25 SEPTEMBER 1964, Page 18

Great and Lesser Traditions

I THINK the novels of Elizabeth Taylor have been greatly under-rated. True, she gets a very good press (see back-flap of her new book), but she is hardly one of the novelistic names which make news, probably because she is, in the best sense, old-fashioned; that is to say, she writes an elegant, witty prose, has a decent respect for the Queen's English, and is not obsessed by crime, violence, madness or homosexuality. There are a handful of novelists, at the moment, who are considered 'significant,' but I have never seen Miss Taylor's name included among them; yet her books seem to me far more significant (without the inverted commas) than those of— oh well, all right, Miss X and Mr. Y. Also they are far better written.

Flora, the cosseted upper-middle-class heroine of her new novel, marries a dull businessman, and later adopts as her protege a rather unen- gaging young writer, with unfortunate results. Flora, 'the soul of kindness,' is in fact thoroughly self-centred; Miss Taylor analyses her personality with great deftness, and the subsidiary charac- ters are also excellently drawn : Flora's friend Meg, her mother, and the rough-spoken, rough- dealing woman painter, Liz Corbett. The book is a study of self-love and self-delusion, and Miss Taylor carries it off splendidly. For sheer competence, good writing and psychological in- sight, Miss Taylor has few rivals.

Mr. R. C. Hutchinson is also, I suppose, an unfashionable writer, and for more or less similar reasons. in his new, novel, the child of the title is a moron: the daughter of Lopuchine, an aristocratic Russian émigré, and his Greek- Rumanian wife, Helene Milescu. Husband and wife become estranged; Helene is an immensely successful actress, but Lopuchine takes a job as a lorry-driver based on Marseilles. Before the story opens, Helene has lied to her husband, tell- ing him---in his own interest (as she persuades herself) and that of the child----that the little Eugenie has died. But the child is in truth alive, in a Swiss hospital, and on hearing that an up-to-date operation, by a famous surgeon, can ameliorate if not cure her condition, Helene feels impelled to confess the facts to her husband. She is .in favour of the operation, not from any real maternal love, but from a sense of duty. The father, on the other hand, opposes it : the moronic girl, loathsome and sub-human as she is, becomes for him—merely because she is his

own child—a genuine object of affection. He takes her to live with him in a slum in 'Mar, seilles, and contrives to combine the roles of lorry-driver and male nurse. The novel ends with an ironic tragedy: the child dies, but there seems some prospect of the self-centred Helene and the quixotic Lopuchine (a sort of Dostoievskian Holy Fool) being brought eventually together again.

Most of Mr. Hutchinson's novels have dealt with some such moral predicament or dilemma; in A Child Possessed he explores the given situation in depth, and from a variety of angles. Dr. Leavis hailed Lawrence as the last novelist since Conrad to belong to 'the great tradition,' but Lawrence, for all his greatness, could be (as Joyce pointed out) an appallingly sloppy writer at times; Mr. Hutchinson is never sloppy, and his deep concern with moral issues seems to me to relate him, far more closely than Lawrence, to George Eliot, James and Conrad.

The blurb of Miss O'Grady's novel compares it with A' High Wind in Jamaica, but surely the point of Richard Hughes's masterpiece was that Victorian children, in unusual circumstances, could act in a way totally at odds with the cur- rently expected behaviour-pattern. The children in Let's Kill Uncle, let loose on an island off British Columbia, behave, on the other hand, fairly predictably, given our entirely different system of discipline. Outrageous they certainly are, but Miss O'Grady makes their actions seem not only justified but credible. I found this book great fun. The Last Word is about the degeneration and final break-up of a love-affair. Patrick and Francia are engaged, but Francia, for reasons which she doesn't wholly understand, feels com- pelled to call off the engagement and to marry an unhappy, suicidally inclined young cousin. But the content of this novel is less interesting than its form: the story is told by Patrick and Francia in alternating monologues, spoken as though to some unnamed third person. (Mr. Arthur Calder-Marshall, in one of his early novels, employed a somewhat similar method.) It is an extremely tricky, technique, but Miss Banks employs it with great efficiency, so that each character is presented, successively, in both subjective and objective terms. Both the speakers are trying to justify themselves for the' mis- fortunes which result from their conduct, and the reader is invited to act as their judge. I'm not sure whether Miss Banks intended Patrick to be such a brute as he seems, or Francia so bitchy; but perhaps her object was, in fact, to leave to thus in doubt. Miss Banks writes easily and readably, though her facility occasionally betrays her into glossy-magazine cliches and a rather glib use of American colloquialisms and pop lingo.

JOCELYN BROOK0