Ulster Innocents
No Surrender. By Robert Harbinson. (Faber, 18s.) AN autobiography that stops at long trousers— the form that blurb-writers call an evocation of childhood—has observable drawbacks apart from the limited nature of the material. Stylistically the author often seems to feel under an obligation to regress to the age concerned, which produces a tendency to wide-eyed prose and brief infant paragraphing; and the result can read like a limp pastiche of The Inheritors, the novel in which William Golding undertook the experiment of limiting himself to the conceptual equipment of prehistoric man. Any book of childhood remini- scence, however, tends to be protected from criticism by its content. To be harsh even about an adult autobiography is a caddish enough action in England, since it means bringing up a man's private life; but when an innocent childhood is involved, it becomes unthinkable. Unnerved, the reviewer falls back on the special non-committal vocabulary that has been established to get him out of this situation: 'pellucid,' radiant,"tiptoe' and the like. 'Simplicity' is the key-word. It would take a churlish critic to suggest that this can some- times mean simple-mindedness.
The churl within me is dangerously aroused by Green Seacoast. Printed on very small pages with pregnant spaces between every other paragraph, it reads like a rather overworked undergraduate parody of the genre. The style is both cosy and cosmic. Though the sentences are minute—many of them rivalling 'Jesus wept,' previously celebrated as the shortest verse in literature—they remark- ably achieve the effect of long-windedness. The first four-fifths of the book, written in a present tense that inspires little feeling of real life, is a curious interior mumble about stars, poetry, the Ulster landscape, the Otter Patrol in the Boy Scouts, the jokes of the author's rector father, and so on. By the end of the book this method, in spite of its already ample openings for inconse- quent generalisation, seems to have become too constricting for Mr. Buchanan because he shifts to a ruminative past tense that affords a series of metaphysical statements on an even more spacious scale. This last section reads like a zany parody of T. S. Eliot—'Fixation is a sticking to the same thing. Fidelity means letting go'—with a strong strain of an American authoress writing about regeneration through stillness.
Mr. Buchanan's quietism leads him to refer to his father's death as a victory in the sunshine. Robert Harbinson, whose No Surrender is also an account of a Protestant Ulster childhood, can find no such comfort. When his own father died of a brain injury, having fallen from work on to some iron railings, his son knew that to a working- class family this represented defeat. From then onwards his mother had to keep four people on the £2 a week that she made as a char. Robert Harbinson soon contracted TB and started going to hospital fbr what was called the annual lie-in, a grim experience of medicine that he managed to survive, in spite of a necrophilic atmosphere in which the nurses would chat sweetly about a child's death as 'a glorious wee passing.'
In the working-class Belfast where he lived, and which he describes with the apt and concrete detail off' a good documentary film, the overriding topics were death and religion. In death, naturally, he had a cool professional interest, and used to knock at the door, of any house where the blinds were down to ask to see the coffin. In comparative religion he was also an - expert—knowing, for instance, that nuns wore habits to conceal the singe-marks of their orgies, and that the Duke of Norfolk, being a Roman Catholic, must clearly be scheming to seize the throne. Like many children, he drew away instinctively in adolescence from patrist Protestantism and developed a secret feel- ing for the forbidden Mickeys. When he was evacuated in 1939 to a Catholic family and found that, contrary to forecast, he was not castrated in his sleep, he decided that 'Father Christmas, the Mickeys and the Germans simply affected adults in a curious way.'
PENELOPE GILLIATT
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