Fly ting
IF the current malady of English fiction is the cult of unpretentiousness, used to justify a good deal of timid, drab and inept writing, the con- temporary American novel is afflicted by the opposite—and on the whole more promising —symptoms of pretentiousness: straining for effects, excessive indulgence in lyricism, amateur metaphysics. W. H. Auden, in one of his re- cently collected essays, has related this to the fact that the American writer is exposed to an intensively competitive ethos : his greatest temp- tation is to produce, not the book that will express what he has to say, but the book that will knock every other book off the market, like the latest gimmick-laden washing-machine.
These reflections seem relevant to This Passing Night, the impressive but exasperating first novel of a young American writer. It is elaborately wrapped up with a gnomic dedication, a long, allusive dedicatory letter by the fictitious narrator, quotations from Keats, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the English and Italian versions of the prologue to 1 Pagliacci, and with each chapter comes the free gift of a chunk of the next chapter but one. All of which is not so much art as promotion, stunts designed to generate an excited sense in the reader that this is it, man, this is the contemporary novel. There are mock plays, surrealistic dreams, funny draw- ings and Eng. Lit. jokes (`womb with a view,' `Mistah Headmaster—he dead') woven into the story, and the action skids bewilderingly all over the time-scale, almost concealing the contrivances which hold its two strands together. On the other hand there is a good deal that is funny, exciting and convincing in This Passing Night, which traces the lives of two boys who were friends in childhood, and later took very different direc- tions in life: Ricky Pierson to ebb and flow be- tween America and Europe with a group of rich, restless Harvard and Wellesley graduates; and Amadeo Magini to lead a gang in the violent and treacherous underworld of Brooklyn. The spectacular successes of the novel are certainly in those parts which deal with the gangs. Mr. Miller manages to bring out the epic quality of their violent, vulnerable lives, while keeping in view their pettiness and grotesque self- dramatisation. He has also created a style of speech for them which affords superb displays of 'flyting.'
`The comic effect of flyting,' to quote Auden again, 'arises from the contradiction between the insulting nature of what is said, which appears to indicate a passionate relation of hostility and aggression, and the calculated skill of verbal in- vention which indicates that the protagonists are not thinking about each other but about language and their pleasure in employing it invectively.' The verbal facility and inventiveness of his culture put the American writer at a great advantage in this and similar respects, as Goodbye to Some confirms. The narrator of this novel about the US Navy bomber crews in the South Pacific shrewdly observes of an RAF novel he is reading : 'It is a good story about reticent English pilots doing wonderfully active things without comment, but suddenly the book will go over into formlessness and ambiguity as the author tries to resolve fear, hatred, sexuality and other rather non-British emotions into words.' Mr. Forbes himself labours under no such handi- caps. He has rich resources of wit, irony and other rhetorical devices through which his hero and other characters relieve their bitterness at the tragic farce of modern war. The Learners has a novel and intriguing basic idea : a learned Himalayan lama and his retinue are invited to an ancient English uni- versity by a young English Oriental scholar. Miss Rider has personal experience of Tibetan exiles and their quaint, gentle manners, and she writes a sensitive, graceful prose rippling with discreet literary echoes. Alas, the novel does not fulfil its early promise. The possibilities of the situation seem to elude the author, and she gropes unhappily about among a bunch of rather etiolated English eccentrics for interest and action. The diffident young scholar is a tiresome hero, and even the lama, given nothing to do, becomes boring. Miss Rider, who has achieved distinction as a short-story writer, lacks the robustness required by the novel. When she acquires it, the results should be impressive. The Formentor Prize has been getting a bad press lately, and the latest winner to be pub" lished will do little to enhance its reputation. The Age of Discontent comes from Italy, but, is essentially an example of the International Style Youth Novel. A stoical Roman teenager describes her drab and penurious existence, lls tedium relieved, if that is the word, by frequent but listless sexual encounters. The book's literarY interest is limited to a single, simple device-- the flat, unmoved narration of what should be shocking—and the novelty soon wears off. DAVID 1.01)9A-
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