Night Life
Streetwalker. (The Bodley Head, 12s. 6d.) LET me make the point at once : Streetwalker is not an addition to the tedious list of books by experts in specialised fields—racing drivers; royal nursemaids—whose giddy reminiscences expire in the limbo of fan readership. It is quite obviously the work of an artist. One has the image of a thoughtful, intelligent girl, highly sensitive yet tough, with a dry sense of humour ('the two probation officers who shared the flat above mine'), an intellectual without a trace of snob- bishness, to whose many admirable natural quali- ties others have been added or sharpened by her life on the streets—insight, observation, compas- sion. Snobbishness is not an odd word to use in such a context; this besetting English weakness is sometimes shared by prostitutes as well as the rest of us—the 'part-time' housewife tending to look down on the call-girl, the call-girl looking down on the streetwalker, and so on.
The author has constructed her book around four main events, deliberately and cleverly cho: to give considerable insight into an import: segment of a prostitute's life. A studied expositit of three different kinds of client, a wryly corn adventure with a stranded 'Mick,' a truly horni ing experience with a sadist, and the final traE desperate involvement with Pete, who inje sweetness into his eyes, rather as icing-is squirte on to a cake.' The characterisation of Pete is deepl and brilliantly developed; it is the best study I 11:1 read of a ponce, and I am not forgetting Baba Montparnasse.
It is all supported by a mass of vivid detail, t author's vital relationship with her landlady, t life of the Soho underworld, the law, the 'queer and of its authenticity there is, in my mind. the slightest doubt. To anyone who knows the' the nostalgic account of criminal 'caffs' and clt, is immediately evocative of the whole flu highly-charged world of spieler, ponce, prostitu layabout and tearaway.
The author describes the most moving or d turbing incidents with a detachment that is some ways her most astonishing quality, and it by this re-creation of experiences in which s must have been profoundly involved emotiona that she displays her gifts as a writer, becat although her approach is so objective it is at t same time so highly affecting. A bitter, swl and beautiful book. One speculates on the fol that a new work by this promising talent will ta I Sir John Wolfenden says that he wishes tl book had been available to his committee. It pity that his committee were the instigators of t Street Offences Act, which has led to such a pi secution of the profession and such an apparL increase in the social stigma that the book f had to be published anonymously.
VICTOR beIUSGRA
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