The novels in my life
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
Reading and reflecting on The Green Hat made me consider my present attitude to the reading of novels. Has the role of that art form changed? Have novels been downgraded? I hardly ever read English novels and only occasionally French or American novels but in that I am not necessarily representative. Yet looking around and consulting my friends of the same generation, few seem to read novels as we all did in the 'twenties. It is 'theatre' that now excites attention and controversy. Look Back in Anger bad more impact than any modern English novel I can remember (although I laughed my head off at Lucky Jim when it was called to my attention by a very eminent Oxford philosopher). In fact, more and more the few novels I do read have been called to my attention by friends not by critics. Thus over forty years ago, Robert Birley called my attention (for which I am still grateful) to Barnabooth. But none of my friends seem to get out books from the library, much less buy them, for 'a good read.
There has always seemed to me to be a mis- understanding about the Victorian attitude to novels. If they were often frowned on, it was .pot because they were 'daring' but because they were untrue. Thus my grandmother (whom I never knew) was a. secret reader of what she called 'novels.' Both my father and my mother were devoted readers of Dickens—but he was 'different.' My mother used to get novels from the best circulating library in Glasgow (Macle- hoses's) both for herself and for that learned, rich, handsome prelate, Charles Eyre, Arch- bishop of Glasgow. (Among other things Charles Eyre also read regularly Ally Sloper's Half Holiday.) And when my mother got the books back from His Grace she discovered that her mother secretly stole them and read them. So a war to force my grandmother to stop being a humbug was waged for years. But she still disapproved of novels; they weren't true and like all Nixons (for that was her name), she bad a passion for truth.
By the time that I was beginning to read, there was no ban on novels or even on 'Westerns' but there was an intermittent ban on 'comics.' The Scout, yes. (Clare Leighton's father's serials were all right, but Sexton Blake was not.) However, I soon showed signs of highbrow tastes. I liked Scott and thought I liked Thackeray. Now I can appreciate Dickens but prefer to read about Thackeray in Gordon Ray's admirable biography to reading Thackeray's novels. But I was delighted to dis- cover, a few weeks ago, that one of the charac- ters in Thackeray's Novels by Eminent Hands was the Prince de Borodino. Did Proust know?
It was perhaps getting the Proust infection that diminished to the point of abolition my taste for 'mere novels.' I found myself only reading novels that 'cast light' and that meant reading far more French and American novels than English. Of course, some of the American novels were agreeable as well as useful. I liked the Iowa pastorals of Ruth Suckow and, still more, the novels of Willa Cather (except for The Professor's House which was oversold). I had long read and re-read Moby Dick but that is hardly a novel and, of course, Huckleberry Finn which is everything. But I took less and less literary interest in some of the most famous novels of the American boom. After Babbitt I lost interest in Sinclair Lewis—after, even be- fore An American Tragedy, all interest in Dreiser. I once hesitatingly admitted as much to Mancken with whom I was dining in the Maryland Club. lie.laughed. 'I defend Lewis and my old friend Dreiser, but I'd gladly give all of the geniuses we have now for another Conrad. I defend them for the enemies they have made. But that's all.'
When I was reading up for my French books, I dutifully ploughed through 'important' novels which bored even if they informed me. It was different with Balzac; there was always more than mere information about prices or social classes or rural moeurs. But with Stendhal, I found I was reading without adequate regard to his utility. Thus I have always preferred La Chartreuse de Parme to Le Rouge et le Noir and read Lucien Leuwen for more than the light it cast on the political system of Louis-Philippe.
Then I ceased to read detective stories. I think it was the increasingly bogus inflation of the genre (for which Dorothy Sayers was so much to blame) that put me off. For me, apart from Sherlock Holmes who is a world in him- self, the only detective story writer I really re- mained devoted to was A. E. W. Mason. I finally had doubts about Trent's Last Case although I knew and liked Bentley.) I remem- ber how my wife and I went to Dijon, in part at least, to try to identify 'The House of the Arrow'—and I think we did. But Conan Doyle was a master in his "bwn right. He had a mastery of the decisive or chilling phrase. 'A child has dime this terrible thing'; of the retort crushing like 'Rache, my dear Lestrade, is the German for Revenge,' with which Parthian shot he left the room. A. E. W. Mason sometimes brought off the same effect. 'That will do now' in The House of the Arrow and 'No other tiger passed that way that night.' But I was deeply put off when Inspector French came to see me in my office during the war (he was investigating an alleged plot to murder Winston) and did not know that he had been written up by Freeman Wills Crofts, and I was even more shocked when I met the Chief Con- stable of Birmingham, Colonel Moriarty, who bad never heard of his uncle!
In more recent times, I have completely lost touch. I bought Dr Zhivago in Siena, in the Italian edition, read a hundred pages, had my despatch case stolen at the Gare de Lyon and have never gone back to Pasternak, though I was presented with the French edition by a cultured female friend.1 bought II Gattopardo in Venice, read it, enjoyed it and then learned that it was not the done thing to admire the Prince of Lampedusa. As for the anti-novels, I think I have read one. I saw it in the Italian edition in Rome with a band asserting that it was a book 'that made Madame de Gaulle blush.' I bought the FrerIch edition, decided that Madame de Gaulle blushed very easily and abandoned the book.
And for German novels? Aldous Huxley once asserted that the Germans suffered a great deal from having so feir. good novels to read. Every situation was new to Them. I did notice that friends whose German is excellent did not read German novels much. I gave my wife a novel by a reputable German novelist, bought in Augsburg in 1932; it still has a book mark about page fifty. I remember a party at which everybody (except me) was an excellent Ger- man scholar. I asked them when they had last read a German novel? '0 often' 'When?' No one had read a German novel for a good many years, although our hostess bad read and Tilted The Elective Affinities when she was up at Newnham. So it has been with me. I have bought three copies of The Magic Mountain but never finished any of them. I like hearing my friend Erich Heller expounding the merits of Thomas Mann but I can't read him. But recently I did read with pleasure, much to my surprise, Dr Faustus. I also read with more pleasure and less surprise, The Man Without Qualities (all I had read of Musil before was Young TOrless which I read simply because I was writing an article on the work of Frank Richards). But Musil was or is something. But anxious to be just to Thomas Mann, I read Felix Krull. Alas, it only confirmed F. Anstey's opinion. 'A German joke is no laughing matter.'
Stop Press. Coming out of an anaesthetic a few days ago, the first and only words I uttered (so the surgeon tells me) were 'Harold Wilson, Harold Wilson.' This is not as ominous as 'Great Pan is dead' but it must mean some- thing. If at Chequers or the Isles of Scilly the pecking of chickens is called into service, hope that battery chickens are not used. I can't believe they will have any prognostic value.
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