All in favour
Tony Palmer
The Revolving Door, Mervyn Jones (Quartet Books £1.50)
Anonymous Venetian, Giuseppe I3erto (Hodder ant Stoughton £.115)
For Whom the Cloche Tolls Angus Wilson and Philippe Julian (Secker and Warburg £1,95).
The Revolving Door is the second Mervyn Jones book to be published within a matter of weeks. This is shorter, funnier, and in every way more admirable than the first, Holding On. Its purposeis satirical, its effect scurrilous, its tone political and its style occasionally portentous. Since I was less than kind about Mr Jones's previous book, I'm glad to report that I laughed from start to finish when reading this one, Dr Dmitri Sergeyevich Myslov is one of .those permanently defecting Russian. scientists, inevitably brilliant, inevitably possessed of the very, latest top secret information and inevitably whisked away by MI5, 6 and 7. upon arrival in England. Before long, the delights of western civilisation are para. ding themselves before him, some dressed, mostly , .undressed. The defect or's dreamt There's Arabella, a stripper with a geography degree. There's Lady Henrietta Burrell, an aristocrat of the very best tradition, hungry
for love and sex. There's Brenda the General's daughter who knows a trick or two, and Dinky who invented them. And, of course, there's Cleo the black waitress who also attends lectures at the Liberation University. Meanwhile, the good doctor is happily feeding his M15, 6 and 7 interrogators with wild fantasies about the Russian Ministry of Defence getting more and more exasperated as they seem to be swallowing every word he is telling them. Eternally grateful. however, MI5, 6 and 7 equip our hero with a luxury flat plus a hundred pounds a week pocket money.
Inevitably, the ladies appear . . but this is precisely what our hero does not want. Little do his interrogators realise that the reason for his defection is not the threat of Siberia, not an ideological dissatisfaction with the mores of communism, not even the glamour of capitalism, but Tanya, Katya, Tenar and Masha to name only four. They too had been hungry for love — and sex. They, too, had been insatiable. They too had — well, you must buy the book. It's a good quick read, without pretension yet not without mild social comment. It would also make a very funny film.
The re-publication of another satire, this one concerning the? of the 'twenties, allows me to settle another score. Angus Wilson's For Whom the Cloche Tolls, with illustrations by Philippe Jullian, originally published in 1953, has always been my favourite book of 'his. Utterly delightful, effortlessly gay, totally lacking in any self-conscious strivings after being 'a great novel ', Mr Wilson's parody tells us a great deal about the social madnesses which consumed post-first world war youth. He has collected together the memoirs of Maisie, a lunatic man-hunting grandmother from Texas who lived in Eaton Square, was photographed by Cecil (Beaton), grabbed her daughter's lovers, holidayed in the Riviera, sought out art in Montmartre and generally, it was generally agreed, embodied all that was essential and fun about the 'twenties. Indeed, Mr Wilson captures the
self-congratulatory seediness of poor little rich girls with such perfection that one wonders where he got all his information from. While not completely destroying the accepted version of events, it pours scorn (for example) on the much boasted wisdom of David's successor, Solomon, and demonstrates what one has always suspected about many of the Old Testament kings, namely, that they were often not much more than a gang of landgrabbing villains — or as Mr Heym puts it about David himself, "a killer who maintains close personal ties with God, a brigand who doubles as a poet, a tyrant who from a dozen hardly settled nomadic tribes forges a nation." The Report, which has been commissioned by King Solomon and his advisers to legitimise Solomon's claim to the throne and is thus the work of one Ethan, author, historian and tenant of 54 Queen-of-Sheba Lane, Jerusalem, is presented with gusto con brio, even con furioso. It is wholly plausible, intellectually arrogant and like Mervyn Jones's book, not without its unmistakable social and political relevances.
What is it about contemporary Italian. writers that allows them to pen such poignant love stories? A few weeks back I was extolling the virtues of Giorgio Bassani's Behind the Door, Now, Giuseppi Berto has published a story of equal sadness and of equal eloquence. A husband and wife have grown apart during eight years of separation — she with another man, he with his career in an orchestra. Suddenly and without explanation, he asks her to come and meet him in Venice. They touch, and all the old passion is awakened and along with it the jealousies and bitternesses that had caused the original breakdown. Painfully, they realise that in spite of all they are still hopelessly in love although reconciliation is now impossible. Without anger or sorrow, he asks her to forgive him. One last request, that is, before he succumbs to the cancer which is eating him away.
For the rest . . you must buy the book. It is exquisite. Dignified, cautious, without self pity, poised, restrained, every sentence one feels has been lovingly fashioned. Maybe Italian writers of S. Berto's and S. Bassani's generation have, through historical accident, become imbued with a certain philosophical fatalism which colours all their work. Moravia has that same pessimism, although neither he nor the others could be described as gloomy. On the contrary, their writings are eternally sunny and blissful, however dark their stories and however disappointed their heroes.
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