber-Surgeon
8. Marie-Jeanne, Tregnum, Tappit Hen
7. Hello Sea Bishop, Goodbye
6. Lorl Worries
5. Jeroboam, Rehoboam! Jeroboam, Rehoboam! Jeroboam, Rehoboam, Goliath!
4. Snip Snap Snorrem, or: The Ways of the World
3. Ivede-Evadne
2. Over the Treetops Manthony Hides, Under the Water, Under the Waves, Scarcely-Breathing, Long-Awaiting, Turn Around--Turn Around!
1. Whistle-Pig in the Coal Scuttle
From Notes, or: Manthonia:
Even scholars, who should know better, will often admit that in their secret hearts they feel the cloaked Byronic figure of the later novels to be the real Manthony. Yes—wicked Manthony, hated of the Moon, with the Moon’s silver scar crawling down his left cheekbone; Manthony, lying to all the newspapers, enraging the Moon ten times over, sued in Decan’s Court (in Wigs for Hell’s Barrister); Manthony bankrupted, drunk on the Prince Regent’s own tincture of Benedictine and bruisèd coca leaf, gambling away the third finger on his left hand; Manthony rusticated, forgetting his vow to marry none but the woman who slew the Moon, never guessing that that the task could be accomplished, nor that it would take two women to do it; Manthony fallen helplessly in love with the lapidary who regilded his chryselephantine prosthesis; appealing to the Twelve Popes for a special dispensation to be released from a vow made in excited delirium, but denied (in Manthony Denied)—and the rest.
All this, we cherish as the full flower towards which the unripened seed—first introduced in Who’s This, Now—Manthony Whom?, elaborated in Tears on the Cravat—strove and struggled and finally, fitfully, became, as it was always meant to.
But what is real? What is a true self? What is meaning? I put it to you that the character of that gawking provincial striver was not a false beginning nor an authorial misstep nor a youthful skin long shed and buried. I put it to you that Manthony did not learn true Cynicism, but only to conceal the hard kernel of unyielding innocence that still festers within him as lately as Stevedore in Byzantium. Turn with me to the famous Humiliation scene of Manthony Does His Best:
“Why-y-y-y, even our dear Manthony was young once,” he drawled.
Manthony regarded the Viscount wide-eyedly, scarce knowing whether he dared correct such an acanthus-laden Corinthian. “Well—” he trembled, “—to be precise, milord, I’m quite young now. Measured in Imperial units,” he hastened to add, not wishing to offend, and not knowing in the least whether this pomatumed Brummelliad might not be a partisan of the stern Thermidorian accounting.
As the lurching Whisky-curricle shook with fierce guffaws, it was borne bitterly in on Manthony’s tender soul that his guileless remark, meant only, in the springing freshness of this gentleman's natural candour, as a clarification, had been, in point of fact, the very intended meaning of that cruel sprig of fashion's first rhetorical sally.
Later, huddled in the pantry, Manthony wept bitter tears. “They’re always drawling at me, Mother,” he choked.
By his sophomore outing, Manthony has learned only the frightful necessity of learning: thus we catch sight of him struggling out of a besprung landaulet made so small that to be donned it must first be wetted and then allowed to mould to his contours, tragically ignorant of the sudden fashion for expansively embiggened land yachts and pleasure caravans among the Viscount’s set. The anxious reader must endure through agonies of fremdschämen until these pretensions explode in the infamous Confrontation Scene (Chapter 16: Snobbery in Chancery, Manthony?), and by chapter 41 all is well with Manthony’s soul once more (“All is well with my soul,” sighed Manthony.”)
The pivot point in his psychological evolution is said to arrive when a disguised ‘Marchibald Mandrews’ takes the King’s Shilling and falls prey to vile rumors spread by the ship’s cat, an agent of the Moon and trusted confidant of the Chief Petty Officer, who strands our Manthony in Trebizond:
“You dasn't!" he gasped. Appealingly, he cried, "He dasn't — dast he?"
But indeed he had dast.
and at this moment, he swears a secret Swear, which I need not here repeat. What I wish to draw your attention to is this: he swears it under an assumed name.
[Several pages omitted from this preview]
Through these thirty-six early novels — the preamble, one may say, to the worldly, saturnine Manthony we know — one’s blood thunders in sympathetic agitation as Manthony tries inexpertly to conceal his ignorance (Manthony! we shout in vain. ‘Cattle’ means horses, Manthony, they’re trying to confuse you! You mustn’t eat the Prince Regent’s snuffbox on a dare, Manthony! Manthony, you mustn’t shine your Hessian boots to such a gloss, if you see your own reflection in the boot leather you make a scrying glass for the Moon and she sees you, Manthony, she sees you!)
But Manthony cannot hear and must plunge headlong into the Doom of Youth, from whose painful jaws only Time, and Love, and the Devil’s Tinderbox, and the Moving Mausoleum, and the Hares Above the Ground, and the Withered Apple of Harmamaxa can draw him.
* * *
[The full elaboration of this Argument may be found in Monographs for Manthony (2020), now available for pre-order.]