Auberon Waugh on new novels
Scanning, as I do every week, the shelf of novels to be published and trying to decide which can possibly merit the supreme ac- colade of a review in the SPECTATOR, I find a noticeable reluctance to choose any novel which its publishers describe as a 'modern parable'. There is also another, more disreputable, reluctance to choose novels by Central European authors. The generalisa- tion that foreigners can't write novels is upheld in nine cases out of ten when one puts it to the test, and Central Europeans tend to describe their gloomy predicament in the modern world with such oppressive seriousness that this might be a good enough rule for the casual reader of novels to bear in mind. But reviewers must use more scientific yardsticks, and a little investigation reveals that M. Kosinski, although born in Poland, emigrated- to the United States twenty-four years later and is now, at the age of thirty- eight, Professor of Dramatic Prose and Criticism at the Yale University School of Drama. So he qualifies for this column's quota of American novels.
It is a sad fact that the American middle- run of novelists is now turning out much bet- ter novels than its English equivalent. Perhaps this can be explained by the fact that American society has greater vitality than our own; that it is still engaged in discovering about itself; that the violence of urban America creates greater tensions and greater paradoxes than anything we can hope to experience; beside the drama of American life, our only English equivalent must be to describe.yet again the twenty-four different love positions, performed in a bed- sitter in Earls Court. But it may also be because the Americans take creative writing so much more seriously. Universities have courses in it—Kosinski, I notice, has held a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing in fiction. Whereas English novelists must teach themselves everything, American ones have at least a start. The elementary mistakes which English novelists make time and again—describing dream sequences at enormous length, failing to distinguish between hallucinatory and real experience, crashing around with tenses and persons, breaking into idiotic vers Libre, destroying any communication with the reader by self- Indulgent incoherence—all this could be put right with a little simple tuition. Why do our universities not teach people how to write? Why must it be left to a novel reviewer?
Jerzy Kosinski's new novel would be unremarkable in every way—its plot is thin, its story unconvincing and its charac- terisation weakest of all—except that it is extremely well written, Under the cir- cumstances, I can only urge as many people as possible to rush out and buy it. So far as the story goes, it is an adaptation between the legend of Rip Van Winkle and H. G. Wells's Time Machine. An orphan is brought up by a rich old recluse, from childhood, to look after therich man's garden. He is never allowed to meet anyone except a female black servant who brings him his meals, and later dies.
He is well fed and given an expensive col- our television set to watch. He is very happy in this way of life, and deeply involved with his garden, until the old man dies, and the orphan, called Chance, is turned out. He is then bumped by the car of an extremely im- portant but ailing financier, taken to his house by the financier's young wife who develops an attraction for him, introduced to the President of the United States who sup- poses that he is another financial expert and quotes him in some State of the Nation ad- dress. Rocketed to fame, he becomes a television personality, internationally ac- claimed pundit on the American economy and ends by running as Vice-President, still unable to read or write. His only qualifica- tion, and the one which apparently makes him unique in American political life is that he has no past history of disreputable finan- cial dealings—or, indeed, any past history.
It is a slight tale. One does not feel that Professor Kosinski has tried very hard. Cer- tainly, it does nothing to justify the ludicrously portentous blurb which Bodley Head have contributed: 'Is Chance the technocrat of the future? Is he the kind of leader the young seek—unattached, un- perturbed and "turned out"? Or is he Rousseau-esque, with a touch of natural goodness to which men respond? The reader will decide for himself.' If the reader has any sense, he will decide that the hero, Chance, is nothing of the sort. He is the product of a highly literate man's idle half-hour —material for an ingenious short story, here spun out into a short novel, without any attempt to block in his character or motives. Nevertheless, Professor Kosinski has given us a highly enjoyable three hours' read, and for my own part should like to thank him and beg that English writers take note.
Lionel Davidson's latest novel was a bit of a disappointment. Perhaps success has spoiled him, or perhaps, he has fallen under evil influences, since writing The Rose of Tibet. Smith's Gazette tells the story of a one-eyed, cloven-mouthed Arab who devotes his life to breeding a rare type of antelope in a fertile valley somewhere on the old border between Israel and Sinai. It is coy, it is twee and it is pert, as all English writers are when they write about Arabs, full of sweet old- world allusions to their abysmal ignorance, their superstition, their appalling blood- thirstiness and their repulsive demeanour. Because one is not an Arabist oneself, still less a follower of Mohammed, I suppose one should not sneer at other people's innocent pleasures. There is a recognisable syndrome among British Arabists, from Burton through Sir John Philby to our great modern exponent, the dauntless Mrs Freya Stark, with which I must confess myself out of sympathy. Every reservation one had ever held about the charm of Arab culture is somehow reinforced by Mr Davidson's sugary description of it, and it comes as a mild shock to learn that he lives with his wife and two sons in Israel.
But if ever a book was destined for instant success, surely Smith's Gazette is such a bobk. Involving animals, anti-foreigners, the six-day war, a slice of history and everything else, it is hard to see how it can fail. It is clumsily constructed—instead of starting at the beginning and going on it has three separate beginnings which are woven together at a later stage—and awkwardly written, but there comes a point at which reviewers must stop preferring their own pernickety ideas and bow to the voice of the people. Mr Davidson must be congratulated, I suppose, on giving a pet animal twist to an account of the Middle East confrontation. And I hope it chokes him.
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