Talking of books

Penguins and Paladins

Benny Green

It is not all that easy for a paperback to -1 , its way into my library; easy, perhaps, but On`e ' all that easy. I suppose the rigour of th,, cross-examination which each volume has ; undergo before the shelves are opened to dates back to the time when I never had all shelves, and my literary possessions We:, stacked against the wall near my bed, inchalg° their way from floor towards ceilinfiv throughout my adolescence, until eventual they had grown into twin Towers of which swayed like jerrybuilt pylons in a tub, gale, and to get a book from the base of either tower meant moving several hundredweiP„g of printed matter. I cannot be sure how 1°11"`e I have been acknowledging t houseworthiness of paperbacks, but I can sa(e with certainty that the Collins White Circ, e Canadian edition of Leacock's SunshUld Sketches of a Little Town, much-tattered aLte hardly opened, was acquired from 6. secondhand bookseller in our street in 19'10 The first few pages appear to have Vivo marinated in orange juice, and un the

it smoky-yellow cover somebody has marke

up at one shilling. and Since then, what with one thing , a another, I have come into possession 0.1vg further 466 paperbacks up to and incindieR last weekend, which, assuming that Leac°„e was my very first, works out at roughly °,"! every three weeks. In the very early stage' I developed the faintly pretentious and distinctly vandalic habit of inscribing my name and the date on the bottom right-hand corner of the front cover, which is why I can so confidently claim to have purchased, at a lling a throw, Penguin editions of rYganialion on July 29, 1946, The Black Girl Search of God one day later, The History of 317r Polly in that October, and Love and Mr Lewisham in the first few days of 1947.

Last weekend's was my first full census ever

TrlY Paperback possessions, and anyone who yelleves that there may be some deep cultural slgnificance in statistics may care to note that L'le breakdown worked out in the following terms:

Penguins and Pelicans 299, all others

!68,trued which I suppose in a way could be cons „ as the story of the mass dissemination or literature in Britain since the end of the lar. of my also-rans, Fontana make the best 'lowing, followed by Pan and Four Square, With Oxford University Paperbacks making *III? in quality what they lack in quantity. Over e last year or two the most interesting inn19vation for me has been the Penguin °graphies, particularly the reprints of Justin `laPlan's Mr Clemens and Mark Twain and Henri Troyat's war and peaceish Tolstoy. But

way I have come to expect this sort of

from Penguin, even if I find their "ionthly release lists less interesting than I Irice did. So I tend to be more beguiled by rioice items from other houses. Last year for wilstance, on Bognor Regis railway station, I as delighted to pick up a remaindered copy (N1,1 A. L. Rowse's William Shakespeare in its j entor edition, and more recently, the late (rtes Pope Hennessy's Anthony Trollope k anther) won an instant pew. But the imprint which currently raises my r'xPectations highest of all is Paladin, for two „easons, Form and Content. The Paladin ;„",age-size and shape is longer and more :ender than the norm, and its cover designs ,`,1rlosually imaginative. To he frank, very few • tialadins hold the slightest interest for me, sf,eirt.g so heavily tilted to the kind of bogus tr;c1°10gy that belongs in an infant school as h"mb my senses. But Paladin continues to „O'd out infinite promise, and just about to nages to fulfil that promise often enough v, itrIpel me to maintain my emotional inu'sttnent. I quote three examples. In 1970 '„aladin came up with George Dangerfield's sIglected classic of History-as-Style, The p,:atige Death of Liberal England, a work of rne scholarship so scintillating that not sev,e° Paul Johnson's dispensable preface ji.,'Ined too high a price to pay. A year later 6'ere followed Philippe Jullian's biography of :ear Wilde, just as sympathetically ?searched but more worldly than Hesketh itearson's standard life, and complementary to ex In both cases the cover designs were 1.',„_e,InPlary; Dangerfield got a poster from the 11 10d showing a caricatured Asquith being N-1 d ' • a, e in different directions by Radicalism fal Socialism, while Wilde's fate was symassed by the saffron stain of rotten eggs on tent. James's Theatre poster of The Impor ce of Being Earnest. (Jullian also included 1311e tiny my but priceless observation of Wilde's di to me, to the effect that Wilde eosaPproved of playing cricket because the is.are assumed while batting was indecent). Slip Ow Paladin have started 1974 with another (erlative volume, The Citizen Kane Book the' introduced by Pauline Kael. This time to,' cover design is indifferent but the cone„"ts dazzling. Normally, a volume which ines:Grated both the shooting script and the itaetu.ing continuity might seem to be taking sens"t„;09 seriously, but as in more than one the citizen Kane may turn out to have been leminost significant American movie ever hip'e, the device seems not only justifiable 'tt,entirely necessary. The one serious fault to eProduction of the book is that in order Witile,t all the words in without ending up 100 bulky a volume, the publishers have

printed Pauline Kael's text in twin columns to each page, using a typeface calculated to warm the cockles of every optician's heart and freeze the marrow of the rest of humanity. Never mind; there are such things as magnifying glasses, and it is in Miss Kael's text that all the fireworks are fizzing.

To oversimplify matters only very slightly, Miss Kael's essay, predictably entitled Raising Kane, seeks to rehabilitate the slobbish figure of Herman J. Mankiewicz, who apparently wrote the screenplay, without diminishing the stature of Orson Welles, who apparently says he wrote the screenplay. As Mankiewicz appears to have devoted all his energies at the time to be seeming to be too drunk to write anything, and as Welles did everything to do with the movie except write it, the confusion which Miss Kael examines remains confusion after all. But only in the sense that confusion still surrounds, say, GIadstone and Disraeli. I would not, for instance, dare to suggest that either Sir Philip Magnus or Robert Blake has been telling fibs, but they can't both be right about their respective clients. Which is precisely why we never tire of reading about Gladstone and Disraeli, who, like Helen and Paris, Dante and Beatrice, Compton and Edrich, and Marks and Spencer, cteated by sheer energy so variegated a body of anecdote as to create as many possible interpretations of themselves as there are people prepared to speculate on their motives.

So far as the Kane debate goes, I suggest that Mankiewicz, who, on Miss Kael's evidence, had a hand in at least seventy-four other major productions besides Citizen Kane, only achieved a masterpiece once, when he collaborated with Welles, and that Welles, who has spent the last thirty years being hamstrung by the glove salesmen, has produced many magical fragments, and, in the late afternoon of his peculiar career, the remarkable Chimes at Midnight. Miss Kael is shrewd, keeps her temper, deduces with admirable wit, and above all gazes with scientific dispassion on the bizarre variety of bugs which always start scuttling out of the woodwork the moment you begin to give the Hollywood wainscot a kick or two. Is there, I wonder, some unsung Rabelais equipped to say anything bad enough about Louis B. Mayer, who tried to buy up the Citizen Kane prints and destroy them? Is there any vituperation bitter enough to pour on William Randolph Hearst, who failed to see that the Kane portrait of him, if that is what it was, so far, from being scurrilous, was actually flattering? Is there any guillotine blunt enough to fit the gizzard of Nicholas Schenck, whose judgement of men was so warped that he actually got on with Mayer? How interesting that when Miss Kael kicks the wainscot, the first two invertebrates to scuttle under our feet are the same Mayer and Schenck who scuttled twenty years ago when Lillian Ross performed that brilliant piece of surgery, Picture.

Miss Kael's text is more tightly packed with aphoristic wisdom than any I have read about the movies, and the only small point on which

I would take issue with her is that Welles tends to claim authorship of Citizen Kane

whenever interviewed. Well, I interviewed

Welles at length on television, twice, and on neither occasion did he mention Kane, even

though on the second of those two occasions he had promised to do so. Before, during, and after interviewing him, I had the feeling that I would rather be wrong with Welles than right with Front Office. After reading this outstanding piece of critical journalism that Miss Kael has produced, perhaps the choice is phoney and it is possible to be right with Welles after all. What I have in mind is the

contrast between almost all of The Magnificent Anzbersons and the birdbrained, chicken-livered adjustments made to the ending of that crucified movie by those good old glove salesmen of yesteryear.