Cities of Words
The Talent Scout. By Romain Gary. (Michael Joseph, 16s.) 11 was almost a great week for the Novel. Not just for novels, the honest, small segments of private experience which arc always with us, but for the Novel itself, the grand old, panoramic monster, wading through time with its cargo of politics, money and sub-plots, a list of characters glued to its flyleaf. As it lumbers toward oblivion like the last buffalo, the shots at it grow rarer and more painful (the Alexandria Quartet and Strangers and Brothers stick bloodily from its shoulder); but this week brought two more, by writers not merely dazzled with dreams of build- irig a city of words, but finely equipped in intelli- gence, invention and experience.
One is by the most exasperatingly gifted writer in England, Edward Hyams. Mr. Hyams is be- wilderingly sophisticated in commerce, tech- nology, agriculture and several languages. He writes with the lucid, populous reality of a wittier, colder H. G. Wells. Yet his conclusions always strike me as unreal: arbitrary, muddled, wrong- headed and naïve. He clings to all the Kelmscott clichés, that apples are better than engines, vil- lages truer than towns, that tinned food is taste- less and TV makes square brains. But the hum of these bees-in-the-bonnet is muted for most of the length of All We Possess. You can sit back and enjoy the rich, devious story how Edward Tillotson rose from counting gift-coupons in Mendoza's cigarette factory in NW17 to direct- ing an electronics empire built on the simple wire device with which, in idyllic pre-war Kentish holidays, he improved the reception of his aunt's radio set. Mr. Hyams is a master of the professional detail which makes the feeblest Arnold Bennett or Warwick Decping so satis- fying. Best of all, he knows how London works, peopling those anonymous outer miles of Vic- torian streets and bedraggled little parks with accountants who spend their evenings working on the mathematics of harmony, literary widows who collect the recipes in Proust, Linotypists who live for Workers' Educational Tourism. He evokes the city's savage, ruined grandeur under the raids, the humanity spilled from its cracked and huddled warrens. It's so large and warm an image you can't believe he'll fall into the arrogant post-war generality of supposing this reality diminished by higher incomes and cathode-ray tubes. But he does. Edward and his wife. so long as
they live in the Sussex stockbroker-belt on un- earned revenues from his gadget, aren't allowed to love each other or bear children. An implaus- ible double catastrophe must enable them to Purge their guilty luxury in prison and a subur-
ban television shop. The moment he turned his back on that frugal Kentish Eden, you see, Ted Was damned. I found the poor man's tainted ‘ealth less disproportionate than the punishment fv
orced on him by his jealous creator, but the sour puritanism of the ending can't cancel all the book's humour, generosity and scale. lt's very nearly a Novel.
..S0 is Anthony West's 7'he Trend Is Up. On Ins nineteenth birthday, Gavin Hatfield realises that his august Boston family has contracted out of America's roaring, vulgar adventure, and announces to his father that he means to make a million dollars before thirty. 'I should have sent, you to Yale,' sighs the old gentleman, and shows no further interest in the leaps and bounds by which his son becomes the richest citizen of Maramee, a booming, graceless Gulf port which unites Galveston's raw thrust and New Orleans's carnival on a site not far from Tallahassee's. Mr. West has made a similar leap to join the gold- rush to the palmy sales-territory hitherto queened over by Edna Ferber; but with the difference that he's followed by the eyes of numberless col- leagues marked by his critical knife in the New Yorker. He plays off his two audiences fairly neatly. His tale is as lavish as Miss Ferber's plumiest with pioneer virtues, giant property deals, millionaire's Gothic, miscegenation, drunken wives and sulky children in their own Cadillacs; but the new South's like that, and they're held in perspective by a socio-historical eye as cold as O'Hara's. I hoped Mr. West would stand by Gavin's splendid opening challenge, but his intention has .a darker core. Instead of knitting together, the novel deliberately disinte- grates: the wife strays off the page across Asia in bisexual hysteria, the children go their own indifferent ways, the Gothic folly stands empty once more. Not that Gavin's success is con- demned, it's just irrelevant, like most things men use to prop apart their birth and death. The Novel has come to this bleak truth before, but its characters have been more than their hollow triumphs. Gavin isn't, and sags away into his clothes. Mr. West's city is a cardboard replica like those run up in the Nevada desert for demolition, but until its collapse it is solid and complex enough for lesser architects to envy.
Robert Muller runs into similar difficulty in The Shores of Night. It's difficult to populate convincingly a novel about the hollowness of modern man; if the best lack passionate convic- tion, how do you show they're the best? Every- one says Alex Denham has been the lion of Fleet Street, but twelve years of crumbling marriage to a neurotic German refugee, Tamara, have levelled him with the guilty, insomniac status-clingers who once fawned round him in pubs. For a time, Mr. Muller seems about to trace the source of disease to the great general scar Germany has left on Europe, and large historical purposes appear to stir. But a trip back to Belsen's razed site shows Alex and Tamara that the fault is in themselves, and the novel shrinks again to an intelligent, slightly infatuated study in Fleet Street angst.
So in the end it was just a fairly good week for
the short story: that's what The Talent Scout really is. There isn't enough in Romain Gary's idea of a• superstitious Latin American dictator who, finding the Devil patently stronger on earth than God, seeks his acquaintance and favour, to make more than the kind of thin fable we used to associate with Thornton Wilder. His sketchy fictitious Central American republic seems even more brazenly fictitious than usual.
RONALD nay DEN
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