On editing a manuscript
Auberon Waugh
Silence James Kennaway (Cape £1.25) The Night I Caught the Santa Fe Chief Edward Thorpe (Michael Joseph £2.10) A Terminus Place Lee Story (Michael Joseph E2.15) James Kennaway's last novel is a puzzling one, written with intense seriousness, about the American colour problem and about the love between a white doctor wounded in a race riot and a speechless female black militant who gives him shelter after the riot, although she has helped to lynch his son in the course of it.
Dr. Ewing's daughter is assaulted in a particularly unpleasant manner, being urinated over by a black with whom she worked in a community centre. We are given no hint of what she did to deserve this, although it is hinted that she may have done something. By and large, however, we decide that this is just the sort of thing black Americans feel privileged to do from time to time, and they generally have good reason. Her husband, Ewing's son-in-law, insists on a foray into the black ghetto to extract the miscreant and confront him with his guilt; much against his better judgement the doctor agrees to go. A great race riot ensues.
Mr. Kennaway describes the hatred and tension which any white visitor can experience in the black ghetto quite excellently. When the story develops, and the black girl called Silence is crucified by her fellow blacks for harbouring a white man, there is enormous dramatic tension. I hope many readers will be powerfully moved at the end when the Doctor, having escorted her back to white civilisation, murders her out of love to prevent her being forced to speak by the police. My only criticism concerns the middle and is addressed to Lynn Hughes, who edited and prepared the manuscript for press, rather than to Mr. Kennaway who is now, alas, beyond the reach of praise or blame. Through Lynn Hughes, for that matter, it is addressed to all editors everywhere, since one tiny change would have made the book twice as good. When we are introduced to Silence she is not a real human being at all but a grotesque. She lies half-naked on a bed, with diamante buttons over her nipples like a Vaudeville bride, a tiara on her head, white luminous panties, diamante belt and velvet slippers. This appearance is never satisfactorily explained, nor is her initial acceptance of the wounded doctor. At this point we decide that Mr Kennaway is indulging in some surrealist fantasy which we are not supposed to take literally.
If that was his intention at the time, he abandoned it later, and more than makes up for the lapse by pages and pages of agonised realism. Of course, James Kennaway did not survive to cut or re-write the two or three paragraphs concerned. Included, they undermine the whole episode's credibility. It is the editor's job to spot such incongruities. However glaring they may seem to the reader, it is a curious fact that even first-class writers like the later James Kennaway have occasional blind spots. The fault would not be so glaring, of course, if the rest of the book was not so good. It is a great shame for English novels that Mr Kennaway did not survive to write more.
Mr Edward Thorpe's first novel also throws two unlikely characters together as quarry in a hunt; a sort of love develops between them once again and it ends also with one of them killing the other out of love. But there the likeness ends. Mr Thorpe's hero is represented as being a "typical representative of the Chelsea subculture ", but as he is described as posses sing see-through trousers made of voile for easy seduction as well as blue patent leather boots one does not really read the book for sociological import.
He is forcibly taken as hostage by a murderer on the run. Together they face the terrors of helicopter pursuit through the New Mexico desert until, after various adventures with treacherous Indians and an erotic episode (straight from Chelsea) with a lovely drop-out, the murderer is bitten by a rattlesnake and begs the hero to shoot him as the police close in. Mr Thorpe's first novel is highly readable and quite unpretentious. The human interest angle is a little spoiled by over-emphasis on the hero's wetness and cowardice, but novel readers must get used to the idea that any hero nowadays is bound to be fairly ignominious. He has researched his subject well. The book would be worth reading if only for the useful tips on survival in the New Mexico desert.
Mr Lee Story's hero is also odious and even more ignominious than Mr Thorpe's. As an amusing gimmick, he calls his hero Lee Story. The Lee Story of the book is a young working-class tomcat who makes pregnant a girl from the North called Dorothy Kircaldy (the novel is also dedicated to a girl of that name), marries her after their son is born, then after various infidelities develops a meaningful relationship with a Swedish girl called Carin and drives Dorothy out of the house. It is written more or less in diary form, with long descriptions of their love life and adventures on their honeymoon, where they visit an old castle and make love in a motor boat on the great lake. For the first half, we are invited to consider Lee Story very twee as with Alan Bates in A Kind of Loving; very natural and unaffected and, you know, young like Michael Crawford in The Knack: "Why do I always want to say I love you afterwards?" I said, and she said:
"Why do you think they call it making love."
From this — and we are treated to endless, nauseating sentimentalities between Lee and Dorothy while Mr Story demonstrates how a young couple in love should talk to each other — we move to a bit of the old John Berger when Lee decides he is really Don Giovanni: Carim Melin from Stockholm showed me a pattern by which I assessed and still assess the meaning and consequences of the world ' love ' . . . Above all, I realised that life has no room for love and used in the same context, the two entities should never be confused.
if one judges Mr Story's book as a novel — veering, as it does, between the slightly shopsoiled naiveté of The Young Visitors and the more obscure high-brow artists of our time — one can only say that it illustrates an interesting idea of what a novel should be. But if one judges it as a social document it is quite fascinating and something altogether rarer. Previous novelists of the working-class have tended to wait until they could write before being published. This has meant, as I complain time and again, that they are writing about more or less distant memories. Their memories are coloured either by guilt, or sentimental nostalgia for the society they have left or, worst of all, bogus indignation about the discomforts they have left behind.
Mr Story, who at twenty-five can ob viously wait for nothing, gives a picture of what it is like to be a young member of the working class in our affluent society such as I have read nowhere else. Its values are there, its preoccupations, its occasional attempts at jokes. One can forgive all the tweeness and the nauseating sentimentality about young sex as so much sugar for the old men. Between it all there is a first-class social document — a source book for all middle-aged, middle-class old dears who want to write about the young.
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