SALLOW AUTUMN fills our laps with leaves, folios rather. Heavy fruits (Sillitoe, Aragon, Barth; Uris to come next week) drop in the silent autumn night. Season of lists, etc.
Paradoxically a transatlantic gust comes smelling of spring and one’s (meaning my) youth when all literature was exciting and none more so than the work of the prose experimenters – Joyce, Stein, Hemingway, John Dos Passos.
Dos Passos’s trilogy USA once haunted me like a passion. It is a measure not so much of one’s own approaching autumn as of the way in which Dos Passos has been absorbed by a whole generation of writers (Norman Mailer, Budd Schulberg, etc.) that the spring thrill is a mere ghost in Midcentury. Here you will find all the techniques of 1919 and The Big Money – potted biographies (Freud, Eleanor Roosevelt, James Dean), newsreels with headline-montages, italicised prose-lyrics, slabs of bald narrative, typography having a field-day. But you will also find no change in the story-line – there is still the Marxist dichotomy, the worker’s fight.
Blackie Bowman, Terry Bryant, Frank Worthington emerge from the Second World War to resume the patterns of their 1919 prototypes. They copulate, earn, brawl, are bewildered by the big world of headlines, but they remain faceless, charade or morality figures, grim in the face of the capitalist villains.
It is old drama in new costumes, and the Dos Passos techniques seem only viable for that, incapable of development. They sprang to life fully armed in the early days, cognate with the gimmicks of expressionist playwrights like Toller and Georg Kaiser. Gimmicks soon look old-fashioned. It is embarrassing when one has to use the glass of ‘historical perspective’ to read what the cover calls ‘a novel of our time’.
The other breath of spring and youth blows in with Anita Loos, already a classic, a writer whom one would describe – if it did not sound pretentious – as one of the minor shapers of the modern sensibility. No Mother To Guide Her is as sharp and digestible as a good asti spumante: Hollywood-in-its-heyday has never been so well lampooned. Bliss (a columnist of amazing innocence, worshipper and knight of the sadly set-upon star Viola Lake), a character to compare (the only one I can think of) with the shamefully neglected Augustus Carp, is just that. Bliss, I mean.
Key to the Door is Alan Sillitoe’s attempt at a big Bildungsroman – the first 21 years of a new Seaton (Brian not Arthur), shuttling between depressed pre-war life in Nottingham and disaffected RAF other-rank down-with-the-bleddy-boggers grousing in Malaya. The Nottingham parts (boozing, swearing, courtship, marriage) we have already met in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, in its way a seminal work. Mr Sillitoe writes vividly and aromatically of proletarian life, though one becomes a little tired of the self-pity.
The Malayan sections chilled me. Young Brian seems to grouse through a dripping and frightening jungle-and-mountain-scape completely without (if we except his grousing mates) human figures. We hear of Malayans, and wonder which of the Malayan races he means. Occasionally a Malay, clad for some reason in a sari, glides through. There is an unconvincing Chinese dance-hostess and ‘keep’ called Mimi. It is the complete lack of concern or even minimal interest in people other than the ingrown group of working-lads that appals.
But one is also appalled morally. Brian cannot see the Chinese Communists as enemies. His failure to kill off a terrorist who eventually snipes at his own mate meets no condemnation. The political naivety of the book is incredible. But to be just, there is life and a certain poetry: nobody is going to doubt Mr Sillitoe’s talent. He needs more than talent now: he needs to grow up.
‘She was like a picture that one sees in an art gallery that makes you feel sad because it is painted.’ V.S. Pritchett has lost nothing of the image-maker’s gift, nor that micrometrically delicate ear for the fall of speech of ordinary people. Yet I was not always happy with this volume of short stories, When My Girl Comes Home. The titlepiece is 73 pages long, and feels like it. It is the minor characters (Jack Draper, for instance, to whom war itself is the enemy, so that he lumps the combatants of both sides together) who carry more life than the major.
There is a certain flatness and plotlessness not normally associated with this brilliant writer: the expected seems to happen a little too often. Too often, too, one cannot really care about what happens to the characters: our sympathies are not engaged. But there is so much to be thankful for – keen observation, exact notation of contemporary manners, and always that marvellous ear.
The Sot-Weed Factor is a good title, even if it only means ‘The Tobacco-Estate Manager’. This immensely long novel is a pastiche of old-time picaresque, in an honourable and best-selling American tradition, telling of an obdurately virginal poet, Eben Cooke (‘virgo’ being male in medieval Latinity) and his exploits at sea and in the New World. It owes everything to the episodic booze-and-bawdry boys, and is none the worse for that. It must have been great (though laborious) fun to write.
Yorkshire Post, 19 October 1961. Reviews of:
Midcentury by John Dos Passos (London: André Deutsch, 1961);
No Mother To Guide Her by Anita Loos (London: Arthur Barker, 1961);
Key to the Door by Alan Sillitoe (London: W.H. Allen, 1961);
When My Girl Comes Home by V.S. Pritchett (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961);
and The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961)