Hall-marked
Paul Ableman
Ealnlly Business Anthony Blond (Andre Deutsch £5.95)
There is more family than business in FamilY Business but, despite its 430 pages and a Promised further two volumes, not really enough of either. 'Few writers', the blurb informs us,'. . . know much about the sort of English Jewish family which becomes a household name. Anthony Blond was born into such a family.' His book must therefore be considered to some extent a roman-a-clef and will doubtless provide delightful guessing games for privileged insiders. What does it offer the rest of us? In fact, quite a lot even though the narrative fails to achieve enough drive to make it totally gripping. When the Steimatskys begin their climb from an obscure Polish stetl to wealth and Power in England they naturally Anglicize their name. The one they select is a tribute both to their own, and their creator's, cunning. It is Sterling. What could be more solid, more English, more hall-marked for success and respectability? And yet, with its in-built reference to a precious metal, its Palatal softness and suggestion of the exotic, the name evokes the diaspora as insistently as it solicits the House of Lords.
Ezra, the second-generation heir to the founder, marries Audrey Mendoza of the Old Sephardic-Iewish branch of the English aristocracy and thus lays the social foundation for an electronics empire. He is knighted in 1938, elevated to viscount in 1945. His sister, Sarah, eager for the son biology denies her, adopts a refugee boy in 1940 and this action supplies the book with its only really spine-chilling insight into the ruthlessness of the rich. The boy's parents are in Hamburg, at the mercy of the Nazis, but ways can still be found to extricate Geiman Jews. Ezra asks his sister: 'Do you want me to try and do something for them . . ,?"No, Ez • .. I think you'll have done enough. Sarah Kind wanted her son without par ents.'
Apart from this hideous lapse — and, in fairness, it should be remembered that extermination camps were still unknown and unthinkable — the family is an airniable-enough bunch, dripping with wealth and refreshingly prepared to enjoy it. It spawns, in addition to British-style officers and (a typical 'family' joke) `gentilernen', endearing eccentrics like Chaimy, a kosher, communist, scientific-genius who lives in squalour in Islington with a goy mistress and Dr Kind who, because of the demand in wartime for his medical speciality and the high military rank it wins him is dubbed by the jocular Ezra 'the brigonorrhea'. Counterpointing the affairs of the family, Israel is born and struggles to survive, Suez comes and goes and the nuclear age gets into its apocalyptic stride. There is much sly comedy concerning jewels, servants, gadgets and the fleet of Rolls's. Blond has a shrewd eye for social and cultural detail. In one hilarious passage, a grand party is thrown into confusion by a drunken female neighbour bellowing: 'Isn't it about time you bloody Jews remembered there's a war on?' Although the assembled guests include several authentic war heroes, an ancient ghetto gloom descends on the company. My impression, however, is that, as the book advances, the shafts of irony and cutting epigrams decrease almost in exact proportion to the increase in typographical errors. For a book written by a major London publisher and issued by another, the production is a disgrace. In substantial compensation, the dust-cover is one of the wittiest and most elegant I have seen for years.
Unhappily, the 'family saga' effect aimed at is not fully realized. This is partly because of the division of the book into broad sections: 1940, 1956, 1966 etc which are then subdivided into smaller sections. The resulting box-within-box structure is inimical to the classic flowing river format of works such as Buddenbrooks or even The Forsyte Saga, which latter epic is invoked by the blurb as an appropriate analogue. The partial failure is even more attributable to the fact that Blond is less a narrator than a reporter and thus the tone of the book — bland, objective, uninvolved, faintly ironic — remains the same whatever the passing subject. For the first hundred pages or so, I kept thinking not of Galsworthy but of Mario Puzo and The Godfather.
An instructive comparison can be made between the deaths of the patriarch's sons in the two books. Puzo builds, with flawless dramatic instinct, to Corleone's anguished cry of: 'See, see, how they have massacred my son!' Ezra merely reacts violently, hurling a bowl at a mirror and exclaiming: 'My son is dead. What more can go wrong?'
The difference, not one of character but of narrative skill, reflects that between an instinctive story-teller and a determined one. But although none of the scenes in Family Business generate much dramatic tension, many are telling and most enjoyable. To pursue the comparison, Puzo wisely restricted his narrative to one leitmotif: social relationships within a criminal clan. Blond is vastly more ambitious. He tries to interweave the stories of fifteen or more members of his family, as well as those of various mistresses and hangers-on, with the recent history of the world. The truth is that the very events he chronicles — technological change, political upheaval, the giddy human and scientific vistas of the mid-twentieth century — have rendered obsolete the kind of naturalistic narrative with which he attempts to evoke them. It is not a matter of scale but of technique. You can't catch the wind in a net no matter how fine the mesh. Picture Palace Paul Theroux (Hamish Hamilton £4.95) There is absolutely no question that this is one of the brightest; whether it is the best, I'm not so sure. Here is a dazzling display, an intellect just bubbling with ideas, knee-deep in literary cross-reference, echo and undertow, which sometimes support and sometimes drown. Now this boy is really talented, but is he, as his obstreperous heroine narrator, Maude Coffin Pratt, distinguished old curmudgeonly photographer might ask, an artist? And if he is, what is the relationship between his life and his art? This is the Chinese box, the core of the book. It is, like Maude's pictures, a collection of acute portraits, from Graham Greene, whom he must have met to D.H. Lawrence, whom he can't have, but whose character and work is summed up in a fumbling session with young Maude: he has, as she notices in others, the halitosis of the liar. The stink of bad faith; the way that good art can be bad or inadequate life (`The rest of us are healthy; it's the wounded who take to art; no one wins more races than the cripple in his sleep . . . '); the way that art can cheat on the artist and also on the subject: 'That's not Marilyn', Maude retorts to an admirer, 'It's a picture.' Later her artistic barnacle, Frank, the parasitic hanger-on bought with twenty pieces of Guggenheim silver to mount her retrospective exhibition, says 'An artist's life is his work' and she replies 'I don't buy that,' then instantly wonders whether this means she's not an artist.
But, in spite of the brilliance of the whole peep-show of Maude's photographs, so wittily imagined and snapped by Theroux, is he actually right to choose a photograp.her, splendid creation though she is, to puzzle out the conundrum? Of course the photographer cannot be his pictures, nor his pictures be their subjects. But the writer can, in a qualitatively different way, be both maker and object: more skill, more technique, above all, more imagination required; and, to be fair, Theroux plays around with the reader on this one: 'The speaker heaves images around, his telling simplifies the truth until simplicty makes it a he; words are toys.' But he knows damn well they're not and the skill he displays telling Maude's real story, the one that never appears in the photographs, tells more about him as an artist than any number of vignettes. Her tragic romantic obsession with her brother, the ghastly pathos of her gradual realisation that it is the other sister he loves: the incestuous double suicide is a vindication of romantic and artistic bravery; no longer is she 'behind the camera, cheating' but, by changing her mode she is her art.
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