Are You a Monster ?
By PATRICK ANDERSON
Le't's start with the monsters. A monster, I should explain, is a human being so simplified, falsified and generally caricatured by the over- development of a few characteristics as to en- danger his humanity, his lifelikeness, so that at times he may seem entirely outside the scale of value which could make him a flawed hero or an interesting villain. Few people are really that isolated. Monsterdom is thrust upon them by the agencies of our emptily. reverberative society, with its PROs, television and yellow press. 'And publishers will ask empty-headed, near-illiterate glamOur-pusses for monstrous books.
The late Miss Elsa Maxwell (The Celebrity Circus, Allen, 21s.) was a Celebrity Monster. Forty years ago she decided to become a legend 'and did just that.' She learned 'the neglected art of conversation' and also 'how to clown,' with the' gratifying result that people found her 'a lively and popular guest' until the happy, happy day when 'Prince Christian of Hesse once saw me swimming off Eden Roc, and mistook me for a rubber mattress.' Looking back over a lifetime of party-giving and social climbing, she reassures us with an account of her reconciliation with the Duchess of Windsor and of the slight moral hiatus in her championship of Maria Callas consequent upon that fatal trip in Ari's yacht (Tina said it was hell). One must admit that Society isn't quite what it used to be, and her rich friends weren't all that grateful (a touch of Proust here), but still, there were always TV appearances for one's old age, and just think of that Wonderful Greek cruise she organised for 120 celebrities, including Olivia de Havilland and 'the Duchess of Argyll and a man from the Daily Mail and the head of Vogue, more famous people than ever sailed in the Argo or on the expedition to Troy! Elsa was in such a tizzy that she rushed from Piraeus to a luncheon en- gagement near Athens, with King Paul, of course, and somehow managed to take in Delphi on the way. Or so she says.
Was Mme de Stadl a monster? Mr. Wayne Andrews (Germaine, Gollancz, 25s.) declares that 'she could speak with a certain authority on `almost any subject that claimed her attention' and there does seem something larger than life about this amorous blue-stocking, daughter of the banker-statesman Necker, meddler in revo- lutionary politics, friend of Constant and Chateaubriand, and unsuccessful suitor for Napoleon's attention. Mr. Andrews's 'portrait' is scarcely more than a provocative sketch; he makes one want to know much more about such a complex character and period. Germaine's visit to high-minded Weimar emerges as a subject for high comedy.
Mr. T. J. S. George (Krishna Menon, Cape, 35s.) is aware that his subject can appear a Monster of Singlemindedness. He describes India's late Defence Minister as cantankerous, bitter, lonely, daemonic, rootless, arrogant, ob- sessed with his colour, and contemptuous of the social graces. His striking appearance is one of 'rugged masculinity,' but he has 'many feminine characteristics' (he loves shopping and collects 'impeccably tailored' suits). Yet he is the austerest of puritans, a vegetarian and teetotaller who, I quote, 'never takes a solid meal, tea and biscuits being his staple diet.' Add to all this that Menon despises biographets and is totally indifferent to his private self and you have a character too problematic for this pleasant, rather plodding study to illuminate very fully.
Miss C. A. Lejeune (Thank You for Having Me, )lutchinson, 25s.) is certainly no monster. For a pioneer film critic on the Manchester Guardian and the Observer—one who, I suppose, thrilled to Eisenstein and Pudovkin and Griffiths as well as to her beloved Rend Clair—she strikes a remarkably cosy note: middle-class Mancunian, suspicious of intellectuals, interested in roses and horses and whodunits. She writes of her mother and her upbringing with ease and charm, of course, and there is a good description of the old Denham studios, but few of the characters she introduces (from Elizabeth Bergner to Arthur Machen) have much fire or bite. And no `fewer than three of the book's small climaxes are concerned' with royalty. In fact, this swan-sting sounds like the cluckings of an amiable hen.
Next, an American playwright (Elmer Rice, Minority Report, Heinemann, 42s.). Mr. Rice is quite clearly a nice left-wing sort of guy, not notable here for style, wit or the evocation• of atmosphere, but able to give a fat, forthright account of a rich and useful life devoted to the stage and to human freedom. Incidentally, there is a fascinating account of genuine in- spiration with regard to one of his plays, The Adding Machine, and there is also confirmation of a point made in Man Ray's recent auto-. biography: namely, how little the Paris ex- patriates shared in the life of the French because of their ignorance of the language.
I can recommend even more strongly Colonel R. Meinertzhagen's curiously named Diary of a Black Sheep (Oliver and Boyd, 42s.). Here is caustic, uncompromising Old Fogeydom—a world closer to Pindar and Yeats and Lampedusa than all Miss Maxwell's 'aristocrats'—which miraculously enshrines a Victorian childhood preserved, live, immensely vulnerable, in the re- markable diaries of a young boy. With their.,aid the colonel recalls his sufferings at the hands of a sadistic schoolmaster and the long, baffling refusal of his mother to give him the consolation and affection he was too shy to demand—when he was an officer in uniform she was still capable of slapping his face in public. A most moving as well as a gloriously eccentric book, it gave me more pleasure than any of the others.
Finally, two examples of belles-lettres. Alastair Reid's Passwords (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 27s. 6d.) suffers from two familiar weaknesses: tailoring one's style to the mild eunuchoid suavities of the New Yorker magazine, and be- lieving that you can paste together your bits of journalism and pretend that they make an organic whole with—and here the blurb-writer licks his lips—an underlying theme. Mr. Reid begins well enough with some aphoristic para- graphs on being foreign (he lives abroad), but after this the New Yorker style asserts itself in the chapters on Spain: very smooth, very civilised, but no longer very Mr. Reid. He's a competent writer; he's also a poet. And 1 wonder if his artistic conscience didn't wince when ha interleaved his poems with those glib little essays towards the end.
Maurice Rowdon (A Roman Street, Gollanc4 21s.) writes with great warmth and sensitivity about ordinary Italian life, and has endearingly odd opinions of a Lawrentian kind. I hope ues working on another book, one perhaps which'will contain more in the way of personal revelation.
Previous page
