Three lapses

PATRICK COSGRAVE

Rich Man, Poor Man Irwin Shaw (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 40s) A Domestic Animal Francis King (Long- man 30s) The Vivisector Patrick White (Cape 40s) There are here three novels, too interesting to judge but fascinating to criticise, because,

as a trio, and viewed historically, they epitomise all that is wrong, and much of what could be right, with the novel in English today. However, 'we must judge',

said Dean Inge, and it is only straightforward to say that Shaw's novel is so

bad as scarcely to be worth consideration in any company, let alone that of the other two; King's is a bad, pernicious book by a writer of obvious integrity and talent who sees only through a glass, darkly; and White's is a fierce, corruptive, demanding book by a great writer who has bent—momentarily, one hopes—to fashion.

To summarise. Shaw tells the story of the life and hard fornications of a German- American family from the end of the war to late last night: when in difficulty with a character, scene or transition, the writer pro- duces the four-poster, or the American .version of Messrs Heals' modish equivalent. King's narrator is a sad, queer, English, novelist, who falls helplessly in love with his Italian lodger—a beautiful, wholly unrealised footballer turned philosopher. himself torn between the demands of a eupeptic wife and an attenuated mistress: there is a great deal of sex here, too. White's hero is a distinguished painter, Hurtle

Duffield, whose career goes through a panorama rather than a life, exploiting all about him in the interests of his art : there is a great deal of sex here, too.

The distinguishing mark of King's book is the poignant juxtaposition of the ordered and delicate life of its narrator with the primitive character of his passion : Dick tries to live in his antiqued home, waiting for An- tonio to return from sessions with Pam in

her battered Volkswagen; he is consumed with jealousy, rescued occasionally by an ob-

jective realisation that others might be

almost as unhappy as himself. Within the inevitably, and deliberately, narrow ex- istence of the selfish, if civilised, homosexual.

gradually degrading himself through a necessarily degrading passion, King is brilliant. But that inverted world is very far from enough; for us, for King's talent; for the novel as an art form, as a realisation and judgment of human value. White I will re- serve for a moment.

In Advertisement for Myself and Can- nibals and Christians, Norman Mailer describes the novel as seen from the inside by an American novelist : it was a contest in machismo, in which everybody tried to be better than Theodore Dreiser and as good as Ernest Hemingway and, above all, tried to write the great American novel. Because he is an egotist Mailer reflected on 'the other talent in the room' in prize-fighting terms; because he is intelligent, he saw a basic lack of confidence in the American novelists.

Their failure was the failure to realise in detail a social milieu and provide a con- sistent scale of judgment for their characters. The American novelist—such was the implication of Mailer's judgment—shouted loudest when he had

least to say. Thus, in Shaw's book, the deprived Thomas becomes portentous: 'What's America done for me . . . I don't care if I never see it again after this time.' And Gretchen says 'All those scolding articles I wrote . . . were digs at America because it produced men like Teddy Boylan and made life easy for men like Teddy Boylan.' In the cadence you get echoes of bad Hemingway. When Tommy has fought his French gangster and is told he might have been killed he says 'For a little while there the chances looked pretty good.' Only Hemingway himself could transcend this nonsense.

If Irwin Shaw shouts, Francis King withdraws and whispers. Every detail in this novel is beautiful and its whole strategy is wrong. In the most brilliant and objective piece of contemporary novel criticism in England since the war, P. H. Newby wrote of King (in a pamphlet, The Novel, which ought to be reprinted and its author paid a fortune to extend its analysis) that 'intensity of experience' was his forte and that his characters were among 'strangely fore- shortened figures . . . giants and grotesques'.

King's narrator suffers, but nobody else in his book lives: they are all grotesques. His footballer-philosopher has scarcely an in- telligent word to utter. He is not only inarticulate in the presence of other philosophers (even when they are queer), he is incapable of sensing or seeing a single intellectual notion or moral feeling : he is a beautiful body, a few words in Italian set in italics and, in the author's recurring word, 'unfathomable'. Yet King—one of the few young writers in Newby's list who is still writing well and usefully—chooses to con- fine himself within the narrow range of a pervert's limited experience when he, with his talent, could go public, give the novel back its true social dimension and treat of what Denis Donoghue called 'the ordinary universe'. Mailer would, no doubt, invite King to come out of his corner and fight.

Patrick White, working from a new col- onial cultural context. may terminate that lack of confidence permanently, as he did temporarily with Voss: but he will not do it with this novel. Like Maugham, and Cary, and even Hemingway, in his last book, White retreats into the world of the painter to express the unparsable frustration of the artist-writer with society and the consequent exploitation by the artist of people around him : the book is dedicated to Sidney and Cynthia Nolan and its message of human relations is in the title. 'To fortify himself against the truth', White says of a character at one point, 'he hunched his shoulders.' The truth is that novelists should not retreat into seeming portentousness, like Shaw, or private theologies, like King, or hostile isola- tion, like White. Their work is rooted in the values of society and its experiences, as well as in the behaviour of its members: they must accept the ordinary universe.

Of these three novelists only White— who is magnificent where King is precise, as can be seen in the wonderful tactility of the farmyard description in his first para- graph—might one day rise to penning a first sentence that, for wit and arrogant con- fidence might be put alongside Jane Austen's 'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a

single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife'. When, and if,

that confidence is re-achieved we will, as an incidental bonus, have done with the tedious, four-letter word 'sex' that disfigures the best writing of White and King, while it characterises that of Shaw.