Low campus
Francis King
Entertaining Strangers A R Gurney (Alien Lane £5.50) It has become a cliche' to say that every novelist must decide for himself how much time to devote to recording life and how much to living it. But often economic circumstances preempt this decision. There are many novelists who would like to spend more time in the market-place than in their studies, but who cannot afford to do so. It is this enforced segregation from the day-today experiences of ordinary people that has resulted, in the past, in so many tedious novels being written about the tedium of being a novelist.
But even more harmful to the novelist than incarceration in his study is that other and more recent form of penal servitude — incarceration on a campus. Since Fellowships in Creative Writing are far more common and far more highly paid in the United States than over here, the campus, even for English novelists hardly known across the Atlantic, is usually an American one; and the novels produced in these essentially comic circumstances tend to be essentially comic — in intention, if not in effect. I suspect that the reason that they usually receive critical attention and praise far in excess of their intrinsic merits is that reviewers have themselves often been beneficiaries of the same kind of patronage.
I must, however, confess — perhaps because I have not yet done my own stint of hard labour on the campus treadmill — that my heart sinks when I am faced with yet another account of some polite, bright Englishman falling repeatedly on his face as he fails to see the invisible trip-wires stretched out across his path by overfriendly or jealous colleagues, amorous or recalcitrant students, or merely the bewildering customs of an alien country. My only hope, in each case, is that the book will make so much money for its author that he will then be able to shake the dust of the groves of academe off his hush-puppies once and for all and set off boldly for some place like Patagonia or the Coco Islands.
In producing Entertaining Strangers, A. R. Gurney Jnr — an Anterican previously known to me only as a dramatist — has obviously drawn on his own experience as a writer-in-residence. His hero, Porter Platt III — dubbed by his students 'Professor Platitude' — is Associate Professor with Tenure at what I presume to be the imaginary Boston Institute of Technology. (Tenure is, of course, as desirable for an American academic as a wedding-ring for a pregnant woman.) Platt has a wife, who is so dimly characterised that we know little about her other than that she wants to get a second degree and so spends much of her time, away from her husband and four children, out at classes.
Platt is making his not particularly swift or graceful way up the scholastic ladder; what he needs is the hot-air lift of some publication — but his projected opus, 'The Neglected Sector: The Family in American Fiction', never even gets off the ground. He is, however, moderately contented with his life and his colleagues — who are trying to bring the humanities to students majoring in more rigid disciplines. 'Sex and Society', 'Consciousness, Culture, and Capitalism', 'Playing with Plays': these are the kind of subjects that make up their intellectual wares.
Then Christopher Simpson arrives on the scene, claiming to have already taught at Eton and Oxford and seeking a job. Though certainly not consciously homosexual and perhaps not even unconsciously so, Platt suffers a coup de foudre, when he compares the illusion of the newcomer's youth (in fact, it later transpires that he wears false teeth and dyes his hair), enthusiasm and idealism, with the reality of his colleagues' dimness and dreariness, He adopts Simpson as his protégé, procures him a post and defends him against criticism — only to learn, through a series of humiliating experiences, that this 'Englishman' (in fact, Rhodesian) is a schemer and a fraud. He has used Platt; and, worse than that, has totally failed ever to give him anything of himself. His two marriages, his acquisition of a smart little restaurant, his earlier career: of all these things, he has revealed nothing.
This mordantly drawn character suggests a real-life English novelist to me; but no doubt the resemblance is merely coincidental. At all events, he is a splendid study in bland, heartless and slightly sinister ambition. Platt's American colleagues are also amusingly delineated, as they undermine each other's reputations, serve each other foreign food in order to demonstrate that they have travelled abroad on grants, and arrange curricular conferences and sabbaticals for themselves, all expenses paid. Mr Gurney has a pleasantly wise-cracking wit and a no less pleasantly relaxed, if undistinguished, style.
It is a virtue, rather than a deficiency, of his novel that, at its close, the precise nature of the attraction that the intruder has exerted over his patron should still not be wholly clear. In a sense, in loving Simpson, Platt is giving vent to his suppressed love for himself; and when Simpson behaves with total ruthlessness, he is merely acting out Platt's own suppressed desires. 'Violence was something that others did unto others, somewhere else,' Pratt states; but this gentle and gentlemanly man eventually commits a violent assault in public on his former protégé.
The book is certainly an enjoyable one; but I hope that it will be the last campus novel that Mr Gurney will write. It would be too much to hope that it will be the last campus novel that anyone will write. Requiem for a Dream Hubert Selby Jr. (Marion Boyars £5.95) The Bloody Chamber and other stories Angela Carter (Gollancz £4.95) The Fugitive Marie-Claire Blaise (Dennis Dobson £6.50) Even more single-mindedly than Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby's new book offers a lesson in how people destroy themselves. It is a very well-written anti-heroin tract, remarkable for maintaining the illusion that writer and reader are inside the head, or with an ear to the mouth, of each of his lost souls. How accurate his flow of Brooklyn Jewish or black talk is, I cannot judge; sometimes I had doubts, as when Tyrone, the black, talks of a `thang' (sexual part) on one page and a 'thing' on another; but it works — the bludgeoning trivial details are energetically grim, the repetitions not quite repetitions, but crawling from bad to very bad to worst. He allows Harry, the Jew, and Tyrone some sense and dignity and is concerned to show that they possess brotherly love of a kind. They are always touching each other, usually in exhilaration at obtaining more heroin, and to begin with they share drugs and money. This gives them a greater height from which to fall. Marion, Harry's girlfriend, sleeps with her psychiatrist for money, then (further depths!) sucks off a large negro for dope. Of course they don't think they are hooked: the fiction becomes more and more impossible to maintain, as their reason for living begins to kill them. Marion at one point describes the high as making her feel 'whole'. Thus heroin is made to stand for any obsession, though the book is less a parable on obsession than a stern warning about a society that has nothing else to offer.
Voluptuous or unexpected matings of women and beast-men form the connection between Angela Carter's stories. Her style is voluptuous and unexpected too: 'Spilt, glistering milk of moonlight on the frostcrisped grass' — she spits, she is selfconscious, but there is something attractive about it. Some of the stories are retellings of fairy-tales with the sex left in: another kick she gets is from recreating them in historical dress. in 'The bloody chamber' — the Bluebeard story — the trains, cigars and Poiret dresses add to the claustrophobia. After the marriage is consummated Bluebeard untangles his wife's hair from the buttons of his smoking jacket.
The Fugitive is not an inviting book. Translated from French-Canadian, it is a short, expensive look at an unhappy son through the eyes of his mother, father, notebooks and Feederik, a boy who was in love with him. It begins with the fatal sentence 'My story is so simple, so insubstantial, that it may not even merit being told.' It is all very French, with learned students quoting great authors, going for runs in the forest and pressing burning cheeks against frost-silvered windows.
Emma Fisher
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