NEW NOVELS

The Cruel Time

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur. By Violette Leduc. (Peter Owen, 25s.) To the End of the World. By Blaise Cendrars. (Peter Owen, 32s. 6d.) The End of Something Nice. By Angus Wolfe Murray. (Macmillan, 25s.) The Hot Month. By Clifford Hanley. (Hutchinson, 25s.) The Last Gentleman. By Walker Percy. (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 30s.) IN his ballad about the passing of youth and the approach of old age, Villon cries out: 'Oh, cruel time.' His words echo in both Violette Leduc's short novella and Blaise Cend- rars's rather drawn-out roman a clef. Both books are set in post-war Paris, and in each case the story revolves round an ageing woman. In To the End of the World, Therese Eglantine is a famous actress of seventy-nine who has been married and divorced more than once and had many lovers. Hardly a moment of her career, or her sexual life, is left unrecorded. 'When are they going to open the famous theatre of erotica . . . which Blaise Cendrars has talked . . . about so often?' she asks at one point.

In contrast, Violette Leduc imparts very little information about the background of her cen- tral character in The Lady and the Little Fox Fur, and never reveals her name. The only concrete facts to emerge are that she always had an eccentric nature, according to her parents; that she once went to Menton to convalesce when she was twenty; and that she is now 'handling her sixtieth year as lightly as we touch lint when dressing a wound.' Her candle- sticks are in pawn, and nothing of her inheri- tance remains. Her day is taken up wandering the streets and quays of the Left Bank, and while others earn their livelihoods by working, she earns her idleness by walking, scavenging, anotAitationitly begging. When the book opens, she has not enough francs left to buy sugar. Cendrars gives every chapter of his novel a title—living is a Magic Art,' for instance, or 'The Soul has no Arse.' Quite as aptly every chapter might have been entitled 'Stand Still while I Shout.' For the book is full of shouting, stage whispers which could be heard at the back of any gallery, and bombast. 'Napoleon, that French Fiihrer' is a typical example of his rhetoric. Adjectives are employed by the score, and nearly everything is repeated a dozen times. It is rather like attending a rehearsal and hear- ing the same scene acted over and over again. The murder of a barman—a crime that is never solved—protracts the book by more than 150 pages. There is, too, a good deal about possible links between sanctity and debauchery. Cend- rars has already published twenty books, but on the strength of this, his first to appear in English, he seems to me a poor man's version of Genet.

In her autobiography, La Bdtarde, Violette Leduc revealed how she had experienced poverty, the mirages of hunger, and what it means to be dispossessed. In her new book, she once more touches on these themes. Her lonely old lady discovers a whole world of objects with which she can form relationships: they include shop windows, a coffee bean, posters—even the Metro. The story presents ultimately an exer- cise in endurance, and shows how little it takes to sustain human life. If people can fast for forty-five days without dying, she reflects, is making six potatoes last a week anything to complain of? Then one morning, long before the city is moving, she wakes up craving for an orange and goes out to scavenge among the dustbins.

Instead she find a fur tippet, a little fox who, after his long days of running through the coun- tryside, is now at peace, a peace that slowly transmits itself to her as she lets him lie 'warm in the crook of her arm,' or at night 'warm up that place behind [the] ear where we need people so much.' On the point of starvation, she makes one attempt to sell him—and fails; and from then on the bond between them is forged

even stronger, and she dies eventually, hardly knowing it, with the fox curled protectively around her neck. Outwardly this is a tale of alarming simplicity; but technically, it represents a marvellously sustained feat of writing.

Angus Wolfe Murray's very promising first novel is set in Scotland and is concerned with eight-year-old Jonathan Clehane and his twin sister Jane, and their reaction to school and the adult world. Jonathan is sent across the border to an English preparatory school, where you are taken to the bogs and whipped if you sneak; where as often as not you are told to mind your own beeswax; and where you are threatened with a beating-up if you blub. At Jane's school there are nature rambles, and she tells her

brother how Mary Usher, a girl'of her own age,

was pushed into a clump of nettles and cried without stopping for six hours, and how John Paul's big brother kissed a girl in the cinema and said it was like kissing a dog. Against this background of childish discovery, three deaths from the adult world cast their shadow: that of their father, their uncle, and their gamekeeper. The author writes precisely and with a fine tactile sense. His ear for dated slang is acute. 'I'll ask Matron to patter along,' says the Headmaster of Tamberwell to Jonathan as he lies in the sick wing.

Clifford Hanley's The Hot Month is also set in Scotland, in Ochie, an imaginary village in the West Highlands. I found it at times hard to distinguish one character from another— though Nat Boag, the painter, and his wife Mary are involved in some pretty hilarious situations.

A few of the jokes are faintly reminiscent of the Ben Travers farces. "That's something that worries me about these aristocrats jumping into bed with peasant girls," she said. . . . "Their spurs must have made an awful mess of the sheets." '

In The Last Gentleman, William Bibb Barrett, a young engineer from the Deep South, suffers

from an emotional illness that cuts great chunks

out of his life. During these gaps, he falls•into what he describes as a 'fugue state' and goes

wandering about the countryside scarcely aware of his own identity. At the outset of one of these phases, he buys an expensive telescope in

order to get a closer view of a peregrine which he has spotted in Central Park. Instead he catches in his lens a pretty girl and immediately falls for her. His pursuit of her, and his meeting with her brother who is dying from leukaemia and his further involvement with her family who are also from the Deep South, are very well done by the author. But the brilliant clarity of the first statement of the theme, which depicts Barrett's neurosis, becomes more and more lost in the mist once he leaves New York. The night- mare world of his fugue state gets more pro- nounced, and his wanderings with the dying young man take on a Don Quixote-like quality.

NEVILLE BRAYBROOKE