The Wounded Surgeon
The Chapman Report. By Irving Wallace. (Barker, 18s.) Across the Water. By Michael Campbell. (Heinemann, 16s.) Kindred by Choice. By Goethe. (Calder, 15s.)
THE only reason for giving The Chapman Report pride of place this week—or, indeed, any place at all—is that it had huge sales in America and is likely to do pretty well here : this seems a pity, since it is an unusually bad book. Dr. Chapman, engaged on a post-Kinsey survey of the sexual habits of married females, conies with his little team of assistants to round off his tour at the wealthy Californian suburb of The Briars. It proves to be the end of the line in more ways than one. A lady subject is posthumously raped by an interviewer, who then commits suicide; another subject is inflamed by the questioning into sub- mitting to the racially mixed embraces of a jazz quintet; yet another lady (widowed) finds her first fulfilment with Paul, the 'decent' inter- viewer, who enshrines what small moral centre Mr. Wallace has felt appropriate to his book. Paul it is who offers the memorable formulation:
Kathleen, I love you. But I've learned some-
thing, too—sex is only one part of love.
This insight is a shade devalued by Kathleen's rejoinder: 'I want that part now.' But it is en- dorsed by the powerful presence of Dr. Jonas (who smokes `an aged corncob' but offers Paul chartreuse). Dr. Jonas's role is to convince us that Dr. Chapman is,at fault somewhere in his easy statistical assumptions.
The trouble with this dreadful commercial job is that Mr. Wallace doesn't really give a hoot in
hell about anything except describing a few devious sexual encounters. He has none of the novelist's gifts except stamina, and all the laborious furniture of Krafft-Ebing and suburban sociology is ridiculous when there's no one shown to be sitting on it. Even the recumbencies are ill done. There is such a popular demand at the moment for incitement to coital fantasy (when, if it comes to that, hasn't there been?) that one is tempted to say the obvious: risk prosecution and invest in a genuine 'dirty book,' which has at least been written directly for the market, rather than waste time or money on this submerged pornography. For The Chapman Report is no more than the logical extension of the titillating 'vice probes' of our self-styled family news- papers: `the wounded surgeon plies the steel' (of course) and his hand, for all the moral masquerade of healing, is a little shaky. The plain truth is that this is a terribly dull book. A commercial product, created by general, if un- spoken, request, it contrives to say not a new or necessary thing throughout its considerable, painstaking length.
This, from Across the Water, is (it seems to me) a very different matter: She was aware of odd yearnings. She was distantly touched, once again, by the womanly feeling that when you have a husband, children and home, the only worthwhile thing to be done is to find some available gentleman and strip him to his socks.
Michael Campbell is alert, you feel, to what other people hazily think of doing—and, much better, to what he himself wants to do with this know- ledge: it makes for humour. His latest book concerns itself with a batch of rich, idle Irish in and around Dublin. It moves, spoofingly, through Somerville-and-Ross antics and creatures to a disappointing Nancy Mitford finale. The hero is probably Ireland: no single character has the power to dominate the various coteries; and a big costume party inundates the end. I found his previous book—Oh, Mary, This Lon- don—enormously funny : that concerned frag- ments of England seen through chilly, whimsical Irish eyes. On home ground, Mr. Campbell is far too gentle with his gallivanters. Yet this, no sort of whole, is a joy in its intermittent parts. The difficult Brendan Behan figure nearly comes off (why smother him with well-born ladies?) and there are acerbities which intimate that Mr. Campbell, who has here produced the nearest thing he'll ever write, I hope, to a Book Society choice, could yet do something of great interest. This time he's too charming by half.
That odd literary centaur, the Gillons, has- have?—generated a neat fantasy in The Unsleep. The title holds the gimmick—injections have cut out the need for the usual slumbers—and the new world moves in appropriate patterns. .A man holds out, the non-conformist, and vainly tries to satisfy his wife and do his job while still taking time off to sleep. Frankly, you could almost work out the complications yourself. Otherwise, it's a professional piece of bookmaking—with sex, social observation, pessimistic prophetism, and a neat twist of plot nicely blended into a pre- digested 'read.' The jolly speculation comes in how they do it. Does one of them put the adverbs in? Does Diana do the male sex and Meir the female? Can only one of them type?
To make the move from the ephemeral to the durable: Goethe's Kindred by Choice (which has hitherto been known in translation as Elective Affinities) is a deeply irritating work, thrown off in 1808 from an idea for Wilhelm Meister. One should put the objections first if only because they are partially vanquished in the reading. H. M. Waidson's new translation (conversion from German is not easy) labours under this sort of heaviness: If you are having me on, I shall leave you in the lurch another time.
There is so much symbolism that it is difficult to give credence to the physical situation of the four unhappy protagonists. Edward and Charlotte are discovered literally cultivating their expensive German garden. They choose to disturb their calm by inviting their chemical complements to stay : Ottilie, Charlotte's niece, and the Captain, a nebulous gentleman of vague fortunes. The in ,e directness of the sym- bolism is fairly inuicated by the appearance of the child Charlotte bears during sundry peri- peteia, by her husband : it has Ottilie's eyes and the Captain's profile. Yet this heavy, indifferent tale will interest more than just students of Goethe or of the European novel. It works, for all its tiresome historical 'limitations,' its indul- gences of debate, to produce an image of complex life that would astound our weekly novelists. Even Ottilie's homiletic aphorisms (inscribed in a diary) reverberate down the years. The effect is disconcertingly mod.'rn.
JOHN COLEMAN
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