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Peter Ackroyd

Resurrection William Gerhardie (Macdonald £2.95)

The Roaring Queen Wyndham Lewis (Secker and Warburg £2.10) The English novelist's home has always been his typescript, and his bored but eager-to please expression at interminable London parties. In these days of ' new' and newer writing, this may seem an anachronistic com ment but I was prompted to it by the revival ist air with which these two novels have been greeted. Both were written in the 'thirties, but this is not important. It is, in fact, remarkable that novels which draw upon the same milieu should be so completely estranged in spirit and in form. William Gerhardie has enjoyed one of those reputations which is more fashionable the less he is read; now that Mac donalds are relentlessly bringing his collected works into the light, we can expect a decline of interest. Wyndham Lewis's novel has been

similarly buried, but not so much by fashion as by fear of libel. The Roaring Queen (which think should be ' quean,' by the by) does not, as the title suggests, rely upon the undertone.

The period similarities are there, of course. Resurrection centres around a society ball, and The Roaring Queen around a society

weekend, The ' characters,' those card board creations of the vulgar mind can be loosely described as literary gents in both cases. The resemblance ends there. For the purposes of satire, Lewis narrows his scope while, for the purposes of resurrection,' Gerhardie widens his. For Gerhardie's is the more ethereal writing. His novel is on the theme of his personal transmogrification: one twilight, Gerhardie's spirit leaves his body for a short period and wanders. The rest of the narrative is devoted to Gerhardie's explanations and adventures at a ball.

Perhaps this is reason why the mysticism, and indeed the whole tone of the book, is overwrought and highly mannered. I do not mean this pejoratively. Mr Gerhardie is one of that declining number of English men-of letters, His prose has that ease and politeness which has seen better days. Gerhardie sees no harm in rambling from topic to topic, place to place, and in fact he positively delights in it. Disunity is the only constant thing in the book. It is unpretentious writing, but it is loose writing. But Gethardie has that other gift of the old style, a vein of self-mockery and an exact social humour. Others of his

books — My Wife's the Least of It being the most recently republished — are conceived wholly in terms of satire. But in Resurrection the jokes are an occasional thing, since I suppose that Gerhardie is on to more serious business.

For the novel is very literary, and literariness is its theme. The book is about itself in what I suppose was the modern way in the 'thirties, but the style isn't so much James Joyce as P. G. Wodeho use. Jokes are made at the expense of Gerhardie's bumbling efforts to write the book we are reading: in more enlightened circles than my own, this is called the technique of the meta-novel. Not very English, of course, and Gerhardie adds a native confusion and helplessness. Real portions of autobiography appear in the supposedly

fictional narrative; others of Gerhardie's novels are discussed; Resurrection is planned and discarded; actual literary figures are discussed. A veritable jungle of allusions. And it

turns out, to nobody's surprise, that the astral escape of Gerhardie's better half is some kind of symbol for the act of writing. As Gerhardie says to his equally astral companion, Bonzo, on one of their trips," this new life of ours is literature."

I can picture the reaction of Wyndham Lewis to this epiphany of the bellettrist. The Roaring Queen punctures all of that hocuspocus. It is set at a country house, and reports the gaudy not to say gory happenings that attend the venue of Samuel Shodbutt, Rhoda Hyman, Donald Butterboy and Baby Bucktrout. To name but a few. And perhaps I should make it clear (while following the excellent introduction of Walter Allen's to this secret history) that these are, in order, Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf, Brian Howard and Nancy Cunard. This is not so good a satire that its personae will outlive their human models. But it is good enough to set any literary set to shame. And whatever happened to Virginia Woolf? Lewis at least makes her interesting, as a mixture of plagiarist and bitch, instead of the hysterical bore which her acolytes have inadvertently created.

Lewis was not literary. The prose of Gerhardie is soft and loose, but that of Lewis has a hardness of edge which matches the satire. Let me quote a passage of Samuel Shodbutt's diatribe to his wife, on a new discovery for the Book Of The Week club:

"A fine book that — a deep book! — a deep thing. Depth — depth!" Samuel half closed his crossly-drowsy eyes, and every inch the holiday-watercolourist limned the air with two fat pontifical fingers, above depth at which the Mind grew dizzy — the chiaroscuro as it were of the mysterious depths of genius.

"A deep book, Joanie, a deep book!"

The description fastens upon the gesture and the detail; the humbug is caught fullface. And the whole of this satire has this attention to manners and men, with a closeness that discards any very large achievement, but with a strength that does not preclude one. Gerhardie is trying to make some kind of statement about 'literature,' and Lewis sees literature 'for what it is. A farce and a gimmick, with its serious novelists' and its' important critics.' It is for this reason that Lewis is the better writer. He was not fooled by what passes as 'depth,' and was thus able to sense the real thing. William Gerhardie is more absorbed in conventional estimations of what is good and what is not. He was too much part of the literary scene, which he satirises with so much more politeness than Lewis, Life continually escapes Gerhardie because he is looking for it too hard, while Lewis kept to his prose.