Ever Interesting Topic
A Girl I Knew. By Axel Jensen. (Deutsch, 16s.)
ONE of the gravest problems confronting twen- tieth-century man, as he is laughingly called, is whether there is too much sex in literature or too much literature in sex. (When I consider the quantity of printed matter that the youngsters will have to plough through before they get round to propagating I have fears for the future of the race.) Mr. C. L. Jubb, of Chapel Langtry New Town, is very neatly trapped between theory and practice. Jubb is looking for a mistress, or more particularly a nymphomaniac. He is in essence a literary man, widely read among the more bravura paperbacks, and he has a soul full of hope.
There must be nymphomaniacs in the world. They do exist, they're not made up. They don't belong in the world of mythology. Why do you think people write about them? . . . I am not talking about trash now, I am talking about well-informed authors.
Jubb is what the newspapers call a sex maniac, and like most sex maniacs he is impotent. Called upon to perform, he backs away. A woman as lonely as himself offers him an hour and a half in a caravan, and he refuses; a prostitute whom he has followed through Soho offers him a few minutes for £2 10s., and he refuses; he has been looking all his life for sex and for love and he has consistently refused every offer. He spends his days writing obscene letters, making obscene telephone calls, peeping through windows and looking in vain for a woman he refused twenty years before. He is frequently laughable and always pitiful. Mr. Waterhouse writes with an understanding that the Jubbs of this world prob- ably never receive; he has caught the tone of that infantile fantasy upon which the public sex machine has been raised, and if Jubb is a painful book to read, that is because it is deadly accurate.
Mr. Blechman has written a very good book on the themes of New York and money. The Halpern family is going mad en masse. The father engages in suspicious business deals in order to find enough cash for his wife to pay her psychiatrist and for his son to destroy his mind with 'hobbies' The fine, frantic note of panic is sounded when the widowed grand- mother comes to stay. The family murder her by degrees, stealing her few possessions and undermining a will that was to begin with almost non-existent, finally delivering her to the sadistic care of one of those horrible nursing homes that fill New York's upper West Side. Nursing homes cost money, however, and the cries for cash become more insistent with every page. The book rises to a terrible crescendo of rented Cadillacs, surrealistic telephone conver- sations, insane shopping sprees and the grand- mother dying in an agony of loneliness. The book breathes of the money-fever that infects New York down to its granite foundations. Mr. Blechman writes in an appropriately vicious style - that is not at all weakened by the inclusion of three short, bad poems and a silly fore-piece.
Like Jubb, Tom McKinley of All Men Are Mariners is by sex obsessed, but, unlike the poor suburban fish, Tom always succeeds. And when 1 say always, I mean always. The woman he can't get is the woman he hasn't met, and the woman he can't satisfy hasn't been born. Old Tom is Frank Harris and Rock Hudson rolled into one, with knobs on, and he knows it. But don't think that Old Tom is only another Casanova. Just because a man happens to be Copenhagen's dreamboat doesn't mean he can't talk, not to say think, about what Old Tom would probably call the eternal verities. And he can suffer as well as the next man. (At one point he spends two weeks—two whole weeks—without having a woman.) So anyway, he's in Copenhagen and he goes to bed with his friend's fiancée (who is married already) and of course he feels dreadful about the whole thing. Another young lady is jealous and lets out the secret and then every- body feels dreadful. Obscure moral issues keep sliding about in this book, but I can never quite make them out; Tom isn't too clear about them himself, but he puts in a little prayer at the end, and that might help. The sad part of it all is that Mr. Kentfield can write pretty well; I know he can do better than this.
It appears that sex has come to Scandinavia along with Gerry Mulligan and hip talk. Jacob, the hero of Mr. Jensen's book, is a moderately sane but mixed-up kid who is hanging around Norway because he is in love with a beautiful girl. As you may have guessed. they spend a good deal of their time in bed, and when they are not in bed they are drinking or sailing or playing records or fighting, just the way we did when I was a kid. The situation is tense at the start, and it gets tenser and tenser until they have a real fight, when Jacob busts up the living- room, breaking glasses and trying to kill Carrie. He doesn't succeed, but there is blood all over the place. I had thought they were either bored, or trying to enjoy themselves, or both, but as usual the cause is the general moral decline, for Norwegian society, like many another, is full of false values. The publishers claim that this book 'speaks the international language of the restless young.' What won't the blurb-writers think up next?
The Night of the Generals pivots on a par- ticularly horrible crime committed in Warsaw during the last war, and if you are thinking that 1, is a sex crime, you are right. It is a sex crime.
Mr. Kirst is mildly clinical about the dastardly deed. German generals are involved, and the book settles down to a detective story a Jet Simenon, with the generals' plot to kill Hitler thrown in as a spice There is some fairly funny satire of intelligence and counter-intelligence net- works in Occupied Paris, and General Tanz's efforts at cultural uplift are diverting in a heavy- handed way. If you like sex, there is some hanky- panky between a lance-corporal and a general's daughter, and if you like fatherly French detec- tives, there is a fatherly Frztich detective who knows all about good wine and good food, and who alleges that 'As long as we policemen stick together there's still hope for mankind.' God help us.
Mr. Linklater's book is something of an anomaly among modern novels, because there is a man in it who has no sex problems. Do you know why? He had the mumps, that's why. This man is secretary to a big television personality named Balintore. Balintore never had the mumps, but he has many, many problems. You could read all through A Man Over Forty ,to find out why he has these problems, but I ,am going to save you the trouble. Balintore's problems all stem from the fact that he happened to have mur- dered his foster-mother, which is about the sexiest thing I've ever heard of. Oddly enough, Balin- tore can't remember committing this crime until Chapter 22, when an old friend jogs his memory. Balintore then decides to enter a monastery on Mount Athos and expiate his sin. Under the circumstances, it's the only decent thing to do.
Whenever I come across a heroine whose name is Rosacoke Mustian I drink two quarts of neat gin as fast as I can and rush out to visit my aunt Idabelle Ticklepaugh. Aunt Idabelle stands six feet eight inches tall in her bare feet and weighs 325 pounds dripping wet, a hawg- caller by trade and the dirtiest woman east of the Natchez Trace, but she has two things in her favour; she has never read a Southern story, and she has never written one. Aunt Idabelle is just plain folks. Mr. Reynolds Price, on the other hand, is too exquisite for words. Mr. Price has perpetrated seven stories so crammed full, of sen- sitivity, sensibility, symbolism and God that even Aunt Idabelle isn't crass enough for antidote. Mr. Price is a beautiful writer, as they say down to the Literary Society; beautiful writing in this case is a mixture of weary Faulknerisms and the worst of Eudora Welty From brave old Negro family retainers to Baby Sister (sic) sleeping by Papa's deathbed, Mr. Price pursues his languorous way, and while the old ladies and the angel chillun clap their hands and call it art, I say it's pabulum, and I say the hell with it.
• PETER COHEN
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