Despite his Cleverness
Joseph, 15s.) .
MARY MCCARTHY has an anecdote about a young American girl engaged on a creative writing course who remarked, 'Mr. So-and-so is very pleased with my story, and now he's going to help me put the symbols in.' This has only a limitedre- levance to James Purdy, who is a fantastically adroit American writer and who doesn't, I imagine, need anyone to help him put the sym- bols in. Nevertheless, his effects are so calculated that they might well induce a certain discomfort in those English readers who don't mind authors being serious but who would rather they weren't to clever. But in performance Mr. Purdy suc- ceeds nearly all the time, despite his cleverness.
Colour of Darkness is a collection of stories that was first published some years ago, and is now reissued with some additional pieces. The title story is a fine account of the sad faltering re- lationship of a preoccupied man and his small son, the child of a broken marriage. In it Mr. Purdy magnificently combines the symbolic and the naturalistic. Most of the other stories approach this level in their exploration of various degrees of personal or social failure. Mr. Purdy writes with a detachment that is compassionate rather than ironic, and the result is sometimes comic, sometimes pathetic, and occasionally both. The Nephew is a short novel, set in a small town called Rainbow Centre; the principal characters are Alma Mason, an elderly spinster, and her brother Boyd, a widower. The chief event is the death in Korea of their nephew, who had been an orphan and whom they had brought up as their own son. The atmosphere throughout is quiet and tense, set in scorching summer heat and pervaded with the smell of tomatoes from a near- by ketchup factory. Mr. Purdy has all the gifts of a straightforward naturalistic writer; his charac- ters, even the most eccentric, arc firm and plausible, and his dialogue, though stylised, is authentic. Yet he has other gifts, of a less tangible kind. Works of fiction are often loosely described as 'poetic,' but Mr. Purdy's prose does in fact have the reverberations of meaning that are characteristic of poetry, and eludes paraphrase in the same way. In Mallarmd's phrase, he seems to use the spaces between the words as well as the words themselves.
Someone Like You is Roald Dahl's second col- lection of stories. The first one, Kiss Kiss, was compared by reviewers to Charles Addams's cartoons and Tom Lehrer's songs, which ade- quately suggests the nature of Mr. Dahl's pre- occupations. Though his subjects are mostly British--and he shows remarkable expertise about such varied topics as wine and dog-racing —the manner is that of the New Yorker story, where the lethal point is finally reached at the end of a long lane of type hedged in by advertise- ments at the back of the magazine. Some of Mr. Dahl's pieces are pretty sick, others are simply off-beat, and they are all prodigiously skilful. I enjoyed reading them, but I found my taste palled after a time—rather sooner than the end of the book, in fact. I would feel happier if I could be sure that Mr. Dahl's peculiar way of looking at the world is the result of a genuinely personal vision rather than a response to a fashionable demand.
Wilfrid Sheed's A Middle Class Education is a vigorous first novel that takes the lid off Oxford in the mid-Fifties----a very different world from the elegant scenes of Sinister Street or Brideshead Revisited. His hero, John Chote, is a lost but resourceful soul who has progressed from a minor public school to a smallish, hearty college. He is a profane, engaging lad who spends much of his time boozing and playing cards in the college library; nevertheless, he is also what one of his churns bitterly refers to as 'a secret worker, a solitary bookso,' and he is awarded a scholar- ship to an American university. But once away from the protective background of Oxford he comes to grief. In Chote, Mr. Sheed has success- fully portrayed both an individual and a clearly recognisable type. This is an untidy, sprawling novel, and is unashamedly padded in places. But it is full of life, often very funny, and contains innumerable neat observations of the raddled face of contemporary Oxford: Their digs were in a terrace house, which was looking even more anonymous than usual in the dark. In the downstairs living-room they could hear the two boarders from Christ Church huffing and puffing over their nightly port : from the hallway outside, it sounded like a pair of elderly walruses waffling over a piece of fish. 'Preposterous . . . Outrageous . . . Frightful little man. . . . Positive troglodyte.'
In lagua Nana, the Nigerian novelist Cyprian Ekwensi describes the tragi-comic adventures of an ageing beauty who has dominated the sophisticated demi-monde of Lagos for a long time but who is beginning to lose her grip—in particular on her lover, an ambitious. intellectual twenty years her junior. Mr. Ekwensi tells her story in a smooth but colourful prose; if this book is anything to judge by, the West African novel is growing up fast.
BERNARD BERGONZI
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