The Complete Fiction of W.M. Spackman

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 30, 1997 | by Vincent D. Balitas

William Mode Spackman led an extraordinary life. Born in 1905 Win Coatesville, Pa., he was educated at Princeton (class of 1927) and Balliol College in Oxford (a Rhodes scholar). He returned to the United States in time for the Great Depression, taught classics at New York University, worked in radio and wrote his first novel, Heyday, in 1948. When it was published in 1953, Spackman, at age 48, retired from teaching to write.

His second novel, arguably his best An Armful of Warm Girl, didn't appear until 1978, when he was 73. It was followed by A Presence With Secrets; A Difference of Design; A Little Decorum for Once; and As I Sauntered Out One Midcentury Morning....

Thanks to editor Steven Moore and to Dalkey Archive Press, we now have The Complete Fiction of W.M. Spackman. The author is such a joy, readers new to him will wonder why his fiction has been unavailable for so long.

One possible reason for this oversight: Spackman's work may strike many as old-fashioned, too much an echo of Henry James and of the English and French mannerists. Although Spackman's fiction shares similarities with these writers -- his characters are well-educated, financially and socially secure and able to lapse into several languages in midsentence -- he takes the wind out of the high seriousness of his predecessors. His fiction is very funny, and his comedies often take place where earlier writers couldn't go: the bedroom.

Spackman wrote often about the varieties and vagaries of love, especially adulterous love. Indeed, his fiction is an important contribution to the literature of adultery, placing him in the company of Hawthorne, Flaubert and Tolstoy. Spackman's often satiric treatment of adultery, however, has less to do with its transgression of social, legal and religious contracts than with illicit love's "sheer heaven."

Spackman's spouses are not devastated by their partners' unfaithfulness. No one is exiled from the community, forced to wear a scarlet A; no one commits suicide with poison or under the wheels of a train. Affairs begin, enjoy a reasonable duration, end. Sometimes after an interval, they begin anew. Memories of a shared bottle of iced Bollinger, of haute cuisine (how nice it is to read fiction that pays attention to what people eat) -- such is the stuff that transforms illicit trysts into romance.

If earlier novels of manners rarely ventured behind bedroom walls, Spackman never hesitates at the threshold. Yet, there is nothing offensive or even erotic in his fiction. We learn about the physical activities of his lovers from the pauses in their conversations.

Spackman's characters talk much of the time. They probe each other's psyches, gossip, share views of current and past affairs. The men who endure, we learn from their conversations, are those who truly admire women. But to say that men are hunters, women their prey, would be to misread. They are equals in their pursuit of love.

All this is politically incorrect, perhaps another reason why these novels until now have been out of print. Although it is true that Spackman's style, characters and themes might offend seekers of a political agenda, it also is true that there is a bittersweet innocence in his fiction. He possessed a classical parodist's sense of humor, a painter's eye and a poet's ear. Find a copy of this tribute to a wonderful writer.