MY BOOKS OF THE YEAR

By BERNARD LEVIN

ISUPPOSE the outstanding factor in the world of books during 1957 was the remarkable unity of theme that ran through so many of the works published during the year. In books, as in so many of the mul- tifarious worlds that make up our one world, the grave problems of our day, such as the hydrogen bomb and inflation—and many other less grave, less urgent anxieties—have come together during the year to give a new dynamic, a new community of purpose, a new sense of together- ness—feelings hitherto lacking in our society of (as it seemed) angry young men and tired old ones. The seven books I have selected from the hundreds I have read this year seem to me to illustrate and underline my feelings about this newly risen yeast in the bread of our public (and, indeed, private) life in a remarkable fashion. That is not to say that they are necessarily the best books I have read during the year (though each is, of its kind, excellent); but each seems, while treading its own path, to be marching steadily towards the same goal as the others. It may be objected, perhaps, that I have selected them too carefully; that a truly random choice from my year's reading would have yielded no such result, and that the trend I feel I have discerned is the result of a perhaps too lively imagination at work upon too little hard fact. It may be so; `Wartun,' as the German has it, 'in die Ferne schwei fen, wenn dos Gute light so nah?' I can only present my case, and leave it to the jury of my readers.

Here, then, is my list : Shakespeare at the Old Vie, Vol. 4. By Mary Clarke.

(Hamish Hamilton, 25s.) A History of Rowing. By Hylton Cleaver. (Herbert Jenkins, 21s.) The Phoenix and the Spider. By Renato Poggioli. .

(Harvard University Press : O.U.P. 40s.) Miss Williams' Cookery Book. By Miss R. 0. Williams.

(Longman's, :)s.)

The Willing Maid. By C. T. Ritchie. (Abelard-Schuman, 16s.)

Britain's Wild Larder : Nuts. By Claire Loewenfeld. (Faber, 30s.)

Love, Life and Sex. By Barbara Cartland. (Herbert Jenkins, 12s. 6d.) The first point to which I think I may draw attention is that among all these books only one is a work of fiction : Mr. C. T. Ritchie's historical novel, The Willing Maid. Mr. Ritchie (it is surely no accident that he was christened, or has adopted the name, Cicero) takes for his canvas the struggle between England and France for control of North America in the eighteenth century. The hero falls among Red Indians, and a fight with one of the savages gives rise to such a poignant passage as this :

Wabak ! Kill !'

`Antida-maalak ! Strangle ! '

VsIabak, nabak-delta! Kill, kill ! '

Mr. Ritchie—Cicero T. Ritchie, remember—has indeed gone to the heart of our contemporary malaise; his hero is all of us, and round us stand the savages crying, in their bilingual fashion, Wabak ! Kill!' and `Antula-maalak ! Strangle!' Yet how rare, how refreshingly rare, to find today so clear, so unambiguous a statement of the human predicament in a work of fiction. It is for this reason—that his achievement does not stand upon, as it were, the shoulders of others' achievements—that I give him pride of place. The other authors in my list would no doubt agree to yield it. Not for them the tightrope-walker's methods of the liberated imagination; theirs is the way of research, of patient accumulation of facts (and with the facts, of understanding). Yet how similar the result! Take, from Miss Clarke's fourth annual volume recording the season's work at the Old Vic, these lines :

Tarry a little; there is something else

This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood; The words expressly are `a pound of flesh'

True, the words are not Miss Clarke's : she is here echoing a much earlier traveller along her road. But when she herself says, later, of Cymbeline: 'It contains some of the saddest sweet passages in all Shakespeare . . . but at the end all is happiness . . .' we feel again the loneliness, the

insecurity, that troubles our days, that invades all our waking thoughts. Truly, Mr. Ritchie and Miss Clarke are birds of a feather.

But so, indeed, are Mr. Cleaver and Miss Williams. While one can only regret the absence, from Mr. Cleaver's books, of any mention of that curious by-way of the sport he has otherwise so meticulously chronicled, the swift rise (and swifter fall) of the four-oared stylobate, and the races between these curious craft that Dr. Johnson (if Boswell can be trusted, and I think he can) so enjoyed watching, nevertheless one cannot deny that he has in his way, like Miss Williams in hers, cast a light into dark places. Miss Williams's book is described by her publishers as 'a book for every Nigerian woman.' It is a commonly made claim; but I think in this instance it is fully justified. Indeed, more than justified; when Miss Williams says, 'If the vegetables are new fry in hot oil at once,' she is surely, though she may not know it, speaking to every woman, not merely those of Nigeria. The Colonel's lady and Mrs. Oowoombula, in fact, are sisters under the skin. It did not need Miss Williams to tell us that, of course; it is.the theme that runs like Ariadne's thread through Manzoni's great novel E pericoloso sporgersi. But Miss Williams has done the world some service in reminding us of its truth afresh.

There remains Miss Loewenfeld, Mr. Poggioli and Miss Cartland. Mr. Poggioli's book of, as he puts it, 'Essays about some Russian writers and their View of the Self,' can be easily summed up. It got into my parcel of books owing to a monumental piece of carelessness on the part of the Spectator's Literary Editor, and as far as I can understand it, which is not very far, it seems to have nothing to do with either phoenixes or spiders. Miss Loewenfeld's monograph (who among us does not treasure the book, Fungi, to which this is a sequel?) is a very different piece of work. Well, naturally.

(Ratiocination, sensitivity, perception, nostalgic de la boue, Goethe, methodology, intellectual equipment, compulsive, imagery, Marghanita Laski, identification, Gesamtkunstwerk, Bernard Berenson, hamartia, logomachy, classicism, organic form, architectonically, Aristotle, novella, objective correlative, David Daiches, rococo, evoke, reclame, echo, terza rima, self, arabesque, Sainte-Beuve and of course—my italics—catharsis; I am sorry about this plethora of words suitable for book reviews, but I am almost at the end of my space and feared I would not be able to work them all in.)

And finally Miss Cartland, on Love, Life and Sex (not, as Mr. Philip Toynbee called it in his otherwise admirable review of the book in the Observer—in which he said it was 'one of the seminal works of the twentieth century'—Love-life and Sex). I understand that Miss Cartland is the mother of Mrs. Gerald Legge, and after reading her book I can only say that I am not in the least surprised. As in Mrs. Legge, so in this book, Miss Cartland has summed up generations of human experience, years of the slow crystallisation of thought and belief, innumerable tiny grains of opinion that together go to make up the climate of our time, the Zeitgeist. It is her book, above all, which draws together the thread of my books for 1957, which points most unerringly the road which the books of 1957 have begun, hesitantly perhaps, but in the end decisively, to tread. Tie Weltgeschichte,' as Hegel reminded us, 'ist dos Weltgericht: In Miss Cartland's hands—her more modern hands—this becomes Fundamentally a man has nothing to lose and everything to gain by sexual experimentation before wedlock. He is perfectly prepared for it and even without the skilful co-operation which his partner, can in time provide, the first experience will in his mind be. the best of all, because it symbolises conquest.

His fiancée is blessed with just as much passionate longing but during courtship it is merely in bud. She may well disappoint her man in her passionate fervour simply because love has not been completely awakened in her. She will also be curbed by fear and misgivings.

Could anything be more attuned with the times, more representative of the hopes and fears of mankind as 1957 slides ever more rapidly into 1958? 1 hardly think so. It is perhaps a gloomy note on which to end; yet 1957 ends on no cheerful one. 'C'est absolument defendu,' said an anonymous nineteenth-century French writer, 'de cracher a l'interieur de l'autobus: It is hard, even now, to disagree.