22 NOVEMBER 1957, Page 52

Writing it Out

Westminster Wader. By Rufus Noel-Buxton. (Faber, 18s.) As a rule, by the time the idea of writing an autobiography occurs to novelists they have already cannibalised most of the worth-while material in their lives; and when they come to sort through the rest, the temptation to re- arrange facts to tell a better story proves too strong. Mary McCarthy experienced just these difficulties when she wrote or, rather, collected her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. These had already appeared in print, mainly in the New Yorker, as a series of sketches; and in them she had taken the fiction writer's customary liberties with the facts. For most writers that would have been an end to it, but for Mary McCarthy it was not. Having been orphaned at the age of six and separated from her brothers, she was left with a mass of imperfect recollections that she felt impelled to verify. She found she wanted to get at, and set down, the literal truth.

The result is this collection of nine autobio- graphical pieces, all but one of which are followed by four or five pages of critical examina- tion. In these she tries to establish how far she has wandered from the facts as she and her brothers recall them. It is a curious literary form but it suits her analytical talents. It gives her time to develop those syntheses that tend to grind her fiction to a stop, while, incidentally, giving the reader a chance to see the way she works. And as a subject for her beady-eyed observation, what more could she have asked than the reactions of her Catholic, Protestant and Jewish grandparents to finding four unwanted orphans on their hands?

In Goodbye to All That, first published in 1929 and now reissued, Robert Graves also set out to put a period of his life behind him, by, as it were, writing it out of his system. His was not a test of memory but a test of will. He had to make himself relive his recent experiences in the Great War : an exercise in self-discovery and self- acceptance that few who had shared those experiences had the courage to undertake. One can imagine the effect the book, with its can- dour and its lack of self-pity, had on those who believed themselves a lost generation. Now, almost the same number of years after another war, it reappears, sharpened by. its author's editing, and with none of its power diminished. It makes its point just as effectively : that before you dismiss something nasty from your mind, it's just as well to take another look and see exactly what makes it nasty.

Westminster Wader is, the author explains, 'an estimate of Westminster in All Ages, by one who longs for MUDDY WATER, and the return of the bittern to London Fen.' And the wader himself, Lord Noel-Buxton, is an odd bird indeed. He tries to convey the picture, continually coming before his eyes, of Westminster as an island, Thorney Island as it was and will be again, a place of marshes and bog-oaks and great crested grebes, lying in the broad waters of the Thames; and he tries to communicate the deep satisfaction of wading across the Thames at old Roman fording points. He is obsessed, whimsical, digressive and, ultimately, boring. Fabers, however, take him VERY SERIOUSLY, giving him the Full Typographi- cal Treatment: not a word of text until page 19, and thereafter many spaces to draw pictures. In Dr. Hubert Bagster's Country Practice, autobiography is simply a device for displaying a minor, but quite genuine, talent for story-telling, and for -describing, as the BBC would put it, A Day in the Life of a Country Doctor. He iS shrewd, observant and without the bedside man• nerisms often found in the part-time writers of his profession.

Judging by the favourable notices of his Per" formances, which Ram Gopal quOtes in Rhytittn in the Heavens, people who like to read about dancing have come to expect sumptuous rhetorical prose and a rich display of the inner spirit. The author does not let them down.

GEOFFREY NICHOLSON