Was Lord Goodman in the bath?
Edward St Aubyn
TO THE GOAT by Peter Levi
Hutchinson, f8.95, pp. 85
Whatever happened to the old- fashioned amateur? He is here, he is the author of To the Goat: ex-priest, television critic, poet, archaeologist, travel writer, classicist, Shakespeare scholar, and now, mini-novella-ist. What can we expect next from Mr Levi's audacious pen? A wine column, perhaps. To the Goat is the novella of a born wine-critic, it is fruity and yet tart. It is certainly very expensive. At 10p per page, it is clear why he mentions `the provincial reader whom I most value'. Anybody who has access to a parking meter would prefer to feed it than buy a page of this footling fiction.
The author's voice intrudes in an irrit- able or essayistic way. He says of one of his characters, In fact he was very tiresome indeed', and one can only agree. He does not really like telling a story, nor has he one to tell; 'escapade after escapade does not amount to a career', as he says of his hero. He would rather be a little learned, a little mischievous and, above all, distressed (like a bogus antique) by the modernity of the present day. To the Goat has its Aids, its cocaine, its lesbians and its wine bars, bin these signs of modern life do not modify the tired conventions and insights on which they depend.
The first quarter of To the Goat borrows the plot of Decline and Fall, but, using it up too quickly, the rest of the book is without any plot at all. Buck, a middle-1/4.iass young poet just down from Oxford oeconics the tutor to Hamsyn Haddalot and gets *mbroiled in upper-class life. He goes to tissuitcase. After prison, his life becomes rison because his wife plants cocaine in Father aimless until the end when he tealises that his life has become rather iiiinless. We are supposed to be consoled for this lack of narrative interest by the tilliance of the verbal surface, the fruity Opinions, and the worldly vignettes.
'Art is short and pointed, but life is long ind pointless', says the maestro at one oint. Where does that leave his book, hick is short and pointless? Another &infusion of fiction and life runs through he novella, in the continual use of real tople as characters. 'Lord Goodman rang n the house telephone to say that a hathtap had come off in Stephen Spender's band.' Why didn't Stephen Spender ring? Was Lord Goodman in the bath with him? s Levi saying that the way we believe in amous people without knowing them is 'milar to the way we believe in fictional haracters without knowing them? Levi is o entranced by his name-dropping to follow up these implications. In a sense he Is right to use as many real names as possible since the ones he invents are so embarrassingly silly. The rich people are 'walled Sir James and Lady Haddalot. Their aughter is a drug addict, so she is called izzy. When a German character turns up riefly he is called Dr Furer.
Levi never lets us forget that despite all e evidence he has a strong connection 'th literature. Buck lives, 'Somewhere to te North-East of Shakespeare's London'. e says of Buck and one of his girlfriends, hey made love in a hotel in St Albans, ather as the young Graham Greene play- d Russian roulette on the gloomy com- on at Berkhamstead not far away, only in more positive frame of mind.' Setting ide its pretentiousness, that sentence light have worked if only he hadn't alified it with the last clause: if they are iii a more positive frame of mind the whole mparison, tenuous to begin with, col- pses pses completely. He hasn't got the cour- ge of his cruelty — as he says, looking ack on Buck's career as a social climber, issing and telling demands a coldness and nastiness he had not yet achieved, though was working on it'.
There are jokes in this book, not of the *nd that make you laugh or smile but ones at satisfy the comic impulse to say ho!
1fo! every so often. The prose shows too any signs of a poet's frustration in the uirkiness of some of its imagery and the nging for typographical isolation that ome of its sentences exhibit, so that they An be portentous thoughts, instead of arts of a narrative which doesn't work. e had smelt the mythical place where torms are brewed or born,' or 'He had iscerned the flicker of paranoia in the eye the Buddha.' It is easy to see how even 1, he Buddha's serenity might be shaken by ppearing in To thk Goat.
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