New Novels
Flame for Doubting Thomas. By Richard Llewellyn. (Michael Joseph. 12s. 6d.)
The Acrobats. By Mordecai Richter. (Andre. Deutsch. 10s. 6d.) African Diversions. By Ernst Juenger. (John Lehmann. 10s. 6d.) ..rlittEE. books about exotic places : a Californian tour de force by our own Mr. Llewellyn ; a Fiesta-like fiesta in Valencia by young ' Canadian Mr. Richter ; and a quiet, dreamy, remarkable little story --an early one, not translated before—by Herr Juenger. A Flame for Doubting Thomas is the story of a young American Professor who, rejecting the half-truths • of the academic world and , hot wishing as yet to marry the rich woman who loves him, goes to lye on an amusement pier off the Californian coast. The owner Of the pier, tired of the continual struggle to keep racketeers from t.aking it over and using it to cover a gambling set-up, takes a liking %.9 the professor and disappears, leaving him the whole property. 'he professor struggles with the racketeers, goes to bed with a Finnish waitress and a strip-tease dancer (in fair detail and quite often), ;.0Mes—you will not be surprised to hear—to Know Himself and, ua_ving won his fight, is able to marry his rich, rich true love. the language in which Mr. Llewellyn tells his story consists, for ;!le Most part, of American slang, short, squat wiggles of sentences, 'Ike blobs of toothpaste, interspersed with some of the most indigestible PurPle goo I've gagged on for quite a while. The fine writing— much of it surprisingly thirtyish suburban-imagery, petrol-station 6tufr---is brandished challengingly on the first page:
A corner drive-in's neon bloomed scarlet on rolling grey, and its Joke-box spewed an aria of corrupted adolescence that seemed to loll, viscously buoyant on a pulse of lush regret. Crockery rattled in metal containers, and a man's faint shout echoed for One To Go. In open air women shrilled laughter that puffed small smells of Cheap cologne. . . .
and so on. (Why is it always cheap cologne?) Once you have got Pjtst this formidable declaration of style you find yourself in among "le squiggles of toothpaste. And these, after a hundred and fifty Pages or so, become clogging. The language is, in places, so barely ,ePrehensible, and Mr. Llewellyn gets so thoroughly excited by t Is own story, that the train of improbable events becomes difficult .° follow. The blurb assures us (as usual) that this is "more than tist another gangster-novel. It is a powerful parable of the modern tt,c'rld." Once upon a time parables were easier to understand than ..ue ideas they embodied ; with A Flame for Doubting Thomas the 'everse is the case.
his wife Jessie, the sad, sick Americans ; Pepe and his wife Maria, the good, simple peasants ; Chaim, the indestructible Jew ; Derek, Jessie's brother, the emasculate homosexual and ex-artist—to whom the author, in his fearful moments, is closer even than he is to Andre; Toni, the good, lost whore ; Guillermo and his communist friends, tough and brutal and ugly ; Juanito, the gentleman turned p:inp-- here is a whole range of' characters all of whom we have, in some guise or another, met before; and yet all of whom are given touches of real life by Mr. Richter. These are the characters. And the models ? The early Hemingway is omnipresent ; the Dos Passos newsreel techniques flicker on and off ; Miller nightmares pack a few pages with rhetorical, dialogue- free paragraphs ; Mr. Norris occasionally changes trains.
This is not to say that The Acrobats is all regurgitation. No, Mr. Richter has a fire and a frenzy all his own which, when they truly take hold of his characters, produce a powerful effect. But what is it all about ? Mr. Richter is of the generation which has missed the opportunity (their terms) of taking a physical part in the good-evil struggle. There have been for him no easy externalisations of his own problems, no Smash the Hun, no Save the World from the Red Tide. But all around him wash the ripples of these simple causes, echoes of clean, harsh storms far out at sea whose origins he can only wonder about. Derek, his pathetic ex-hero says :
And he realised now and for ever that those days at the front constituted the only moment of truth he had known (not the ideas or the lies or the speeches or the poems or the machines, but the men all together and angry and beautiful).
Desperately the characters try to find a truth which means something for them. By struggling they fail ; by accepting they win. And it Is in Chaim, the old, wise, essential Jewishness, that Mr. Richter finds a temporary peace : "Chaim, is there any hope ? " " Yes, child. Of course there is."
" Is there 7 " " There is always hope. Always. There has to be."
This isn't a brilliant answer. Because for Mr. Richter's generation there isn't one. But the failure lead an answer is what The Acrobats is about. And as such—as the work of a worried, whirling, over- read young man of twenty-two who's prepared to face up to not seeing the way out—this book should be looked at, and looked at by a lot of people.
Let Herr Juenger supply me with the springboard for a last jump at Messrs. Richter and Llewellyn.
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