Auberon Waugh on fantasy novels
The Harness Room L. P. Hartley (Hamish Hamilton £1.80).
The Giver Barry Cole (Methuen £2.50).
The Scorpion God William Golding (Faber £1.75).
Three novels published this week are worth reviewing, and all three are written by experienced and highly intelligent craftsmen of the art. If none wins a gold medal the reasons may appear at first glance to be different in every case, but I think the writers share a common error which is their failure to relate the fruits of their imagination to the time in which they live. To claim that all novels must deal with the social problems of the day is, of course, a palpable absurdity, although it was fashionable among novel reviewers less than ten years ago. Nor is it any less absurd to proclaim, as the picayune Kenneth Tynan used to proclaim, that works of art should be judged by the extent of their commitment to a particular social or political system. All I claim is that if writers do not meet people, read newspapers and intelligent weekly magazines, take an interest — however disapproving — in what they contain, Move around a bit and expose themselves to at least a few of the daily experiences of their audience, they will lose the ability to hold that audience's attention.
Some time ago I was irritated to meet a female novelist on a wireless programme Who said that she opposed the idea of a public lending right for authors because if authors were given a fair return for their labour they would do nothing but write books and the quality of their work would suffer, Novelists in particular, she said, should have another job so that they can have something to write about. Perhaps she regretted giving me this advice — she was called Gillian Tindall — when her next novel appeared and It was my unpleasant duty to advise readers of The Spectator against buying it, but plainly there is a germ of truth in what she said.
Mr Hartley is seventy-seven years old and one cannot reasonably complain if he now decides to live on his memories. The only sad thing is that he did not publish The Harness Room forty years ago, when It would have caused ot:. stir, influenced people's attitudes and described feelings which, I have no doubt, were widely, secretly shared at that time. A youth is given by his stereotyped colonel-style father into the care of the chauffeur to make a man of him. The chauffeur, called Carrington (heh! heh!), is an ex-Guardsman of magnificent physique who no sooner gets the lad into gym shorts than starts having a homosexual affair with him. The colonel-style father comes back with a new wife who takes a shine to the lad, called Fergus, but before they can get around to anything she has to watch an exhibition boxing match between Fergus and Carrington in which Fergus is killed.
His novel, then, is about the ideal of manliness — not a subject of pressing concern nowadays, unfortunately — and about the master-servant relationship, advancing the dangerously radical proposal that servants are human, and are not, by reason of their intellectual inferiority, to be despised. After showing the lad pictures of himself in the nude, Carrington asks: "I'm not being cheeky with you. am I?" "Of course not."
"Because I don't mean to be. Some people would say I was, but it's only because I like you. One sort of bloke can like another sort of bloke, can't he?"
What agonies the intelligent Edwardians must have suffered in their relationship with domestic servants. Personally I judge it a false and sentimental perception of Mr Hartley's to suppose that there could ever be a deep relationship between an intelligent rich man and his male servant, unless in the most exceptional circumstances of a homosexual attachment. Half of Mr Hartley's mind realized, I think, that the meeting of the minds he describes is far more unnatural than the meeting of the bodies, and this may be why he kills the lad. But the book's preoccupations are so much removed from those of the general reader nowadays that only those very few, like the reviewer, who are more interested in the problems of Edwardian servants than in almost anything else will even try to see its point.
Mr Barry Cole's ivory tower is of another sort. He lectures in literature at the universities of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Durham. The result of this is that he is so crippled by self-consciousness, so constantly looking over his shoulder at his colleagues in the Eng. Lit. Department — or more particularly looking at himself in the Eng. Lit. Department — that he can't bring himself to write a novel at all. He has written a sort of magazine, full of jokes, anecdotes, discussions, interesting facts with a central theme about a novelist trying to write a novel about a novelist trying to write. . . . One of Waugh's golden rules has always been that one should not make asides to the reader (yes, yes, Mr Bragg — I knows all about "Reader, I married him" in Jane Eyre) because it destroys his concentration on the narrative. As well as writing a novel about writing a novel, with countless asides to the reader, Mr Cole also swaps first person narrations for a long stretch in the middle, and inserts satirical exam papers throughout. Although many of the jokes are excellent, and Mr Cole has convinced me that he must be a most engaging fellow, I doubt very much whether he will succeed in his declared intention of writing a best-seller until he learns to put first things first and tell his readers a story.
Mr Golding strikes me as showing fairly advanced symptoms of the disturbancepatterns which 1 label the genius syndrome, but as I know nothing of his circumstances I can offer no friendly explanation for this. The first two stories in the three short novels which make up the book strike me as the purest gibberish; when writers begin to mistake themselves for St John and start writing a new Book of Revelation, it is generally time, in my experience, to send for a strait-jacket. But the last story is a pleasant, unpretentious Luddite sermon about a Greek at the time of the Roman Empire who invents the steam engine, gunpowder and a printing press. The Roman Emperor wisely sees the danger of these things and sends the fellow to China, where he teaches, no doubt, the Chinese.
This is agreeable enough, although one's appetite for such elegant little flights of fantasy is strictly limited. All three of these writers are highly gifted. Mr Hartley at least has the excuse of old age, but I think it is high time the other two came back into the world and learned something about the audience they seek to please.
Previous page
