NEW NOVELS
Readers first
HENRY TUBE
Chewsday Dan Greenburg (Seeker and Warburg 25s) •
Joseph Winter's Patronage Barry 1 Cole (Methuen 25s)
Ifs Time My Friend les Time Vasiliy Aksyo- nov translated by Olive Stevens (Macmillan 35s) Fiesta in November Eduardo MaIlea trans- lated by Alis De Sola (Calder and Boyars 25s) All Green Shall Perish Eduardo MaIlea trans- lated by John B. Hughes (Calder and Boyars paperback I2s 6d)
Tristram Shandy, as everyone knows, is pre- faced by a quotation in Greek to the effect that people are stimulated not by things that hap- pen but by the way they interpret the things that happen. Now, the type of novel which has exercised such a long domination over our literature—I mean the 'fourth-wall,' natural- istic,"socigl-realistic' novel, cousin-german to the so-called 'well-made' or proscenium-stage play—has retained its dominant position and has even come to be thought of as the 'legiti- mate' type of novel, by means of its very crafty application of that Greek maxim. The technique has been to reproduce as minutely as possible the surface appearance of life, to present the things that happen just as if they had happened or were at this moment happen- ing, but at the same time to embed within them, by careful selection and arrangement, the way these things are to be interpreted. Thus, to the unsuspecting reader, life itself seems to be offer- ing its own interpretation, while the writer, having subtly led his horse to water, stands there disingenuously averring that only Nature makes him drink.
It is not so much the dishonesty inherent in this proceeding as the tedium, both for writer and reader, of keeping up the pretence once its novelty has passed that has led so many modern writers to return to the practices of their forefathers, Laurence Sterne among them,
and openly admit that the things that happen are only things that happen and that the inter- pretations are only interpretations. Dan Green- burg's Shandian 'sex novel' Chewsday makes this admission with the most disarming con- cision, self-confidence and wit. His characters are as nothing to him compared with his readers, for whom he shows the most tender solicitude, labelling for their benefit the sexy parts 'SEXY PART'; putting the exact reading time of each chapter at its head, so as to give the quick reader a sense of superiority and encourage the slow; offering three different endings according to taste ('Moral, Amoral, or Pot Luck'); proposing to rewrite 'for a nominal fee to cover postage and handling' any sections of the text which may have bored or offended the individual reader; above all, never trying to conceal the truth: 'Stanley, who may turn out to be the least interesting character in the whole history of fiction.' I only hope that his readers _ will not ask Mr Greenburg to rewrite anything, but will let him devote his energies to many more books.
Barry Cole showed himself in his first novel, A Run Across the Island, published last year, to be a kindred spirit to Mr Greenburg. Though not yet in the same class technically, he evi- dently found life rather odd and the attempt to translate it into fiction even odder. His second novel, Joseph Winter's Patronage, about an old man in a private 'home,' is a smoother read than the first, but disappointing in its rever- sion to a more conventional manner. He leans heavily on pluperfect narration (`She had always told him that her first marriage had given her her fill in more ways than one), makes use of symbolic devices (e.g. the hand- kerchief from Othello) without much enhance- ment of his own story, and involves himself without advantage in the dangerous practice of 'flashback.' Mr Cole's forte, I would guess from his first novel and from its occasional pale reminders in this one, is for the raffish, for the loud check character in the loud check phrase. If he has temporarily allowed the things that happen to overawe him, I am confident that in his next novel he will interpret them through something like a large RAF moustache.
For those who regret the waning of the 'fourth-wall' novel, the most fruitful source of new authors .still able to accommodate the taste is Soviet Russia. Whenever and wherever life is publicly considered real and earnest, your poor author must pretend it is too. Vasiliy Aksyonov's It's Time My Friend Its Time would not disappoint the devotees of social-realism. On the face of it, the story of the protracted estrangement of a young married couple and their final coming-together, predictably spiced with -those elements of romance, of sentiment, of nature-poetry and motherland-prose which belong to this genre, there emerges nevertheless a sharp flavour of something else. It is not just that the heroine is a film-star and that mention is madc of such names as Antonioni, but that the style is light, even 'throwaway,' the approach 'cool.' Vasiliy Aksyonov is a more classical author than he pretends to be.
Eduardo Mallea's Fiesta in November was first published in Argentina in 1938 and is now published in English for the first time. If we read this beside his All Green Shall Perish (1941), which was published in English two years ago and is now issued in paperback form, we can at last gain some idea of this much
bruited, though hitherto inaccessible, com- patriot and near contemporary of the mighty Borges. They make, as it turns out, a remark- ably convincing pair to guard the portals of the new Latin-American literature. If, when set be- side Borges's strange timelessness, the purity of fiction which has been filtered to the last drop through the imagination, Sr Mallea's novels seem now a little dated—these are unquestion- ably pre-war novels—that is the price he pays for representing the other strain in Latin- American writing, a fierce sense of topicality, of being in a special time and place. Fiesta in November, with its glittering 'thirties party set in a Buenos Aires mansion and ligittly shadowed by the squalor of life outside the mansion's walls, is the companion piece to All Green Shall Perish, a grim story of middle- class decay in a savage natural environment which is only highlighted by a brief interlude of urban prosperity. I hope we shall be given access to a lot more of Sr Mallea's work.
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