October 1960
Success says this author, equates with money - it need have nothing to do with happiness or specific talent: so we all know where we are - or aren’t - on page ten. Every man has success-potential, and this is the Age of Success: those who do not question their success or seek it are not of this age. For those who do, there is this Machiavellian manual, which, adopting a kind of hectoring wheedle, takes you all the way from F(ailure) to S(uccess). The writing has that urbane, ingenious villainy which reminds me of Laclos’ Dangerous Acquaintances: it glitters with devastating remarks about behaviour which makes one start at their precision and suspect an S in any old patch of grass in one’s life; and there is no escaping the fact that very, very nearly all of us in varying degrees have lapsed from S potential to S practice.
The questions which this civilised and fiendish indictment provokes are much more pressing and effective than the results of somebody angrily decrying the present situation because they aren’t getting the best of it. Mark Caine is a pseudonym for somebody whom the jacket of this book blandly assures us ‘has become a successful novelist’, and one can only suppose that the trick up this author’s sleeve has been to embody the man of talent and the S man in one person (in this book he implies that they are disparate). Anyway, spoil yourself - read it!