The Ego and I
The Plague House Papers. By Robert -Neumann. (Hutchinson, 21s.) The Plague House Papers. By Robert -Neumann. (Hutchinson, 21s.) 'I ALWAYS had had the gift of impersonating other people: an histrionic, impostor's gift at bottom. . . .' Unsurprising, then, if there are at least five Mr. Neumanns in this 'autobiography' and two of them read disturbingly like impersonations. There is the ageing literary gentleman who moves into a fourteenth-century house in Kent and extracts fun, in the manner of Betty MacDonald from the turmoils of settling in; the gent) macabre teller of ghost stories (for the house tor out to be haunted); the homtne a femmes wh harbours a refugee dancer one-third his age an marries her to save her from extradition, only 106, find himself in love, and a father, again; Or,illa swashbuckling Austrian poet and novelist whe'cle' was asked by the German Crown Prince, 'an what else, Herr Neumann, do you propose—ft the salvation of Germany?'; and, best value of a for my money, there is the fascinatingly informe chronicler of his Jewish antecedents. Much what Mr. Neumann divulges of his private Ilf might have been considered indecently outspoke vldi if he hadn't taken care to caution us against'! believing it : !a book of Fancy a propos of Facts, Ka he suggests. Foreworded is forewarned. And perhaps this was the only compromise Nit No Neumann could find between the terribly dece Egg and I antics suitable for a sedate readershi and the much tougher revelations that insisted o rising to the surface. It seems a pity, a miss opportunity : under the spell of his strenuotn charm one is in danger of forgetting that thi author, given his time and race, has undergone far more of the awful processes of history that the jolly old Georgian josser who is one of hit several personm could ever have done.
JOHN COLEMAII
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