Semi-fiction
Francis King
The Case of Mr Crump Ludwig LewlSobn (Allen Lane £5.95) The publishing of Ludwig Lewisohn's The Case of Mr Crump is quite as eventful and curious as that of either Lolita or U/ysses. Plainly autobiographical in inspiration, if not wholly in substance, it was written in the mid-Twenties but could not then be Published in the United States for reasons of libel. Edward Titus, a rich American who crops up as a footnote in memoirs and biographies of expatriate writers in Paris between the wars, then came to the rescue and issued the book in a limited edition, copies of which, inevitably, found their waY across the Atlantic. Translations also appeared. In 1947 —anyone who might have been identified and taken exception by then being dead— the book was at last brought out in America. Subsequently, the New Arnerican Library managed to sell more than a million copies of an abbreviated version under the title The Tyranny of Sex. Surprising? Not at all. With that title, a publisher might even manage to break even with a novel by — well never mind. If Somerset Maugham had not alreadY preempted it, a title less off-putting than 'The Case of Mr Crump', less sensational than 'The Tyranny of Sex' and more appropriate than either would have been 'Of Human Bondage'. The hero is a composer uf German origins, called Crump; and if that name, originally Krumpf, strikes the reader. as vaguely comic, then he should remina himself that there is a highly respected coalposer called Crumb at work today. CruirIP, an indulged only child, is brought up in a German-American community of admit.' able, if narrow, rectitude, in South Carolina — where Lewisohn himself was brought UP He eventually goes to New York, to pursue his musical studies, and there meets and falls in love with an ambitious young singer. TheY have an affair but she, though she recir rocates his feelings, has no intention of marrying a penniless youth, who can do nothing to further her career as a would-be star of musical comedy. Crump then falls in with a married woman, Anne, much older than himself, succumbs to what he at first sees as her wistful pathos, and in no time at all finds himself ineluctably involved in a divorce-case and then obliged to shoulder responsibility not merely for the aging vixell but for her three ghastly children. Anne is a monster: an individual of towering will, insatiable sexual appetite, and diabolical cunning. She runs up crippling bills, cheats and robs her husband, sets private detectives on him, insults his friends, lets dust and garbage accumulate in the home, and talks in gradiloquent terms of her vocation as a writer of mediocre verse. In depicting such a woman, with no redeeming feature, the author seems to be simultaneously paying off a deep-seated grudge and squeezing dry a deep-seated abscess. Repeatedly he reverts to her personal appearance and habits. 'She had forgotten to cut off the two hairs that grew from a mole in her chin', he records typically — just as he records revolting details of her colitis and haemorrhoids.
One can understand why Crump should have been lured into the trap of marriage to such a creature — 'very honourable and thoroughly stupid' is the verdict of his publisher — but it is less easy to understand why he not merely sticks with her but also puts up With her outrageous demands on behalf of her children, even when they have reached adulthood. For a man to abandon his wife at that period might certainly result in scandal; but a successful composer in New York (as Crump eventually becomes) would be far less vulnerable than, say, a schoolmaster or bank-tnanager in some South Carolina town. lithe worst came to the worst, he Could, after all, always retreat to his ancestral Germany. As Crump and his creator keep finding reasons for his not breaking free, one wonders if there may not be an element in his Character Of which neither is aware: masochism.
Manifestly written both to 'nail' his monstrous gaoler and to exculpate himself, Lewisohn's book certainly has both extraordinary ferocity and extraordinary pathos. The style, now languorous and limp and now gritty and graceless, is oddly reminiscent of the Lowe-Porter translations of Thomas Mann. 'She seemed to him woven of moonlight'; 'A fluid seeped into the boy's celibate Void'; 'Beauty abode where she was'; 'Herbert preened, unconsciously enough, his most seductive psychological gestures': academics and particularly American academics — of which Lewisohn was one — may be permitted to write like this; but the author of 'an incomparable masterpiece' (Freud's description) should write better. Is the book a masterpiece? On the debit Side must be placed this stylistic inadequacy, the subjectivity with which an ostensibly objective narrative is presented, and the technical blunder of revealing Anne's essential depravity in the opening section, before Cilimp has actually met her and discovered it for himself. On the credit side must be placed the ravening passion of the work. In his Preface, Thomas Mann writes of 'something stripped and naked and so terribly immediate that it seems at every moment to negate its own form from within and be ready to shatter that form.' But what is negated and Shattered is not so much the form as any Objection that the reader may voice. Lewisohn — biographer of Goethe, professor of Comparative Literature, apologist for Zionism, drama critic for the Nation— was not a great novelist; but his fictional autobiography or autobiographical fiction is certainly a great book.
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