Rake's Progress
Not Honour More. By Joyce Cary. (Michael Joseph, 25s.) Hell. By Henri Barbusse. (Chapman and Hall, 30s.) Rusty. By Jessamy Morrison. (W. H. Allen, 18a) A Leavetaking. By George Milner. (Hodder and Stoughton, 16s.) IT is not surprising that the erotic often has an academic touch about it, for it is detached from the traumatic tensions of this world. It does not try to express the inexpressible; it flatly refuses to have anything to do with the soul or the sub- conscious. Eden and Arcady have always been happy situations for the erotic, but they have disappeared and the university is as close as we come to a modern version of the pastoral retreat. It is therefore appropriate that Stephen Vizincz_ey's In Praise of Older Women should take the form of the amorous recollections of Andras Vajda from his seclusion in the Philo- sophy Department of the University of Saskatchewan.
Beginning his thesis in pre-war Budapest, Professor Vajda takes us—with the aid of quo- tations from famous non-erotics such as Engels and Kierkegaard—through the encounters of his childhood, adolescence and young manhood. The chapters are divided into neat subjects : 'On War and Prostitution'; 'On Don Juan's Secret'; 'On Virgins'; 'On Happiness with a Frigid Woman'; 'On Grown Women as Teenage Girls' down to 'On More than Enough.'
This scholarly paraphernalia is classic, but a trifle misleading here. Mr Vizinczey is not writ- ing an instructional handbook on older women, but a continuous narrative of a young libertine in Hungary and Canada, and one soon forgets whether his women are older or younger. There are some vivid glimpses of life under the Germans, the Americans and the Russians and an account of the hero's escape after the 1956 uprising, but, as with all picaresque erotica, it takes second place to the sex, especially in the latter half of the novel.
Once the scene has been established and the identity of the hero clear, we are not over-concerned in which town or country his bedrooms are. The sensualist optimist is happy to be a cork on the seas of life, and this necessarily makes the narrative aim1pss It could have been longer or shorter without making much difference. As it is, it eschews any serious Sorel-like purpose and intends to be no more than it is : a buoyant diary of sex for sex's sake. Written in lucid and energetic prose, 1 don't doubt that the paperback edition will be a great success.
Joyce Cary's Not Honour More was first pub- lished in 1955, but has dated less than many of the novels published this month. Lord Nimmo is in his seventieth year, an eminent politico steering the country through the troubles of the general strike. He is detested by the narrator, Captain James Latter, ex-Hussars, who con- siders all politicians rotten to the core and 'this great country so blinded and bound, so hocussed and gammoned by the bunkum boys, the smart ones, the power and money merchants, it doesn't know where it's going or what it's going there for and it's too bewildered to care.' Litter's wife has become Nimmo's lover and is involved in the political dirt.
Joyce Cary's extraordinary gift for narrative that is both intricate and dynamic has not yet been fully recognised. It is not simply that he is an old-fashioned master of 'the plot.' He is, but he has a genius for making his people move with all the flurry of farce while keeping the underlying tragedy believable. The general strike gave him a subject perfectly suited to this. In the small port-town of Tarbiton, Devonshire, the Communists, Fascists and anarchists are as ferocious as they might be in London. Captain Latter, who thinks honest men should be given the jobs and left to get on with them, is set against the intriguers and publicity-men. Joyce Cary was obviously sympathetic to his 'honour' which is in the title, but he has placed Latter in an ambiguous relationship to the reader so that we are never sure how necessary the skulduggery of the Nimmo disciples is. In this way Cary gets to the heart of the problems about power and politics. It is a fine novel by our best novelist since Virginia Woolf.
Back to sex with Hell, by Henri Barbusse. This is sex as Divine Service, Apocalyptic Reve- lation and all. First published in 1908, it tells how a young bank clerk staying in a hotel finds a hole in his bedroom wali, through which he watches the occupants in the next room. This promising beginning is unfortunately the last touch of realism in the novel. Everything happens in the next room, and it happens in a semi- mystical prose that becomes increasingly more gorgeous. The steady parade of adulterers, lesbians, fumbling adolescents, old men and young women is sadly unerotic, and hardly dis- cernible through the philosophy. A woman gives birth to a child; a man dies; a priest storms over religious truth and a poet reads a full-length epic poem.
What were breathtaking assertions against patriotism and Catholicism have gathered dust, and even the long descriptions of women undressing have a coy and perverted flavour. It is understandable that the sight of a human knee in 1908 was worth half a page, but one can't help feeling that the author's paeans to eternal beauty owe a lot to the prudery of the bourgeoisie. Still, the book was scandalous at the time (and is genuinely more scandalous than Dreiser's Sister Carrie, which made as great a fuss) and retains a period interest.
Rusty concerns a famous novelist and his in- volvement with the traditionally good prostitute. The famous novelist realises his own wife and family are elegant dummies, and that Rusty is more 'real.' His elegant wife meanwhile is having an elegant lesbian affair with his best friend's wife. Unfortunately, it is never possible to tell with any accuracy how deliberately pompous and pontifiCating the successful novelist is supposed to be, whether he is an object of satire or not. One fears he is sup- posed to be taken seriously.
A Leavetaking, by George Milner, is described as a 'psychological shocker,' but it is more shocking in its psychology than anywhere else. Commander Peter Farquarson leaves his identity in a London club, goes to Ireland and appears to fall passionately in love with the thirty-year- old wife of the Master of Hounds, who happens to be his godfather. Murder is done, and there is a twist at the end which I leave to those
Previous page
