Innocent Abroad
MR. NORRIS AND I . . . By Gerald Hamilton. (Allen Wingate, 15s.) THE prison at Nice is quite the most horrible I have ever been in.' It is impossible not to be fond of Gerald Hamilton. It is always a pleasure to share a bottle of claret with him; to sympathise with him about the price of a pair of shoes—he has never, I am sure, bought anything ready-made; to hear him blow- ing up a newsagent for delivering the New Statesman and the Observer instead of the Spectator and the Sunday Times; to watch him meticulously affixing the right number of stamps to envelopes directed to Abercorn, Alba et al. Was it ever thus? Were there not blazing indiscretions in an otherwise murky past? Is he or isn't he Mr. Norris? Mr. Isherwood is rather equivocal in his introduction to these memories, but one gathers that Mr. Norris is but a faint fictional adumbration of the grand original. It is therefore disappointing to find that Mr. Hamilton is discreet beyond all reasonable limits. It is a tantalising book. One is introduced again and again to famous and infamous figures of the past, but they are as uncommunicative as their glazed and dusty images at Madame Tussaud's. To be sure, there is a danger- ously epicene Chinese servant, but he remains a mere Mongolian question-mark, and the wicked and the witty maintain their enigmatic silence.
This finally makes one a little impatient, A green, but a nebulous carnation, with a faintly unpleasant smell of compost-- or is it of ink? The tongue in Mr. Hamilton's case is mightier than the pen, even when, as Mr. Richardson points out in an epilogue in which friendship wrestles with exasperation, it remains within that permanently boyish cheek. What did Roger Casement really say, what did Frank Harris disclose in those last brave years when, wearing an Old Etonian tie, he would discourse of his schooldays at Rugby? Mr. Hamilton, himself a Rugbeian, never reached the Sixth Form. He has never perhaps quite reached Sixth Form. One envisages him as carrying a succession of notes front his fagmaster to his less reputable friends in other houses. The fag' master changes—at one time becomes the King of Egypt—but the go-between remains in a state of almost idiot innocence. yet is he so innocent? He would hate us to think so, but his lips are sealed. By what—discretion? Yet he has been fantastically indis- creet, it would appear, in the conduct of his worldly affairs. No: it is something grander than discretion. Butlers are, or used to be, discreet. This little book is a monument to good taste. Mr. Hamilton is a naughtier Augustus Hare—the last Victorian, travelling ceaselessly, often in great discomfort, in search of an ideal world where great ladies 'do not move,' where the pheasants thud splendidly down before the noble guns, and The Times is decently warmed. A world, too, of mysterious coulisses; but gentle- men, however beardsley they may behave, never tell. Is it quite fair for them to hint so darkly? One longs for a dash more hock in the seltzer.
JOHN DAVENPORT
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