Chekhov and Sugar
The Last Hours of Sandra Lee. By William Sansom. (Hogarth Press, 16s.)
MR. SANSOM'S work, I read in Encounter, has been described as 'Chekhovian.' There is no way of knowing how long it was since the describer last read any Chekhov, bufpresumably the name produced in his mind a blurred image of shrewd and tender writing about ordinary people and events, of small-scale masterpieces coaxed out of the inconclusive and the everyday. In a sense, this is what Mr. Sansom gives us, but at some point the Chekhovian mixture has been sugared out of all recognition; what he presents in his new novel are not ordinary people, but perfectly normal chaps, a bit (let's face it) ridiculous, but just as warmly human as you or I.
It describes a Christmas party at the head office of a firm manufacturing cosmetics, and centres on the problems of a secretary whose boy-friend has asked her to marry him and go to Sarawak, where he has been offered a job. She would like to accept (being a nice girl), but feels the need of 'a past with which to face the future,' torn by 'the deeper wish of all women sometimes to play the bitch.' (Everyone's be- haviour in Mr. Sansom's book can be univer- salised in this sort of formula.) In one drunken December afternoon she doesn't do too badly, and marches off to Bun (her nice boy's nice name) still good, of course, but having had her sweetly irrational fling. Mr. Sansom's skill is enormous, and the convincing vignettes pile up On each other so fast and so readably that one is through the book in no time; but eventually so much doggy love of the human race turned my stomach and I found myself longing for some of the squalor and spite an office party por- trayed by, say, Roy Fuller would provide.
The people in Heaven Has No Favourites are far from ordinary: Herr Remarque takes us back to royal tragedy, where characters shop at Balenciaga, stay at the Ritz and whip off to Venice for a spur-of-the-moment holiday, their giant lives embracing, rather than ignoring, the pettier experiences of the poor. Somewhere at the bottom of this romance between a con- sumptive and a racing-driver (both, as it were, under sentence of death, but in very different ways) there is an important and interesting point: she eventually returns to her sanatorium to die, disappointed in her search for a non- existent total freedom. But the effect is badly spoilt by some ham-handed gracious living and heavily 'stoical' dialogue.
The House on Coliseutv Street is a slight, Saganesque sketch of an affair in New Orleans and its repercussions in a household of women, a mother and her five daughters by five different husbands. The steamy heat of the city is nothing to the emotional temperature of this family, and it is hard not to feel that Miss Grau has loaded the dice heavily in her own favour by construct- ing this setpiece of communal isolation, or that she might use the machinery for a more startling or eventful plot. But she writes with great clarity and distinction, avoiding the cracker- motto aphorisms which usually decorate this sort of novel ('she had hardly learnt, yet, that one's first lover is always, in a sense, one's last') and displays a quiet maturity of style.
Respect for reputation, rather than sheer pleasure, kept me battling on through Pantaloon. Mr. Toynbee is as eager as he was in Tea with Mrs. Goodman to create a new form (an occupa- tional disease to which critics are particularly subject) and therefore works some very ordinary childhood recollections, supposedly those of an aristocratic old man at the end of this century, into vers libre of Mr. Toynbee's own epoch: it reads rather as if Browning at the age of 140 were trying to parody these youngsters Sitwell and Eliot. The result is indeed as dull and dis- cursive as an old man's conversation, and although there are some genuinely striking lines scattered through it, the ratio of currants to pudding is deplorably low.
As for Mr. Uris, I wish his enormous capacity for work, his passion for factual information and his blazing moral fervour could be canalised into writing genuine history, rather than history thinly exemplified in representative stereotypes with college-boy sex-lives for human interest. His style is admittedly unacademic ('The Jesuits, of Posen and Krakow triggered Middle Age riots against the Jews, persisting in the spread- ing of lies about ritual murder-libels'), but not notably worse than most historians', and it would save one the trouble of skipping half the book to extract the genuinely gripping and heroic story of Warsaw's ghetto. But I suppose no one would buy the film rights.
FRANCIS HOPE
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