RULES FOR OLD MEN WAITING
By Peter Pouncey
Random House. 210 pp. $21.95
Like many other academics who have spent years professing the literary works of others, in his retirement Peter Pouncey, professor of classical historiography and distinguished former president of Amherst College, has now given it a go himself. The results are mixed. On the one hand, he is a big-hearted and deft writer with a fine eye and decent ear; as one would expect, his novel makes ready use of the wisdoms and observations of age. On the other hand, as one would also expect of a first novelist, despite his age, Pouncey makes his share of rookie mistakes. "The poet thinks with his poem," said William Carlos Williams, and the same must be said about the storyteller and his story. In Rules for Old Men Waiting , the academic Pouncey tries to have it both ways: to dramatize not a story, but thinking about a story. In my mind, despite charms on nearly every page, it doesn't work.
Rules for Old Men Waiting is an elaborately built novel, a Russian matrioshka of a book. The story at the center concerns three Englishmen in the trenches in World War I. It's a good story: three well-imagined characters, a whiff of gas and cordite, a smattering of homoeroticism and a doleful denouement that has far more to do with class differences on the British side than with anything lobbed at them by the Germans. So far, more than good.
This story comes to us neither as written nor narrated, but rather in bits and pieces as imagined by its author, Robert MacIver, an 80-some-year-old emeritus history professor living out his last weeks in a crumbling vacation home on Cape Cod. At the opening of the book, MacIver's wife, Margaret, dies, and knowing that the end is not far for him -- he is dying of some nicely unspecified body failure -- he settles in for the last project: awaiting death. After a few weeks he recognizes that he can do this either heedlessly or alertly and, choosing the latter, formulates the list of rules suggested by the title, among them: eat, bathe, burn books by rival scholars to keep warm and -- critically -- tell a story to its end.
And so it goes. Day after day, the old military historian MacIver adds to the travails and fates of the upright Lieutenant Dodds, the murderous Sergeant Braddis, the sensitive, arty Private Callum. As MacIver assembles the book, it is clear that it is a bit of romance despite its occasionally gritty details, and it will sound quite like All Quiet on the Western Front . In one passage, for example, a German machine gun "could have spelled havoc," but our hero moves "low and smartly to the right," lobbing a grenade at the Germans that "finished their effort." MacIver doesn't go into what "finishing their effort" looked like, but no matter; he isn't readying this for publication anyway.
At the end of his day's work, MacIver occupies his evenings listening to the slow movements of everything from Beethoven's Archduke Trio to Mahler's Sixth Symphony. In these evenings the memories and reflections are allowed to pour out: early acclaim as a student and rugby superstar in his native Scotland, marriage to a beautiful and successful artist, a charmed academic career, a son off effortlessly to Yale, sabbaticals in Scotland and Paris, work going well no matter the venue, a life simply packed with good fortune all rather smugly accepted. I confess that I got a little tired of MacIver's success. Doctors randomly consulted can quote from his work, and, on the last day of his life, a former student says on national TV that "the most important lesson I learned for my profession I learned from Robert MacIver." I hope Pouncey meant that as a piece of academic gallows humor, but I'm not sure he did. Even the great tragedy of MacIver's life, the "bubble of the idyll" recalled in some detail, merely slows him down for a semester or two and does not dispel the feeling that this guy had it nailed from the beginning.
So we have lives imagined and lives remembered, and despite much charm and wisdom, the pitfalls of this novel's plan are obvious: In attempting to dramatize the rather undramatic act of writing, there are simply too many ways to go wrong. Not enough opportunity to throw the unexpected at the protagonist; too much opportunity for sermonizing. If I formulated a list of rules for old men writing, I would propose, first, that one avoid a novel about an old man writing and, second, that one avoid a novel about an old man remembering. Writing and remembering are already embarrassingly self-conscious and self-congratulatory acts, and MacIver is far too satisfied with his life to permit any real struggle on the page. Pouncey clearly recognizes the dangers in his project, and thus we have the Great War story, but despite his efforts at the end to use it as a text for some rather academic musings, even MacIver doesn't consider getting the story down as anything but a pastime.
Still, it's all well written, all honest, a quietly wise piece of work if not a particularly successful novel. Here one says to the first novelist what virtually anyone who has ever completed a first novel -- published or unpublished -- has been told by people who care: lovely prose, fine characters, good you got that one done and out of the way. What's next? ·
Christopher Tilghman's most recent novel is "Roads of the Heart." He teaches at the University of Virginia.
