Dream-Bubbles
The Nature of the Beast. By Robert Holies. (Heinemann, 21s.) The Itinerant Lodger. By David Nobbs. (Methuen, I8s.) The (Diblos) Notebook. By James Merrill. (Ch4to and Windus, 21s.)
DAVID KARP was born in 1922, so I suppose it is possible that in a teenage dream-bubble he passed oblivious through pre-war America's left- wing ferment. The Last Believers gives the rum impression that now, suddenly stumbling upon this episode of his country's political past, he Is moved by blinding urgency to reveal the scandal for the first time to other dream-bubble dwellers.
His hero, Arthur Cameron. a successful Jewish playwright, learns that his idealistic son, Abram, up to his brain-pan in Student Peace. Committee demonstrations, is about to renounce citizenship as a ban-the-bomb gesture. To cir- cumvent this foolishness Arthur adopts the role of Scheherazade and, in apocalyptieal sessions, recounts to his son his own 1,001 nights of Marxist madness. The East Bronx 'chapter' over a candy store, the faked stories of revolu- tionary sharecroppers for New Masses, the swimming-pool clans of Hollywood undercover red screen-writers . . . the whole sorry saga of gullibility and stoogery. But Arthur came through. He may seem to have ratted by selling glossy rubbish to Broadway and handing 200
names over to the House Committee. But, as Arthur carefully explains, he squealed on his ex-comrades because he decided 'to play the game as dirty as the Communists.'
Apart from the gluepot consistency of the prose, there are two serious central flaws. One is the false parallel between the old party-lining and the new youthful militancy. And Arthur's righteous solution, 'What 1 owed to myself was more than anything I owed to anyone else,' seems neither morally acceptable nor pragmatic- ally workable. The other flaw is the identikit characterisation, most twaddling in Arthur. Is wily Mr. Karp subtly letting Arthur sandbag himself to destruction with his own bromides? No, it is unavoidably evident that he projects him as an IBM repository of mature wisdom. When all around are shouting and sobbing, Arthur the thinker always 'softly' intervenes with ,a recital of platitudes representing calm realism. My theory is that Abram was planning to re- nounce citizenship to escape being bored into dust by awful Arthur.
By contrast with Mr. Karp's enamoured identification, Stephen Birmingham stands quiz- zically aloof from his Vixens of Harrow. This plantocrat dynasty is Caribbean sugar instead of the customary Dixie cotton. The toxic despotism of Citizen Sugar Cane father is visited upon generations of heiresses. They are all, poor little rich people, doomed to be spiritually murdered by their money. Edith, product of the hideous union between megalomaniac pa and wino mama, is deserted and cancered. Her daughter Diana is a hardboiled, poodle-hooked socialite. Grand-daughter Leona, thrice divorced at twenty-seven, takes off with a carpet-bagger. With elliptical coolness, Mr. Birmingham adroitly manceuvres all this around the yawning plug-hole of melodrama. One doesn't now whether to be impressed or irritated by his skill at giving credence to this load of old booshwah.
The reverse is true of Quondam. The circum- stances, so frowzily contemporary, should be in- stantly acceptable, yet the author has shuddered away from something so explicit. The characters' lives intercoil around Quondam, a doomed Pal- ladian mansion. Philip, an intellectual of mulish integrity, has seen all idols crumble under his laser-beam scrutiny. Only Ludo, a probable charlatan, survives. At an accurately dreadful literary festival it seems that Ludo will hijack the prize with Philip's purloined manuscript. Too clumsy a fraud. By handing Philip the prize, Ludo's generosity is exalted; by its acceptance, Philip's scruples are defiled. The style is burn- ished and complex, yet often like splintered glass: sharp, glittering fragments with coherence lost. The donnish amusement in everyday trivia is warranted but inexact. A tune doesn't get on Radio Luxembourg from being overheard tinkled at a piano. People don't say, 'Are you with it?' People get stoned, but not 'stone drunk.' Quibbles, but such misunderstandings block belief in the gifted Mr. Pryce-Jones's parable.
John Nichols's first novel displays an ener- gentic talent hag-ridden by Salinger, The Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding and Tom Wolfe, Pookie Adams is the Pop Art Kid ver- sion of Sally Bowles, Holly Golightly and Sally Jay Gorse, that machine-tooled line of dizzy irresistible dolls. Pookie, however, is singularly resistible, from her bus-stop greeting to Jerry: 'Judging from the intense expression on your
.incredibly boyish face, you are thinking of either punching a gorgeous naked broad in her big white belly or else catching a flock of tame canaries in a huge net' (and on, 'devastatingly,' on-) right up to where he consummates their unappetising union by baring her acned skinni- ness. The college teensters tear about in Screaming Bitch, their jalopy, stoned out of their minds and having crazy sex-rumbles, until kookie Pookie munches some sleeping pills—so ending a tough-tender idyll presumably meant to install Pookie as the symbol girl of the Pepsi Generation, but whom I found more Screaming Bitch than the 'frisky puppy' of the cover.
Amy pants less, and also de-pants less, in the fourth American import by Joe Morgan, an amiable alternative to an ITV playlet. It con- cerns a Minnesota housewife who produces the year's best-seller, and her defeat of the ballyhoo sausage-machine and of the publicist who doesn't get her into the headlines but does get her into bed. Mr. Holies has a rich gift for Pinterish dialogue and spiralling absurdity, but the farce here is too extravagant to be sustained.
Finally, experimentation. The Itinerant Lodger is layered in isinglass. Behind the opacity gropes Wilson, who also flits through seven other identities but never actually that of Everyman. He is, not surprisingly, searching for mankind's universal panacea. At the end, as Smith in the Black Country, he has not yet bagged it. Nor, • although it is an interesting try, has Mr. Nobbs.
The (Diblos) Notebook is a novel within a novel, an imagination flickeringly at work in the bright marine light of Greece, deletions left in, sen- tences unfinished and an upside-down section. '
KENNETH ALLSOP
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