HOLY DISORDERS:
FEN, THE LITERARY MAN

For a professor of English Literature, Fen was wonderfully free of the high-brow elitism that might be expected of such a person. When first encountered, he is prone to utterance of ‘Americanisms’, clearly culled from the works of the hard-boiled school. He seems to have lost his fascination with these during the war, around the time he grew out of Alice — his exclamations of "Oh, my dear paws!" always sounded somewhat affected anyway.

The hard-boiled impression lasted upon him though, so much that in Love Lies Bleeding  he announced his intention of writing a thriller set in the Catskills Mountains. Sadly, there is no record of him having completed (or even started) this story. In fact, the only book Crispin mentions Fen having published was a treatise on the minor satirists of the Eighteenth Century. By the time of Glimpses of the Moon, he had begun a detailed appreciation of the post-war novel. His publishers went bust, however, much to his relief, and he never completed that work either. But his real feelings to the sort of high-brow analysis he was attempting to carry out were revealed in some telling episodes. He was seen struggling to complete a single sentence on Penelope Mortimer, and when he finally succeeded, he forgot to whom it applied. Later, when dealing with Muriel Spark, he concluded that, "The use of ellipses in Mrs Spark’s earlier work expresses patterns in her narrative which … sometimes make the reader wonder if his wits are failing." Is this the work of a motivated man? At the end of Glimpses, he announced his intention of writing a post-war novel of his own, to be called 'A Manx Ca'. Sadly, Mr Crispin's untimely death, and the absence of any further chronicles, leave us with no evidence that he ever got around to it.

Fen had a low opinion of the intelligence and reliability of poets, as he told Richard Cadogan. Indeed, he seemed to shun literary people and things in general, but it was his fate to be face with literary policemen, Inspector Garratt (Holy Disorders), Sir Richard Freeman, Casby (Buried For Pleasure), and of course Humbleby. But his interest in discussing literature outside of the lecture hall was never great, as shown in Long Divorce, when he was dismayed by Peter Rubi’s attempts to discuss the works of Waugh and Greene.

At the same time, his love for great literature must never be doubted, as proven by his reaction to the destruction of the manuscript that could have been Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Won.