The Garden of Forking Paths

When Herbert Quain died recently, at his home in Roscommon, it came as no surprise to me that The Times Literary Supplement granted him a bare half column of pious valediction, none of whose complimentary adjectives went unmodified-and considerably tempered-by an adverb. The Spectator, in its relevant issue, was undeniably less brief and perhaps kinder. However, to liken The God of the Labyrinth, Quain's first book, to Mrs. Agatha Christie and other of his writings to Gertrude Stein are not comparisons that inevitably spring to mind, nor would the late author have been cheered by them. Quain never considered himself a genius, not even on those peripatetic nights of literary discussion when, having by then exhausted the printing presses, he played at being Monsieur Teste or Dr Samuel Johnson. Herbert Quain was fully aware of the experimental nature of his books, which were admirable perhaps for their novelty and for a certain blunt honesty but not for the power of their passion. "As with Cowley's odes," he wrote to me from Longford on the sixth of March, 1939, "I belong not to art but to the mere history of art. " To him there was no lower discipline than history.

I stress Herbert Quain's modesty-a modesty that is not, of course, the sum total of his thought. Flaubert and Henry James have led us to believe that works of art are rare and painstakingly created, but the sixteenth century (let us recall Cervantes's Voyage to Parnassus, let us recall Shakespeare's career) did not share this dismal view. Nor did Herbert Quain. In his opinion, good writing was not uncommon; he held that almost any street talk reached similar heights. He also felt that the aesthetic act demanded an element of surprise and that it was difficult to be surprised by something remembered. Smiling sincerely, he would deplore "the stubborn, slavish preservation" of books from the past. I do not know whether his woolly theory can be justified, but I know his books are too eager to surprise.