NEW NOVELS
Rich and rare
MAURICE CAPITANCHIK
A Very Private Life Michael Frayn (Collins 21s) Myra Breckinridge Gore Vidal (Anthony Blond 35s) Without a City Wall Melvyn Bragg (Seeker and Warburg 30s) 'I think it good plain English, without fraud, To call a spade a spade, a bawd a bawd' wrote John Taylor, the Water Poet, who, if he were living now and deluged with the millions of semi- and non-truths dressed in verbal fancy which pour from the presses each day, would probably conclude that good plain English, or any good English, are commodities which dis- appeared with plain John Bunyan, or possibly old D. H. L. Two of the books under review this week would undoubtedly confirm his opinion, but one, A Very Private Life, is a rarity among new novels, an attempt to find a lan- guage relevant to our day—Taylor would stand amazed! Myra Breckinridge is neither good nor plain, it is a black sexual parody, unreadable except by masochists, from a writer whose bale- ful intent, if serious, would be to destroy us all. As for Mr Bragg, his book makes it plain that he can't tell a spade from a bawd, if he tries.
At a time when the distinctions between the various traditional forms of writing are break- ing down—plays are `happenings,' poems are performances, fiction is loosening the grip in which the old conceptions of 'character' and `plot' once held it—the theatre is poor, the novel poorer, and poetry is poverty-stricken indeed. That is, in Britain, for on the continent there are Becket, Sarraute, Robbe Grillet and others, all of whom, by crawling out from under Dos- toievsky's Underground Man to produce short, poetic novels, point towards a new dawn in which, if it comes, a new type of literature will arise, transcending what we now know as poetry and prose, announcing a new, and miraculous, birth of form. Or perhaps that is a dream. At any rate, in this country we have at present few good writers and, as yet, only brave attempts at the no-longer-so-new vague—and, in our climate, even a brave attempt is very brave indeed.
Michael Frayn, in his parable of the horrific future, does not escape the impress which Orwell and Huxley have made upon the genre, nor does he really go beyond the area of authoritarian oppression so brilliantly illumined by Kafka, but he does something else both valuable and unique : he shows that his 'Brave New World' is really our cowardly old world, if we did but, shudderingly, know it, in a prose which is often beautiful and, almost, poetry.
The pattern in which the book is cast, a kind of Lewis Carroll's Alice in reverse, is slightly fey, but forgivable because this Wonderland of the future—in which all necessities are piped to sealed, windowless houses, in which even the luxury is delusive for the cushions are made of air, in which all ideas, sensations, images and knowledge of the outside world are television pipe dreams—is simply the fantasy-world of today. It is the fairyland of the ad-men become the daily life of man, and Mr Frayn points this by using, subtly and ironically, the language of the ad-men themselves. Thus, in the three- dimensional-television holidays that families will take together, beneath a synthetic spume blower, there will be 'weeks on a lonely shore where the sun shines all day, on and on, and the surf booms, and the fine salt spray drifts over them in the wind, riming their brown skins with white.' This is the purest holiday brochure make-believe.
Only Uncumber, a rebellious, questioning child, longs to know what the world is really like. All, except Uncumber, admire on television the beautiful topside of the detritosphere, a blanket of waste-products (reminiscent of de- tergent advertisements) from the earth's man- made satellites which darkens and dirties the earth. Uncumber, the last romantic, in a manner the reverse of Wordsworth's, is in love with the decay and 'scornful of such common- place prettinesses. She prefers to let her mind run upon the grey underside of the detritosphere, and the great waste-grounds of the earth be- low . . .' And when she actually comes face- to-face with the sea, she finds:
'It is unmistakable, of course—flat and vast and bounded by the neat horizon, just as it was on those childhood holidays. But it is not blue, as she had expected, or even green, the way she sometimes used to see it. Under the yellow sky it lies a lurid yellowish grey, shading in some places to lead, brightening in others to silver.'
The dinginess of reality, the writer seems to be saying, is more beautiful and various than any fabrication.
Unfortunately, there are considerable weak- nesses. Uncumber does not, finally, convince, she is merely the vehicle for the author's aware- ness, and he is sometimes slipshod about his use of words; he relies too much on the pretti- ness of his prose and too little on' verbal values. But, all in all, this short book is a stride, or several, in the right direction.
- -We owe Michael Frayn our gratitude for the pleasure he has given, but not, not at all, the American Gore Vidal, whose book is the latest piece of porno-puritan commercialism to be foisted on to us. Myra Breckinridge, the film- struck supposed 'widow' of Myron, really sex- changed Myron himself, .is dedicated to the destruction of the phallic supremacy of the male. She aims to be hermaphrodite god, the first of a new and superior type. Blackmailing her way into teaching at a Hollywood acting academy, she picks a young actor with conven- tional male values as victim, horribly breaking his pride, then attempting to seduce his girl- friend as the culmination of her revenge. But finally, by what the author obviously considers to be an ironical twist, Myron turns into the type he most despises, the average, American male. The book is scarred, and marred, with contempt. Myra, keeping a bombastic diary for the benefit of her psychoanalyst, asserts: 'Yet not even I can create a fictional character as one-dimensional as the average reader.' There are echoes of an earlier writer's work here— could it be Mein Kampf?
Beneath the author's viewpoint, and the in- discriminate sexuality he advocates, there lies a great fear, that the potent phallus is a totally destructive force; this contradiction is, I suspect, a root of sexual puritanism. Thus, like all por- nographers, Mr Vidal's attempt to destroy the puritan ethos reveals him as, possibly, the deepest-dked puritan of us all. Prurience, he should know, is the dream of an average man, and a bore.
Melvyn Bragg's third novel, Without a City Wall, falls flat; it is travelogue, an inept tourist guide to the Fells. He describes his hero's de- meanour in the following contradictoryAerms: 'In his attitude there was an undetermined vigour which might loosen to scattered remin- ders of unkept promise. . . Or, in one fell word, disintegrate, as the book has done.
Mr Bragg can't write, by which I mean that when one reads real writing, the mind's latent images are stirred to life, awakening the dreams of a thousand, or ten thousand, years. In this sense, Michael Frayn is a writer who can, and Mr Bragg, and all the braggs, writers whir), definitely, can't.
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