NEW NOVELS
Controlled chaos
NEVILLE BRAYBROOKE
Cotters' England Christina Stead (Seeker and Warburg 35s) Nora Eckdorf Leon Whiteson (Eyre and Spottiswoode 25s) A Wilderness of Vines Hal Bennett (Cape 25s) The Saddest Summer of Samuel S has a mini- mum of plot. The number of hard facts revealed about the hero can be counted on one hand: he was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island; he took a degree at Harvard; he lives in Vienna on his wits and borrowed money; he has ridden in the Prater with a countess whom he lusts after moderately; and he has been clocking-in
twice a week with the same analyst for the past five years. Before that, he has put 'three does out of action trying to cure [him].' Even if his hair is beginning to turn grey, he remains a perennial student of life. One recent insight has told him that 'one grows older faster by staying in the same place.'
Sometimes he thinks about taking his own life, or the epitaph that he would like put up to himself in the loamy soil of the Zentral Friedhof. Sometimes his thoughts about dying take wing and become little poems: A summer fly Waltzes out And wobbles In the winter.
But more frequently he thinks abstractedly about laying women and marriage and rearing a family. When he is evicted by one landlord for arrears in rent, he takes rooms in the house of an impecunious widow. Yet no sooner has he settled down there than he becomes addicted to chasing her round the dining-room. When they patise for breath, he observes that he is standing on one side of the table naked from the waist down, while she is on the other side naked from the waist up. That is the extent of their intimacy. Later, when he falls into conversation with two American college girls, one of them comes to visit him at home. In less than an hour they have both undressed and climbed into bed—but that is as far as it goes. On another occasion, his friend the Countess offers him a settlement for life. He replies: 'Wham bam, thank you mam.'
J. P. Donleavy's triumph in this book lies in the pattern that he superimposes on the free- ranging fantasies of a neurotic expatriate. So often when writers let their central characters extemporise in this way, the result is chaos. But in the case of this novel the author achieves controlled chaos—and The Saddest Summer of Samuel S is a superb achievement in economy and style.
Cotters England is the working-class north with the lid off; it is 'the furnace beneath the green moor that'll blow up into a blistering vol- cano one of these days.' Bridgehead is a town situated between Tyne and Tees where the Cotters once lived as a united family of five. Now two of the children have grown up and gone south. 'What is wrong with Lon- doners? They have more percentage of sun than we do up north, don't they? But no fight with it.'
This is Nellie Cook (née Cotter) speaking, a woman who never forgets her northern origins, nor the great depression of the 'thirties and the malnutrition that made her mother bedridden. In the East End, she attempts to make her home into a kind of sorting-house in which she can gather not only the outcasts and outsiders of society whom she meets as a newspaper reporter, but where she can also harbour her ne'er-do-well brother and his strings of women, and her husband's ex-wife suffering from TB. Nellie is a compulsive talker, prepared to waylay any listener, and ready to discuss in the most lively terms anything under the sun from marriage to marxism, from Shakespeare to Shaw (`From the very first play I denounced him as a mountebank . . . just another Irishman pulling wool over English eyes').
Christina Stead was born in Australia in 1902. When her novel The Man Who Loved Children first came out in 1940, it was by- passed; now it has come to be regarded as a masterpiece. Cotters' England is her tenth book, and in its masterly depiction of working-class life, in both the north and south of England, it has a freshness of vision which makes it unique.
Nora Eckdorf is the portrait of a middle- aged Jewish widow, set against a Rhodesian background in the 1930s. But because she is a person larger than life, Ivan Klingman, to whom she is secretly engaged, fears that he may be swamped by her. It is characteristic of her sudden impulses that when they arrive at Bulawayo, after a week in Johannesburg, she should order her chauffeur to drive the Buick home, and hire a rickshaw. With lunatic aban- don, she urges the driver to go faster and faster, her exhilaration and excitement • far outweigh- ing the dangers and distress caused to the cowering Ivan. The constant need to dice with death, or to shock her friends out of their wits, is a composite part of her emotional re- birth at fifty-one. A series of macabre and hilarious events trigger off a mental collapse that ends in delirium. Leon Whiteson writes of Jewish community life in Rhodesia with an authentic ring, but he is less skilled when he attempts the virtuoso passages and great cadenzas of the mad scenes.
Hal Bennett's A Wilderness of Vines tells the story of Neva Manning and her only son, Eugene. Both are light-skinned negroes living in Virginia between the two World Wars. Neva is an orphan and though she marries into 'the same shade,' she remains obsessed by the virility of her first black-skinned lover. Moreover, the first 300 pages are packed with repetitive details of `bellyfugging? which are somehow lowering to the spirits. In fact, it is only in the last few pages when a child of twelve throws a grenade at two lovers because one of their' has referred to her as 'black,' that one's interest suddenly flares into life.
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