The Big Store
Bond Street Story, By Norman Collins. (Collins, 16s.)
ONE of the simpler and more meaningless ways of writing a novel is to take a building and recount the lives of its tenants; what might be called the meanwhile, two floors above . . or egg-box, approach to the art of fiction. But certain prac- titioners of the craft of pleasing the public have known how to go one better. Grand Hotels and three-star restaurants are their chosen stamping- grounds and the reader gets not only the hopes and fears of a dozen assorted characters but a breathtaking tour of high-class life thrown in : this is the 'all the world loves a head waiter' variant. Now comes another tilt at the genre, Mr. Norman Collins's latest revolves, in so far as it can be said to move at all, round Rammell's, sort of supra-Harrods (`Letters addressed simply 10 Rammell's, England, find their way to Bond Street all right'). All walks of store life are repre- sented, from spry old Sir Harry himself, who 'imply won't leave well alone, via comical Mr. Bloot, the senior shop-walker, right down to in- significant I reen whose dad wangles her in against her will. Other puppets are Mr. Privett, who is never so happy as with his model yacht on the Highgate ponds; Marcia, top model on her way down, fast approaching the age of assent:. the Managing Director with his culture-mad ununder- standing wife; and the Managing Director's son T ,_°nY, who drops all his adolescent nonsense 4°001 the Arts and makes good when the old man has his heart-attack. A note on the jacket lets us know that `.A.11 in all, Bond Street Story is half a dozen fete all, novels in one . . f; and there can be no quarrel with this. In fact, two of them occurred 1;), 1110 right away, Angel Pavement and Richard Seven Against Reeves, though I
should hasten to add that both these undistin- guished fictions are whole arcades ahead of Mr. Collins book. For, leaving aside the author's niassive assumption that all of his characters w loe]0 —
the rank of director will have odd names and lalk in funny spelling; ignoring if one can the sheer weary inaccuracies (one of England's ..1°P models' would not be working full time for ':slOre): conceding Mr. Collins his facetiousness, ,' .'s reworking of stock literary types, his nudging worldliness and his sludged-up conclusion, one
has still to undergo an appalled confrontation with his style. The writing is so raggedly perfunc- tory, so peppered with full stops and hesitancies, that I had the illusion of a tired voice issuing from a tape recorder.
Charles Mercer's Drummonds are in a slightly more virile, American tradition. You are aware, for all their conventional gestures, that he is doing his level best by them, not standing back to twitch at their vowels and mannerisms. Young Drew Drummond has disappointed his father, the General, by taking to the Italian hills after cover- ing himself with glory in the two most recent wars. There are danger signals that he may be seduced by the Mediterranean into leaving the regular army for good. So the General sets off for Italy with his doglike ex-sergeant servant Harry, plotting to haul his son back into the Drummond Tradition, essentially martial, by invoking his aid in writing their family history. Two American girls—Marcia (again!), just married to a queer Count who has immediately deserted her, and hence a rather queer Countess; and Jane, a whole- some, beauty, hopefully imported by the General as a prospective military wife for Drew—provide the required feminine relief, and surprisingly tame it is till the very end when there are some improbable switches: The main stresses of the plot tug around the father-son relationship which, at one moment, through the irony of Drew's greater knowledge of some ancestral skulduggery, threatens to come alive. But the book as a whole is not a whole. It shows every sign of meditative planning; there are quite neat pastiches of old diaries, quite revealing flashbacks to Drew's bullied boyhood; but, the central issues, such as they are (where does duty lie'? what is love?), are not so much resolved as dissolved finally in the first sentimentalities to hand, a deathly in- adequacy reflected in Mr. Mercer's lucid yet strangely inert prose.
Mr. Marquand's sentimentalities are much better disguised for the most part, and there is no question about his reissued H. M. Prawn, Es- quire being the most rewarding of this week's meagre selection. It's an interesting book to come back to after a lapse of several years. For one thing I'd failed to realise how influential he must surely have been for the flock of efficient second- rate urban novels coming out of America since the war. Few of them, however, have caught the distinctive urbanity of his reporting, his excellent comic sense. It's as if he had taken over Babbitt and made him fit for the New Yorker. Henry Pulham, the narrator, invited to write his per- sonal history for the twenty-fifth anniversary of his Harvard Class, sets his life in nostalgic review. 'Most of them have been so busy working that they haven't had time to do anything,' says the yearbook secretary, and her comment echoes out over the leisurely recapitulation of Pulham's entrapment : the girl he loved and the girl he married, the job he enjoyed and the job he has ended with, the life he might have wanted and the life he's got. Mr. Marquand, of course, de- lights in ironies and, since he can handle them so devastatingly, it's all the more irritating that he allows himself to deploy so many; in the process he nearly twists Pulham in two. Towards the end, when Henry returns from summer vacation and his wife has patently been conducting an affair with his best friend, the difficulties of presenting his 'innocent' report to the worldly reader are almost too much even for Mr. Marquand: H. M. Pulham might be mistaken for H. M. Benchley.
JOHN COLEMAN
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