Into the Net
Inside Daisy Clover. By Gavin Lambert. (Hamish Hamilton, 18s.) Boys and Girls Together. By William Saroyan. (Peter Davies, 18s.)
LONDON today, surely one of the most difficult and ungraspable of subjects, takes a central place in two good novels I have read this week. A Slanting Light tells of the arrival of Bernard Zold, an American Jewish playwright, for the production of one of his plays in a theatre very like the Royal Court. He is accompanied by his problem family, composed of ex-garment- worker momma, charming shallow wife and hysterical female child. Ruth Holland, who housekeeps for them in St. John's Wood, presents their predicament through her letters to her estranged husband. This business of the letters works out a little clumsily (Ruth. a person of great honesty, is forced to be eavesdropping at some of the most important scenes), but it does not seriously matter; this novelist has narra- tive powers, together with a seriousness, a sense of justice needing to be done, which are quite remarkable.
Most novels about contemporary life break down into duologues and parties. Miss Charles avoids this, and many of her big scenes are in fact 'scenes' in the popular sense, family rows among the Zolds, which show their whole rela- tionship to each other and to the unfriendly city outside. The power in these scenes reminded me of Christmas dinner chez Dedalus. Perhaps such successes are only possible with Jewish, Irish •or Slav characters: the English retreat, separate, 'sulk and are to this extent less re- warding to the novelist. One of Miss Charles's most important chapters is that in which Bernard, smibbed and neglected by the pro- ducer and performers of his play and their friends, is cornered and hounded by some of them whom he has invited to his own house. By the end of this scene Miss Charles has proved to us that Bernard is not only a good man, but also a 'good writer: a tremendous achievement.
With her English characters she is less success- ful: she hates them too much, gives them im- probable perfunctory names and does not really succeed in catching the way they talk. About their value as human beings, though, she is quite precise; she is aware, too, that much of the nastiness of such people consists in the fact that they think they are so nice. If I was more moved by A Slanting Light than by any novel I have read recently, I think it is because Miss Charles is a really humanistic writer: no quirky meta- physics, no gracious living, no incest, no Alsatian dogs. And the Zold family seem to be the best portraits of Americans we have by an English writer : they are not to be missed.
The Bender is the story of George Lisle- Bruce's attempts to raise £200 owed to his accountant brother, who will, he believes, use it to get a teenage daughter out of trouble. This not very original plot is a trigger-mechanism which starts off a series of pictures of contem- porary London, sharp, varied and convincing. By the time The Bender is over we know a great deal about George's antecedents, his -rela- tives, his career and his failure. Mr. Scott has captured a large variety of people, but they have
come into his net singly, whereas Miss Charles got the Zolds in one magnificent haul. But Mr. Scott's characters are English, and enisled in tbe salt, estranging sea which is London. Georges brothers, the accountant and a Pinteresque tele- vision playwright, are so unlike him and each other that we need Mr. Scott to remind us all the time that they are related. This, too, is Per- fectly true to English life: the decline of the British novel is pretty closely connected with the impossibility of family relationships, and I don't think Mr. Scott to blame for the con. trivance with which he forces his brothers to- gether. His anti-hero reminded me of a Patric' Hamilton character. Hamilton, however, liked t° pursue one man to his final destruction, whereas Mr. Scott chases after amusing minor figures 00 the way. For this reason, I think, The Bender is perhaps less moving than it should be. Inside Daisy Clover Gavin Lambert's second book about Hollywood. He has learned a lot from Isherwood and like him, is very good at describing the edges of things: the world oot- side the film city, the beats' world of venice, California, the Lesbians and beach boys who get left out of Hollywood's occasional portrayals of itself. But whenever Mr. Lambert takes You among the big people, everything seems a bit flatter and more like a film script. Daisy Clover' the narrator of Mr. Lamberts new, book, is some thing like Judy Garland. She grows up ill a trailer near fogbound Muscle Beach with her crazy mother, called the Dealer because she plays endless games of patience in total silence. All this is beautifully done. But Daisy gets dis- covered and joins the world of the studios. We can have no moral expectations about studio executives any more, and so the;r activities always seem unsurprising. I found it difficult to believe, in such surroundings, that nobodY would have told Daisy that she was about t° marry a homosexual. But Mr. Lambert writes the sort of prose I like best and his novel is certainly very entertaining. Farther up the Pacific coast, William Saro!..all agonises in the later stages of a typical Americadg literary career. Boys and Girls Together is ealle a novel, but is obviously an autobiographieu. meditation about 'the man' and 'the worna° Unlike Hemingway, Saroyan comes out f10111 behind the hair on his chest, and his book 'is 3. genuine cry of pain—but only about himself' However, he is so often dismissed as a writecrl today that it comes as a surprise to find that 10,-, of this book, describing the writer's house, 01 and family, is masterly in its economY all authority. In the end outsiders intrude, boring predigested people from Hollywood, and tll° discussion turns to the metaphysics of what Niro' Saroyan calls 'horniness.' This writer seems t have run out of everything except talent. In answer to my strictures about America narcissism here is a novel by a young Ng writer, , William Melvin Kelley, which is 011.1e;,; tive in the extreme; indeed, it is mostly t°1 ironically from the point of view of the Whitc,.,5. A Different Drummer concerns the sudden aba'i donment of a mythical Southern State bY 3, its coloured population. Mr. Kelley is still bit tied up in the trickeries of the Creative WI. ing schools, but he has two magnificent scene-so' one, the folk memory of the escape of an Afrieuo prince from the slave market; the other, wile,. Tucker Caliban, his apparently docile descendao", spreads salt on his lands, burns down his hou;: and takes off for .the North with his famitr, Mr. .Kelley- is already an, assured writer: let hope he goes on writing about other PeclP'` instead of projecting himself. FRANK TUOII
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