Auberon Waugh on Gold in California
The Great American Jackpot Herbert Gold (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £1.75) One great advantage of having a Negro pro- blem in a country is that it produces the most excellent novels. I pointed this out once to Mr Powell (Enoch, not the cee) before a writers' programme on which we were both due to appear, but I must have failed to con- vince him because he devoted his time on the air to arguing that a coloured problem such as the one they have in America was something which we should try to avoid at all costs. Perhaps he never reads novels, like his leader, the magnificent Edward Heath. If so, they may both be in danger of losing touch with the electorate. There has been an enormous increase in the readership of novels in the last five years, and whereas resentment against coloured folk is heavily localised, novel readers are to be found everywhere, influencing events and seeking to satisfy their appetite for good novels. The removal of restrictions on Commonwealth immigration might seem a rather oblique way for the Government to improve the general standard of novel-writing in England and thus add to the happiness of its citizens, but I fancy that if Mr Heath were to make his reasons for this action clear, it might prove a vote-winner.
Mr Gold's novel is set in California. I have never been there, but from my reading, the entire State of California seems such an ideal breeding-tank for novels that one might easily mistake it for .a novel in itself. Perhaps it really does exist—in any case, we must believe in it. At one time I used to receive large monthly cheques from a magazine in California which apparently thought I was its adviser on women's fashions. Then one day a solicitor's letter from San Francisco in- formed me that the magazine had gone bankrupt. We are asked to believe that San Francisco and Los Angeles await destruction like Sodom and Gomorrah, being perched on this thing called the San Andreas Fault, into which they may both fall at the drop of a hat, whenever God is next feeling a bit Old Testamentish. No wonder so many Califor- nian novelists feel that novel-writing requires no effort on their part. You can pick novels off the wall in California, like avocado pears. They give us a slice of Californian life and call it a novel; however priggish one may feel about the English novel, or however jealous of their material, an honest reviewer has to admit that it makes very good reading.
Mr Gold has tried a little harder than this. He provides a story of sorts and occasional attempts at satire—as if anything so deliriously absurd as the new California could ever be satirised. But his efforts to paint the lily and cast a perfume on the Violet, are not intrusive, for the most part merging effortlessly into the wild, un- believable background.
Al Dooley, a postgraduate student at Berkeley who works under a Negro sociolo- gist, Dr Jarod Howe, in the race relations in- dustry, decides to make his mark on the world, so he robs a bank of $16.000. Betrayed by the crooked Negro lover of his girl-friend, Al is apprehended by the police becomes a cause celThre among the student radicals, makes legal history by being found not guilty by virtue of jumpiness and is
sentenced to a diet of wheat-germ, celery and Thorazine in order to calm his nervous feel- ings.
Very satirical, very fantastic, you might suppose. At one point it seems that the fan- tasy might be part of a controlled existential experiment, when the hero. Al, listens, to the judge's very satirical, very fantastic summing- up—'Al wished he could hear the judge. He knew what solipsism was. He wished he could hear the real judge, and not make him up as he went along.'
But Mr Gold does not pursue the matter, and we are never plainly told whether we are supposed to believe that people really talk and behave in the way described (in the hyperbolical tradition of satire) or whether the action only happens in Al's head because Al is insane. I dare say Mr Gold is not sure himself. This type of subjective-fantastic writing is on the increase, and needs to be slapped down hard. There is nothing so bor- ing as lack of precision. Many good jokes can be made on the theme of insanity but they need to be tightly circumscribed and distinguished from jokes about eccentricity, just as the hallucinatory vision needs to be clearly distinguished from the merely idiosyncratic one.
Another criticism of Mr Gold's book is that it would improve with cutting. Whole wodges could go—chapters sixteen to twenty-two inclusive, for instance—and the book would be much better for it. But this criticism is not meant to put anyone off. Mr Gold writes about California first and foremost, and that is a subject which must be of endless fascination to Englishmen. It is also about the Negro problem. Quite sud- denly, America has awoken once again to the humorous possibilities of their Negro problem, forgotten since Mark Twain. Sud- denly--since Tom Wolfe's excellent essay, published over here in the Daily Telegraph magazine—it has become smart to see the absurdity in the more extreme black power and white liberal traditions. Mr Gold is still
a little timid at the beginning. White liberals may be absurd, and even the blacks who now make their living in the race relations industry, spouting rubbish to the tender whites—'Socrates, I think he was a black man'. But it takes him a bit of time to accept that the rhetoric of the black extremists is every bit as absurd as the rhetoric of the white liberals or the police or the Minutemen. Then, I am afraid, it goes to his head and he becomes rather silly. But the book is most enjoyable to read so long as one keeps in mind that its intention is primarily humorous, as I think it genuinely is.
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