Gentle malice
A. N. Wilson
The Bridge at Arta and Other Stories J. I. M. Stewart (Gollancz pp. 182, £.6.95)
4 "Did you ever hear such a ridiculous name as Bounce?" Pillman might have said, "Well, yes", again, but felt it wouldn't be tactful. Instead, he resolved to get on "Diana" terms as quickly as possible. It was a pity, he thought, that her father was a mere baron and not an earl. Otherwise he could have started in on "Lady Diana" straight away.'
With Debrett to hand, what storyteller needs a muse? And when we read of a librarian called Bounce, or of a lower-class English don called Pillman on the track of the poems of Shenstone, through whose brain the author forces to pass such quaint ly hierarchical musings, it could only be one author. Opening a new volume by J. I. M. Stewart always provides one with the reassuring impression that art stopped short somewhere during the leisurely reign of George V. It is like coming off the busy squalor of Piccadilly and pushing back the door of some fusty old London'club, where the leather armchairs and the thick Turkey carpets and the dull tick of the old clock seem to belie the existence of the modern world. This new collection of short stories is as polished and solid as an old mahogany table.
'The Time-Bomb' the tale from which I have just quoted, is set in a provincial university in the 1930s. Pillman shares rooms with a Wykehamist called Francis Gethin (Franco to him). They enjoy drinking Burgundy and playing golf together. They even have the occasional goodhumoured wrestling-match until it turns out that Franco's interest in his handsome lower-class friend is rather too amorous. (Perhaps it had been no more than a startling instance of the hung-up state these public school chaps were liable to for a time'). Franco is all right. One day he will be a Viscount, and he pretty quickly becomes a don at Cambridge. But Pillman has to make his own way in the world. It is lucky for him that he captures the heart of Diana (even though she is merely the Hon. Miss Eatwell) who gives him a copy of David Hartley's Observations on Man which had belonged to Wordsworth. This turns out to be a great literary 'find', for it has all the poet's annotations and marginalia, of prime importance to a study of The Prelude. Thinking Diana has pinched the book from her father's library, Pillman goes off to France, where he pretends to have discovered the book in a shop in Blois. The 'discovery' makes his career and he becomes a professor at the age of 30. Meanwhile, though, Diana, who looks so like her twin brother on whom Franco had a crush at school, has married the Viscount. The pleasure of the tale consists not in its being credible (which it never is for a moment) but in the skill of the plotting, and in its invariably bland, urbane construction. Mr Stewart is a perfect craftsman.
Equally fantastic, but no less enjoyable, is 'A Reading in Trollope', in which Sir Bernard Balmayne and his wife are rather troubled by the fact that they know nothing about Mr Roland Redpath who is courting their daughter Claribel. Their fears are increased by reading Trollope's Prime Minister, at the opening of which 'no one knows anything about' Ferdinand Lopez, the sinister Portuguese Jew so much favoured by the Duchess of Omnium. 'It is certainly of service to a man to know who were his grandfathers and who were his grandmothers if he entertain an ambition to move in the upper circles of society', Trollope remarks, and Sir Bernard, being a creation of Mr Stewart's, agrees with him. As it turns out, Mr Redpath's secret is a ludicrous one. He is the son of Sir Bernard's father's butler. George Bernard Shaw could just about extract shock value out of this kind of social contrast when he wrote You Never Can Tell. But the vanishing of butlers from the face of the earth, a disappearance as absolute as that of Tolkien's grey elves, does nothing to cramp Mr Stewart's style. The tale is beautifully finished. The butler, as it turned out, had been sacked for pinching the silver. But Sir Bernard is inclined to turn a blind eye to this fact when he discovers that his father pretended to have lost more of the silver than was actually stolen in order to get money out of the Insurance Company.
Being one of the most accomplished authors of detective stories in our language, Mr Stewart has no difficulty in concocting improbable and exciting twists of plot whenever he picks up his pen. His delight in Henry James has never prompted him to imitate the Master's curiosity about the puzzling enigmas of human character. His medium is deft caricature, and the division between Michael Innes and J. I. M. Stewart, has, over the years, become so slight as to be inconsiderable. He does not provoke helpless laughter, like P. G. Wodehouse; something more of a chortle, a fruity, slightly donnish smirk is what his stories aim to produce. But like Wodehouse, the world he has created is entirely self-sufficient. The plots hang on lost art treasures, academic jiggery-pokery, macabre twists of fortune in colleges and country houses. And our pleasure in them is neither diminished nor increased by their complete lack of resemblance to anything which any of us would ever have called the real world. The snobbery, for example, of the Stewart world is totally innocent and fantastical. No one here speaks, in Anthony Powell's faintly creepy phrase of 'breaking new ground'. The hierarchy remains as untouchable as that which supports Lord Emsworth. The clever, good-looking plebs go on being plebs. However attractive they may be to males or females of the upper crust, they are happy, on the whole, to leave it that way.
Not that all his stories concern these social divisions, of course. Nor are they all about dons. The opening tale, 'The Bridge at Arta' is a good example of that other ingredient in the Stewart recipe which one could only describe paradoxically as gentle malice. Lady Cameron, on a Greek cruise finds herself face to face with the man who had been her husband 50 years before. He fails to recognise her. Since he is the 'bore' of the party, she reflects on how happy she is to have lived so much of her life without him. But the pleasing twist comes when he confides in her that he once had a terrible wife, who 'never stopped chattering at me'. In almost any other writer's hands, we would be left wondering whether Charles Hornett really failed to recognised his spouse when he delivered this insulting opinion. But not here. Such moral ambiguities are not to Mr Stewart's purpose. He aims only to give pleasure, and he triumphantly succeeds.
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