I am not going to make any more jokes, it's

too dangerous

By BERNARD LEVIN

LAST Christmas, feeling rather irresponsible, I wandered into the room of the Spectator's Literary Editor to see if there was anything I might review. The Literary Editor suggested that I take half a dozen books that would not normally have been reviewed at all, put them together and write round them a parody of all those dreary pieces that fill the Sunday Times and the Observer around Christmas-time in which T. S. Eliot says that the best book of the year, as far as he is concerned, was the sixteenth volume of Gschwandkopf's Geschichte der Norddeutschen W urstfabriken im Mittelalter and Colin Wilson says his favourites were Stuart Holroyd's Shaw's Mysticism as Exemplified in 'You Never Can Tell' and Bash 'em in the teeth, the new (and as yet unpublished) novel by Bill Hopkins, whoever he may be. I thought this was rather a' good idea, and said so.

I now wish I hadn't.

The books I chose, after picking over the junk- pile, included a history of rowing, a Nigerian cookery book, a perfectly dreadful historical novel called The Willing Maid, a volume of more than usually incomprehensible American literary criticism, a book called, with what turned out to be a deep and significant irony, Nuts, and the latest Barbara Cartland. This was called Love, Life and Sex, and appeared to be the result of forty years spent reading trash on all three subjects.

I then proceeded to write my article. I thought it was rather a funny article; so did a lot of other people. But this is not important; whether it was funny or whether it Wasn't, it was clearly meant to be funny. For instance, I said in it, among other things: Miss Williams's book is 'described by her publishers as 'a book for every Nigerian woman: It is a 'commonly made claim; but I think in this instance it is fully justified . . . when Miss Williams says, 'If the vegetables are new fry in hot ,oil at once,' she is surely, though she may not know it, speaking to every woman, not merely those of Nigeria . . . it 'is the theme that runs like Ariadne's thread through Manzoni's great novel E pericoloso sporgersi.

I also said : 'C'est absolument &Venda,' said mous nineteenth-century French cracker a l'interieur de l'autobus.' even now, to disagree. an anony- writer, 'de It is hard, And of the book of literary criticism, entitled The Phoenix and the Spider, I said : Mr. Poggioli's book . . . can be easily summed up. It got into my parcel of books owing to a monumental piece of carelessness on the part of the Spectator's Literary Editor, and as far as I can understand it, which is not very far, it seems to have nothing to do with either phoenixes or spiders.

And, in case this was not enough, I put in an entire paragraph (in brackets) consisting of a long list of thirty-three unconnected words like ratiocination, sensitive, David Daiches, rococo, Marghanita Laski, catharsis, and ended it by saying, 'I am sorry about this plethora of words suitable for book reviews, but I am nearly at the end of my space, and feared that I would not be able to get them all in.'

Yes, but that wasn't all I said, alas and alackaday. I also said of Mr. Cicero T. Ritchie's The Willing Maid:

Mr. Ritchie . . . has indeed gone to the heart of our contemporary malaise; his hero is all of us . . . how rare, how refreshingly rare, to find today so clear, so unambiguous a statement of the human predicament in a work of fiction.

And of Miss Cartland's Love, Life and Sex 1 said the following : And finally Miss Cartland, on Love, Life and Sex (not, as Mr. Philip Toynbee called it in his otherwise admirable review of the book in the Observer—in which he said it was 'one of the seminal• works of the twentieth century'—Love- life and Sex). I understand that Miss Cartland is the mother of Mrs. Gerald Legge, and after reading her book I can only say that I am not in the least surprised. As in Mrs. Legge, so in this book, Miss Cartland has summed up genera- tions of human • experience, years of the slow crystallisation of thought, and belief, innumer- able tiny grains of opinion that together go to make up the climate of our time, the Zeitgeist.

' Right. The first thing that happened was that the Editor of the Spectator got a letter from some character who said indignantly that I was a fat- head and that our proof-readers vi,cre not much better, because Manzoni's novel is not called E Pericoloso Sporgersi. This, explained our corre- spondent with glassy-eyed idiocy, is what you see on Italian railway trains, and means 'It is dangerous to lean out of the window.' Manzoni's novel, he said, was actually' called / Pronte.ssi Sposi.

But this was not all. Oh, my paws and whiskers, it wasn't. The next thing that arrived was a letter from Barbara Cartland. 'Dear Mr. Levin,' she wrote, 'how charming . . . how kind . . . thank you so much . . . [she uses about eighteen under- linings per sentence, just like Queen Victoria] how I wish 1 could write as well as you . . .' and a lot more in the same strain. Well, naturally, I concluded that since nobody in the world could have written that letter seriously, she must be in turn pulling my leg. 'Oho, you smart young man,' I could hear her saying, 'so you think you can take the mickey out of me [or whatever she would say in place of that rather vulgar phrase] do you? I'll show you.' Honours, I thought, are even. But no; because a few days later I got a note from the Literary Editor of the Observer enclosing a card Miss Cartland had written him, drawing his attention to my remark about Philip Toynbee's imaginary review, saying that her press-cuttings agency had not sent it, and please could she know which issue of the Ob.serTer it was in?

Then I went away on holiday. Well, I mean, I felt. I needed one. When I got back' there was a letter from Cicero T. Ritchie on my desk. Mr. Ritchie's notepaper described him as a 'Consult- ing Geologist,' and his letter thanked me ful- somely for my `review' of his book. 'You must have a warm heart,' he said (me!), and- could we meet some day. No, Mr. Ritchie, we couldn't. Not any day. The fact is, Mr. Ritchie, I don't like you. You'll see why in a minute.

And then, a few days ago, the dam broke. I got a long letter from a perfect stranger in Canada, telling me that he had read and enjoyed my 'Books of the Year' spoof, but that it had had some interesting results. For instance, he said, his wife had reviewed Mr. Ritchie's 7'he Willing Maid in a Toronto newspaper, and pasted the slats out of it. She, too, had received a letter from this consulting geologist (he must have a hide like oolite granite, if I may so express my- self), thanking her for her review, and adding, 'Bernard Levin, in the Spectator . . •. under "My Books of the Year," listed seven titles, all of them non-fiction except The Willing Maid. I am en- closing the applicable paragraph . . . in the hope that it might help you to find an excuse for men- tioning the novel again—provided you really liked it.'

Next night my correspondent was watching a television programme called Tabloid. Who should appear but Mr. Cicero T. Ritchie, introduced like this : 'Bernard Levin, in the Spectator of England, picked this book, The Willing Maid, as one of his seven books of the year. He wrote that C. T.

Ritchie "has indeed gone to the heart of our con- temporary malaise; his hero is all of us." ' Then Mr. Ritchie was interviewed, and announced, to my correspondent's alarm (not to mention that of his wife) that he had written six more historical novels, and was now going to have a stab at getting them published, seeing what a success this one had been.

So far, I have heard no reports of my remarks on Mr. Hylton Cleaver's A History of Rowing being placed on the United Nations agenda; I have hopes. But as for the title of this article, I trust it explains itself. After what my last joke did, do you imagine that I feel like making any more?

Anyway, Marghanita Laski thought it was funny. 1 haven't heard from David Daiches yet.