Fiction for the new housemaid
Auberon Waugh Death of the Fox George Garnett (Barrie & Jenkins £2.75)
Mr Garrett writes with admirable modesty to introduce his labour of the last twenty years to an English audience, fearing we may find it "deeply outrageous." In 739 pages he has recreated the last thirty-six hours in the life of Sir Walter Raleigh, with many discursions, flashbacks, philosophical asides and descriptions of court and society in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. By any standard, his achievement is a remarkable one, comparable to Sir Compton Mackenzie's gigantic autobiography, Mr Anthony Powell's amusing series of novels called "A Dance to the Music of Time," Sir Francis Chichester's journey round the world and so many other exciting and wonderful things which have happened in our own lifetime. Even more ambitious claims have been made for Mr Garrett's novel in America. Mr 0. B. Hardison, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, is quoted on the dustcover thus:
I have read Death of the Fox and feel that I have probably participated at the inception of a major literary event.
If one takes Mr 0. B. Hardison's probable participation at such an inception as meaning no more — in the richness of the American tongue — than that he has had a thoroughly enjoyable read, one still has to face this tribute from the Publishers' Weekly:
This is quite simply and honestly, one of the finest novels we have ever read. It is . . . a novel that restores fiction to the realm of literature.
Of course, everybody is entitled to his opinion, and it is not fair to judge a book by the idiotic remarks which others have made about it. Normally, it would be the function of a responsible reviewer to limit his comments to a quick tirade against the publishers for reprinting it. What on earth does Publishers' Weekly mean by the " realm of literature" from which fiction has been absent for a time? At first glance one might suppose that the wretched reviewer is merely complaining that he has not read any good novels recently. That might well be the case — I should be interested to know how many of the English novels to which I awarded a gold medal in the last year have found an American publisher. But this is not what he means. If my understanding of the American language is correct, he means that he has not recently read any novels which are in the same class as Winston Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples, or Nicholas and Alexandra or even John Updike's Couples — books which can be issued by American Heritage mail order book clubs in uniform imitation-leather volumes, with tooling in nine-carat pure gold. By the "realm of literature" this unhappy man means the New Housemaid School of Fine Writing, a school which had its proudest moments when Miss Pearl S. Buck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938 and Winston Churchill in 1953. And it is only because this Quotation, seen in the context of the American book market, places Death of the Fox precisely where it belongs that I discuss it at such length. Judged as a contribution to the New Housemaid's Realm of Literature, Mr Garrett's book comes somewhere near the top of the class. It is highly informative; its descriptions of London's palaces and castles in the early seventeenth century are quite riveting; there is a mass of historical anecdote from the period. A few. of the historical points seem worth making at any rate to an amateur historian of the period, even if others are more suspect. I was delighted that Mr Garrett points out the extreme boorishness of the Scottish monarchy which was visited on England by Cecil's regrettable Union of the Crowns. The Stuarts may have been slightly less bloodthirsty than the appalling Welsh dynasty which preceded them — it is easy to attribute James's shiftiness, brutality and perverted habits to his Welsh mother — but it is as well to remember when in the company of people claiming an ancient or noble Scottish lineage that as recently as a hundred and fifty years ago, the finest nobles in Scotland dined With their servants, eating porridge in their fingers from a common wooden bowl.
The book is written in a curious mixture of styles, and I am sorry to say that it is his prose-style which will deter many from finishing the first chapter. It plainly aims at the simple lucidity of the English Renaissance. Just occasionally it achieves it, too, although I suspect that more often than not these passages are quotations from contemporary sources. What distinguishes Renaissance prose more than anything else is its beautiful precision, its economy of words. Mr Garrett chooses to adopt a slightly bogus, archaic style to which he adds long passages in iambic metre flights of Churchillian bombast and occasional swoops into contemporary idiom to produce something which is a mixture between traditional Daily Mirror horrors-of-Bangladesh florid and Andrew Sinclair Old-Testament-prophetic: They had feared war with Scotland and an English nation torn asunder, ripped ragged, and hurled rudely back in time to the brutal past.
Again: But that was long ago, longer than the span of years between. A life-time long, and the world has changed as if by flood or fire, Again: Likely he would show mercy to some. Just as likely some must die. For the example of kingly mercy to be efficacious, there must be contrast. Some fear and trembling. For mercy to have meaning there must be an example of rigor. (sic)
One could go on for ever. There are many rare and beautiful words to describe this sort of writing, but I think the best one is ' bad.' When his apparently irrepressible urge to over-write is added to an inaccuracy of observation and sloppiness of thought, one might decide that the whole enterprise boils down to no more and no less than an extremely bad book: He has been beset by an antagonist not unworthy, not entirely without power, like a blue buzzing housefly, to sting a king.
Have you ever seen a blue housefly? I certainly haven't. A few of his more sententiolic 1)th-1-pines are seen, on analysis, to be completely meaningless: Wisdom is, then, the knowledge that if any of these men, from King to hangman's son, could, by signs and portents, come to imagine part of the truth of the future he could not believe it.
To believe would be to be turned to stone or into swine, as in the old myths. And he would no longer be able to live as a man, not able to feel, and therefore unable to care.
To be a man, awake or asleep, darkness or daylight, is to feel and to care.
Best then, that none of the living can read the ciphers of the future.
The only appropriate comment on this passage is a drawn-out housemaid's "coo." But one must not depise the new housemaid readership of the Sunday Times Co/our Section. They all have immortal souls, however cavalierly they are treated by Mr Harold Evans and the new Thomson House executive-style journalist. Perhaps, for some, Mr Garrett's book will be a stepping-stone to Shakespeare and the authorised version, just as the Colour Sections might be a stepping stone to The Spectator. And there is much solid information to be gleaned from both if one can overcome one's resistance to the jinglejangle noise and the emptiness of all the thought surrounding it.
Previous page
