A congenial despair

Auberon Waugh

There will be a Short Interval Storm Jameson (Harvill £2.25)

Miss Jameson's new novel illustrates a variation on the idea that when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Her hero is a university lecturer who has been given eight days to decide whether to submit to an operation which will probably kill him or to eschew the operation and face a more certain but slightly delayed fate, accompanied by unavoidable processes of degeneration. Essentially, however, this variation is no

more than a novelist's device which adds an element of dramatic suspense to what is intended, I fancy, as a discussion of 'civilised nihilism ' as an appropriate response to the intelligent man's dilemma in our post-Christian, post-Marxist mass culture.

Miss Jameson saves a lot of time by avoiding any discussion of Christianity or Marxism — although I fear she will confuse many reviewers by this omission — on the tacit understanding that these two systems can now be accepted as irrelevant to any intelligent inquiry, the refuge of geriatrics and intellectual cripples. Instead she examines the various forms of selfishness which parade themselves under the banner of disengagement and asks us to consider which of these are harmful and which might be construed as a rational or ' civilised ' response to the pressure of the time. Her conclusion is muted, if, indeed, she reaches any conclusion at all. After considering all the courses of action open to a man under putative sentence of death, and after emphatic repudiation of anything which smacks of hedonism, her hero writes a letter whose contents we are not told and then tears it up again. Civilised nihilism in action?

The narrative with which Miss Jameson clothes her philosophical inquiry finds our hero a widower, his young mistress away in New York, when the sentence of death is delivered by his friend, a Jewish surgeon called Salaman. The opening pages are frankly rather poor, with a Pseuds Corner introduction about London on the first page which makes one fear one has wandered by mistake into a puddle of Andrew Sinclair:

fourmillante cite and the rest of it and the rest of it, old sick capital, condemned fair-ground of the young, timeless graveyard, womb, museum? Perhaps.

Another reviewer has labelled this the " mosaic of clichés" style, but I prefer the more specific description of "Andrew Sinclair-apocalyptic" after the important young writer who pioneered it in the 'fifties. On the second page we have a tastelessly violent image of " eyeballs from which in the past quarter of an hour a skin had been peeled" and on the third page we are taken on the traditional tour of Nazi extermination camps:

the dry earth underfoot was littered sparsely with naked and half-naked male bodies, the limbs oddly flattened, sinews starting out of the throat, skulls pushing against the brittle discoloured skin, warped blackened ape-like nostrils staring up.

Of course these tours are more or less obligatory in a novel with any pretensions to seriousness nowadays. Are such journeys really necessary? They are the signal, in every case, for the various morons who sit in judgement in the review pages of the Times and Sunday Times to give the work a tick for importance. But in this one case I honestly urge readers to persevere, rather than groan and give up. By taking the debate beyond the boring, discredited clichés of Marxism and antiMarxism into the realm of civilised or sceptical nihilism, which is surely the only sane alternative to civilised or sceptical Christianity, Miss Jameson makes a notable contribution to English letters of our time.

The hero's mother, a famous writer, has abandoned the hero as a child, opting out of all responsibility in obedience to the dictates of genius. This form of selfishness receives very short shrift from Miss Jameson, and Dame Retta Jebb is portrayed as a totally unpleasant person, quite unscrupulous in her search for material to write about. The hero — Sergeant Jebb—allows his own son to be looked after by this fiend when his wife, a hypochondriac, opts out of her responsibilities and chooses a lonely, valetudinarian existence in the South of France. The son, Simon Jebb, rebuffs an older woman who is infatuated with him and feels no remorse when she commits suicide. This, too, is a form of opting out. The narrative, which is fairly unimportant to the debate, then describes how Dame Retta steals the girl's letters, intending to use them in a novel. When someone tries to steal them back, Dame Retta dies of a heart attack. We assume that the thief is Simon acting out of malice towards his grandmother as well as a certain feeling of reticence, and learn with only slight surprise at the very end that it was the moribund Sergeant, acting partly out of hatred for his mother but also, we suppose, from a belated sense of parental responsibility.

Miss Jameson in careful not to caricature the attitudes she portrays. The main question, of how the civilised man should comport himself in the new, illiterate mass culture, must be discussed in civilised terms. For this reason, perhaps, she makes little attempt to include the drug solution, which is more or less dismissed out of hand. Even Simon, the amiable, middle-of-the-road spokesman for the decontracte generation, dismisses LSD users as "poor innocent brutes. A mug's game." However, Miss Jameson advances no reason why, if individual peace of mind is to be considered the only sensible goal of our brutish society, drugs are necessarily wrong. She seems frightened even to consider the deeper, deliberate nihilism of the drug culture, and offers no answer to the question why clarity of perception or accuracy of inductive reasoning should be considered important or even desirable in the sort of world her characters envisage — except, of course, in the context of writing a readable novel for those still able to read.

But there is an entirely congenial despair in her attitude which prevents the novel from becoming a bore even when she descends to the mosaic-of-cliché or Andrew-Sinclair-apocalyptic style to sat irise the rhetoric of modern youth (culled more from the Socialist Worker, I

imagine, than from overheard conversation):

Well, how do you describe a society that pollutes even the sea, lets half its children live in stinking slums, and diverts untold sums to inventing methods of over-killing itself . . .? It's only a question of time until our electronically-minded herd-leaders break their collective neck . . we're living in an asylum run by insane doctors. What can one do but attempt to get out? You can't argue with psychosis, it's incurable.

For all that, it is a most stimulating book. There is a refreshing awareness throughout that only fools or knaves would set themselves up to improve anything, that true idealism no longer concerns itself with uselss and unpleasant schemes for giving the workers more spending money than they already have. Miss Jameson has a warm and sympathetic understanding for the miserable existence of people who never drink claret, without making any suggestion that it would be a useful thing to encourage them to try. All in all, a most enjoyable book.