BOOKS

Houyhnhnm's Travels

By BERNARD LEVIN

mitt. quite recently I believed (consequent upon reading his City of Spades, but not the blurb) that Mr. Colin Maclnnes was a black man. Indeed, I not only believed it: I told other

people as much, including a Cabinet Minister who wanted to know about him for some State purpose. For all I know, the belief may have rippled outwards from my ill-aimed pebble, so that there are now huge and growing files in various government offices, all containing refer- ences to the blackness of Mr. Maclnnes, and hundreds, if not thousands, of people going about the country spreading the tale. Soon, perhaps, there will be nobody left to deny it, and Mr. Maclnnes will be accused of imposture when he tries to sign in at hotels, or arrested when he applies for a new passport. It is a frightening load of responsibility for me to bear, and I am glad of the opportunity, in discussing his new book,* to shed a little of it.

The trouble is that having read England, Half English I am rather more than half-inclined to

believe that I was right all the time. At least, if

Mr. Maclnnes is not black, then he must be green. Or he has two heads, or three legs, or a

Cyclops eye, or telepathic powers, or else he is one of the anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. At any rate, he is different from us. To begin with, he is the first cousin, twice removed, of • both Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling, the great-grand- son of Burne-Jones, and the son of Angela

Thirkell. (I am not making this up—though he may be.) Also, he was brought up in Australia.

Also, he is a highly gifted writer of romantic novels (wrongly, and to his chagrin, called docu- mentary) and of a recently published book about Sidney Nolan.

But all that could happen to anybody. What sets Mr. Maclnnes quite apart is the fact that in him we have one of the most penetrating, sen- sible, balanced, yet deeply passionate observers of England to check in for centuries. Indeed, apart from Mr. Nirad Chaudhuri, whose electri-

fying book A Passage to England appeared a year or two ago, I can hardly think of any com-

mentator on the ways of the English—not Vol- taire, not Karel Capek, not G. J. Renier- who has seen this country so wisely and so well. This makes him sound, again, like a visitor from outer space, instead of a British writer who has lived in Britain for most of his life, which is what he actually is. But it is difficult not to think of him in such terms, so objective (as opposed to detached), so fresh and so perceptive in his way of looking at Britain. He has scraped the grime from his eyeballs and the fog from his • brain and looked hard and long at Britain in the Fifties, or whatever those things were that came to an end not long ago and not a minute too soon.

Which brings me to the first point about Mr. Maclnnes which sets him off from other such observers. He works. Take his analysis of three famous Daily Express cartoonists—Giles, Osbert * ENGLAND, HALF ENGLISH. (MacGibbon and Kee, 18s.) Lancaster and Barry Appleby (of The Gambols). There is nothing here of the weedy generalisations trotted condescendingly out by other writers on such topics. Mr. Maclnnes has clearly followed all three of these artists, day by day, over a very long period, patiently making notes about their characteristics, their attitudes, their draughtsman- ship, their politics, recording everything about the people who inhabit their drawings, working out, for instance, what George Gambol earns and what at, discarding everything that is irrelevant or discrepant, unless it is significantly so, like the contrast between what the Giles family earns and its fantastic standard of living (they even have a yacht!). At the end of all this he has not only discovered things about the cartoons that even the most regular students of them did not know, and in all probability the artists didn't know either (such as the fact that the notorious Giles's twins are apparently illegitimate), but has turned his examination of them into a serious and even profound analysis of the cartoons' place in English popular culture and the light they shed on contemporary mass attitudes in this country. And this, note, could not have been done without the patient and laborious work of collecting and classifying that has gone, before.

The same can be seen in the essay (all these pieces have appeared before, in such magazines as Encounter and the Twentieth Century) on what the Fifties teenager wears, called 'Sharp Shmutter.' Only the stupidest .Tory MPs believe that the original Teddy-boy outfit still survives, but few of us have taken the trouble to find out exactly what the newly-rich young people actually do wear and would not be seen dead in. Mr. Maclnnes knows the people he is writing about and talks to them (another thing that the windy summers-up do not), but he is not content with giving us his impressions; he gives us the result of his observation, which is a very different thing. Of course, he in his turn tends to generalise, but consciously; he would not claim that all his sub- jects dress this way (and as a matter of fact I walked right round Eros twice one evening last week—its plinth being covered with just such teenagers as he describes—and not one of them was wearing any single garment of the kind that he claims as standard sharp teenage dress), merely that such clothes are, in some not closely defin- able sense, typical, and departures from the standard, however numerous, abnormal.

So, Mr. Macinnes works at his work; would that other observers of the contemporary scene would do the same. But that, in itself, would not make him so stimulating and thoughtful an observer. For with his attention to detail and his great grasp of the reality to which the details amount goes also an immense, cool, cantless sanity. The quite exceptional nastiness of the Eng- lish pub is something that everybody knows, but that few will admit, largely owing to the decades of drivel talked about the 'friendly English inn' (if Hilaire Belloc were not dead it would be necessary to kill him). Mr. Macinnes, in a de- lightful essay called 'See you at Mabel's,' which is an analysis of the out-of-hours drinking-clubs (this was before the Street Offences Act and the consequent mushrooming of a different kind of club), sees this nonsense off the premises in one mighty, savage paragraph.

The word 'pub' conjures up for me no vision of a cheery mine host and rollicking regulars. I see instead grim-faced citizens with their hats on, swilling slowly gassy pints, flanked by tight- skinned women sipping gin with a dreadful air of decorum, the pair staring silently and cen- soriously at nothing. Even worse are the ghastly saloon bar wits, belching with hard unfriendly laughter, or public bar athletes getting in every- one's way with that inane game called darts. The service is slow and slovenly (will they never wipe the counter, as they do in every civilised country, or, if they can't, manage at least not to put the packet of fags you've bought in a puddle of ale?). The food (unless the pub is Jewish) is a disgrace (withered pork pies and leaden sausages are a luxury; the best you can usually hope for arc potato crisps, peanuts, aspirins and breath-pills), and you can't get a coffee, so that your wretched non-drinking companion has to drench himself in fruit and vegetable juices. To add to these delights they've now installed the telly; and if you ask for a drink, they gaze at you as if you've screamed in church. They make you as drunk as they can as soon as they can, and turn nasty when they succeed.

Mind you, we should not assume too readily that Mr. Maclnnes's consequent preference for clubs is founded on entirely objective reality; the only one I have ever been in (in the company of Mr. Kenneth Allsop, who appeared to be an intimate friend of everybody there, including the obvious criminals) provided the most horrible two hours of my life so far, not excluding time spent in the Norbreck Hydro Hotel, Blackpool. But his diatribe against the pub sums him up neatly: the dislike of avoidable squalor, of spiritual meanness, of incompetence; the ruthless observation; above all the positive values under- lying his attitude.

Not all the essays are of this description-with- comment type; there is, for instance, a remark- able extended essay on the novels of Ada Lever- son (Wilde's Sphinx) which is either a very re- markable piece of special pleading or a very remarkable act of literary revival, and in either case will make me read some of her books to find out. But for the most part, Mr. Maclnnes looks at his subjects, in particular teenagers and Negroes, and at the England into which they fit, or do not fit, and writes down both what he sees and what he thinks about what he sees. The second point is vital; he is not merely a reporter, a chronicler; he is an analyst, and one of extraordinary range and power, of warmth and sympathy as well as understanding, but quite without any hypocrisy and quite without any mercy for the shoddy, the inadequate and the cold. His very fault is a good one—the tendency for his romanticism to shade over into senti- mentality, particularly when writing about the minorities for which he feels so warmly (that nonsensical parenthesis 'unless the pub is Jewish' in my quotation above is typical). Truly, we would do well to cultivate a man like Mr. Maclnnes, and we might start by commissioning him to do a big book about this country, in which, for instance, the themes that he handles so well in his novels, and which here receive so tantalisingly brief an examination, can be ex- amined at length and at leisure. Meanwhile, we are lucky to have him among us, and as for my theory, still not quite dead at the back of my mind, that he is black, I can only say that if he is, I wish he would rub up against some of our home-grown semi-sociologists, in the hope that some of his colour might come off on them.