Mr. Beethoven
by Paul Griffiths
(Henningham Family Press, May 2020)
Reviewed by Jon Day
Historical novelists are more parasitic than most writers of fiction. They hang their stories on the scaffolding of established fact, inhabiting and exploiting gaps in the historical record. In this, writing historical fiction is a bit like performing music. Both activities depend on balancing fidelity to your sources with creative embellishment of them. Too free an interpretation and you might be accused of ignoring the facts or deviating from the score; too constrained and you’ll be writing biography rather than fiction, mechanically reproducing a piece of music rather than performing it.
Paul Griffiths’s Mr. Beethoven is a novel about interpretation: about how a writer might go about interpreting the life of one of the most well-known—and well-chronicled—composers who ever lived, but also about the role interpretation plays in creativity of all kinds. It is also, like much of Griffiths’s work, a riddling, playful, and often very funny investigation of literary form, and a demonstration of the unexpected liberation that can emerge from self-imposed constraints.
The bones of the plot are almost entirely invented. Rather than dying in 1827, the composer imagined in Mr. Beethoven travels to America in 1833 to compose an oratorio commissioned by the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, with lyrics written by one “Reverend Ballou,” a bumbling Unitarian minister. The kernel of the story might be true—Griffiths, or his narrator, provides a footnote in which we learn that Beethoven was once approached, via the US Embassy in Vienna, to compose an oratorio in English—but Griffiths doesn’t labor the point, acknowledging just how easy it is to generate a sense of realism if you sprinkle enough plausible detail around.
By 1833, Beethoven would have been deaf for nearly twenty years—he composed some of his most famous works without being able to hear them—so Griffiths gives him an interpreter: Thankful, a local girl who teaches him a special form of sign language which was developed in Martha’s Vineyard in the late eighteenth century due to the prevalence of congenital deafness in the area.
Thankful, “not his mouthpiece but his earpiece,” is one of our guides through the silent world of the novel, mediating sounds neither Beethoven nor we can ever hear. “Her hand gestures,” the narrator says, in a typically self-reflexive flourish, “no more need be described than would, were the transmission direct, the vibrations of the stereocilia. Let her be. Again, let her be. Let her listen, and form her own judgement.” While staying with a local worthy, the politician and President of Harvard University Josiah Quincy III, Beethoven also meets a widow, Mrs. Hill, who rewrites Reverend Ballou’s uninspired lyrics. With Thankful’s help, the two become friends and collaborators.
Though some of these people are drawn from real life—I recognized a few names, others I Googled—most are composite figures, pieced together from scraps of historical record. Thankful and Mrs. Hill represent the kind of overlooked, undemonstrative lives that history usually forgets. The “first names” of so many people like this are, Griffiths says, “lost to us as surely as the color of their eyes, or how they wear their hair.” Without sufficient written information, such lives tend to “dwindle into stereotype.” But one of the novel’s great possibilities is that it can imagine back into being these quiet, unacknowledged existences.
The fact that the events Griffiths describes did not and could never have happened is part of a wider point. Rather than maintain the illusion of omniscient authority, Griffiths seems more interested in asking what it means to fictionalize history when only a very small part of it is available to us, to ask what we are free to invent about the experiences of other people, and whether there is any difference—either aesthetically or ethically—in giving voice to a famous historical figure or inventing someone who never lived.
Much of the early part of the book is narrated in the future conditional tense, and Griffiths’s narrator often breaks off to remind us that what we’re reading is either speculation or pure confection. After rendering a conversation between Beethoven and one of the members of the Society, we’re told, “What they all hear was, of course, delivered in German, though the usual convention will generally be followed here, of translating anything spoken or written in another language.” Griffiths is winningly upfront about his sources (he used the Internet, mostly, supplemented with the odd auction catalog and literary archive), and disarmingly honest about his research methods. He often intrudes on scenes to tell us how he’s put them together, or to acknowledge that he can’t know for sure what happened (not least because none of this ever could have happened). “There would be the opportunity here for atmospheric description,” says the narrator, archly, at one point, while never giving us that atmospheric description itself.
Other techniques are more formally inventive. One chapter—a dialogue between two members of the Society—is marked with a flurry of musical annotations, much like one of Beethoven’s own scores. Another rehearses the same snatches of dialogue to produce three entirely different conversations between Ballou and Beethoven. The spoken words become a repeated theme, like the refrain in a piece of music, recurring with different stresses across the chapter. It’s a brilliant technical achievement, but also has a thematic point, forcing you to consider the ways in which meaning is contingent.
This kind of metafictional tricksiness can get tiresome when used without a certain amount of humor, but in Griffiths’s hands it always feels assured and, more important, it is part of the wider aims of the novel. In drawing attention to the interpretative, speculative, and fundamentally fraudulent nature of historical fiction, Griffiths draws attention to the artificiality of so much writing about the past. Here, he seems to be saying, is what a historical novel about Beethoven in America might look like, had it been written by someone who had more faith in the established conventions of the genre.
let me tell you
by Paul Griffiths
(Reality Street Narrative, Jan. 2014)
One thing that Griffiths hasn’t allowed himself to invent are the words Beethoven speaks, which are taken from letters and other sources which he lists scrupulously at the end of the book. Griffiths, who has a parallel career as a celebrated music critic and librettist, has played with this kind of Oulipian constraint in his fiction before. His most well-known novel, let me tell you, was a reimagining of Hamlet’s Ophelia written entirely in the vocabulary used by her in Shakespeare’s play. The conceit was more than a gimmick: part of the magic of let me tell you is to witness a fully-fledged character emerging from within the confines of the words ascribed to her.
Beethoven was a notorious self-interpreter of his works. His innovations as a composer meant that he often had to tell musicians how to perform his scores. This, too, is something that is suggested by Griffiths’s method. Like let me tell you, Mr. Beethoven is both a novel and an essay on the methods and limits of fiction. Sometimes it reads as notes towards a novel that has yet to be written rather than that novel itself: the score of a performance yet to be heard. It’s not that it feels unfinished, but that Griffiths acknowledges throughout how contingent any version of history might be. What cracks in the record are there to imagine in, it seems to ask, what space is left to perform a life within?
Jon Day is a writer, critic and academic. He is the author of Homing and Cyclogeography, and teaches English at King’s College London. His new book, Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia, will be published in September.
Banner image by Bill Barber and reproduced under CC BY-NC 2.0 license.