Fiction
Real lives
Peter Ackroyd
Married Lives Harry Kressing (Faber £2.95) The Living Daylights Jill Neville (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £2.50) A novel which almost opens on the line With pimentos there's no need to take up refrigerator space" and climbs dizzily with "You know Mrs — I forget her name but she has the heavy black hair with splitting ends — well she ..." invokes a mimetic grandeur which would seduce even the most bilious misanthrope. And to record a conversation which begins, "I didn't say I was determined to go" and ends "I didn't say I was determined to go" takes a heart and stomach of iron. Connie and Edward Johnson, an American couple of the Colonel Sanders school of urban deterministn, want and don't want to go to Roz's party. Mr Kressing's novel, the first of two in the book, is a record of their elliptical, wavering and extremely long conversation. These stones can speak. After all the fuss about wild-life and the environment, it is good to see poor neglected human life coming into its own with remarks on Roquefort, as opposed to blue cheese, the contents of a ginmartini, how to store cutlery, what will Roz's new flame be like and how dreadful her parties are, anyway. The conventional imagination pales beside this suburban demotic, con
sisting as it does of those loved and tidy phrases which bubble to the surface of the folk-mind and make the world a safe and comfortable place in which to have a good time.
Connie is an American made in heaven, and her remarks are clearly from something greater than herself: "What kind of woman do you think I am?" and "I'm sorry I ever heard of Roz's party" are two of the smaller pearls. Connie is also a part-time social worker (an American invention not dissimilar, I'm told, to a locust) in the Lucille Ball tradition of making a great deal of something out of nothing. Edward, an average citizen and something in probate, has that sly but repressed wit which is common to those who expect little from life. Between them, they reveal the opera bouffe which is the stuff of everyday reality. The telephone rings, they must consider who it is and if it is who they think it is what should be said and, of course, the telephone stops ringing. Split-second timing is a necessity of modern life.
Married Lives admirably demonstrates what I have long suspected, that if you take social realism (especially of the Edward Hopper variety) to its natural conclusion it will, in faithful Hegelian fashion, turn into something very much like its opposite. And, in this particular case, almost into verse-drama:
"Where's the knife" "Surely you know where the knives are"
"Don't tell me you still keep that knife with the
others" "Yes. It doesn't fit in that drawer".
This kind of thing is, of course, too fine to be violated by an idea and it seemed just a little out of character when Connie began to probe her nether regions: "It makes me wonder how many things I do unconsciously without knowing about it," which reminds me of the schoolboy's unanswerable point that if the unconscious were that unconscious, how come we've heard of it? I am romantic enough, however, to trust in appearances and this novel pierces the facade of the glassy smile and the banal word to reveal precisely, absolutely nothing.
My own banality is, of course, always in evidence in these pages. I was immediately attracted, for example, to the title of Miss Neville's latest novel: "living daylights" being a phrase, like "blue murder," so pointless and inconsequential that it must have a deepseated and universal origin. And the narrative is one of the few nowadays actually to live up to its title, being both cheerful and vulgar. Emerald Dahlberg, known as Em or "darlingest," is a happy medium of the pay-now-livelater school. Serge Dubois, a small and dreadful foreign singer, conceives a passion for her, as foreigners will.
But this is, thankfully, only the beginning and we are soon confronted with a positive embarrassment of heroines. There is Em's chum, Sonia, a minor luminary in what is laughingly known as the art world; there is a Nurse Alice Spooner, of soap-opera fame; there is Charisse, a young girl honoured in the breach. Miss Neville is adept at dirty thumbnail sketches of these small characters; like Theophrastus, she can save herself the trouble of constructing a plot.
Hers is an unselect but small cast, celebrating what pessimists used to call the rich diversity of life. Miss Neville has an eye for tat and flash, and an ear for a cheerfully vulgar style which smacks at points of the higher journalism. Her prose is of the world, with winks, nods, giggles and glissades into casual seriousness. There are some happy moments: Em reminds Sonia "of the tin man in the Wizard of Oz who cried so much he rusted himself so that he couldn't move but was stuck, rigid, in one place." Follow me, dearie, and I'll show you a good metaphor.
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