An Awful Lot of Books (6 page)

February 1961

The writing of this extremely accomplished novelist has a style which, as well as being its own, is strikingly European. Whistler and Henry James both lived and worked here, but while their subject matters were naturally taken from what came to their hands, their styles - and if they were not both stylists, they were both tremendously concerned with style - would never have been described as predominantly American. The same might be said of Auchincloss, although he is dealing with America and Americans, but here - at least - he contrives to give a different slant upon some of them which is detached without being an alien’s point of view.

The novel is about a fortune made by a Julius Millinder, a German immigrant of the 1850’s but the book is more a history of a fortune than of a family, and he is dying in his huge brownstone house in the middle of New York at the beginning of the story, which is told by one of his granddaughters, Augusta Millinder. The money is principally divided between two of his sons whose wives build gigantic houses in Newport and generally vie with each other in displaying their vast wealth. The children grow up embedded in this display, and although the story shifts its focus from one member of the family to another, it is always through the ageing Augusta’s eyes that we observe them - trying to make and to change and to break each attitude which they have inherited or acquired towards their money. Augusta never marries, and having helped her indomitable mother through her last (discriminating magpie) phase she remains in the brownstone house, a certain old maid, lonely, gruff and bulky, the dullness of her life relieved only by family crises.

What makes this a remarkable and fascinatingly readable novel is the author’s extraordinary grip over this large, ramifying situation. He never loses his sure and acute sense of period, and he never steps outside Gussie’s experience or nature, while at the same time showing through her the shift of certain values between 1886 when the book opens until 1948 when it closes. One watches the cycle of this money being displayed with the utmost ostentation, being lost, being made, being spent, being invested and being concealed, until I had the feeling that it was very like an ocean dominating these people’s lives in which they had to float, or paddle, or swim, or drown without any of them in the least affecting it. A brilliantly good book.

February 1961

Probability in a crime story or thriller need be no more effective than a hat holding water - in both cases a little time destroys the situation, but meanwhile you can be entertained or slaked. Mr. Bingham’s story is probably improbable, but quite probable enough for me to read right through it wanting to know how things will happen. For his villain is so pitch black - so uncompromisingly wicked and horrible that one can be in no doubt about his end. He is a blackmailer, a murderer, and sexually (if nothing else) unbalanced. He is mean, greedy, a bully, a sadist and a coward, and he has a nasty little voice. He has, in fact, none of the charm often attributed to wicked people - from the devil to Cecily Cardew’s Algernon - and one does wonder a bit how he manages to pass the time when he is not actually engaged in the activities outlined above. It is no chance, I feel, that he spends his holiday fishing, which involves the same kind of isolation and fleeting contact with his victims.

He is taking his ill-earned rest when the book starts, and does not know that he is being pursued by a journalist who has good personal reason to kill him. The reasons are then separately outlined from the point of view of the various victims, until, by the time we are back fishing with these two men, we are, so to speak, informed towards revenge. Mr Bingham is very good at his vignettes of people - one sees their lives stretching each side of the moments in which he presents them, and therefore, I should have liked a wider vision of his main character: but this would probable turn out to be a morbid request.

March 1961

Miss English is perhaps predominantly a writers’ writer, although this does not mean that she is not also a readers’ writer. But apart from the
sine qua non
of any good novelist - readability - she has a remarkably articulate sense of form, and writes with the mixture of concern and passionate attention to her detail together with those delicious little flights of what I can only call pure writing fancy which are seldom found in the greater bulk of readers’ writers. The four voices are none of them - as the readers’ writers would say - pinned down to professional or external life. They are more like those various, interesting objects found upon beaches after a shipwreck; clearly they have all had some use but one is not quite sure what it was: one picks them up and examines them with curiosity and faint nostalgia for the unknown heyday of their utility. There is Mona, a gigantic old drunk, who has been married and had one daughter who died, and now lives on a pittance with an aunt in Belgravia. Her one time husband, Penry, was once some kind of journalist, who has brought vagrancy and total irresponsibility for any of his wives or children to an art so fine that they all feel constantly in his debt. There is Elizabeth, an earlier wife of Penry’s, a Catholic convert with a son called Gervase, whose silliness and dishonesty become pathetic when she had to face losing him to the fourth voice Blanche, a young woman who has left a rich husband and small daughter to embark on marriage with a bloodless young man.

Blanche is intelligent, vaguely literary, and with an emotional structure which is only spasmodically equal to her perceptions. Of these voices, who speak in random turn (Gervase neither deserves nor gets one), it is Mona who really wrings one’s heart - with her irrelevant clarities, her reckless vulgarity, her knowledge of the appearances which she is damned if she will keep up, and her understanding of the mutual dependence forged between herself and Penry by the indissoluble links of their different weaknesses. She reminded me in some ways of Joyce Carey’s Gully Jimpson in
The Horse’s Mouth
. Given that something which is both elegant and intricate can also have power, I think this is a powerful novel, and Miss English a very good writer indeed.

March 1961

This is Miss O’Donovan’s second novel, and unlike Miss English, she has made much good use of a professional background: what her characters are has a great deal to do with what they do. Her heroine, Jenny Brown, is a new and young teacher at Gudge Street School in London. Jenny has been given Form O - made up of toughs and near delinquents, and run by a backward but forceful twelve-year-old called Sam, ‘who moved with the mad co-ordination of a crippled tank’, and whose language, I must say, is a delight - at least, to read. The only member of the staff who is friendly to her is Jack Star, a Communist, married and about twenty years older than she, who cannot resist seducing any personable young woman and at the same time trying to recruit her to the Party. As Jenny’s home is a country town and she is living in a furnished room with no friends in sight the first part of Jack’s programme is not difficult, and as it would be hard to someone with Jenny’s earnest simple nature not to equate having an affair with being in love - she is in love. To compensate for her imagination about her lover (in no time there seem to be two of him - one present, one absent) she starts trying to make her relationship with her family, a step-father and a neurotic mother a more honest and interesting business.

Apart from her tremendously good school atmosphere (the children are brilliantly drawn, as are the staff-room scenes with their jersey-knit bonhomie and bitchery, and there is a headmaster whose conversation is a mixture of a scrambled sports commentary and the dregs of any distant political speech), Miss O’Donovan has that unusual gift for writing scenes which tremble between pathos and near farce - they are very funny, and they are sad, and it is this kind of double-barrelled accuracy that makes the people she writes about both touching and surprising.

April 1961

The writing of a successful novella requires an idea so simple that most novelists - when blessed with such a thing - dismiss it as a mere short story notion. Publishers have claimed for years that they cannot sell a novella (unless by Turgenev, etc.), and so it is not surprising that we see very few of them. The facts are, however, that this is a particular form with demands and possibilities which do not occur either in the short story or the novel, and it is extremely pleasant to settle down in a hundred pages at one sitting, which is, incidentally, from the writer’s point of view, the best way of being read.

Miss Spencer’s idea has the right simplicity, and this story has the charm of a good watercolour - there is no room in a novella to overpaint.

Mrs. Johnson is American, and has brought her daughter, Clara, on a trip to Italy. Clara, pretty, innocent, and radiantly charming, has the mental age of a child of ten, due to an accident when she was very young. Mrs. Johnson knows that in America Clara will never to able to lead a normal life - she had been through all the heartbreaking experiments and experiences that prove this. When, therefore, a young Italian, Fabrizio, who meets Clara outside his shop in Florence, falls instantly in love with her, her mother, who loves her with the kind of intelligent devotion which enables her to see more than one side of the situation, is faced with the choice of stopping him, or of letting it run its curiously childlike course. It is through Mrs. Johnson that we follow the affair - the meetings with Fabrizio’s family when it is clear that Clara’s simplicity matches something in Fabrizio’s Neapolitan mother: Mrs. Johnson’s attempt to explain Clara to the family, and the family to Clara’s father in America - the escape from the situation and the return to it. The whole idea has been perfectly explored and resolved: I should have liked more of Clara, but since the book is more or less an exercise in accident and fate, and it is Mrs. Johnson who is given the power to discriminate between the two, this is probably an idle wish.

April 1961

James Bond may either delight or disgust his countless acquaintances, but whatever he does to us all, he must be a source of serious anxiety to his author. Ruthless, restless, usually in the best of health, unmarried, and with a striking lack of interest in what a landlady of mine once described as ‘the little delicacies of life’, he prowls about needing new shots of crime, sex and excitement. It must be a strain to keep up with him, and Mr. Fleming is to be commended for his annual excursion.

This time Bond has been packed off to a nature cure establishment and it is here that he first comes in contact with one of the members of Spectre, an organisation so international and wicked that no one country can deal with it. In no time at all, he is in the Bahamas, awaiting atomic developments, which include aeroplanes, submarines, a lot of underwater swimming and an Italian girl called Domino.

Mr. Fleming’s plot is most conscientiously worked out, with good technical detail, admirable locations - particularly underwater - and peppered with all the ingredients which make for variety in Mr. Bond’s life: eroticism which could not stand repetition; pain and danger running their gamuts of the hero’s physique; unlimited money - there’s an emergency on - and beyond the suspense, the understandably cast-iron certainty that Bond will win through in this intensely physical world. I don’t enjoy this kind of adventure enough to appreciate the finer points, but it does seem to me that an organisation such as Spectre is a shade too Germanically inflexible about their master plans: it is also hard to believe that none of its members ever read best sellers, and are not therefore on the look-out for James Bond to queer their pitch black plans.

April 1961

This is a good first novel, set in Louisiana - one day in the lives of a Jewish family in a provincial town. Julian Black has inherited a large store, much money and considerable position in the town from his father, who is dead. He has married a Gentile; has two children called David and Charlotte. His wife Evelyn, despises him and drinks; his son, who looks very like his mother, has passed in New York as a Gentile, got a young Jewish girl pregnant and come home in a panic; his daughter has fallen in love with a young Jew - the son of a new family in the town whom Julian, as a ‘tolerated’ Jew, is being urged to combine in ostracising. The day is the Jewish New Year, and during its drawn-out conflicts of ritual, public argument and private distress, Julian’s essential weakness is revealed to him.

Mr. Ansell’s strong suit is his depiction of this hot-bed of conformity - the living by appearances with dark glasses and the blinds drawn. Everybody in this community is so riddled with the desire to fit in with society’s view of what he ought to be, that his own needs and feelings are strangled for lack of any continuous air. Many of the main tenets of being a good Jew are, in fact, held by many householders: the importance of family life and the family; the desirability of virtue in young women; the necessity for obeying the laws of whatever religion is being practised. The dislocations occur further out, so to speak, on the limb - at the point of the social and/or civic rights of each individual; discriminate there, and distortion of the other more private and significant values inevitably follows. This is what Mr. Ansell’s novel makes clear, and it is a theme of some interest, because while convincing one of the situation, he makes one wonder at the unnecessity of it all: the pressures which drive the Julian Blacks to their impasses of paralytic ineffectiveness are all symptomatic of an artificial and partial life. The rabbi in the novel says to Julian, ‘there are two things certain in life; death and taxes. For a Jew there are three ---- death, taxes and being a Jew.’ The assumption here is that all certainty is a frightful business, which is interesting when it is put beside a society hell-bent on security.