An Awful Lot of Books (16 page)

April 1961

Buried treasure … There has always been treasure, and most of it has at one time or another been buried: it has also always been in the nature of every right spirited person when they hear of such stuff to want to dig it up. Nowadays, however, in spite of many other improvements, there is a distressing lack of pirates, torn old maps, and practically fruitful last words, and so Miss Lane is unusually lucky to have married someone who inherited both a map and first-hand information about a hoard of uncut diamonds buried seventy years ago in the grave of an African chief in the Portuguese African territory of Mozambique. The original possessor of this knowledge had himself made an abortive attempt to discover the chief’s grave forty years ago, and had been defeated by illness and the difficulties of the country, but his failure in no way invalidated his information, over which this author and her husband brooded with a kind of detached luxury and the high gloss of excitement which complete ignorance of the problems involved blissfully lend to a potential adventure of this kind.

Eventually, in 1958, they decided that they would attempt their own expedition, together with their nephew. They none of them knew the country at all and found that the area in which they were interested was virtually unmapped. Forty years could render all the clues on their own tattered map unrecognisable, and they could not only expect no help locally, but positive hostility if their intentions became known. They needed advice and were in no position to ask for it. So they invented a cover story to account for them wishing to go to such an unfashionable part of Africa - and to stall the well-meant advice from those of their friends accustomed to stylish safaris.

They arrived in Salisbury in April 1959, to be met by their nephew and to find that their travel agent, uneasy at the prospect of three greenhorns going off alone into the bush, had decided to send his son, a Rhodesian police officer, along with them, and he was accompanied by a huge Alsatian (also in the Force) appropriately named Shadow. Miss Lane’s account of what followed with the three treasure hunters struggling to provide adequate reasons for their mad and futile requirements against the policeman’s idea of a jolly good leave in the bush is both entertaining and exciting, and graced by English of the most excellent clarity and unobtrusive style: she also gives, or implies, a remarkably good picture of the moods and phases which underlie the life of an expedition as opposed to a piece of ordinary travelling.

June 1961

Mrs. Bedford is one of the very few women writers living whose observations and comment upon almost any subject is certain to be uniformly interesting. I, for one, would buy and read her if she chose to discourse upon monotremes, madrigals or Martinique - certain that she would prevail upon my attention about these or any other matters. In this book, however, she has picked a subject in which it would be difficult for anyone to have no interest; the varying concepts and principles of justice, freedom and protection for the individual, and their administration in various courts of law - high, low and police - in such countries of Europe where she had the language to gain an accurate impression.

She begins in England with an ordinary trial in a Criminal court in London, and goes on to the courts where approximately forty thousand people a year are dealt with by lay and professional magistrates. Those accused come here, she says, steaming with their deeds, as the law is twenty-four hours from arrest to court (unlike France, where the wretched accused may languish in prison for three or four years after arrest and before trial). She describes good and ‘not so good’ magistrates at work, and confirms the general view that this country has more concern to protect the individual through its laws than most others. This is not a surprising conclusion: the surprise comes when Mrs. Bedford gets to Western Germany. There, in Karlsruhe, she listens to the trial of a Dr. Brach, for the killing of a man who had kept indecently exposing himself to the doctor’s small daughter. The trial has taken eight months to prepare, and during this time Dr. Brach has been entirely at liberty, and is subsequently treated with the utmost kindness and consideration - the verdict is a deferred sentence of four months, both sides having the right to appeal. In Munich she gives examples of summary justice - conducted there by judges of which there are eleven thousand in Western Germany - and where the same kind of humanity and concern for all offenders seemed to apply.

Austria, where she only spent one week and did not go to Vienna, rates farcically low with somnolent, cynical judges, and a Lewis Carroll-like air of unreality. France was perhaps the most frightening, and certainly the country where one would least like to be a prisoner, and in Switzerland there are twenty-five independent legal systems - one for each Canton. There is also a prejudice against lawyers; ‘it has been more or less accepted that lawyers could not be entirely eliminated from the courts’.

This is a fascinating book, and another admirable opportunity for the layman to discover how certain professional parts of the world go round, written by somebody whose perceptions really are the next best thing to one’s own.

July 1961

‘Writers of comedy have outlook whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight’. This remark of Mr. Thurber’s, which might be described as a lance with a lantern bobbing at its end, occurs in one of his more serious moments in this newest collection of twenty-four pieces, and to me, one of the most fascinating aspects of the book is the range displayed in it, so that one would not - like the lady in Iowa - dream of asked Mr. Thurber ‘how do you get through the day?’ The truth is that he does get through the day without contriving to bypass it - as he feels she may be suggesting - and not only his day, but his nights as well, although the latter involved insomniac preoccupations with the private and public lives of most of the alphabet. In view of these, this book can only be described as a bedside book for those who a) cannot sleep at all anyway, or b) can’t keep awake and are willing to try anything, as the night life of Thurber’s mind’s eye is far from soporific. For him, words, and the letters of which they are composed have a kind of physical life where their appearance as well as their meaning is taken passionately into account; he has muscles for the exercise which generally speaking are only acquired by poets, and although it seems a doubtful form of relaxation for Mr. Thurber, it must be marvellously restful for the words: word-watching does give the word every chance to get away unscathed, whereas shooting off your mouth simply murders the poor things before one has seen the dots of their i’s.

There are also many interesting reflections upon time: a delicious fable about a clock-eating ogre (I don’t think anyone has succeeded with fables since Stevenson) and an anxious prognostication of future dolphinity - their schools, as he points out, unlike ours, are on the increase, and he foresees a thoughtful and brilliant dolphin writing about
The Decline and Fall of Man
. There is a dazzling essay on Henry James, which like all proper appreciation, really attracts the reader to its subject, and there are many conversation pieces of the kind we have so luckily come to expect. He seems unlucky in birds, cats, and casual female acquaintances at cocktail parties - on the other hand, dog’s best friend is clearly Thurber; he has also a kindly, if resigned understanding of his own species, and he certainly keeps the figures out of speech.

August 1961

Mr. Maugham is said to have described his writing as ‘a harmless habit that happens to be profitable’; he has also said that he knows just where he stands: ‘in the very front row of the second-raters’. These two remarks taken together do seem to sum up much of his attitude towards his writing, although whether his attitude and his private feeling about it are the same thing is difficult to determine. The ‘harmless habit’ has a faint echo of the epigrammatic decorations which embroider his earlier plays, and his assessment of his writing has that ruthlessly unsentimental accuracy which people only believe when somebody applies it to himself. His writing has certainly been profitable - forty-two million copies of his works have been sold to date (this does not, of course, take into account the various and innumerable dramatic presentations of his plays and stories); he must in fact have provided more people with entertainment than any other living writer. A book about him which he does not object to is therefore of much general interest.

Mr. Cordell gives us a brief biographical sketch, which is necessary although it does not tell one anything new, and then goes on to discuss Maugham’s works - beginning with what he calls the autobiographical novels and going on to most of the others (there are twenty in all), and followed by the short stories and the plays (twenty-seven original and three adaptations). There is a brief chapter about the non-fiction, and finally, and most interesting, a summary of critics’ view on Maugham throughout his long career. He has been condemned by the highbrow for failing to create any new form, an accusation which could be levelled at many writers of classic significance. He has been condemned by the lowbrow for writing about people he met and/or knew - an ephemeral judgement, since it is usually transformed from contemporary wickedness into historical interest in half a lifetime. Perhaps a fair conclusion might be, that it you do something as well as Mr. Maugham, your own excellence - intelligence, observation, craftsmanship, accuracy, honesty - betrays to you those regions which are both disciplined by and mysteriously free of these merits. In any case, in spite of repetition, and some woolly and arbitrary reasoning, Mr. Cordell’s book reminds one of Maugham’s phenomenal contribution, which in turn makes one realise that a writer producing this intelligent and successful quantity of work actually raises the standard of popular writing: ‘the very front row of the second-raters’ becomes a more exclusive position than many a young writer likes to imagine.

September 1961

Although he is continually quoted, I must confess that I have not before read any of Chateaubriand’s works, and coming fresh to these memoirs is certainly a remarkable experience.

A Breton nobleman, born in 1768, he lived through the most turbulent period of France’s history, witnessed and played parts in the royalist/republican seesaw, and died at the age of eighty in 1848. The political conflicts which are the scenes of his extraordinarily varied life do seem to reflect upon the complex divisions of his nature. His writing was widely acclaimed in his day: he was a soldier, ambassador, poet, explorer and historian, to mention a few of his attributes; he also adored women, with whom he clearly enjoyed general success.

By turns a sceptic and a passionate Christian; a philosopher and a man of action; a courtier and a recluse; a liberal and a fanatical believer in tradition; possessed of both courage and timidity in unusual degrees; struck alternately by bolts of pride and humility; a man of ideals and ideas; innocent, worldly, morose and charming; a gifted amateur and the most polished professional; whose life is compounded of integrity and expediency, of gestures and withdrawals, it is astonishing how much he presents of himself - some of it, at least, one feels, unconsciously. His most conscious writing - the rather gothic reflections upon mortality, which were one of the most tiresome literary fashions of early nineteenth century Europe and usually took the form of gigantic metaphysical clichés overgrown with sentiment - is easily the least interesting aspect of this work; but his account of his childhood, particularly the two years he spent in the vast and gloomy family château with his enervating and eccentric family - that sense of frantic isolation set in interminable wastes of boredom - is marvellously good, and his description of his favourite sister, Lucile ‘endowed with beauty, genius, and misfortune’ and incarcerated in futility by her sex, her breeding and the age would have kindled any Brontë heart.

There is also much fascinating material about Napoleon about whom he was characteristically divided, but his account of the Emperor in Russia, and the summing-up after St. Helena - of his nature and career, is both brilliant and measured writing, filled with the most pertinent observations upon military strategy and politics. He has also an extraordinary knack for being there at dramatic moments: it was he who had to identify the bones of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, and there is a very good account of his hearing the battle of Waterloo from a quiet Belgian village. His life abounds with historic occasion: he is aware of this, and yet, experienced though he clearly is about men and affairs, there are confounding little touches of naiveté - as well as passages of disingenuous evasion. On the whole, he seems to have had an emotional feeling about defeat: he is nearly always on whichever side is losing, which is endearing, if not always reasonable. I am not qualified to criticise Mr. Baldick’s discrimination about selection: can only say humbly that this reads clearly and well, but it does seem to be a good translation - it has the flavour and rhythms of its language at that time, and is altogether very well worth reading.