The party that exploded
Sophia Watson
AN ALMOST PERFECT GENT by Horace K. Kelland Wyrick & Co., $24.95, pp. 306 Well, this is a funny one: a traditional rite-of-passage sort of a novel, the kind you see clever young men writing in their early twenties, all about love and art and redemption, pain and humiliation and suc- cess. It is a first novel, of course, but the novelty is that the author is nearer to 80 than 20.
This gives the book a setting which is more amusing than the beaches of the far east which have become the new stages for young men who wish to think about them- selves. Kelland's story is set between the first and second wars, in a New York very reminiscent of Edith Wharton's. Rich women's dresses rustle expensively, men smoke cigars and talk about fine art. Europe is a state of mind as much as a place. No one really seems to have much in the way of a job, and the women who are not dangerous seductresses are either artists or lesbian explorers.
The hero, Tim, is a young boy 'to whom beauty was almost a religion' when the book opens. His face, 'still callow with youth, was made charming by his look of innocence' (there is a lot of that sort of talk). He loves his mother, who is pale and beautiful and plays the piano excellently. The novel opens with the opulent Christ- mas party being given by Tim's family. Into this charmed scene bursts wicked Aunt Hilaria, wild and sexy (not that Kelland would use such a word) and almost evil. She wreaks her damage and that evening, after the party is over, Tim's father kills his mother and then himself in a jealous rage. This is not at all what the reader was expecting.
This is the charm of the book. Side by side with fairly self-indulgent writing is a totally whacky story-line. We have ridicu- lous figures with names that even Trollope or Dickens at their silliest would not have dared try — the opera singer Wissie Bird- whistle (actually a rather likeable charac- ter), the predatory homosexual Gaetano Acrimonia, Bigonia Sweetfoot and Mimi Pepperoni — and we also have Aunt Hilar- ia, a wonderful creation of mixed-up wickedness and vulnerability who really does come off the page into our imagina- tions. Kelland is good on the pointlessness of being very rich, the boredom of it all, and there are moments of real perception, such as the description of a flirt made ridiculous with age:
She flirted with the trees. She flirted with the flowers. She flirted with babies, with the postman, with her husband's friends. Flirting was her profession.
A certain amount of the novel is unashamedly ridiculous, but this makes us warm to it — and Kelland — all the more. Tim goes off his first lover (a handsome gardener's boy) because he prefers roast pork and swedes to lobster. Yet his patient waiting for his real love, Leah, is touching without being sentimental.
By the time we leave Tim he is grown up, married, a successful art dealer. And the truth of it is that despite the faults of this novel, we are sad to leave Tim and his mot- ley crew of friends and relations behind. This is pure escapism, funny, unfashionable and dotty and well worth the read.
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