10 SEPTEMBER 1983, Page 20

Books

The legend of Colin MacInnes

Christopher Hawtree

Inside Outsider: The Life and Times of Colin MacInnes Tony Gould (Chatto and Windus £12.50)

D eviewing books — particularly novels IN.— is an ungrateful task,' Colin Machines remarked in these pages when

discussing the stock locutions to which journalists often resort. Well aware of the haste and clumsy judgments and the other

difficulties inherent in belonging, in An- thony Burgess's phrase, to 'a whole profes- sion that finds it hard to pay bills when first presented', Colin Maclnnes produced his best work against such pecuniary odds. These are vividly described by a character in City, of Spades who has abandoned a safe job: 'the word "free-lance", I used to think, had a romantic ring; but sadly discovered, when 1 tried to be one, that its practice has little freedom, and the lance is a sorry weapon to tilt at literary windmills. I'd desperately succeeded in appearing in some serious periodicals that paid little; and in printing some disreputable anonymous paragraphs, cruelly chopped by the sub- editors, in newspapers I'd hitherto despis- ed'. Without becoming submerged by their political or social stances, Maclnnes's style was malleable enough to suit the rather dif- ferent readers of such surviving journals as Encounter, Harpers & Queen and New Society and the defunct Gay News and Twentieth Century.

In an excellent discussion of the late Ger- man-born Nikolaus Pevsner's study of London buildings, MacInnes felt 'that Dr. Pevsner has preserved the rare and enriched dual vision of a thoroughly inside outsider'. Tony Gould's use of this phrase as a title for his biographical study is appropriate. Born into one of those late-Victorian families which was part of the intellectual 'dynasty' whose existence Machines once attributed to the inevitable cross- fertilization of a densely-populated coun- try, the course of his life none the less enabled him to write authoritatively not on- ly about the Edwardian world of Ada Leverson's novels but also to discuss the burgeoning influence of 'teenagers' in the Fifties, Soho drinking clubs and the life of coloured people in England. In the way that one of his characters liked `to mix Jermyn Street . . . with the Mile End Road', Helen Shapiro nestles beside Shakespeare in the index.

A daughter of Burne-Jones, Margaret, married J.W. Mackail producing a daughter, Angela, who could claim kinship with Stanley Baldwin and Kipling. Her own marriage introduced a less hardy growth in- to the tree: beguiling the singer James Campbell McInnes (his son would slightly alter the spelling) away from life with a composer, Graham Peel, she had a few happy years until McInnes's alcoholism and his delusions of political influence, brought on by singing for Sir Edward Grey, broke up the marriage under allegations of rape and brutality. Presently, the beautiful, domineering Angela met and married an Australian, Captain Thirkell, and, the war over, the family sailed to Melbourne. Some of the book's most ambiguous comedy con- cerns her life out there as she tried to keep up a form of Edwardian Kensington. The relationship between mother and son is a theme of the book, MacInnes gradually coming to revolt against a woman with whom, as he saw it, 'an emotion is transformed into an idea, never into feel- ing'. Tiring of the plain Captain Thirkell and his failing business, she left the children and returned to England, soon to take up writing; Maclnnes, forsaking university, followed two years later. He once calculated that the number of books he, his mother, father and brother wrote ran 'into scores'. He and his mother loathed each other's work; she to the extent of cutting him from her will; he to refusing anything except a crate of champagne when his brothers generously offered him a third of the fortune resulting from their mother's light comedies. (By comparison, his jealousy of his brother's unexpected success with a series of autobiographical books ap- pears almost normal.) His half-brother thought it symbolic that when MacInnes was buried in the Channel his mother's ashes should be looming above at Rotting- dean,

Tony Gould deals quickly with Mac- hines's life in the Thirties — when, after working in Europe for a Gas Association, he joined the Euston Road School of Draw- ing and Painting for a frustrating while — and with his war-time career in the army which is chronicled in the diffuse To the Victors the Spoils. Marching along in heavy boots is described as 'a consciously butch effect contrived, perhaps, to conceal the ex- quisite in himself'.

The long-delayed revolt began when he inhabited the haunts of Fitzrovia, now vanished beneath pornography and 're-

The Spectator 10 September 1983 development', and 'plundered' the B.B.C. for money. Much of his involvement with various raffish types is irrecoverable and, but for some steamy quotations from an unpublished novel, Inside Outsider is ftee from the accounts of debauchery which drenched John Lahr's biography of Orton, To the Fifties belong his best essays, Ca!` lected in England, Half English, and hist most interesting fiction. The trilogy °.' 'London' novels, once praised for then. 'Hogarthian' portrayal of low life, now seem largely stale, the characters not suffi- ciently individual to be convincing. Wili!.1/„ better is the earlier June in her Spring, fo,' own favourite, in which memories of his Australian years form a short novel that, although the notion of hereditary madness is not made plausiable enough for the latest victim to appear anything other than 3 thug, forms a lyrical and yet realistic tale of love in a small town in the Thirties which also evokes the country as a whole. After these he managed nothing good; of his last, the impenetrably allegoric Out of Me Garden, Tony Gould rightly says, 'let tis draw a veil ... ' In a polemical pamphlet, 'No N0vfl Reader', published in 1975 a year before his death, Machines said that the author ie whom he returned most assiduously 'vas Swift. If Maclnnes, too, could never be a great novelist, his prose is similarly able to sustain analytical and descriptive essaYs that are as pungent as they are effortless, England,. Half English, a more cohesive col. lection than the posthumous Out Of r etnef Way, shows the real spirit of the age. Look Back in Anger he commented it ists within the context of the old order,all ill sense, takes on its meaning by being, nda sense, a part of it. To a teenager, it w°11i ,.,.„' seem thoroughly old-fashioned'; even J., his praise of Tommy Steele now arear,! fulsome and his analysis of Pau] 'Diana' (a cri de coeur of a man saturateu by an excess of experience') as unlikely as the adulation that The Sunday Times gives every week to electronic combos nowaclar Out of the Way, although written aurtags the Sixties when, distressingly, Maelitiri,el, became involved with such people as the ap- palling Michael X, contains InanY pieces, notably one about his pursuit by loil`e Inland Revenue and appearance in t,d Bankruptcy Court; it is the mark of a g°".1.1 journalist to be able to write on a subject which he is hot interested, and this he d.lc1,_j, a piece about a cricket-match which is a.u., sorbing even for readers similarly bored °Y.. the subject; his final article, 'Canee,' Ward', is one of his finest — its resilt lens humour is matched by Frank Norinarde description, printed here, of the (lugs', funeral service and burial three miles °,61;he. In his peculiar foreword to Out 0.1 ' s Way Ray Gosling said that Macilicrifeen should have had a Boswell. I1 is °„°,,-,r forgotten that Johnson would be nir"-„ figure even if the Life did not exist• To terms that MacInnes deplored in his Spec- tator article but which do seem appropriat Tony Gould has provided an account, of Considerable documentary value and which sOrnetimes succeeds in being moving, of this Minor writer who sufficiently escaped his

mother's shadow to produce some work that will last longer than that of any number of subsidized sociologists.