A Sort of Vortex
Miss Macintosh, My Darling. By Marguerite Young. (Peter Owen, 63s.) Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx. By Piers Paul Read. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 21s.)
No two approaches to the novel could be more different than those of Miss Marguerite Young and Miss Shirley Hazzard. Miss Young devotes nearly twelve hundred closely-printed pages to the romantic afflatus, the Gothic imagination, the American hunger for myth; Miss Hazzard contents herself with no more than a hundred and fifty knowing that these will be quite sufficient for the deployment of a brief bitter-sweet love- affair in a spirit of classic restraint.
Miss Young comes to us with storm-signals flashing and amongst a roll of publisher's thunder: university teacher of creative writing, seventeen years of dedication to the one book, initial approval by Maxwell Perkins (the man who cut Thomas Wolfe from enormity to mere excessiveness), pre-publication of extracts in Botteghe Os-cure (that elegant graveyard of the avant-garde), grants and fellowships galore, and at one dreadful moment seven suitcases of prose gone astray (in Paris, of course) to be recovered .later by seven men from Cook's with seven wheelbarrows. The conclusion is obvious: at best a masterpiece, the Great American Novel at last; or, if not quite that, then indubitably highbrow, high-thinking, intense. 'A bit of a
bore?' will the naughty reflex of some readers, for clearly—with the Guggenheim and the Rockefeller, etc.—Anthony Adverse and Peyton Place are out. A bit of an oddity, anyway, follow- ing the well-worn tradition that a serious Ameri- can writer, not just a Sinclair Lewis or Don Passos, I mean, never quite gets down to writing about his country as it is but goes off to an allegorical sea with Melville or a Mississippi Eden with Twain, pops over to Europe or finds a distant revolution or war. Except for Southerners, of course. They are rooted and very expressively they rot.
Let me admit at once that Miss Macintosh. My Darling is a brave and often beautifully written book. Its method, though, seems to me to have great dangers. At relentless length it sets out to do in poetic prose what poetry proper usually accomplishes with stunning abruptness. Its sentences are circular, encompassing, potentially hypnotic—this extends to the chapters, to the structure as a whole; each phrase is balanced by further parallel phrases, each substantive requires another and another until extravagance (some- times mantic, sometimes self-consciously literary) takes over and rhythm, or energy, becomes as important as sense. The effect is of a sort of vortex; whirled ceaselessly round, the reader is comforted only by repeated images and symbols or by exceedingly slow accumulations of fact. This repetition serves to emphasise some limita- tions in the imaginative range (the New England house-by-the-sea is pretty near to Poe or even Cocteau) while in page after page one finds image-streams including fog, cloud, moth, sea- shell, birds, wave, star.
More generally, does the past have to be so grotesquely fungoid with hallucinations and dreams? Is human nature so unremittingly
quaint? Are reality and appearance so insuper- ably opposed? Above all, can a novel approach- ing epic—think of Homer's rich sanity or Virgil's pride of race—concern itself with case-histories however lyrical? I confess to such queries as I followed the narrator on her cosmic bus journey across Indiana and watched the cyclical evocation of opium-drugged mother (not as scary as O'Neill's), weird old Mr Spitzer who thought he was his dead twin (vintage early Capote?), tough Cousin Hannah, the suffragette, and Miss Mac- intosh herself, with her red wig and her umbrella. gauntly humorous and practical, and certainly the most successful of the characters.
There is little more to say about Shirley Hazzard's The Evening of the Holiday than that it is very good and very readable. The story of how Sophie drifts into an affair with Tancredi, a middle-aged man separated from his wife but unable, since the setting is in Italy, to get divorced, and how after a few months she decides, although still deeply in love, to stop, is an object lesson in how little a novel needs to go on about; beauti- fully poised, meticulously selective, the technique almost amounts to a con-game where our imaginations do the author's work for her. There is an agreement, a sense of shared assumptions, a tingling before the mystery that inhabits well-lit cleanly-defined places such as Greek temples, baroque parterres, the works of Jane Austen. Such things belong to classicism.
Lady Elizabeth Montagu has established a small but secure reputation as a novelist and .it is good to have her with us again. Change is, in fact, a group of short stories, modestly described in a preface as 'the scrapings of a barrel . . . the sediment of a novelist's career.' This is, I think, a characteristically honest description. The book glitters with talent and personality but, as shaped works of art, few of the stories are entirely successful. Some, having exuded atmosphere and suspense for pages, get themselves tied up with a point, a mystery, that frankly has me beat ('Castor Saint,' Change,"Madame Del Vas'). Some belong to the confessional and Salingeresque; one feels loneliness and an exacerbated moral sense pretty desperately pressing towards com- munication. 'Simon' has a lively pace and wit where 'Poor Colin' is no more than an anecdote with an implausible sting in its tail and 'The Defaulter' reads like a contribution to a very good school magazine in the 1930s. What emerges most strongly is Elizabeth Montagu's refusal to be the 'sensitive' woman writer. I enjoy her slangy American way with the world, especially when her voice silences Saint Salinger's.
Finally, two fantasies, both bright, curiously old-fashioned and relatively pointless. Gavin Lambert's Norman's Letter inevitably invites the comment of deja vu. since it concerns a rich, shy, masochistic, homosexual baronet in the 1930s who has picaresque adventures and retreats to an Arabian palace in New Mexico where he culti- vates an Egyptian alter ego of a muse—the imaginary poetess Oum Salem—before a sleazy death, beaten up but beatific, as the result of an encounter in a waterfront bar which is prompted by his peculiar but ultimately permissive mum, Lady Dorothy. The episode of his lesbian sister's joining the Nazis is, by the way, pure corn. Mr Read's Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx is a verbal exercise, commented upon in heaven. about a revolutionary who attempts to corrupt the bourgeosie and ends by himself being cor- rupted. There is some talented writing here but, what with stock duchesses and scenes from Country Life, little sense that 1966 is anywhere in the offing.
PATRICK ANDERSON
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