Almost like nature
Peter Ackroyd
The Next-To-Last Train Ride Charles Dennis (Macmillan £2.95) The Sword and the Stallion Michael Moorcock (Allison and Busby £2.50) There have been some very amusing novels about bums, at least of the American variety. Mr Dennis is a young Canadian writing in old American, which may account for the fact that he can come out of the closet with the same, skeletal jokes and still be extremely funny. II laughed till I cried; it was a wonderful experience; this is for the benefit of Macmillan's otherwise boring blurbs. Michael Rangeloff is as Polish-American as frozen pie, and follows the national principle of getting something out of everyone by behaving as if he were in a novel by J. P. Donleavy. This is known as fool's gold.
Rangeloff has an. obligatory Uncle Geroge, who screws JOwish, widows out of their inheritance in ways more literal than any Spectator reader could possibly imagine and Michael, with a familiar piety worthy of Orphan Annie, is not one to desert the broads' road. The novel recounts in what Godfrey Smith might call, hilarious detail the picaresquerie of Rangeloff as he steals 75 cents from a ten-year-old nymphomaniac (who might be called California Velvet), dressed up in army drag, and escorts an anonymous coffin half way across the United States pursued by cops, queens and one lady with three perfect breasts. Such is the stuff that dreams are made on.
A great deal of the novel takes place on that American myth, the train of fools, and it is here that Rangeloff becomes a third party in a conversation between Miss Standish Logan and herself: "You probably saw me on Mod Squad last year. I did a guest spot .. . you probably come from a small town, don't you. Probably think Hollywood's some glamorous place where all the movie stars live. Forget it. It's a goddam playground for fags and vibrator salesman. The wonderful world of Charles Dennis is almost like Nature herself, being both threatening and at the same time completely innocent. His novel is full of relatively harmless cranks, who talk, drink, and employ all of their other bodily function with an abandon reminiscent of the wilder moments in a Breughel engraving.
Mr Dennis is what was known in the 'fifties as zany, and he makes a point of yoking conventional people violently together. There is Isadora Frizzel, whom destiny would have decreed a ballet star if she didn't keep on tripping over herself; there is Merle Hopkins, "a poisonous queen with a tiny head and tight little curls on top", a school teacher; there is an elderly Florence Nissenbaum who is hastening her death by relentlessly sniffing amyl nitrate; • and Melody Anne, a small-town sweetheart
• with a heart of candy floss. This is a surrealism worthy of Amt rack and 12,467 identical Howard Johnsons. Scraps of newspaper stories, snatches of dreary popular song and pieces of memory wrap around each other to evoke what cynics call the rich diversity of life.
Like many comic novelists Mr Dennis has a firm hand for dialogue and coincidence, but he experiences a great deal of difficulty in constructing anything remotely resembling a plot. It may well be that he lives like that, and it is the highest function of art to imitate nature. In any case, a student of Cervantes and of Lucille Ball will know by now that a plot is never necessary
as long as the cauchemar is entertaining. Mr Dennis also knows this, and he has his characters tripping over each other and delivering gags as if there were no such thing as the cinema.It just goes to show that the old jokes are still the best ones, and any novel which hinges upon a coffin filled with hundred dollar bills deserves the plaudits of ancient history: to each his own. I liked it.
I have never understood the cult of Michael Moorcock. I know he is very big in Notting Hill Gate among drugsters and students from Essex University, but I have remained untouched. This may well have been callow ignorance, since I was impressed by at least two thirds of The Sword and the Stallion. It opens emptily enough as Moorcock proceeds to embroider a banal little story about wars and rumours of wars with a diction which is unpronounceable but which must exist somewhere between Welsh, Icelandic and demotic Greek. The Novel is set in a land of fantasy last seen in movies starring Douglas Fairbanks, in which a Prince Corum and the Ur-human Mabden are fighting against the cold, wicked and legendary Fhoi Myore. There is something grand about all of this but Moorcock makes the mistake of placing his fantasies at the service of recognisably human motives and passions. This takes the first part of the book much closer to Barbara Cartland than to the Niebelungenlied, with a perfect combination of wooden dialogue with the absence of anything but rudimentary characterisation and plot. It is always assumed that myth or history give the novelist licence to forget anything which has happened in his medium since the nineteenth century, and in The Sword and the Stallion we have a few fanciful archalcisms — "Fene The Legless", "Ronan The Pale", "Uther of The Melancholy Dale" etcetera — and some leggings, broad-swords, mead and an inverted diction whichshad the advantage of conveying very little and meaning absolutely nothing. But, as soon as Moorcock forgets about his humanoids and their blank solial detail, the narrative takes off on a flight of consciousness which left me breathless if not bowed. Prince Comm has journeyed to the isle of Ynys Scaith, "hazardous Island of Shadow", a land which continually changes its appearance and which is afflicted by visions of change and the palpable nightmare of decay. And when Moorcock goes in pursuit of his vision, his prose has a cadence and a simplicity which remind me of some of the more notorious passages of Malory: No sooner had they crossed a few feet of these fronds than they sprang up again and the two heroes were surrounded by the plants which reached feathery fingers out and touched their flesh and sighed. And Corum felt that the fronds reached through his skin and stroked his bones. . . ahead of them they could see two-legged animals bending to drink the liquid, looking at them through glazed, white eyes before stopping to drink again. Something wriggled across Splendid Mane's path. Corum thought at first he had seen a pale snake, but then he wondered if the thing had not had the shape of a human being.
I do not understand why Moorcock wants to bother himself and his readers with tales of battles and human passions when he can construct a prose of such imaginative strength. Malory was able to sustain it for some twenty books, and there is no reason why Moorcock should not devote himself to the rediscovery of those forbidding depths.
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