New Novels
The Return of Gunner Asch. By Hans Hellmut
Kirst. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 13s. 6d.) Something Fishy must have pride of place this week. Not that there is much to say about it, for there is as little work for the critic in P. G. Wodehouse's novels as in Shakespeare's early comedies, but there is in both—to compare great with small—the same effortless and mysterious exfoliation of charm. How is it done? Not by making us laugh I think : neither Shakespeare nor Wodehouse is funny in the conventional sense; it is more like watching an acrobatic display by some graceful and convivial creature whose swings and perches are words. Not neces- sarily his own words in Mr. Wodehouse's case —significantly there is a still great reliance here on his impressive stock of quotations, and often the old favourites are given a further twist of informative cheer, e.g., 'He stared at him in much the same way as on another occasion stout Cortez—though some say stout Balboa—stared at the Pacific.' The plot concerns a Tontine en- tered into by American businessmen on behalf of their offspring during the slump, and the time is recognisably postwar. There are references to 'the late hostilities,' which substantially reduced the competitors in the Tontine, to Nancy Mitford, the Health Service and other modern matters. But these are hardly needed to assist one in coming to the strange conclusion that Mr. Wode- house is writing about reality, in a sense in which the 'other novelists of the week, who obviously and lamentably think they are, in fact are not. I hope readers will test this at once by taking up Something Fishy, and then comparing it with the two next novels. I can only suggest that it has something to do with Mr. Wodehouse's detachment and his uninquiring confidence in the actuality of what appeals to him, to which his craftsmanship imparts a general authority.
The author of The Deer Park, on the contrary, seems to think that fiction should be slovenly exploration of a world in which no one could possibly live. His war book, The Naked and the Dead, which was widely praised, seemed to me to be petrified by its abstractness, as if war and sex were things that the characters endlessly and disproportionately brooded on but were not actually engaged in. I do not believe that even directors and their female hangers-on in Holly- wood behave as Mr. Mailer suggests—he has surely selected them as a plausible framework for his own obsessions which, we are given to understand, have their being 'on that high plateau where philosophy lives with despair,' but which in fact seem better expressed by another sentence in the book : 'Borrow technique in place of desire, and sex like life would demand the debt to be paid just when one was getting too old to afford such a bill.' This kind of pronounce- ment sounds as if it should have a fine gloomy perspicuity, but when more closely examined does not seem to mean anything in particular. It is made by the hero, a conventionally sad, defeated and open-eyed character called Eitel, who spends most of the lengthy book having an affair with a girl called Elena Esposito who is a little more real than he only because she is less able to say what she feels and can only explain her lack of wish to do anything much, even to be effectively vicious, by saying she has been to her analyst 'who uncovered some ambivalences I have.' I cannot imagine why Mr. Mailer writes novels at all : I feel he would be more at home composing poems about sex in the manner of Kipling's 'If.' • The title of Happy as Larry seems to be in- spired by the same self-pitying irony (if there is such a thing) as Lucky Jim; but there the com- parison ends, because while Mr. Amis's hero was invested with the saving and vital anonymity which comes from being fashioned by a real craftsman, Mr. Hinde's is the usual mixed-up would-be writer who is, of course, the nicest and the most incoherent person around (the two somehow go together in up-to-date egos). Mr. Hi de has a brutal way with the shortcomings of the other characters who are unfortunate enough to come into contact with his hero: he seems not to appreciate their difficulties in the same poignant way as he does those of Larry, perhaps because they make some effort to conceal or to overcome them. As if anticipating our possible objections to Larry, Mr. Hinde hastens to show him aiding a friend in distress by alleging that he is trying to recover a dirty postcard which the friend has lost—an odd feature of the 'happy hero' ethos is his smugly loyal attitude to casual acquaintances, though wives, parents, employers, etc., are, of course, entitled to no such con- sideration. For good measure a few decayed fragments from Dostoievski are flung into the brew. One Matthew is threatening a harmless individual's stomach with a knife, and Larry . hopes that he will push it in, 'because he knew that this was something which for his own sake Matthew should do. To fail even to try would only confirm him in the frightened, careful, self- despising way in which he lived.' So unexpectedly decisive an attitude on the part of Larry might with advantage be applied to himself and his own problems. This seems a very jaundiced review, but I can only plead that the querulous dogmatism' of Mr. Mailer and Mr. Hinde is catching. The New Censoriousness irks by being applied to everything except itself, and this self is so very much in evidence. Would not a greater preoccupation with how to write well disinfect these authors' urge to lay down the law the whole time, and withdraw them to a more bearable distance from their creations?
The Return of Gunner Asch is not up to its predecessors, though it is still a readable and well-constructed affair, as professional as the soldiers whom Herr Kirst once satirised, but about whom, in this instalment, he regrettably begins to feel much as Mr. Hinde feels about his Larry. The farewell to arms of Gunner Asch and his comrades takes the form of hunting down some bad soldiers, Nazis and the like, and they do this with such single-minded zeal that even when they are put in the bag by the Americans they mutiny temporarily against their captors in order to ensure that the bad men do not get away. The climax is a most improbable and somehow rather shy-making duel between the good German major and the bad German colonel, while the disarmed Americans look un- comprehendingly on.
JOHN BAYLEY
Previous page
