A Nice Life!
Lite with Topsy. By Denis Mackail. (Heinemann. 128. 6d.) " BUT it is a nice book (said Catherine Morland), and why should I not call it so? '
" Very true,' said Henry, and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. "
Such is the general impression left by Mr. Mackail's last work. Yet it was not written simply to convey this quality. Topsy, the author's Pekingese, was born in 1927 and died in the summer of 1939. The increasing intrusion of ill-managed public events on an agreeable, innocent and self-sufficient private world accordingly becomes the theme of a nostalgic twelve-years' chronicle of work, holidays, visits to the dentist, colds in the head (to which the Mackail family are apparently martyrs), children's parties rapidly turning into débutantes' balls, and the engaging activities of the dogs, the goldfish, the budgerigars, the donkeys and the bullfinch. " Only another war, it appeared, could ever improve the unemployment position. But there's no profit in that for the people. And when it's over—win, lose, or draw—it only produces more unemployment again. Such thoughts came to the author of a light novel about a debutante and her admirers. Perhaps they were worthless, and certainly they were useless from a practical point of view. But what the dickens, the devil and the absolute blazes was an author in this frame of mind to do?
" More guests at Rooklington in September. Mary off on a visit to Scotland. Anne back to school. Mussolini meeting Hitler in Germany. The last Sunday was signalised by a visit from Mr. and Mrs. Douglas, whom of course we were delighted to see." And so on for 415 pages.
It is not hard to find fault with a book of this type. The intimacy of Mr. Mackail's conversational style will not commend itself to all. The robust will be irritated by an occasional note of aggrieved plaintiveness. Certain passages about the dogs will embarrass those who are not fond of Pekingese. The accumulation of domestic detail may well bore those who demand from their reading more than the pleasures of recognition. But, as a distinguished reviewer has recently remarked elsewhere, to judge an autobiography is to judge a man ; and who are we to pass judgement on Mr. Mackail? His industry alone is beyond praise: tan° words a day (20o more than Trollope's average) year in and year out, through illness and depres- sion and other people's holidays : a steady output of novels and short stories which, if not precisely Trollopian broadcloth, are
certainly far from being shoddy. He is a loyal and devoted friend. He is always perceptive and occasionally very funny. And he does well to restate at the present time the effects that wars are liable to produce on the minds and morals of those who wage them. Highbrows, then, will not care for Life with Topsy. Militant politicians will feel self-righteous indignation if they glance at these mild pages of one who resents but does not participate. Criticism from such quarters will leave Mr. Mackail cold. He writes not for highbrows or politicians, but for the much larger number of people who like a book to reproduce, neatly and pleasantly, the experiences of -every day: who want, in short, a nice book about thoroughly
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