First-rate Journalism
Nine Rivers from Jordan. By Denis Johnston. (Derek Verschoyle. 21s.)
WITHOUT reference to James Joyce's Ulysses this is a.difficult book to describe, but with that reference it is almost too easy, and in a dbaracteristic Joycean digression Mr. Johnston himself refers to the full and possibly excessive measure of the master's influence on his own writing. This influence results, as we might expect, in seat variety of style, such as even includes dramatised passages and whole chapters in verse, but results also, without any shirking of the master's standards of achievement, in a bold attempt to re-create a vast area of experience. The essential structure on which all depends is a personal account of the author's adventures as a BBC War Correspondent in the Middle East, Italy, France and Germany, with a trip to Yugoslvia.
The whole-hearted way in which this most gifted of Irish dramatists follows the greatest of Irish fantasists involves him in many question- able proceedings which cannot be ignored in a review claiming honesty. Ostentatious cynicism is the most obvious of the resultant blemishes: a café-gangster irreverence for all things in general, and cheap blasphemies and indecencies sue."' as Virginia Woolf finely described as "egoistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating'' in Ulysses. Yet, though the fault remains undeniable, Mr. Johnston seems here, to this reviewer at least, to have overtaken Joyce, in that the cynicism and obscenity are almost entirely and effortlessly redeemed in the course of this long record. The book makes and substantiates a great claim: we are shown here the way the British and American armies thought, felt, and acted in the culminating episodes of the Second World War, and such a way cannot be prettied and remain true, either when dealing with the rank and file or with the "higher direction," both of which the author came to know well. The reader may recapture some wartime delights, but for the most part he must face the memory of how we on the better side sought to descend to the crimes and follies of Nazism, and to imitate its dis- gusting mental state, in our effort to free the world of that evil; he must acknowledge the brutality of all occupying forces, including our own, and such horrifying absurdities of liberating statesmanship as the Morgenthau Plan and the non-fraternisation effort; and he must not wince when he finds the Nuremberg trials guyed and trounced in a dramatised verse sequence of great farcical power. The army of the West is shown fighting to victory after having lost nearly all the fine spirit of 1940. Yes, this is the end of the war as it felt like to anyone who had a place in its front line, or was "chair-borne" elsewhere. So far as literary criticism is concerned, the question really comes down to one of whether the effect has been gained at too great expense.
The man-of-the-world sneering of the journalist is very similar to the self-pitying accidie that goes with military servitude, and to paint the latter it may have been necessary to give in to the former. Only the writer can know the truth about that; the reader can only register the impression on himself. It seems to this one that the exhibitionism and snook-cocking are about eighty per cent, necessary, the remaining twenty per cent, disfiguring a fine book by indulgence of a puerile taste. Such a conclusion is possibly unjust. Mr. Johnston has evidently entered so deeply into the experiences he
delineates that he cannot at any point disengage himself and stand back.
For this reason the final result is first-rate journalism rather than a work of art. It is a report of breath-taking ingenuity and exactitude, and fortified by the virtues of the best newspaper writing. Every chapter has its story. The book never exacts more from the reader than he can give willingly because, very surprisingly, it is very neatly ordered. There are attempts on the empyrean, but the wings of great poetry which again and again carried James Joyce high beyond the reach of his critics are nowhere here. For great compensation, however, and almost as effectively at times, there is to be found here, in contrast to the master's later work, a great theme handled with strength and skill.
CHRISTOPHER SYKES
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