BOOKS
The New Pastoral-Comical
By D. J. ENRIGHT
RECOMMEND the book firmly to everybody who wants to be shocked,' said a reviewer on the first publication of Scenes from Provincial Life. The book has now been reissued by Penguin.* Its hero is Joe Lunn, who is emphati- cally heterosexual. Joe has a friend, Tom, who is less emphatically homosexual, and a girl- friend called Myrtle who is heterosexual. The scenery is provincial, and the scenes mostly take place in bed or just before or just after. For Joe is spending a lot of time and energy in obtaining sex and evading marriage. It is not that he is immoral. 'Anyone who thinks behav- ing like a cad was easy is wrong.' Indeed, 'feel- ing myself not to have been born a good man, I often sought to try and behave like one.' This sort of moral velleity is something we have grown accustomed to in recent 'provincial' fic- tion: it serves to keep the reader's sympathy with the hero while enabling the hero to pursue with zeal a course of action which will keep the reader's attention. Between jumping in and out of bed, Joe occasionally scratches his head wor- riedly—an endearing gesture!
Another familiar element is the debunking of cultural objects. 'As you grow older, Steve, you'll realise that love is inseparable from suf- fering. . . . Myrtle once made me go to Stratford-on-Avon to see A Comedy of Errors.' As the example suggests, Mr. Cooper does all this very, well. He doesn't snarl or sneer, he is often extremely funny, he doesn't break butter- flies on wheels or stick out a furry tongue at the great composers. Though I wonder if he doesn't overdo the innuendoes--like the rather gross joke about Tom's boy-friend's aptitude for the Merchant Navy, perhaps out of unnecessary anxiety lest the moral velleities should disturb the book's delicate balance.
In its way, Scenes from Provincial Life is very near perfect--until it starts to take another way, and Mr. Cooper tries to persuade us that he is talking about real people and real life. Myrtle, it turns out, is really in real love with Joe. It is not merely that she wants to marry him: obvi- ously the plot demands that someone should want to marry him, so that he can enact his role as a man who does not want to get married. But Myrtle, it seems (and despite her name), actually loves him. So we have several pages of emotions. 'Fear and shame suddenly rose up in me. . . ."She burst into tears.' Do not think I was not caught in the throes of self-reproach and remorse. I was . . . Everything that was causing her pain was my fault. I tortured myself - -because I would not give in.' Now, either the . fear, shame, tears and torture shouldn't be in the novel, or else the rest of the novel shouldn't be there, neither what goes before nor what comes after. The spell has been broken and can- not be convincingly reimposed. Mr. Cooper has presented us with choice scenes from a Pro- vincial Dream Life—an up-to-date version of the Pastoral, with Joe s for shepherds and Myrtles *SCENES FROM PROVINCIAL 'LIFE. By William Cooper. (Penguin Books, 3s, 6d.)
as shepherdesses, with the Odeon and the Dog and Duck and alternate weekends at a cottage in the country as the rest of the paraphernalia. And with sex instead of poesy, of course. Nice, healthy, enjoyable sex. There is no place in this convention for fear and shame, any more than for real people or for real sex, which is not always nice, doubtfully healthy, and not exactly (at least, it's not the mot hate) enjoyable. I may be wrong about this: Sir Charles Snow has described the book as 'always true.' I can recog- nise that Mr. Cooper is an expert light cook who whips up a marvellously frothy cheese-cake; and that Scenes from Provincial Life is a neatly written, nicely naughty book, and so a rare if artificial bird.
Mr. Cooper's latest novelf takes up the story of Joe ten years later. It opens with him on a bus, accompanied by 'an unusually pretty girl.' `P.S.A.,' she murmurs. 'What on earth does P.S.A. stand for?' he asks. (Provincials ought to know that.) Sybil answers, 'Pleasant Sunday Afternoon.' I burst into laughter. It was appre- ciative laughter. Just before getting on to this bus, Sybil and I had been in bed together. My appreciation was enormous.' We gather that Joe has slept with Sybil, 'off and on,' for fifteen years. Marriage hasn't reared its ugly neck, and he tells us that he still hasn't 'the faintest idea what moved her immortal soul, what made her tick.' Theirs would seem to have been an incredibly specialised relationship; and Joe must be—well, less than typical—if he has managed to sleep with a woman over fifteen years (even though 'off and on') without marrying her, or some- thing. Sybil, too. 'Double, double,' muses Joe at one point, 'We are all double.' Mr. Cooper's characters are hardly even single.
Clearly a second novel can't be made out of Joe's non-marrying proclivities. He can't seem to make much of a life out of them himself. So he meets a pretty girl at a party, and thinks (almost at first sight): 'This one's the right one for me.' She is, too. Joe is the son of a Methodist minister, Elspeth (an advance in respectability on Myrtle) is the daughter of a council teacher, so there is little danger of hypergamy setting in. Incidentally, pre-war Joe was a teacher—I take it there is no shortage of teachers now that we know how they live—but he has become a tem- porary civil servant engaged in interviewing scientists and engineers. And the best parts of this novel concern his job: just as the most con- vincing parts of Sir Charles Snow's novels generally have to do with the life professional and not the life private. 'Documentary' is per- haps an apter way of describing the virtues of the new 'realism' in fiction than is 'realistic.' The documents are quite fascinating; but once they are filed away and the office door swings to, we are back in the old, old story, either the old 'human drama' or what one of Kingsley Arnis's characters calls 'the old nonsense' and another 'the old hoo-ha.' As before, Joe is also a novelist, and in the course of Scenes from Married Life, in
t SCENES FROM MARRIED LIFE. (Macmillan. 16s.) what seems to be 1950, he publishes a novel which a friend describes as 'probably the most original book to come out since the war. And it may well be the progenitor of a whole series of similar books.' Scenes from Provincial Life came out in 1950 and—to quote the Penguin cover—`was to be the immediate forerunner of Lucky Jim, of a new school of young writers, and of a new attitude towards life.' (It's com- mon practice for the novelist to write the blurb, but this seems to be a case of the blurb-writer writing the novel!) Joe's following novel threatens to get into trouble with the Home Office, and the incident ought to be amusing (the lawyer suggests that the letter T should be fol- lowed by four or five asterisks instead of three), but is a sad anti-climax after the Lady Chatterley campaign. Joe, it would appear, lacks Mr. Cooper's light touch. Mr. Cooper doesn't use nasty words.
But to get back to the life private, the life married. This starts half-way through the book, not a third as the blurb implies. Which is just as well, for Joe goes in for marriage as whole- heartedly as he used to go in for avoiding it. And somehow Mr. Cooper's smooth technique for handling bedroom scenes doesn't suit the marriage bed as well as it suited the bed of sin. Joe is very happy, and so is Elspeth. 'My darling, I love you. I shall always love you. You're my wife. I wouldn't have it any dif- ferent. . . . I couldn't imagine it any different.' This is unexceptionable. No doubt it is also very true to life. But it is rather boring to read about. The couple then have a baby (another thing Joe used to be anxious to avoid), and Joe realises that he is 'in possession of the most important piece of knowledge, which seemed to energise my whole being with light and warmth. . . . I could have seen it written in stars across the night sky. . . . You want to know what it was? It was: MARRIED LIFE IS WONDERFUL.' We leave him reflecting that he has got a wife, he has got a baby, and now he had better get a house. 'Well, so be it.'
In reading Mr. Cooper one misses the malice, the savagery, with which Mr. Amis treats most of his characters and most of their environment. Though when one turns to his recent Take a Girl Like You—the story of another Joe—one wishes one could miss a good deal of it. Such as the cricket eleven of 'bad men,' with Beet- hoven down as twelfth man. Mr. Amis would be a master of the sneer if the sneer weren't master of him. Take a Girl Like You has a discernibly Arthur Marshall-type heroine, daughter of a hearse-driver, who is not so far removed from Joe's chintzy Elspeth as she is meant to be. The hero is a teacher who considers marriage a 'huge historical bloody confidence- trick,' makes great efforts to persuade Jenny into bed, finally rapes her when she is drunk (cf. Clarissa Harlowe), and then is ready to marry her. He, too, suffers moral velleities—`Trying not to be a bad man took up far more energy than he could, or was prepared to, spare from trying not to be a nasty man, a far more pressing task' --and they are certainly more convincing than Joe's. Partly, I think, because Standish does im- press us as being less than wholly gratified with himself, and partly because most of the other characters are so enormously awful in one way or another, and chiefly in one. Mr. Amis has few compunctions and nothing of Mr. Cooper's gentility. Unlike Mr. Cooper, he uses peculiarly nasty words—one knows they are nasty even if one hasn't met them before. Lightness of touch is hardly his forte. Obviously his work doesn't belong to the latter-day 'Dream World' conven- tion. It belongs to the allied convention of the
Nightmare World, the kind of nightmare in Which the nice headmaster's daughter turns sud- denly into a juvenile nymphomaniac. Novels, we know, are meant to be art and not life; in any case life, we know, isn't all sweetness and light. But one has to stress that Mr. Amis's work is Part of this Provincial Dream World game since it appears to be felt in sonic quarters that these novels have a more direct, more significant con- nection with the realities of contemporary life than is the case, that Mr. Amis is telling some important universal truths rather than exposing some comparatively minor lies—and making Oddly heavy and ambiguous weather over that.
Take a Girl Like You ends, 'But I can't help feeling it's rather a pity.' Scenes from Married Life ends with the words, 'Well, so be it.' The latter novel can be said to point a moral, a moral moral, if a rather blunted one. But essen- tially it is as cosy as Scenes from Provincial Life, Just as much in the new tradition of 'pastoral.' The shepherd marries the shepherdess, they go to live in Shepherd's Bush, produce lots of sheep, and live sheepishly ever after. The Norm has Prevailed in the end, and all the people who were cosily shocked by the earlier novel will be cosily comforted by the later one.
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