New Novels
The Adventures of Augie March is a very long book, which could be taken as a cue for prattling about epic and breadth of scope and all-inclusive vision of life, but in fact what we have is a very long book. Its structure is loose, episodic and sometimes repetitive: some parts of it enjoyed an earlier, separate existence in magazines and still have something of that look, and other parts could be omitted without leaving a hole. Moreover, it takes about 150 pages to get into its stride, a lot of time being wasted, from the narrative i point of view, on long descriptions of the hero's earlier environment, descriptions abounding in patches of that highly poetical, neologising _style which marks the American sentimental vein. Objections of
this sort are justly urged against a novel which claims our attention
for two and a half times the number 'of words usually offered.
These objections, however, are the only important ones. Augie March, who is thereall the time as hero, narrator and commentator, succeeds in being extraordinary. From the Chicago slums he graduates through very petty larceny to apost as the valet, runner and secretary of a crippled real-estate operator, becomes mannequin to a sporting- goods man, tries some less petty larceny, makes a living by stealing text7books and selling them to students, misses the chance of a rich marriage through being misunderstood when helping a• pregnant girl-pal, has a spell as a union organiser, goes to Mexico for the big affair and a spot of falconry, helps an eccentric stuttering millionaire to write a book, joins the Merchant Navy, gets torpedoed, and ends up obscurely occupied in Paris while his wife is being a film actress. (I read it right through, you see.) All this might happen to almost anyone, agreed, but Augie is not the run-of-the-mill, all-accepting drifter to whom it commonly happens in novels. He is saved thousand times from mediocrity by his insight, his lack of pretension, his cheerfulness, his readiness to be kind, the absence of any chip on his shoulder. What is he? A friend calls him a man of feeling, but he is a man of feeling smoking a cigar with a self-deprecatory grin. The same friend detects in him a nobility syndrome, but he carries it about in a two-hundred-dollar suit someone else has paid for. Behind him is Mr. Bellow, right in there pitching with his gaiety and good humour, his fizzing dialogue, his vitality which always rises to the occasion whenever a new character appears, his use of learned allusion for burlesque effect, and above all his refusal to psychologise or pontificate. There can be few important novels which are also entertainments, but this is one.
Tying for first place this week comes Only Fade Away, longish rather than very long, faster-moving than Augie March and easier to read. Mr. Bruce Marshall has in addition a wit and an astringency which Mr. Bellow largely lacks—and could use. This is a well constructed, firmly-drawn narrative about the British Regular Army: Strang Methuen, a 'Bolshie' idealist, is dogged through his military (and marital) career by one Hermiston, whom he once antagonised at school and who, in revenge, contrives to get him suspected of cowardice twice, in 1917 and 1940. An ingenious and very aciting climax in 1943 puts Hermiston at Methuen's merely, but the outcome finally eludes Methuen's control. The various disasters which befall him are, it is true, the result of chance and of the malignity of another rather than of any deficiency in his own character, but this, after all, is likely to be the way with such disasters. The account of Army life is excellent, the various vessels of stupidity are observed with devoted care, and the machinery of disgrace is set out down to the last technicality and idiom.
The book's great quality, however, and what redeems an occasional lurch towards self-pity and emotionalism, lies in the short raking bursts of fury and insolence which periodically spatter its pages' Methuen may talk of life .(he means military life) being a many' splendoured thing, and get laughed at by subalterns for it, but the manifestations of that life, and of marital life, are likely to get let in for a bit of pasting, especially marital life: Had husbands ever managed to be saints? Methuen wondered as he shut himself up in his.dressing-room. Perhaps they were canon- ised for rushing out from behind curtains with flowers in their hands after twenty years of marriage and screeching at their wives; "I love you!"
What all this, plus an admirably brisk narrative method, adds uP to is an uncommonly likeable, efficient and therefore impressive achievement.
Gordon, the hero of Heroes of the Empty View, is a latter-day T. E. Lawrence, indecisively fomenting revolt in the desert, coming home for indecisive flirtations with politics and a girl called Tess ("Once, there had been another soft hand on his life beside his mother's"), and going back to the desert to get indecisively killed on page 400. One is bewildered by hatred for a man of such inexorable volatility (read `moodiness'),. honesty (read 'rudeness') and belief in will (his own will), and who can say when asked, in civil and rational terms, to call off his revolt: "Do you think I air' a thousand years of history, a whole people's free-will, a desert itself all desiccated into the tongue in my mouth to command the thing to stop? " But this mixture of Bulldog Drummond and Father Brown, talking like a bad book, posturing and orating on behalf of 'uncorrupted man,' is only worse than his fellow-characters in that there is so much more of him. They all posture and orate. TheY all talk like a bad book. And why does the author usually, but not always, omit the apostrophe in it's and sometimes, but not usually, insert one in its?
I found Diplomatic Conclusions a damp squib, hardly a squib at all, in fact: it is a diplomatic history of wartime France told from the Vichy side. A man named Georges comes in from time to time and talks, not too well I thought. Recourse to official records would be a quicker and more palatable way of finding out the larger part of what the book tells us. It may, for all I know, be very Gallic, and so on, but for wit give me 'Take It From Here.' The transla- tion reads like a translation.
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