Sickest
My Royal Past. By Cecil Beaton. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 18s.)
FOR a week Dear Dead Days lay on my table and everyone who came into the room picked it up saying, with eager anticipation, 'A new Charles Addams!' Most, though not all, turned the pages to the end. No one put it down again without saying, in one form of words or another, that they found it a revolting, disgusting book. It consists of what is presumably Charles Addams's background material, that is to say, pictures of bodily deformity, disaster, madness, death, pictures that make an appeal to cruelty and lubricity, and none without some special and peculiarly horrible twist. It is, I suppose, possible to argue that this is what we are really enjoying when we enjoy Charles Addams's car- toons, that his, like most other sick humour, performs the socially dubious function of domesticating the abhorrent. That this is true of sick humour in general I would, I think, accept; the old dope pedlar outside the school gates becomes almost lovable when Tom Lehrer has done with him. But the only connection Dear Dead Days has with humour is the name of the author. Not surprisingly; it appears under another imprint than that of his previous books.
It would be nice to be able to recommend My Royal Past for a good, clean laugh. But it isn't quite clean and I didn't laugh, though I will say that it opens with a quite funny errata list. What I can't sec is whom it is meant for. Fully to enjoy parody one must (a) be able to enjoy parody and (b) have fairly strong feelings, pro or con, about what is being parodied. But surely people who enjoy royal memoirs don't enjoy parody? Surely people who enjoy parody don't enjoy royal memoirs? There may be a third group who compulsively read but detest royal memoirs and also enjoy parody. Failing these, I think probably the best recommendation for this book is to the first, who may well take it straight as a frankly scandalous chronicle of life in a minor German court.
MARGHANITA LASKI
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