Human Hearts
A Choice of Ornaments. By Nicolas Bentley. (Andre Deutsch, 25s.)
'IN each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale,' wrote Ambrose Bierce in The Devil's Dictionary. For Nicolas Bentley, who quotes this breakdown in A Choice of Ornaments, part of the gruesome humour of life lies in the spectacle of the component beasts vying for posi- tion. His comic drawings elsewhere—such as those in How Can You Bear to he Human?, a title whose quiet horror is comparable with Stevie Smith's Not Waving But Drowning—express a speculative interest about the hazards of housing such a menagerie. (There is a cool drawing of a Sloane Street lady saying to a road-sweeper, with an elegiac sweetness that strikes one as a dead-heat between the nightingale and the ass, 'I do so love it when autumn leaves begin to fall, don't you?') At a time when asperity in art often seems to be inseparable from the most camp kind of sophistication, Nicolas Bentley is an anachronism. His dry-eyed, staring line, which is without man- nerisms, has an almost eighteenth-century charac- ter in its combination of order and rumbustious- ness. Like Johnson, he can be measured and lewd simultaneously. A Choice of Ornaments, an auto- biographical-anthological-anthropological work. is even more of a throwback : not only in its form, which revives the commonplace-book, but also in the prose that links the quotations, which has a severe and stylish rhythm that seems as forgotten as the saraband.
Compiled over ten years, this is a glittering col- lection of vertu that accumulates into a personal view of the world, like Walpole's letters. The quotations—from Plato and Herrick to the Gon- courts and Jelly Roll Morton—refract the author's own mind. They reveal, among other things, that he has a taste for precision and pun- gency, for a certain kind of graceful melancholy and for sudden outbreaks of buffooning; and that he dislikes cynicism in politics, introspectiveness in modern writing, the dilution of opinion that he suspects to be endemic in journalism, and the fans of pop music. In general he seems not wholly convinced of the advisability of the present, in spite of quoting such contempor- aries as Maugham, Betjeman and The Times, if this is not to use the word contemporary too loosely; but he is totally persuasive about the indispensability of the past. He can also be very funny, quoting a passage of Ouida at her most exquisitely bathetic, and an earnest description of the deaf Beethoven getting out of step with his orchestra that should be mimed by Marcel Marceau. Before this artful and reflective credo goes into a second edition somebody must correct the misprints. Presumably the backwash of the printing strike since the title-page credits a printer in Holland, they include some surreal Dutchisms such as 'haad' for head.
The Stephen Potter of Steps to Immaturity is not the familiar lifeman, in spite of the hint of a ploy in the title. Nor is he that scholarly Potter- obverse whose books on Coleridge and D. H. Lawrence one remembers periodically, rather as one reminds oneself that Osbert Lancaster is really tremendously serious about architecture. This practice, common among humorists, of aton- ing for funniness (i.e., flippancy) by developing some counter-interest of shocking solemnity (i.e., worth-whileness) always seems to me a form of equivocation, and something that fixes too much attention on the ambidexterity of the person rather than on the usefulness of what either of his hands may be doing. But the first volume of Stephen Potter's autobiography is very disarming.
His father was a badly-off accountant who apparently had the same mixture of seriousness and mock-seriousness that runs in his son, and the the same mistrust of himself. Mr. Potter had wooed his wife by leaving a bunch of violets and an embarrassed request for an interview, written
in 'the large, good, confident hand which so well expressed Father's desire to be larger, more confi- dent than he seemed'; the letter and the remains of the violets Mrs. Potter kept until she died, together with a pancake, soon petrified, that her son carried off at one of the traditional Shrove Tuesday battles at Westminster. This was his only real triumph at school, which was otherwise a miserable progress of misunderstandings and un- spoken worries, hefty pedagogic jokes and an academic system that made his mind 'feel as if it were turned off at the main.' At home, by com- parison, there were books and billiards and the Piano, piles of dripping-toast, and a family of exceptional sodality who were already pioneers In lifemanship (Uncle Jim's technique in exploit- ing his deafness being equalled by Mrs. Potter's in making up the fire as soon as anyone started reading aloud). His one disappointment about life at home was the fact that they lived in Lon- don. A keen incipient botanist, he used to dig deeply and furiously in their patch of garden so as to find ground that nobody had seen before.
This is a shy and likeable book. The only trouble is one's persistent feeling that, with this creative equipment, he should be writing comic novels. They might well be very good, and they Would make the lifemanship books look like the Work of half a man.
PENELOPE GILLIA1T
Previous page
