Roman Mask
Translated by Meredith Weatherby. (Peter Owen, 18s.)
A Treasonable Growth. By Ronald Blythe. (MacGibbon and Kee, 18s.) `IN fact, I must own that both of our two expedi- tions to Britain were very disappointing in their results, except as propaganda for myself and the army.' It's through such wry, judicious asides that Rex Warner's Caesar breathes a sort of life into those impersonal Commentaries that bedevilled my schooldays; not all the battles went to the Romans, after all. This companion volume to The Young Caesar concludes an experiment in `autobiography,' history without tears recreated by a skilful novelist and classicist of repute. At dawn of the Ides of March, the great man reviews his life from the day he arrived in Cisalpine Gaul, through the anguish of the Civil War, up to his present Dictatorship. The irony of this device;--- `if, by some chance, I were struck down either to- day or tomorrow . . .'—is rather self-consciously echoed throughout; Mr. Warner's hindsight is grafted on to Caesar; but one can't deny this a certain appropriateness since the subject is, after all, a man of genius. And this is tempered by a gentle, satiric touch; the writing is wonderfully reminiscent of recent generals' memoirs in places: 'I was impressed, too, by the British use of armed chariots, a weapon which has become obsolete in Gaul but which, in the right con- ditions, can be very effective.'
Much of the book is, in essence, a deft recast- ing of Caesar's own accounts, sober and lucid
as the originals, interspersed .with character- estimates of Cicero, Pompey, Antony and others. There is no direct dialogue, and in this the author actually outdoes his hero's sobriety : even Caesar broke into oratio recta in the seventh book of the Gallic War. But interest is amazingly kept up. As an exposition of Roman campaigns and politics over fourteen seismic years, Imperial Caesar is a well-marshalled and fascinating work. What disappoints—as perhaps it was bound to, since Caesar-as-narrator is only a device for giving a decorous broad view of the times—is the angular, stony, improbable simplicity of Caesar himself. He talks neatly and urbanely of poetry, Cleopatra and clemency to the enemy, but the inchoate confusions that beset even great men and drive them to act—the deeper, sprawling motives —are not even hinted at.
Confessions of a Mask could better have been
Mr. Warner's title, in fact. Yukio Mishima's intentions in so calling his book remain Japanese and inscrutable, since his young hero exposes his innermost neuroses with unflagging, almost cheery zeal. He gives us a detailed case-history of inversion, lit by unexpected flashes of humour:
Sonoko and I exchanged photographs like any boy and girl in their first love affair. She wrote saying she had put mine in a locket and hung it over her breast. But the photograph she sent me was so large that it would only barely have fitted into a brief case. As I could not get it in my pocket. I carried it wrapped in a carrying- cloth.
That affair with poor Sonoko was doomed from the first. In childhood he had found his phallic 'toy' excited only by thoughts of blood and mus- cular young men; his saint was St. Sebastian. Hirschfeld and Huysmans annotate his later day- dreaming and dismal attempts to be normal. The development of his obsession takes place against backgrounds of school, university and factory; we hear of air-raids and the atom bomb has presumably been dropped before the end, but these are incidental to the narrator's patient, eccentric exploration. This is an oddly refreshing book, for all its dark depths—sketching in a mysterious East that has more affinities than is usual in fiction with our own mysterious West.
A Treasonable Growth is strong and loving on the Betjeman interiors of England, 'wicked, slippery, inhuman chairs with recessed rings cut in their seats for top-hats, and looking like frustrated commodes,' Suffolk private schools and the nautical villas of admirals' widows. Its damp, percipient focus, Richard Brand, comes to teach at Copdock School and finds himself talking at night to the wicked old woman, now waiting for death, who founded it. At weekends he helps her distinguished nephew, Sir Paul, a kind of Norman Douglas returned from Sicily as war-clouds gather, to sort his books. In his remaining spare time (his teaching activities are barely mentioned), he conducts a hesitant affair with a pearls-and- tweeds girl and has one riotous evening with Bateson, the games master, and some giggling tarts in a local pub. His glowing brother suddenly emerges to supplant him with Sir Paul at the close and he decides to follow Bateson and join up. Richard's motions are as inconsequential as they might be in life and, since he isn't particularly interesting, nor are they. But Mr. Blythe is malevolently sharp about the indecent pressures of the old upon the young, and the evocation of a now unfashionable corner of the English land- scape—lanes of dripping-wet chestnuts, snobbish servants and all—is both funny and lyrical.
One ought to be more impressed by Kathleen Sully's short, intense books; at least, one senses an invitation to be impressed. Her people con- ove strangely ut the vision hind so much rifle is more on has beep to primitive f fairly hunts r and atheist, chieves some becoming the stirs in turn e such jargon, e mayor, go ymbolic, left t the moral IS The Golden ig for what It tions betweet .unesse doret. ing co-tenant ye; all-mixe& Holden Caul' let him. Mr,' e glamour Oi e time in tbt when old Lee stantly say the untoward thing, m against conventional furniture. B that might be supposed to lie bel singularity is blurred for me. Sk explicitly extraordinary. Civilisati destroyed and men have returned communities. Skrine (the name itse with pointless suggestion), murdere stumbles on one such village, a 'miracle' cures and is coerced into local schoolteacher. Conscience against the forces of reaction : som ,anyway. Mobs, the bad man, th through their roles as if they were overs from a morality play. but wha God and Miss Sully alone know. Youth of Lee Prince is far too lot is: a series of flat, funny conversa random members of New York's je Lee is the peg on which his admit hangs the trailing excuse for narrati up in the nicest, concerned way and field's elder brother if I ever n Goodman is very fetching on th, having a lot of money and all th world ahead of one; I was sorry ended up in such a sad marriage.
OHN COLLO
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