Of Mugs and Men
7visit they wouldn't do this. My copy of Rape of Fair Country contained a small shrieking eaflet enshrining the enthusiasms of Jack Jones, Wyn Thomas, Emlyn Williams and Aneurin van. Why not Haydn Tanner, Gollancz bach? r Bleddyn Williams? Not unpredictably, the fair ountry of the title turned out to be Wales, Wales n the early nineteenth century, and her violators he wicked iron-masters. The book sets out to hronicle a dozen years in the life of the Morty- ers, a family of furnace-workers, and to show, hrough them, the early struggles of the Working len's Union and the militant Chartists. Certain et-pieces—the march of. the Chartists against the edcoats, the mating of Dai Two, the family pig -are done with vigour, and the whole small saga s carried along with commendable conviction. tit What a black and white world it is! The ortymers are giants in battle and bed, their omenfolk quick-tongued and beautiful, their nemies ogres, Everything happens to them: ghts, whippings burnings, bastards, death and ape: everything happens,, and nothing. We are ack in Cronin country. What may give the book iial of ferocious readability is the bawdy, sub- , lareggub manner Mr. Cordell has improvised for ".'' circulating-library matter. This is representa- • ,e; It was a criss-cross baying moonbeam of a night, with the wind wolf-howling around the crooked shadows of the Squatting houses, a night of witches and besoms and brooms and curses, When Gwennie Lewis bared herself to Billy Handy on the pee-soaked bed of the ruined iron- works, for money, in strike-time, to keep her childr'en fed, From 1830 to 1997: in his latest book, Sir ompton Mackenzie is as determinedly up-to-date 8 ever—we are rocketed fo the other side of the oon. An Englishman aod a Chinese scientist, for easons which need concern no one here, discover, small colony of Tweedledum-like creatures, ulgs and wugs, blue-skinned and given to a sort f Basic English. They have comic names like Tod %I'd PHI) and Dad and Sex, followed by numbers; "eY get up at A-time, go to First Eat (an unvary- ng diet of bixitit and vitalots) at B-time, watch nlpers (specially bred games players) at F-time, ncf so on : the invention is all on that level, the ,un slow and spurious. I can only think, having iogged through this turgid fantasy—recom- lended by the Book Society, blurbcd as `devastat- nglY irnaginative'—rigbt down to its whimper of ,° end, that the author himself lost interest after ne first few pages. It re-echoes with apologies Or failing to give the 'technological' details, starts are after, mechanical hare we are never to see gain, and succumbs once or twice to confusions its self-imposed terminology. So does the blurb- riter, by the way—the narrator's name, if you're ill awake, is Richard, not John. Autumn for Heroes is quietly fraudulent, a r°uP of character-sketches posing as a novel. Our people—a wet young soldier, a wetter girl at xford, a suburban housewife, and a dispirited °ung schoolmaster--are tracked through separate ;
1aPters towards a moment of crisis: they are
1 en lumped together in a mental home for fifty pages, emerging only to resume their distinct destinies. Not even in the asylum is there any significant interaction, beyond a fugitive idyll between the wet boy and girl, and you feel that Mr. Ferguson is generally as confused about the motivations of his characters as they are them- selves. And yet I look forward a little to his next book, because he has two gifts, authoritatively exploited: a very true ear for the vagaries of dialogue, and a keen eye for the absurd—a re- freshingly different thing from the desire to write humorously about everything. Mr. Kubly's glossily competent short stories will do nothing to dispel the legend that all American womanhood abroad is easy of amatory access. The varieties of love he annotates—thirty- year-old Miss Calloway falling for a jug-eared faun of fifteen, middle-aged Mrs. Gordon enticing a young, blind Italian masseur, the strange re- lationship of the eleven-year-old bartender and the Wagnerian patronne—are as unsurprising as next week's New Yorker; but at least once in this col- lection ('Halloween Party') he allows the beauty- mask to slip and something like the wrinkles of life shows through, shatteringly. 1 have saved the best of this sorry bag to the end. It is the first of a series of translations of works written in 'the lesser known European languages,' published under the auspices of the Council of Europe. Johannes Jensen, a Danish writer who died in 1950 at the age of seventy- seven, got the Nobel Prize for literature in 1944 and some of his novels have been done into English, but I am afraid this is the first I have heard of him. The Waving Rye is a book of frag- ments, what he himself called 'myths,' in which he tried to iive 'those short glimpses of the essence of things that illuminate man and time.' In fact, they read for the most part like sections of a diary, sometimes anecdotal, sometimes given the rough shape of a short story, more often gently specula- tive celebrations of the seasonal joys of living. He has an evocative, rhythmic style, capable of modulating from minute precisions ('The flies buzz around so hotly, as if they were writing something of the utmost importance in the air and then crossing it out again . . .') into broad ruminations. He has been wonderfully well served by his various translators. This is a small, decent glimpse into the essence of a sensitive and thought-
Previous page
