A Fly Like Thee
The House of Five Talents. By Louis Auchin- doss. (Gollancz, 18s.) ABLE novelists do not need to work with the aid of special situations, special 'character- adhesives,' such as a ship at sea or a desert island. I have to admit that the invisible hedge which gives The Ha-ha its name does surround a mental hospital, and that a degree of madness does fashion the chief character, a girl in her twenties who broke down before she could take her finals at Oxford, and that the mental hospital does condition, up to a point, the tactics and the geography of this good novel. But The Ha-ha deals more with life than special life, it emphasises sensing, feeling and meaning more than situation.
The girl, only daughter of a possessive, con- ventional, rather timid widow, 'did not have the knack of existing'; yet the milieu observed through her experience inside and outside the ha-ha has the most extraordinary genuineness. Miss Dawson perceives and refines. Even by page twelve, when her young woman giggles a little madly at the Principal's termly tea-party for third-year students (at Somerville), one is impressed that this is going to be more than a young writer's clever university novel. One may enjoy her attitude towards 'quiet little gatherings of people of good will,' one may enjoy her economically thorough presentation of the party given by the adjusted girl from Somerville (where a haughty young man's eyelids looked 'as heavy and white as cream-cheese'), or of the good-wilier who tells the unadjusted girl that her trouble may be 'non-alignment'- she sat down on the window-seat beside me and suggested that if I could bring myself round to accepting the painful l(almost agonising, if we could really see) fad df the Incarnation, I could understand how God can see us down here in all our mess and misery— one may enjoy much else, fairly certain that pages so full of light, place and person must move, as they do, into a deeper furrow of tender- ness and seriousness.
Quoted at the beginning is Blake's Am I not a fly like thee?
Or art thou not a man like me?
The fly among the 'real' men enjoys, for a moment after all but with appalling conse- quences, a sense of 'existing powerfully.' Then, and before, and after, the novel also exists with power and with delicacy, with that kind of narrow-wristed, fine-featured, clear-eyed, also ruthless power which distinguishes the novels, poems, paintings and personalities of some women (such as Christina Rossetti or Mary Cassatt). A small power, perhaps, but it is wonder- ful enough even in a single work, and even if it is never raised, as one always hopes it will be, to a masterly sustainment.
Richard Stern's Golk is an American culture novel in which the culture satirised is more important, more actual, than the people in whom it is presented. Golk is a TV man with an 'instinct for misplaced life,' an instinct for the 'convertibility of his fellows' and for picking out failures who turn into TV triumphs. On the foundation of being such a dynamic failure himself, he develops a Candid Camera pro- gramme, on which people are exhibited (or golked) in the thwarting of their appetites or at the moment when their prizes turn to dust. He raises it to a national sensation of the networks, so ambitious, so devastating, so popular in revelation that sponsorship is withdrawn. Golk and his satellite workers (his golks) collapse to their aboriginal nothingness. Fair enough. Plenty of wit, momentum, curtness and effective- ness. But what this novel doesn't quite have, and what Golk himself doesn't quite have, is a real fictional independence. The horrifying Golk and his situation need the independence and so the authenticity which enliven the horrifying Shrike and his situation in Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts. But no. The works and the style substitute an acquired quality (the right un- academic American novels having been aca- demically studied) for the authentic vivacity. There is too much of `Golk's irises coursed back into the white.'
The other two novels are both special situation affairs, from America's fiction factory. For The Interns take a hospital, and observe several graduates in their period of hospital service, in the ward, the operating theatre, their tempta- tions (e.g., to abort), their homes. Utter life and death, and there we are : 'For crisake that's not a face, get a move on, there's no cosmetic con- sideration intra-abdominally.' Brisk and able, in a poor kind. The House of Five Talents is soft and able, in a poorer kind, a genially mundane retrospect of a Great American Fortune-curn- Clan by an elderly unmarried granddaughter— immigrant to emigrant (owing to un-American Activities) within five generations. A neat, senti- mental, sub-Galsworthian smooth-over.
GEOFFREY GRIGSON
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