Neato
Francis King
Waiting for Cordelia Herbert Gold (Hutchinson £4.95) There are certain children who, with their world-weary lassitude, their shrivelled-uP appearances and their air of premature middle age, seem to have spent too a time in the womb. The same is true Of 1011 certain novels and Herbert Gold's Wai1. ing for Cordelia is one of them. It iS a clever, expert, cynical creation but one that suggests that the author has sue-, cumbed to the imaginative equivalent hardening arteries, fibrillation and gen,eral debility. I see that one section, entitled 'Out of the Closet Comes Cody', was first published in a magazine way back in 1.97' and another, entitled 'Lady Spain', waY back in 1975. Fortunately in this count it is rare for novelists, however costive, t° present these visiting-cards as an earnest of the big job that will eventually be Peric'he completed; but in the States the practiced is common. An American novelist frier' once explained it to me: since SO 11131IY novelists across the Atlantic hold sine; cures at American universities, they feel obliged to publish something, however fragmentary, at regular intervals as all assurance to their sponsors that they are
not being idle. of The disadvantages of this
piecemeal publishing over a long kind d are, firstly, that the author may 'Ai, tempted to repeat information &eau" given in one section in some other, secondly, that he is apt to lose sight of hi' over-all conception. Mr Gold falls int()
both of these traps. a
In his initial chapter, his narrator te former bank-robber now a graduate student eager for tenure — gives o account of how he has come to `resea'the Cordelia of the title for his the5,".5.0 Cordelia is a hooker and madam, has turned herself into something ot to° celebrity in San Francisco by deddirigfor organise a union of her sisters. Here' the graduate student, is a readY-M'of subject: 'The social consequences „jai non-victim crimes; subdivision: deviance; subdivision: prostitution • 'ill Cordelia has a formidable opponent r. Marietta Kirwin, Supervise".n, Councilperson of the City of San cisco, who sagely realises that her aial to tion to become Mayor is more IikYcds be achieved if she makes San Franc`stoy' reputation for permitting a 5°111_4 moral tone into a major issue of thet."`be. election. This, then, is the eonflt„c 'toed, tween the large-toothed, large-bc).
large-hearted love-goddess and the intelligent, quiet woman politician — pretty but for a series of face-lifts that have given her 'the look of a tragic burn victim' — whose disciplined exterior conceals a rage to push her way to the top.
But this theme, having been stated so Precisely in the first chapter, is then abandoned and picked up again in the Pages that follow with the desultoriness of a reader who keeps laying down and then resuming just such a novel as this one. There is a great deal about Cordelia: her methods of running her 'house' on old-fashioned discipline and the strictest of hygienic principles; her entrapment by an officer of the law; her relationship with her pubescent daughter, Cindy, whom she has sent away to live with her mother but who makes her escape back to the home that is also a brothel. But about Marietta we learn far less. What Mr Gold has succeeded in doing With considerable success is to give a picture of modern San Francisco. How many things there are in that city that Mrs Whitehouse, Malcolm Muggeridge and the League of Light cannot yet protest about in square old London! I suppose that we might well have, in Wimbledon, Richmond or Hampstead, the equivalent of Cordelia's Fine Whorehouse, set down in the sedate residential neighbourhood of Twin Peaks (known to old-timers as 'Twin Titfies'). But where is our Bar Feroce, presided over by a brown, bisexlial part-time barperson, who is also a 1711-time gold-miner, and catering for lestlans apparently divided into 'diesels' and 'keinmes'? ,Mr Gold has an amusingly 'scummy' Wit: gonorrhoea is 'the gift that goes on Cordelia talks of 'finger extensions for sanitary sexuality'; elsewhere 5Lne announces that she will 'give a free aYsterectomy as first prize to the houseWife who shows her 20,000 dollars in the bank which she has saved • out of her Pocket-money'. He also has a gift for creating pathetic and grotesque characters: ah ancient judge, eager to get laid before being laid in his coffin; a middleaged painter, teetering on the edge of the oomosexual maelstrom after a lifetime spent on the safe shore of heterosexualitY; a Russian agent, torn between the w the pleasure of -being forced to do _me washing-up in Cordelia's 'house'• in nothing but an apron and his duty to the Motherland. ,n This last character, eager always to be 1:the vanguard, sexually, socially or 11 Ina;„11 ° asks the narrator what ..ord has now succeeded 'groovy'. Flash, 1, cool? the Russian suggests. The narrator tells 'him: neato. Mr Gold's novel is ...reato, as well as being flash, fly, cool and 8, °, "Y. But it is like an organism without ga backbone. The disparate elements show
hold vigour; but there is nothing to old them together, much less to coorlinate their movements.
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