Laying it on a bit thick
James Delingpole
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CAD by A. G. Macdonnell, with an introduction by Simon Hoggart Prion, 1'8.99, pp. 253, ISBN 1853754145 In his new introduction to this 1938 novel, Simon Hoggart claims that The Autobiography of a Cad 'is a wonderfully sharp, clever, funny book' which has been 'hugely underrated'. Before you go out and buy it on this recommendation, though, you ought to remember one important thing: Simon is a great big lefty.
I'm not trying to say that great big lefties have no literary judgment whatsoever. If that were the case, there wouldn't be a publishing industry. What I am saying is that where political fiction is concerned the praise of left-liberal types needs to be taken with a Dead-Sea-sized pinch of salt. Just look at what happened with Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up! Notwithstanding its literary merits, Coe's satire on Thatcher's Britain was quite the nastiest, crudest, chippiest, least generous book I have ever suffered the misfortune of reading a few pages of before giving up in disgust. Yet to read most of its reviews, you'd think it was a delightful, comic masterpiece. Why? Because its politics tickled so many bienpensant reviewers' g-spots so expertly that, in their orgasmic excitement at having their vilest prejudices confirmed, they lost all critical faculty.
The Autobiography of a Cad is, in some ways, its Thirties counterpart. It didn't enjoy nearly the same commercial success — as Hoggart explains, its bitter view of the land-owning aristocracy and the Conservative party did not suit the mood of a nation gearing itself for war — but it does perform pretty much the same trick. Namely, it takes a lefty's ideas of all the things that make Tories so satanically evil, multiplies them by ten, and then parades them before an audience of fellow travellers so that they can all nod sagely and say, 'It's funny because it's true.'
But —.unless you think it's typical Tory behaviour to do as the book's titular hero, Edward Fox-Ingleby, does and knock down lovely old buildings on your estate and erect monstrous new ones in fabled beauty spots, or to hope that British merchant seamen get torpedoed so that you can turn a bigger profit on your investments — it's not true. Nor is it all that funny.
It has its moments, certainly. I like the way Fox-Ingleby's grandfather makes his money, cornering the rat market in 1870, just before the siege of Paris; and much comic ingenuity has gone into dreaming up Fox-Ingleby's many cunning justifications for his outrageously awful behaviour, e.g. his indifference to his child: 'men are essentially lovers by nature, not fathers'. Also it makes a valuable period document, charting the changing mores of early 20thcentury England, particularly where sex is concerned. In his youth, the cad is only able to procure casual sex by hanging around stage doors and keeping actresses in Maida Vale flats; come female emancipation and the carpe diem attitudes of the first world war, however, and virtually anything in skirts is suddenly up for it.
What spoils the book for me, though, is its underlying shrillness. Its author, Archie Macdonell, was a liberal MP and, rather than create a lovable rogue a la Flashman, he has simply used his creation as a mouthpiece for all the views he most despises. This book is written on one note, and its bitterness can become wearing. Perhaps his better known and much sunnier England, Their England would be more to my taste.
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