Degradation, Gusto and Style
Cain's Book. By Alexander Trocchi. (Calder, 25s.) A Man and His Master. By Francois Billetdoux. Translated by Ralph Manheim. (Seeker and Warburg, 18s.) The Hallelujah Bum. By Andrew Sinclair. (Faber, 16s.)
Paradox Lost. By Marianne Sinclair. (Chapman and. Hall, 16s.) `i KNOW of no young man who is not either an ignoramus or a fool who can take the old ob- jective forms for granted.' There is no narrative in Troechi's latest novel and little direct action. What there is takes place on a scow tied up in New York harbour, in flashbacks to childhood in Scotland, and briefly in London. The thing we used to call action has become a series of pos- tures in a diffuse and foggy world. The 'I' is a junkie, alternating between heroin and junkies
He is loosely surrounded by other unkies who sometimes have homes and sometimes don't, sometimes keep dogs, sometimes whore and pimp, but mostly sit around.
Trocchi writes a terse, effective prose which gives a violent light to the most mundane iob- lects. I felt it might at any moment expand into a world of its own. But it is held down as every- thing in the novel is held down, subjected to a rigid intellectual consciousness which moves from point to point like a computer. The book is not fiction at all, despite Trocchi's insistence that is on the fly-leaf. It may be make-believe, but it is nearer to the abstract philosophical dis- sertation or the sermon than to fiction. The historical character of the fixed identity is dead! long live the diarist! Then why write fiction? The answer is not very clear from this novel. At the end one feels one has read a diary that was deliberately left lying about to be read. Too much Of it is offered as absolute truth, and the ten- sion, like the tension in Whitman's poetry, often resides in the statement of tension. I plopped through it like a jellyfish, agreeing with what was said but feeling nothing.
Francois Billetdoux's novel begins from the same philosophical premises, the same existen- tial void of identity. But there is an acuter drama here, partly because Billetdoux cheats in the old-fashioned manner and does not disclose everything to the reader at once, partly because the 'I' is a clearly realised character. Fernand is a businessman 'with q wife and a son, both dis- tant and unreal to him. His journal intinle is the record of his meeting with Canavaggio, the only man Fernand has ever met who possesses beyond all doubt an identity, even a soul. He follows Canavaggio like a lover, quarrels with him, makes up again and finally persuades him to en- gage him as secretary-valet. The masochistic grovelling of Fernand is recorded with a quiet and logical inevitability. There is a ruthless atten- tion to factual detail, enriched by the irony that accompanies the account as we grow more and more aware of Fernand's perceptual limitations. ilthotigh we are throughout completely depen- dent on Fernand, the external events begin to e..imment on his observations with increasing in- sistence. Canavaggio takes his wife and moves
into his house. The whole account is potentially farcical but it never becomes so. Only towards the end is the novel marred by the symmetry of the action: it begins to seem like an impec- cable comedy of manners. But the first three- quarters is beautifully poised and the tone of the intelligent, trapped businessman, bumbling very slowly towards a pit, is perfect. Andrew Sinclair's fourth novel is a verbal romp through the US with Ben Birt, Anabel and a Cadillac. Ben is escaping from the claustro- phobia of England; he picks up Anabel in the village and they land the Cadillac by a sleight of girl in a businessmen's Key-of-the-Car game. Thereafter they are living on their wits, which are considerable. They run through a series of confidence tricks involving a mortuary, a torn- ado, a fruit machine with real fruit and the Daughters of the Republic. The two characters are hopelessly unreal, and Ben Birt is an open tunnel for the writer's rhetoric. Even the States themselves are a mere excuse for Sinclair's lava of language which threatens at times to flood everything. He has an Elizabethan gusto for words, independent of subject-matter, an Eliza- bethan obsession with bad puns and epigrams. In small quantities it can be pleasurable in an almost sensual way:
Sit behind the wheel with the speedometer steady as a sundial in August and watch the highway lay itself before, humble and true, crisp, carpet to your treads, lay itself down to the rim of the world, ever renewing itself from the guts of the earth as you stretch out the tape-measure miles against the progress of the map, mocking
ou with inches.
But as for its 'implied aims (satire, character, action) the novel does not begin. Only in its lin- guistic intensity does it live, but this is immensely refreshing in an age of prose.
At first Marianne Sinclair's novel reminds one of the currently popular American tales about the innocent young in the vice-dens of Europe. But only a European could write the story of Anabel (definitely related) who has a passionate Lesbian affair with Chris, an older woman who humiliates and prostitutes her in a club of pimps and derelicts. Anabel, middle-class, is rescued by an elegant uncle from her plight, and she emerges as the untouched young lady who has discovered that the prostitute and the bourgeois were 'the two bitter halves of the split lemon of society.' And interchangeable. 'The fruit of the lemon tree in Eden could be bitten and swallowed and then hung up on its branch again, leaving the fruit and the tempted as whole as they had always been.' Anabel is clad in the armour of the bourgeoisie, incorruptible. I couldn't quite believe it.
JOHN DANIEL
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