Fiction
Schmalzwerke
Peter Ackroyd
Tiffany Street Jerome Weidman (Bodley Head £2.95) Long Distance Penelope Mortimer (Allen Lane £2.50) Mr Weidman has written a book about New York on one dollar a day and, like all tall storeys, it is a fairy tale. Here we have the author in cabaret, doing a very professional soft-shoe shuffle between dates and places, keeping all the pieces in the air at once, and with enough time for a string of pawky gags. The hero of this razzle-dazzle is Benny Kramer, a middle-aged Jewish attorney previously seen only in films starring Walter Matthau; in this book he is looking over the chip on his shoulder — to Tiffany Street, the golden mile of the novel's title, with a nostalgie de la bootlessness for the pubescent metropolis of the 'thirties. After all, it was only there that you could bat out a few fungoes, play some lievio and dunk a few ruggles for ten cents with Natie Farkas, Chink Alberg and Hot Cakes Rabinowitz. Oy oy oy, this is too ethnic already but Weidman has a professional brio which brings schmalzwerke into its own.
It is impossible to aspire to this kind of humour without a defiant innocence which, in Tiffany Street, can make even the garment industry a cheerful haven for the dispossessed. It is from this quarter that Weidman can retail the egalitarianism which is the staple of Jewish-American life, and the novel itself is a compendium of that mixture of wryness and softness which makes Jewish' humour so funny and Jewish seriousness so self-indulgent. Benny, meanwhile, is a young man trying to make his family's ends meet
this side of respectability, and it is in the innocent murk of his struggle that he bumPs up against a limey, Sebastian Roon, who has a quite un-British penchant for self-draMa,; tisations such as "Hahf a mo" and "old boy. It turns out, of course, in a manner similar to the toad-or-prince syndrome of fairY tale, that Sebastian Roon has been putting ofl the style, and is really just plain Seymour Rubin from the Semitic end of Blackpool. And so another bright light is switched on, and Weidman has some typical fun with the rhythms of ethnic demotic: "This is some vitzler you got here, Mrs Kramer, the plump woman said. "Wait, wait," my mother said, "When this boychik really gets started with the jokes you'll plotz."
Which says all that needs to be said about the plot, the boychik in question becoming Sebastian Roon, the grand old Englishman of the American stage. Benny has a harder role to fulfil and becomes a successful lawyer with an expression, I suspect, not dissimilar to that of a St Bernard which has lost its quarry on some other mountain peak. It must in all fairness be said at this point that the plot tends to ramble somewhat, as Benny digresses into the past, returning to the present only at times of extreme emergencY and scattering narrative connections through the narrative like peanut shells. But this is no great matter, since it is the characterisation which provides the fake diamonds. Weidman can shoot his moving targets with some brief, deft strokes. It is a cheerful book, and it does not make heavy demands upon the reader's attention; but although some of the lines could have been taken from non-sectarian Christmas crackers Weidman is too astute to disappear leaving only a Readers' Digest smile behind. In true Dickensian fashion (a writer whom Weidman clearly much admires), there are some piercing rays of gloom.
On one excursion into the distant past, Benny recounts a wartime visit to an old and unfaithful sweetheart, Hannah Halper, now living in England. It is quite unaccountablY sad as Hannah sits talking over tea, of how their brief past together was destroyed and how she had always wanted "to changeher life. And she is then killed during an air-raid. Even the restaurant violinist must sometimes pause to wipe away one perfect tear. Back in the present, Benny is mugged by a black thug and his son is drafted for Vietnam — the stubborn fat upon which America continues to chew. And Sebastian Roon now wishes to go back to England in order to die, even if it means losing his audience for the duration. Tiffany Street affirms so many moods and sustains so many characters that it almost becomes a major achievement despite itself. It is not a master-work, but it is more spirited than the weary realism and the even wearier experimentalism which is now current among the Anglo-Saxon nations. I am afraid that Penelope Mortimer would come in my list of examples of that tenuous category. There is still a fashion among IadY writers for being paranoia strip tease babies, blackmailing the sensitive reader with tillating ennui and fashionable anxiety. Sylvia Plath set the course with The Bell Jar, and she has since, of course, been beatified. Miss Mortimer now appears to be praying at the shrine. Long Distance, as a connoisseur of novel titles might suspect, is set in a place and in a mood which will be familiar to those accustomed to the nouveau Italian cinema: 3 well-appointed mansion which is both grandiose and eerie, a heroine who does not knoW whether she is coming or going but remains solemn on all occasions, and absolutely no plot at all.
A sensitive and mysterious "I" inhabits this book with a proprietorial air which events do not actually justify, and it, or she, or what I
will call from now on Miss X, is escaping frorn„ an equally mysterious and oppressive "you. Without the benefit of first-name terms, it becomes all too easy to get the characters completely confused and to leave the novel feeling that you have been banging on closed doors in vain. This, of course, may well be the point. Long Distance is couched relentlessly in the present tense, and becomes an intelligent woman's guide to phenomenological method, and it is written in what in more enlightened tithes was known as a 'feminine style.' Miss X IS tremulous with self-conscious reactions, and Miss Mortimer allows her heroine to spread her sensations somewhat thinly in all directions at once. It is not as if she were the only nut on the beach; somewhere a play is being performed which Miss X finds Melancholy, Miss X now has children and Plays the part of a disturbed and vulnerable little goose so dear to the hearts of modern novelists, Miss X has an affair with someone Or something, and Miss X ends up by transcribing some dubious tapes. The whole business is so resolutely mysterious that there Must be an allegory somewhere. But I cannot believe in mystery which is so easily created: a positive fog of meaning and Intention is imposed upon the narrative from the beginning. It is all very well for the blurb to lick its thin lips: "This being a mystery story in its truest sense, it would be absurd to divulge the final solution," but there is no solution, final or otherwise. Is the mansion a mental hospital? Are the characters real? Are they figments of a past life? Is Miss X here or there? Am I still reading this book or have I fallen asleep? None of these question is satisfactorily answered. All that seems to matter is that the situation is repeating itself: "I have no idea whether the part I know is over or Whether it is yet to come, whether perhaps it is happening now and I have forgotten." There is more in a similar vein, and Miss Mortimer leans over backwards into a place Where few readers will care to follow her. Solipsism is, of course, the poor man's reaction to anxiety but it is worth noting that in art as well as in what is jokingly known as life —an unhealthy or troubled cons ciousness is naturally less interesting and
capacious than a normal or healthy one. This 2fends the dearest held principles of the literary elect, but is concurs with those of
good reading. It follows, in Long Distance, that there is something precious about the
endless self-reflection and self-analysis which
Make up the soft belly of the book. This is not to say that the book is. altogether too con ventional to be rewarding: Miss Mortimer's Prose has a plangency and a sonority which occasionally hit the high note of an authentic
An, glo-Saxon misery: "The tea, the biscuits,
toe joint, the pudding, the sleep." This list is ..ap appropriate litany for the little world of 'ne selfhood, but programme music is not enough. I found the manner of the book too easily achieved to be valuable.
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