New Novels
THE CAPRI LETTERS. By Mario Soldati. (Hamish Hamilton, 12s. 6d.) As it emerges in books and plays, the society of the American Deep South seems as remote as that of provincial Tsarist Russia. In literature if not in real life, the two show much in common. The isolation in space and time, for example, the Great House of decaying fortunes, the aimless leisure, the nostalgia, the impal- pable sense of bondage challenged by an even more aimless intensity that fades into melancholy. To judge from their authors, both societies merited a• protest often best delivered from well outside the bounds of normal behaviour, and their literature accordingly teems with apparent mental defectives and hums with dialogue of a staggering witlessness—a state of affairs by no means lost on American satirists. Psycho-analysis has given these writers an advantage denied to the Russians; owing to the facts of life on Tobacco Road, most of their characters in youth have Seen Something Nasty in the Woodshed, and their creators can tell us what it was. Miss O'Connor does so, and develops its consequences—if anything in Wise Blood can truly be said to be consequent on anything else—with uproarious but laconic savagery. Her hero is one Hazel Motes, an orphan of twenty-two just out of the army. Inspired by a bemused hatred of his dead grandfather, who was a preacher, 'a waspish old man who had ridden over three counties with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger,' he is a preacher too. 'I'm going to preach there was no Fall,' he says, 'because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgement because there wasn't the first two.' Moving in on a bewildered whore, whom he casually samples, he pursues his mission with menacing fervour. Morose and oracular, he confronts his odd world with a fierce moronic stare. It is a world of crooks, cretins and nympho- maniacs, a world only rarely subject to the intrusion of the grimly ribald police. There is Asa Hawks, the fake-blind preacher with a gleefully lecherous daughter; Enoch, the prurient park attendant and unwanted acolyte who, short of emotional nourish- ment, gets it by depanting a fake gorilla in an ambulance, and one or two seedy promoters of evangelism or false prophets on their own. These creatures, with ferocious farce, are upbraided, spurned, threatened and in one case summarily executed, but the scoffers win. The book is a macabre parody of a rejected saviour's career, pursued through sickness and self-blinding to a brutally casual martyrdom, and focused in a gaze of devoted lunacy.
Young Frank, the chief character in The Sleeping Tiger, has
also seen something nasty early in youth, and it is this, we gather, which by the age of seventeen has turned him into a violent criminal. After his latest conviction an eminent and wealthy psychiatrist named Clive Esmond accepts this challenge to his theories by welcoming him to his home (the court was surprisingly lenient here) and hence to the company of Glenda, his youngish, elegant, passionate, restless and inevitably childless wife. There being nothing much, apparently,' that the boy can't do, for his father is a major of the old school, he is soon quite a socialite— and of course a star performer with Glenda in private. His assur- ance and efficiency, the strength of his offensive and defensive equipment against society, are so blandly indicated that the reader is all set for some adroit passages of elucidation. None is forthcoming. By day and sometimes by night, a hectic love affair proceeds, and on other nights Frank leads his gang to further exploits. Two of these jaunts, large robberies, arouse police suspicion, but Clive, bent on his socially expensive task of salva- tion, covers Frank by cheating and bluff. This may or may not suit the public conscience, but by the time Frank has disclosed the glib, trite horrors which We are told have made a thug of him and is thereby 'cured,' Glenda, distraught with passion, has brought herself and Clive to the brink of ruin and murder. The dialogue is slick, though sometimes ill-adjusted to the characters; the bargain offered by Clive to society, as stated here, is too preposterous for serious notice. It says a good deal for the pace and smoothness of the writing that in spite of every affront to probability and social justice, I found the book most exciting.
Mr. Jhabvala's scene and problems are very different. We are in modern Delhi among the heirs to independence, most of whom seem frivolously to have betrayed the idealism that led to its attainment. The issue is that of arranged marriages, but the note of social regression is gently but frequently sounded. Amrita, a pretty girl of good family, works in a radio station; she and the feckless young Hari, also in radio but poor, are sentimentally in love, and their respective tumultuous families, headed by women, set about them with more suitable arrangements. Amrita makes a fight for it; Hari, with Oblomov's flair for sentiment and placid indecision, is engulfed in a match in part promoted by Amrita's mother. It is noteworthy that the main opponents of arranged marriages are older people. Amrita's grandfather, a retired ex- liberal lawyer, will have none of it; nor will her uncle, a futile, capricious decadent zamindar who had spent his youth being Byronic in Paris, which bored him; nor will Tarla, her childless, committee-minded aunt. It is an untidily primitively bourgeois society in which caste is not mentioned, religion is the exclusive province of old women, and cash and family snobbery appear as the only driving force that Mrs. Jhabvala pictures, not with the inspired clownishness of a book like Mr. Sampath, but with amused and urbanely pointed regret.
The Capri Letters is the best novel of the present four. Henry and Jane are Americans who meet in Italy during the war and marry soon afterwards when each, unknown to the other, is physically committed to an Italian partner—Henry to an Apulian peasant turned Roman prostitute, Jane, at a smart pace for all her Catholic prudery, to an actor of sorts. Slowly to the point of tedium, but with a subtlety and cumulative power that the reader may feel is more than such characters can carry, the two pairs of attachments are analysed, and the two guilty decisions that made the marriage—for both parties have betrayed the code of psycho-physical integrity dear to D. H. Lawrence—traced in succession to what, in more congenial figures, might reach the confines of tragedy. Seen through these patient, dry Italian eyes the pain of these Americans is curiously unfamiliar but convincing, and the battered but still gorgeous face of post-war Italy, often delicately and faithfully revealed here, may curb the reader's too often justified impatience without eliminating his fatigue.
H. M. CHAMPNESS
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