The Snow Ball

‘atque hoc evenit
in labore atque in dolere, ut mors obrepat interim.’

P
LAUTUS
:
Pseudolus,
II, iii              

No appreciation of Brigid Brophy’s fiction could be complete without reference to her passionate regard for Mozart and how she placed him in the all-time pantheon of creative artists. (This was right at the top, ‘on the very pinnacle of Parnassus’ alongside Shakespeare, as she made clear in her 1964 study
Mozart the Dramatist
– also available in Faber Finds.) Mozart is a presiding spirit through all of Brophy’s novels, but arguably the one that is most thoroughly infused is
The Snow Ball
(1964), a work that consummately melds Brophy’s deep interests in myth, opera, sexuality and psychoanalysis. Its heroine Anna admits freely to a troika of obsessions: ‘Mozart, sex, and death.’ The Freudian opposites of
eros
and
thanatos,
which Brophy considered in her non-fictional
Black Ship to Hell
(1962), are also shadowy guests in the wings of
The Snow Ball.

The novel takes for an epigraph Brophy’s own note from
Mozart the Dramatist
concerning the age-old critical interest in the question of ‘whether, when the opera opens, Don Giovanni has just seduced or has just failed to seduce Donna Anna’. In
The Snow Ball
‘Did she or didn’t she?’ is turned around to ‘Will she or won’t she?’ as Brophy, with a dextrous touch and allusive skill, brings Mozart’s age into our own.

The setting is ideal for the purpose: an eighteenth-century-themed costume ball on New Year’s Eve, in a London residence so grand as to house a ballroom, home to wealthy Tom and his wife, four-times-married Anne. Anna attends alone, dressed as Donna Anna, unhappily preoccupied by her middle years and what they mean for her good looks, as well as by a general distaste for the occasion. (‘If one wants to forget one’s age’, she will lament, ‘New Year’s Eve is the wrong eve to start.’) Like Brigid Brophy, Anna has a highly developed aesthetic sense, and to her keen eye no one at this ball looks quite right: too many cut-price Casanovas and third-rate Marie Antoinettes. Anna is of the view that people come to fancy-dress balls as their daydreams, and she is pained by the paucity of imagination on display. Yet the judgement she passes on others could be one from which she is willing to exempt herself.

At least one guest at the ball is wearing a mask; and this element of the
bal masque
makes the vital bridge for the novel into a Mozartian world – the masquerade being, as critic Terry Castle has put it, ‘part of the eighteenth century of the imagination, which in the end is the only one we have’. A masked ball is usually a subversive occasion, one where feckless acts may suddenly be permitted, and the world turned upside down if only for a night – including the balance of power between men and women, as it is affected by sexual attraction and consenting sexual intercourse.

So, when at midnight Anna meets a masked Don who kisses her on the mouth – ‘not socially, but on the lips, gently and erotically, then with a voluptuous fluttering, and at last with a violent and passionate exploration’ – she is moved to wonder if this mystery man might share her personal obsessions, and whether a closer union is meant to be.

First, though, as if feeling eighteenth century
mores
pressing upon her, Anna flees from her suitor, seeking refuge in the sumptuous boudoir of her friend and hostess Anne. It is white ‘like peppermint creams’, done in a style Anna thinks of as ‘tart’s rococo’. There she and Anne share affectionate, barbed gossip and confidences – the reader conscious all the while of a current of erotic tension that will drive the novel to its very last page. Anna’s dilemma, though the core of
The Snow Ball
, is complemented by side-plots. Her kiss with the Don has been observed by Ruth Blumenbaum, teenage daughter of another old friend: Ruth is a precocious diarist who has come to the ball dressed as Cherubino, squired by her disagreeable beau Edward (Casanova). The fitful struggle toward intimacy of these two youths makes for a counter-theme in the novel, as does the slightly unsightly but undeniably contented marriage of Anne and Tom (or ‘Tom-Tom’ and ‘Tum-Tum’, as they call one another in confidence.)  

In these parallel
amours
Brophy makes fine use of her gift for describing human carnality. One evocation, from the female perspective, of what the French call ‘la petite mort’ was thought rather scandalous by readers in 1964, perhaps chiefly because Brophy was a woman and wrote so superbly. And yet Brophy never lets us forget that, however well fitted the partners in this dance, its aftermath can lead nonetheless to thoughts of an entirely different nature. Or to paraphrase Plautus – whom Brophy takes as her other epigraph – even in the midst of the most diverting activities Death may creep up upon us.

This is another tension that persists to the last page of
The Snow Ball
, where the curtain drops on what is arguably Brigid Brophy’s most brilliant fictional performance.

Richard T Kelly

Editor, Faber Finds

May 2013

T
HE
double doors at the end of the ballroom were thrust open. Some of the people into whose backs they were thrust resisted and resented for a moment and then, understanding, made way. A space was created and at the same time a pause, as though
someone
very important or very fat was about to enter and nothing of smaller weight could command attention meanwhile. At last a sedan chair was carried in at a run.

On its roof, which was black and probably tarred, stood a few flakes of snow.

Seeing them from above—she was standing in the minstrels’ gallery—Anna held her breath in
enchantment
for as long as it took them to melt.

The sedan chair was grounded and people closed in, milling up to and about it, like snowflakes themselves, making it as difficult for the woman inside to get the door opened as if a snowdrift really had been
compiling
against it; and everyone was laughing in the
invigorated
way of people who had suddenly discovered that it had snowed.

One man was standing against the drift of the
crowd, shewing no interest in the arrival of the sedan chair and evidently neither with nor looking for a party of his own. He had a large paunch which he carried behind a waistcoat of opalescent chinese silk, and to Anna’s view he made the shape of a boiled egg, which she might have been looking down on at the breakfast table—a boiled egg in a neat little chinoiserie egg-cosy. He was holding, at shoulder height, a small cup of coffee, and his only concern was to protect it from the crush.

Anna’s hand at her side gathered control over her long skirt. But she waited a moment more in the gallery. The woman in the sedan chair was still
laughing
through its window, deploring in mime her
difficulty
in opening not only the door but her fan, which she obviously wanted to use; her face was already flushed. The paunched man, meanwhile, deciding it was safer to move, tottered to the edge of the
ballroom
, where he found an empty place on a rout bench. Holding his coffee higher than ever—indeed, above his head—he slowly began to sit down. Just before sitting he made, with his free hand, a gesture of hitching his trousers and then remembered they were knee breeches.

Anna descended the grand staircase, knowing that Voltaire and Lady Hamilton were waiting for her in the crowd at the bottom. The noise, the scents, the very warmth of the people’s skins came to her as
unmistakably
twentieth-century. A film camera taking it all in from her place in the minstrels’ gallery would have captured not a moment’s illusion. You would merely judge: What a
bad
costume piece; how little sense of period; how overdone.

She touched the back of Lady Hamilton’s shoulder. ‘Did you see the sedan chair?’

‘No?’ Lady Hamilton peered where Anna
indicated
, into the ballroom, whose matching double doors at this, the opposite end, had been open all the time. But on ground level it was impossible to see to the other end for people. Anna was afraid Lady Hamilton might deduce she had been looking down from above. Indeed, ‘Where did you get to?’ Lady Hamilton asked, but Anna was already saying:

‘It had snow on its roof.’

‘Must be snowing outside’, said Voltaire.

‘Must be.’

‘Must be.’

Over the heads of the men it might have been possible to see, because most men were lopped tonight, their stature cut off at the earliest moment short of scalping by close, severe wigs. But the women were correspondingly built high. Their piled hair suggested, without defining, a fetichists’ ball, as though they were wearing high heels on their heads.

There were sounds of chairs and fiddle bows being scraped. Evidently the band—which was not using the minstrels’ gallery because it would have been too
cramped—had come back to its position on a shallow platform at one side of the ballroom.

‘First snow of the year’, said Voltaire.

‘Of whichever year.’

‘O no’, he replied, looking on his wrist for his watch and then drawing it out of the pocket where he had lodged it for verisimilitude, ‘it’s not quite—’

A crowd movement from behind them lifted Anna away and set her down inside the ballroom, where people she did not know told her she must make up the set or she would spoil it, an admonition she did not understand until the band’s scrapings turned into music of a Scottish cast.

She began jumping up and down on the spot, which was all they required of her for the moment.

It must, pace Voltaire, whose watch perhaps went slower in his pocket, be getting on for midnight. It must be the approach of midnight that was already colouring the music.

Anna could not remember the figures but she
supposed
someone would tell her when it was her turn to trip out to the centre: unless midnight should come first.

Once a year, the iron tongue of midnight spoke in a Scottish accent.

She was conscious not merely of looking but of being absurd in having joined in. At twenty she would have pouted and refused to be a sport.

‘I
hate
new years’, said a man’s voice, dancing past,
putting a social and jocular face on a sentiment that was true.

The man opposite Anna, in the place
corresponding
to hers in the opposite row, was wearing a kilt, a black velvet coat and a froth of white lace down his chest. He was short, and hollowed out by middle age; and his sporran leapt hectically, leapt breathlessly, up and down, not keeping time with the lighter leaps of his jabot.

Anna’s absurdity was to do this with the face and the drinking habits of middle age. The neat whisky she had been drinking brought her heart not to her mouth but, much more discomfortably, to the flat part of her chest, to what seemed to be a precise
location
on top of the flat bone above the breasts.

Even the music, although, being traditional, it ought to have been timeless, seemed to her as unmistakably twentieth-century as the faces which were jumping up and down—jumping once in their own right and again in Anna’s vision—and which betrayed the ball.

Someone’s fingers pushed her, bruisingly, and she ran to the centre in order not to disappoint an
unknown
Pompadour who was already waiting at an empty rendezvous. Hands clasped high, they scurried round an imaginary maypole, never quite catching up with where they ought to have been according to the music. It was really they, high-haired, unused to the exercise, who were maypoles.

One of the things you would judge overdone was
beauty spots. They might have drifted lavishly down on to the female faces in a black snowstorm.

Now two other women had to do it.

The consciousness of any one of these women must be indistinguishable from Anna’s own: in every case a consciousness of exhaustion, ageing absurdity and the approach of another year. Everyone grew a year older at once on new year’s eve, even those whose birthdays had been the day before. They gathered, Anna decided, for consolation: wearing historical costume to offset the advance of history.

Not the most careless costume piece would have submitted an ageing Marie Antoinette to the absurdity of tripping to her rendezvous and encountering another ageing Marie Antoinette.

Suppose to the camera’s view from the gallery was added a soundtrack on which they had mounted Anna’s consciousness. The camera would be hard put to it to know which of these women was she. It would have to descend, approach, enquire into faces; quiz this beauty spot; explore the flabby, jumping cheek flesh of that Marie Antoinette; insert its lens into the spring of corkscrew curl flapping above these temples. It would find itself sliding with a drunken coiffure here, slipping there with a shoulder strap; it would stumble and recover a heel: it would begin to
dissolve
in the melting heat: as it stooped to retrieve a glittering, tumbling, spiralling ear-ring, the jewels would lose translucence and its vision be swamped in
a flurry of black beauty spots, unseated by sweat, drifting stormily to the floor …

However, she steadied herself by looking at the distant wall which she knew, though she could not see, was not jumping up and down; she managed to screw her ear-ring on again, jarring the lobe of her ear as she jumped; and when her eyes shifted back to a closer focus she recognised that the man in Scottish costume dancing opposite her was Rudy Blumenbaum. ‘Hullo. Who’re you? Bonnie Prince Charlie?’

‘Ti tum ti tum’, he called back and laughed loudly, even as he turned with his line and began to trot away from her. He was out of breath; she was deaf with the pulses in her ears.

‘I can’t hear.’

‘Ti tum——’

She was swept with her line into a circle: a snake had made the decision to eat itself: she saw Rudy’s Scottish shirt pass like a streak of white impasto laid across a sombre painting.

She thought she knew what everyone in the room was thinking. On new year’s eve it was impossible not to think of the approach of death.

The circle straightened again. Rudy reappeared,
unexpectedly
close. ‘
Who
did you say you were?’

‘I’m Rabbi Burns’, he shouted, dancing away from her again, leaving behind him a hoot of
Scottish-Jewish
laughter, a sound of owls, bagpipes and ritual lugubriousness.

As if in obedience to the association of ideas, the
band cut itself off, drew three lines on the strings beneath what it had done and after a formal, rolling prelude began to play Auld Lang Syne. Some of the dancers did not understand for a moment or could not stop. Even Anna, thankful to stop, was distressed to find herself in the wrong line, until she
remembered
that after midnight it did not matter. Her arms were painfully crossed in front of her body, appositely in the gesture of a martyr. Rudy on her right was clasping her left hand, painfully pumping it up and down and squeezing her wedding ring into her flesh by the pressure against it of his signet ring. A masked stranger in a black costume had her right hand. She was singing, without knowing the words, embarrassed to be singing in public: after the parody of ballet, the parody of opera. The song straggled noisily away. No one knew the words. People began kissing, celebrating or assuaging the stroke of the one midnight a year which changed everyone into Cinderella. Rudy had turned away from her to the woman on the other side of him. Anna remembered it was his wife. She looked away, and began to move away from the dance floor. The masked man in black costume began to kiss her, not socially but on the lips, gently and erotically, then with a voluptuous fluttering, and at last with a violent and passionate exploration.

When he let her go, she remained facing him,
staring
deep into the eye-slits of his mask. The mask had not been unsettled by the embrace.

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Don Giovanni. Who are you?’

She continued looking intently at him, even though people were moving about now, kissing more
promiscuously
, blowing whistles, making up half-dancing, arm-locked, straggling lines of three or four.

‘Who are you?’ he repeated.

‘I’m safe so long as I don’t tell you.’

‘Safe?’

A storm of balloons was loosed from the ceiling. A green one fell between her and Don Giovanni. Neither of them moved. It touched them both, bounced and slowly reached the ground. He put his index finger for a second to the bridge of his nose, to feel that the mask was still in place.

‘I’m Donna Anna’, she said.

She put her hand up to the back of her head to
re-secure
the tall Spanish comb and the brief drift of black lace it held there. She had sewn a dozen sequins to the black lace; and as her hand touched it she heard or felt a tiny spattering of them come tumbling down.