Past Time and the River
man, 25s.)
.130 not know much about gods; but I think the river is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable . , I may be forgiven, in a season which his death still colours, for allow- ing Eliot to inspissate everything. But those opening lines of The Dry Salvages remind one that, as a man grows older, the old animistic cliches begin to make sense, and that a novel in which a river assumes a living role isn't neces- sarily a piece of whimsy—idyllic or grim, accord- ing to the face the river shows. The Mallabec of David Walker's novel is 'waiting, watching and waiting,' his, rhythm present in the marital bed- room, the rank ailanthus and the smell of grapes. This Canadian river links, for John and Moira Hyde, the summer of 1939 and the wearier time of twenty-three years later. The salmon are fewer now, but the river and the life of its shore remain as a ground-bass to emphasise where the real flow may be seen—in human relationships, in the growth of a child to manhood. But, by a natural paradox, the river exhibits past time as present : the events of the pre-war summer come agonisingly fresh and clear.
Mr. Walker's presentation of that summer as the central panel of a triptych is a justifiable device, we feel, however much we may normally groan at flashbacks. Unity of place. Gerald Poynder, a fine fisherman, was rushed over the rapids and drowned. Nobody could understand this: after all, he knew the Mallabec and could play it as he played salmon. In John Hyde's recall we see what really happened: Poynder loved Moira; the river cried out to be a murder- accomplice. And now, twenty-three years later, comes the time for expiation. To fillet out the plot doesn't do the book justice. The construc- tive skill is great and the prose evocative without going in for poetic self-indulgence--a temptation with so rocky a theme and with majesty-of-wild- nature phrases ready to drip from the nib. But the river shouts down gestures of melodrama. Mallabec is a sophisticated novel: don't be put off by the great-out-of-doors dust-jacket.
Patterns of Three and Four takes us to the Philip Larkin country. The sound-connotations of 'Hull' are powerful (more so than, say, 'Palmer's Green') and Hubert Nicholson is right not to attempt to moble up his native city with some periphrastic pseudonym like (his own dis- carded example) 'Northport.' His book is about marriage, and the patterns it forms in the life
of James and Trixie Carlin, but the patterns are such as to modify for ever our view of Hull
—such is the power of literature. Of course, we know that the troika—husband, wife and what the Germans euphemistically call Hausfreund- is a Protestant commonplace, but it has a peculiar glamour when art gets to work on it.
Mr. Nicholson's subtlety is to have art working within art: a reading of The Country Wife is
like being suddenly shown naked; crapulous day is let in on the unmade bed and the broken toenails. This book is more than entertaining: it shows us some of those aspects of middle-class life which the women's magazines pretend don't exist. If 'honest' hadn't become a suspect word, I'd say it was essentially honest—prose and all.
Names that appear tricky to us are not, as the film credits show, necessarily that to Ameri- cans. Thomas Baird's Sheba's. Landing has characters called Sally Lenkowitz, Pfeiffer Pelt- zel, Rosa Lomazzo and Mrs. Maupassant, but, even though Mr. Baird is American. I think these monikers are meant to be sort of fun-signals. (Sheba's Landing is not funny: it is an ances- tral home in Maryland.) Paul Dimmington goes to Washington as editor of the newsletter of the National Association of Bathroom Fixtures Manufacturers, which again may be taken as a held-up laugh-card. There are chapter headings like: 'I Spend Labor Day in New Jersey with my Mother. Back Again in Washington, I Go to a Reception and Afterward Meet a Girl on the Way to Supper,' so one has no excuse for setting one's mouth the wrong way. Despite all these nudges, Mr. Baird is a witty and sometimes mad writer, and his book may be taken by British readers as a not altogether untrustworthy guide to Washington—gin, sin, intrigues. America has become the big picaresque country: Sheba's Landing exploits its dry comic possibilities as well as any book I have read in the last six months or so.
Here are two historical novels for you, or rather costume novels, since neither The Cockpit nor The Hat of Authority tries very hard to understand its elected past, to probe its psy- chology or reproduce the tones of its speech. The Cockpit is set in Antwerp in the period just after the Reformation. The narrator, James Crabbe, is the son of an English merchant settled there, and he records its decline in an age of turbulence—taxes, wars, Sea Beggars, Spaniards. It is art that is history's redeemer, and the note of hope is incarnated at the end in Hell Peter and Velvet James, the 'Brueghel boys,' as well as Rubens and Seghers and Henrik van Baalen. The facts are as right as history books can make them, but imagination hasn't played sufficiently on those facts: we can't actually smell sixteenth-century Antwerp. The Cockpit wobbles on the edge of that slough known as the Costume Thriller; The. Hat of Authority, on the other hand, was spawned there. Nicholas Pym is the 007 of Cromwell's Com- monwealth, drawn, like his anachronistic 'proto- type, to intrigues and violence in the Caribbean —historically very sound, Henry Morgan, In- quisition and all. Sarah Hilton, 'lovely, crazy,' is going to shoot Cromwell, but Pym, just in time, blows out her 'poor addled brains.' The Ironsides, unlike your reviewer, shout 'Huzza!' Mr. Sanders is, as well as an author, a car- toonist. Oh, why make the distinction?
ANTHONY BURGESS
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