BIOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL
Big Sur and Elsewhere
HENRY MILLER'S Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (Heinemann, 30s.), ostensibly describing his life in a Californian Paradise, is pre- ceded by the chaste announcement that 'deletions from the original text have been imposed in con- formation to the law. . . .' There remain miles of talk in which he describes his 'Millennium,' his children, neighbours, visitors and, in vast energetic digressions, his frantic convictions and remini- scences. The sudden expression on a child's face will send him back sixty years. His book, a teem- ing chunk of life, is packed with mountebanks and saints, profundity and rant, astrological wisdom, holy-fool philosophy, buffoonery and rhapsody. Paddling nuns resemble 'old demented haddocks trained to stand upright.' His descriptions range from that of a bogus Indian which would fit into a high-class revue to a full-scale set-piece about the formidable, ego-sucking Conrad Moricand, almost a match for Miller himself, 'incapable of understanding why he of all men should be singled out for punishment,' a classic situation simultan- eously comic and tragic. Bombarding the pom- pous world of committees, generals, time-servers and the shoddy-respectable, pillaging scores of old notebooks, Miller, with his obsession with human beings, can vitalise the meanest sponger. Despite its sprawl, his book is a live kick at commonplace 'reality,' a literal labour of love.
'We strangely lack any assessment of the 1902 Education Act which did more than any other to change the lives of ordinary people.' H. M. Bur- ton's There Was a Young Man (Bles, 15s.) attempts to remedy this, recounting his own progress through State education to the worlds of teaching and journalism. With blessed simplicity he re- creates the schools, back streets and humble households of fifty years ago in an atmosphere that mingles the middle H. G. Wells with Talbot Baines Read. His early, more personal chapters are the best. Later, he falls into more platitudinous discussions of education and the class-structure, 'Undergraduates are callow. . . .' A tolerant man, he rightly deplores those 'who had mistaken a faint pulse-beat in their power-complexes for an urge to serve the community.'
Tolerance alone links this world with that of Humphrey Pakington's Bid Time Return (Chatto and Windus, 21s.). Not for young Mr. Burton the cricket in the orchard, the reference to Horace Walpole, the dinner with the C-in-C, the cosy anecdotes of bishops. These genial recollections of a popular novelist and naval officer in two world wars suggest no inner compulsion whatso- ever : they will please his admirers but surely not add to them. The prose is effortless, all too much so. The blurb mentions Mr. Pakington's 'keen sense of comedy and a warm affection for the delights and denizens of the English countryside.' 'Denizens' somehow seems appropriate!
Tolerance would have served Miss Bennett (Louie Bennett, by R. M. Fox : Talbot Press, 7s. 6d.) less well. Rejecting a life of leisure for militant social service she founded, against odds, the first Irish Women's Union, and Irish readers in particular will applaud this tribute to a remark- able fighter. Another unusual woman is presented in E. M. Almedingen's Life of Many Colours (Hutchinson, 21s.), a biography of her grand- mother, Ellen Southee. Miss Southee's fortunes took her to Russia, France and Germany with an assortment of eccentricities, confusions, disasters, none of which overwhelmed her indomitable zestfulness. Her granddaughter pleasantly evokes that lost atmosphere of vast estates, bombed Emperors and servant-friends talking their affec- tionate blank-verse.
The French Prisoner, by Louis Garneray (Merlin Press, 18s.) is a newly translated autobiographical account of the British hulks during the Napoleonic Wars. The record is shock- ing but not dispiriting. Men not only hated, went mad, became demoralised by squalor, cruelty, incessant gambling, but studied crafts, painted, acquired literacy. The very survival of the author's elemental gusto distinguishes between eighteenth-century brutality and twentieth-century evil, between a lively narrative and a pathological file. PETER VANSITTART
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