Choice ot Aliens
Modern German Stories. Edited by H. M. Waid- son. (Faber, 18s.) Best SF Four. Edited by Edmund Crispin. (Faber, 15s.) The Heart of London. By Monica Dickens. (Michael Joseph, 21s.) John Christopher: Storm and Stress. By Romain Rolland. (Heinemann, 18s.) As we sat, for the most part in patient incom- prehension, through the spoken exchanges of Fidelio the other night, it was brought home once again that the educated Englishman doesn't necessarily number a knowledge of German among his attainments. If there is nothing shame- ful about our ignorance, as Bernard Bergonzi declared here the other day, our publishers surely have it to excess. Not only can fewer of us read German than we can French—or even, one suspects, Italian—but fewer translations from German are published. True, we know the giants —Mann, Musil, Hesse, Kafka—and their achieve- ment should be enough to dissipate the old canard that German doesn't 'lend itself' to literature; but the average reader gets precious little chance to acquaint himself with what is best and liveliest now in German writing. So one is peculiarly grateful for the latest of the Faber national anthologies.
Which needn't stop one from being disap- pointed in the result. Is this the best that has been done there in the short story since 1945? If so, that censoring war seems to have cut the German writer adrift, left him floating in some eccentric backwaters. Mr. Waidson makes the point that 'in the twelve years of Hitler's regime frank treatment of topical subject-matter was impossible' in order to account for the moral obliquity of some of his selections, but this deviousness of approach seems far more often to mask the absence of any destination. In a typical piece of Dtirrenmatt portentousness, a symbolic train rushes down a symbolic tunnel to a sym- bolic fate (why? where?); elsewhere, a stunt parachutist has presentiments of disaster and duly crashes; a man and a girl visit a zoo and misunderstand each other's mating intentions afterwards. These last two pieces are slices of life, one damned thing after another, with a vengeance. Then there are the anticipated guilty- sentimental tales, of which Gertrud von le Fort's lachrymose 'The Innocent Children' is the longest and most ingenuous. There is a stretch of point- less Woolfery, cataloguing the reactions of audience and friends to a young man's public performance of his 'Spanish Suite,' and a mild, GOM fragment from Hermann Hesse about losing and finding a trunk. The few good things, which are excellent, are satirical: Heinrich Boll's episodic 'Dr. Murke's Collection of Silences,' centring on a day in Radio House; a tiny story about a man who buys a locomotive and keeps it in his garage; -and Heinz Huber's nicely judged horror-fiction of an evening with chic, empty friends.
The other Faber anthology (more aliens) 's more fun and Mr. Amis has recently adjured us to review SF along with general fiction, thus complicating an already acrobatic week. Mean- while Mr. Crispin has chosen as cunningly as ever—for those, like me, who can stomach the essential triviality of his matter. The first story, Francis Donovan's 'The Short Life,' has nearly everything: an idiot child who shows flashes of disruptive genius, a canine ventriloquist of sorts, hyper-intelligent Things, and quite literate prose. The famous Jerome Bixby fantasy about monstrous, omnipotent little Anthony (It's a Good Life' is both its refrain and title) is in, and humour for once in science fiction has its day in Evelyn E. Smith's `Baxbe (crossword puzzles and a Martian). A museum-cum-factory of life, a new word ('solitosis), telepathic contact with a womb-embryo, some heady chatter of Mabius bands and Klein bottles—these are the ingenious attractions of the rest. William .Golding sug- gests that it is all a game: the jolly contents of this volume are certainly closer to that than to even the most elementary 'criticism of life.'
The Heart of London is really a form of game, too, only it's unlikely to be recognised as such.
Monica Dickens's bad ambitious novel belongs to that unfortunate tradition blossoming from a misconception of the Victorian epic: if you keep enough sub-plots running and crossing, some large energetic truth is bound to be generated, a the very least, an image of jostling, super- abundant 'life.' It doesn't, of course, work out like that, as a glance at the novels of Louis Golding, J. B. Priestley and Norman Col- lins will show. Miss Dickens has chosen to
hurl herself into contemporary life via a garbled version of Notting Hill. It's 'all here'—
the coloured boy, the brave, pretty teacher, the doomed tart, the ugly district nurse with the heart of gold, and the mackintoshed pervert.
There's an amazingly up-to-date allotment of distorted sex, in fact, and it has an unpleasant effect on the presumptive liberality of Miss Dickens's intentions. It becomes not so much a question of not flinching from the sordid as of getting rather a charge out of it. It will enjoy a large, blind success.
The second volume of Heinemann's reissue of John Christopher, the biography of a fictional musical genius that helped to gain Rotnain Rolland the Nobel Prize in 1915, should put such tawdry market-tailored stuff to shame. It also brings up the whole question of relativity in what one recommends in a given week of fiction, being so much more intelligent, arduous and lavish in its aims and effects than anything else under review—and yet a work that invites in- creasing hesitancy of judgment. The old Gilbert Carman translation reads bizarrely in places, but even more estranging are the long hypnotic flights of rhetoric that pass for John Christopher's various changes of direction or heart. Rolland was wonderfully, perceptively harsh on the deep and dangerous sentimentality of the German soul, but his critical awareness of his own Is oddly intermittent. The continuing story carries John Christopher through a few love-affairs and the growing hostility of his neighbours (his concert is a failure and his uncompromising opinions an increasing offence) up to his flight to Paris. There are passages, particularly in his ex- changes with women and his diatribes against the false in art, that recall, or presage, Law- rence's glowing insights and there are moments of alert humour that seem to set Christopher's confusions at a judging distance; there are, in other words, considerable rewards.' But these aren't of sufficient presence in the novel, as it stands, to net or delimit the swelling diffused bulk of the hero.
JOHN COLEMAN
Previous page
