Lindsay Anderson
The novel I have most enjoyed is not available in bookshops. This is The Great Advertisment for Marriage, a comi-tragic dispatch from the battle of the sexes by David Sherwin. Publishers have turned away from it, shuddering, as from so many original, compulsive works. I suppose its disabused wit affronts feminist principle a dangerous thing to do nowadays. And certainly its pained, eccentric honesty fits no fashionable category.
An exceptional wartime autobiography, Saint Praftu, is also unpublished (PRAF- TU is a mnemonic for the checks to be carried out before taking off in a Spitfire). Its author, Murray Anderson, DFC, is my brother. It is not the kind of book that would normally attract me: an upper- middle-class boy goes green from public school into the army, gets bored with the Phoney War, transfers to the RAF, flies Spitfires armed with cameras instead of guns (Photographic Reconnaissance), flies Lysanders carrying agents to and out of France (Special Duties), and ends up as a fighter pilot in the invasion of Europe. But the work is an epic of the spirit as well as of action. The boy becomes a man, learns the ancient truths of life and death, is estranged for ever from the myths of class and background.
As for overpraised books: one hardly needs to read them to know them. For instance, the latest Anthony Powell or Anthony Burgess; the new Clive James or Martin Amis. Try to get hold of The Cannibal Cookbook, though, by my old friend Lionel Miskin. This came out last Christmas, was greeted generally with re- vulsion and returned to the publishers by most bookshops (especially those with lady assistants). But there may still be a few copies lurking around.
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