Both sides of the coin
Tony Palmer
Doctor in the Nude Richard Gordon (Heinemann £1.60)
First Love Samuel Beckett (Calder and Boyars £1.50)
Richard Gordon is one of that happy breed of authors who are usually ignored by reviewers but beloved by the public. This is Dr. Gordon's twentieth book, not one of which I recall being praised by the kulturati, not one of , which ever won the James Blacksmith Memorial Prize for deserving literature. Nor is Dr Gordon reckoned good source material for Atticus or other similar cabalistic con: coctions, nor is he the feted guest at literati lunches where art is adjudicated upon. No, he is one of that unfashionable gang, the popularists. Accordingly, his style appears simple, almost naïve. That his books sell well is, of course, a disadvantage. That they are turned, into films, a dilemma. That they contrive to sell well and continue to be turned into films, an unmitigated disaster. He is also a lapsed; academic, if anything an even worse sin. Fon Merly the Senior Resident Anaesthetist at St, Bartholomew's Hospital and member of the research department of the Department of Anaesthetics at Oxford, Dr Gordon — or Or Ostlere as he is really known — abandoned full-time medical practice twenty years ago to seek fame and fortune in the world of letterS. And in financial terms, it has subsequentle treated him very nicely thank you. But critical approval has eluded him — until now. Doctor in the Nude is, of course, pulp. It is not ,a great book. It is not even a very good book. Nor is it a particularly commendable example of its genre. But it is elegantly written, sharply constructed and languorously witty. ' Droll ' is perhaps the appropriate word for it. The tale is predictable, the characters recognisable through long familiarity and because they are, in any case, caricatures. The jokes are thin and their situations weedy. But it is the manner of their telling that puts Dr Gordon into the same milieu as say P. G. Wodehouse. Alas, he has had to survive till over ninety and nearly 100 books to achieve the dubious status of a cult. Suddenly the newspapers are full of those who claim to have always been aficionados. Ten years ago most of these bandwaggoners wouldn't have been seen dead clutching a copy of The Code of the Woosters. We seem to have an instinctive distrust in literature of that which is unashamedly popular.
Clearly, Dr Gordon's book is not a shattering work of literary significance. But then very little is, and most of what pretends to be could do worse than study the ease and simplicity with which Dr Gordon has created his unputdownable yarn.
Samuel Beckett is, of course, the very reverse of the Richard Gordon coin. Sometimes one suspects that if Beckett published the single word ' Balls' in hardback with simultaneous translation into French, price £2.00, cognoscenti the world over would clutch at their rosaries and mumble " masterpiece.
masterpiece." in fact, First Love although written shortly after the second war, i.e. after Watt and before Molloy, was suppressed by Beckett until 1970 when he eventually allowed its publication — in French. Its translation, by Beckett, appears this week. It is a slight work, less oppressive than most, less haunted by oblivion. Were it written by anyone other than Beckett. one might almost rate its tone as optimistic. But, inevitable, it ends in disappointment — "there it is," recounts the author after his first love has collapsed with the usual recriminations and bitternesses, "either you love or you don't." The book sounds to be painfully autobiographical and in which case would be immediately pounced upon not by literary critics and their grubby paws but by pyschoanalysts more qualified than I. For herein, I believe, lie many of the clues not only to Beckett's later work but to the psyche of the man himself. What did happen to him that caused this lucid yet heartrending outburst? The horror when a child (his child?) is born yelping and screaming so persistently that it drives the author out of the house — "as long as I kept walking, I didn't hear them (the cries) because of the footsteps. But as soon as I halted I heard them again, a little fainter each time, admittedly, but what does it matter, faint or loud, cry is cry, all that matters is that it should cease. For years I thought they would cease. Now I don't think so anymore ... " Stylistically, that passage is the precise antecedent of a host of more fami liar material, the same staccato questionings, the same musical repetitions. the same philosophical dead end. Here is a first encounter with a naked woman (Beckett's own first encounter?), chapter and verse about parents, the first kiss, the first touch, the intellect caught • caught unawares by unreasonable and unreasoning passion, the mind dragged unwittingly through a sea of emotions it neither comprehends nor apparently wishes to comprehend. Writing about Proust, Beckett once tentatively suggested the idea that the perceptual mind itself changes so fast that an understanding of yesterday's wants can afford no consolation to the self of today. "The attempt to communicate where no communication is possible," Beckett wrote, " is merely a 'simian vulgarity, or horribly comic, like the madness that holds a conversation with the furniture . . Friendship implies an alinost piteous acceptance of face values. Friendship is a social expedient, like upholstery or the distribution of garbage buckets." Was it.-I wonder, the events ironically described as First Love which led Beckett toward that barren conclusion?
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