Blessed Bandage 411 11 and Ward. By Henry James. (Hart-Davis, HE4 Y
JAMES was content that Roderick Hudson should be thought his first novel. Actually that Plaee properly belongs to Watch and Ward, which 4.131)eared as a serial in the Atlantic Monthly dur- ing 1871, but was not brought out in book form until seven years later. After that its only further jaPPearance was in the collected edition of 1921. .1trries had revised it considerably before letting out as a novel, explaining that 'if I get any fame, lily early thins will be sure to be rummaged °Lit: But, still finding it 'very thin and as "cold" as an icicle,' though 'pretty enough,' he could hardly have anticipated • the kind and quality of rummaging it would arouse. It has become, by and large, a source of clues in le cas James. 'Very little redeems it except its value as a document,' says F. W. Dupee. And, in the event, it is an un- successful work, and the ways in which it fails do hint at some private emotional unease powerf..11 enough to make James betray his theme.
It tells the story of Roger Lawrence, a rich young Bostonian rejected in love, who adopts an orphan girl and brings her up as his ward and bride-to-be. By the time the girl, Nora, is made fully aware of his hopes, she has already fallen in love with his cousin Hubert. a handsome worldly cleric. She runs away to New York where the resources she hoped to find fail her but where the way is paved for a .conventionally happy ending. There are hopeful indications at the beginning that Roger is to be seen ironically. He is compact of inadequacies, physical and intel- lectual. At twenty-nine, he is balding, short- sighted and clumsy. 'In trifling matters, such as the choice of a shoemaker or a dentist, his word carried weight; but no one dreamed of asking his opinion on politics or literature.' But, at this point, James goes on : 'Here and there, neverthe- less, an observer less superficial than the majority would have whispered you that Roger was an undervalued man, and that in the long run he would come out even with the best.' By such indirections another Roger is suggested and he comes out, Of course, magnificently in the end; but his scruples and sincerity Only show up in contrast to the vast spiritual lacunae of his com- petitors. He is never felt as much more than a tiresomely self-regarding semi-invalid, not even when shown dallying with a nubile Peruvian or arousing interest in a New York belle. Nor, one feels, would the meddling Mrs. Keith who finally opens Nora's eyes have had her vulgarity so triumphantly vindicated if James had been in con- trol of his subject.
Mr. Edel, with other critics, is prepared to make much of the sexual undertow, 'sex uncon- scious of itself,' as a disrupting pressure on the story, citing young Nora's request for a watch- key : Roger's was 'a complete misfit, so that she had recourse to Hubert's. It hung on the watch- chain which depended from his waistcoat, and some rather intimate fumbling was needed to adjust it to Nora's diminutive timepiece.' Cer- tainly what Hubert .elsewhere refers to as the
• 'blessed bandage of American innocence' is seen as blinding James rather than his characters at such moments. What is bound to impress is tat there is so much left to enjoy : Nora's letters from Italy; much in the portraits of Hubert and of Mrs. Keith herself; the ubiquitous play of humorously revealing imagery.
This Sporting Life is tersely narrated by Arthur Machin, a hefty young Northerner; it takes him into the rigours of rugby league football and into and out of an affair with his harsh landlady, Mrs. Hammond. At times, it's a little as if Room at the Top had suffered interpolalions • from someone like Peter Cheyney. 'I swung my right fist into the middle of his face. He cried out loud. I hit him again and saw the red pulp of his nose and lip as my hand came away.' Can _rugby league really be as lethal as Mr. Storey describes it?
And are—come to that—most Northerners quite so knowingly licentious after a few pints? There are other improbabilities, including an attractive matron's tea-table advances to Arthur. And the old man who schemes to get him intoathe team--
and seems, in fact, to be in love with him—is dropped just when his pursuit of his hero has acquired almost symbolic force. The most effective pages are probably those on Mrs. Ham- mond's days in hospital, the more oddly so in that she has remained through all her storms with Arthur an impalpable presence, irritatingly hard on him without our ever knowing why. Yet Mr. Storey's book manages to exist at a level above these dissatisfactions. If John Braine is a good 'regional' novelist, he is a better one. His strengths here lie in his projection of the mean politicking at the back of professional sport, the small fears, squabbles and jealousies; in his voices, which sound true and alive; and in one or two excur- sions, notably a pleased, agonised dinner in a posh hotel with Mrs. Hammond and her two kids.
Something in Common is a much smaller affair than Mary Cecil's previous book, In Two Minds, that remarkable account of a mental breakdown. Disconcertingly, it has similar characters: the new heroine also plays the flute and tours with ENSA, nasty 'Bert reappears briefly as nasty Stan, there is an inert, stagey, artistic lover again, who says things like 'Let me assist you' and loves lovely things. This is, of course, a resolutely 'funny' book, about the attempts of a girl of hideously U family to find real friends among the Bohemians and the Lower Orders. But poor Hilary Amies is presented, frankly, as such a little ninny, pathologically beset by a thousand hazards of her own creating, that a lot of the humour turns sour. The_Gold-Rintmed Spectacles is a novel with two stories—a tragic period in the life of a gentle, homosexual doctor and the effects on the young Jewish narrator of Mus- solini's regime. It's hard to see why they are together, since there is no meaningful interaction between them. Dr. Fadigati's story is the real focus of interest, but the deliberately flat •narra- tion inspires no more than a 'Goodness, how sad.'
JOHN COLEMAN
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