Auberon Waugh on new novels
Florence always has a most disastrous effect c'h the English. Intelligent and witty people suddenly become quite silly and affected, roll- ing the names of unimportant painters round their tongues with an exaggerated Italian ac- cent and boasting of greater knowledge than `lhYone else. Englishmen who happily en- courage the destruction of anything beautiful or old in their own country suddenly blossom into aesthetes and art historians when they get to Florence. -Lhgland may have been reduced to an ;thomination of desolation by generations of incompetent money-grabbing and social pro- gress but English visitors to Florence will 41WaYs be heard complaining about the motor scooters in light homosexual voices. It seems that Dr Stewart has been spend- 1,hg considerable time there, away from the hieous, modern quad behind Peckwater Which he and his fellow students at Christ Church have constructed as their monument. hat would he say, I wonder, if some fren- zied Italian progressive were to start build- ing bed-sitters in the Piazza della Signoria? , ,H18 hero, a dim public school headmaster '3\ no has mysteriously become a Cambridge Oh, meets a former pupil in the departure lounge of Heathrow Airport. Is it funny to describe this spot as 'the antechamber of Aeolus'? Perhaps it is, if the writer can keep hP. The trouble with pedantic humour is "Pt the humorist must never let his guard 3"P• Thus Dr Stewart sprinkles his pages with all°10getic quotation marks whenever he hels he might be indulging in slang—'She for refrained from soliciting my gratitude L°r having "stood out against" Eton—that school to which so astonishing a number of ,,others explain to one that their husband's People" have always gone.' Mothers never ask one to do anything, they always enjoin. When a character exclaims `Thanks a lot' this is described as a `barbarous expression'.
But he cannot keep it up: 'upon this linguistic retreat on Luigi's part I ought to have stopped off. But I chose to take up what he had said.' Again : 'He had me in his head as at least predictable. And he didn't have his father in his head that way.'
Such unfortunate Americanisms might have been corrected in revision. It is when his pedantic humour is given full rein that the English really becomes atrocious. Never mind that he commits the schoolboy howler of using 'disinterest' wrongly. To be disin- terested is not the same thing as to be unin- terested, hooligan. That sort of thing would not matter much if one did not feel that he was trying so hard to get it right.
`That it is important for a boy to have a father is a proposition that nobody who has. had to do with boys is likely to deny—nor, for that matter, will the most Freudian psychologist be prompted to con- trovert it.' Or again:
`There were further possibilities, but I couldn't glimpse them as belonging other than in the same general category of phenomena—which made the galley not in the least an agreeable one for Avery to be stepping on board.'
What makes this galley of Dr Stewart's not in the least an agreeable one for me to be stepping on board as reviewer is that he was Senior Censor during my tragically brief stay at Christ Church. He always struck me as a genial and studious sort of don. Then one reflects that impressionable proletarian youths are being given into his care to learn English who have no means of knowing that this is not the way to write and one must pro- ceed with this distasteful task. Dr Stewart's style of writing is not only affected, it is also illiterate.
One could forgive the style of an Edward- ian Mercurius Oxoniensis, and even the
occasional illiteracies, if Dr Stewart had anything of interest to say. Unfortunately the author (his Doctorate of Letters at New Brunswick is an honorary one) is nothing if not a stylist. The headmaster, called Bannerman, discovers that his ex-pupil, Avery Brenton, has been sent by his mother to persuade his divorced father into a reconciliation. The father is living with a pretty boy called Luigi in Fiesole. Is Luigi his catamite? This question is adum- brated on the dustcover but it is not until page 147 that it is even asked, when it is supposed to come as a surprise. Thereafter, the story gathers speed with three surprise twists, only two of which 1 guessed in ad- vance. But it simply won't do to take 103 pages, as Dr Stewart does, to tell us that Luigi is Brenton's research assistant, when this information is available on the dust- cover. Plainly, he enjoys his own longwinded and ponderous manner, thinking it an excel- lent joke. This is how the ex-headmaster, sees himself : 'I do, I know, render a certain "period" effect; a youth would even appear a shade dull to me to whom the circum- stance wasn't available as a prompting to mild amusement.'
Perhaps I am over-sensitive, but I find myself wincing even to copy out such affected and clumsy rubbish. This is not a time for personal loyalties. Lucius Junius Brutus must be my model. Dr Stewart's characters and situations are as thin as his way of describing them is distressing. He has written a thoroughly bogus, thoroughly bad book and he should be ashamed.
An altogether better book out this week is Hubert Monteilhet's latest sado-erotic thriller. I would say that it is his best yet, ex- cept I see I have missed one, called The Cupiderie. Anybody who has not made the acquaintance of this author should try now. He used to publish with Chapman and Hall, and after the shameful murder of that firm moved to Hodder, whose list has improved by leaps and bounds in the last five years.
Caroline, a secretary, works after hours in a brothel to pay for her illegitimate son's education in a Swiss convent. Meanwhile, she dedicates herself to the impoverishment and humiliation of two men who fall in love with her, one of them her enormously rich employer. The story has little to do with Racine's Andromaque, and nothing at all to do with the Iliad's Andromache, but it is told with such a perverse relish—verging at times on tile diabolical—that one can forgive the author this tiny self-indulgence.
M Monteilhet captures exactly the Parisian attitude both to sex and to religion. At one stage, Caroline settles down to a long theological discussion with her fiancd; first they discuss transubstantiation and the doc- trine of the Real Presence—neither would even dream of going to church—and then move to the vexed problem of con- traception : It was now or never to talk about con- traception. Christian was hesitant on this point, since those techniques were prohibited "until further notice". I led Christian back to solid ground . . . First of all, we put our heads together to find the positive qualities of an ideal method of cheating.
`Don't you see, Christian? Affectionate, periodic conjugal sodomy would comply per- fectly with those commonsense criteria.'
Not everybody's taste, perhaps, but I en- joyed it more than any book for six weeks, and would certainly send it up for the Whit- bread Prize if the panel of judges looked less like a sub-committee of the Hammersmith Labour Club.
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