Fiction
Clockwork cuckoos
Peter Ackroyd
Ending Up Kingsley Amis (Jonathan Cape £1.95) The Little Hotel Christina Stead (Angus and Robertson £2.25)
There was a time, before Freudianism and character-analysis and other party games, when "some one peculiar quality doth so possess a •man," the time when sad humankind passed through seven ages and four humours. It was a time when 'type-cast ing' was the highest form of wit, with choleric Malvolio and Jaques as melancholic as the best of us. Now Mr Amis flabbergasts us with a revised edition of 'Every Man In His Humour' and, being a sentimentalist at heart, has chosen the seventh and last age for a comedy as purple as a squashed heart.
Life grinds to its climax in "Tuppennyhapenny Cottage," an enchanting hide-away for the flatness and cheapness which turn up like bad coins of the realm. It is here that two old birds, brother and sister, Bernard and Adela Bustable, have at long last folded their wings. "Today or yesterday or long ago, he had stopped bothering to pretend to himself that he was different from what he had always been." Why should the aged eagle etcetera, although they do not understand that they are blocking the sun. They co-habit with some other old farts, to use the seedy realism of which Amis is fond and which I much appreciate. There is Marigold, relentlessly known as Goldie, and a prime example of the lipless grin, there is Shorty, an ex-squaddie with the mind of a private, and there is the burnt out case, Professor Zeyer, Emeritus and waiting to be "done" because he cannot do it himself. Mr Amis gives the impression that those who surrender to age are pathetic, and those who ignore it are laughable. That is what fiction means.
It is only within these bounds, of course, that Amis can indulge in grotesquerie and demonic imitation. He is quite clearly fascinated by infirmity, by what is old and difficult. Zeyer, for example, is suffering from a particularly febrile aphasia, and Amis positively revels in his chirpy paragraphs of nonsequiturs. The amateur psychiatrist would make two points, namely, one, that Amis dwells on decay for so long and with such attention that he is secretly enamoured of death itself but, two, that he dwells on it at such length because he really and truly cares for life. Fortunately for him, neither is the case. He is simply a comic novelist.
There are some remarkable scenes, for example, in which the dying Bernard makes
last, desperate attempts to destroy the selfrespect of all the others. He puts a stink-bomh. under the door of the lavatory when Goldie IS doing the natural thing, so she will think her insides are decomposing. He pours warr urine onto Shortie's trousers, so he will believe he has wet himself. No one with an imagination like this could possible have a cynical or morbid mind. No doubt it is the final self-indugence of the old to be senile, but Amis dwells upon their spites and greeds with a weary realism that is truly heroic. The grotesque soft machine chimes out its feW remaining hours with farts and groans, and Amis is not one to spoil a wake.
He does not care for these people (he does not seem to care for life and death very much either, but that is thankfully another storY), but he is a marvellous mortician — patching and touching up the botched job of other peoples' lives. He enjoys it so much that I suspect that he is at heart a sentimentalist. But the old disorder eventually passeth awaY, leaving only a deathly silence behind. And, intimates Mr Amis, it doesn't matter a fart anyway, does it? Let's grin and bear it.
Christina Stead's latest novel also concerns itself with the lesions and illusions of age. But hers is certainly a softer and perhaps more sympathetic vision; while Amis remains resolutely on the outside looking in, Stead enters the narrative with an embracing and encompassing 'I'. The action, if that is not too strong a word, is set in a less than grand hotel in which the 'I' is the proprietress. I'm sorry if this periphrasis sounds a little fussy, but 'I' has always seemed to me a doubtful convention at the best of times and there is no reason whatever to give it the benefit of objectivity. But hers is an unself-conscious, cheerful and alert voice which rambles on with only a suspicion of blandness. A very pleasant per. sona to adopt, of course, and Miss Stead makes the most of it. Her ageing protagonists have soft contours, perhaps, but their portrayal is none the less accurate for that.
There a great many hypocrisies and weaknesses which get numbered in the dark. There is the Mayor, who in this post-war world sees Germans in every room. There is Mrs Trollope, who has been living with her "cousin" Mr Wilkins for more years than either of them cares to remember. And there is the Princess, who intends to have her face lifted and retreat to South America with anything in trousers. An eccentric guest-list, perhaps, but one whose quirks and crotchets are a matter for mild curiosity and amusement, and they are none the worse for the transition. Mrs Stead has a transparent and comfortable style, which combines great technical assurance with more than a touch of Daisy Ashford, and it is one which leaves her protagonists intact and reasonably interesting.
But although she does not sacrifice them to
the special effects of satire, this is not to implY that she is sentimental about the encroachments of age. There is a wary objectivitY playing around the edges of the narrative, and when the senior citizens go too far, they g0
too far with a vengeance. There is one remarkable dinner party, in which drink, greed and frustration combine to form a last supper that would have done credit to Breughel. And if the vices remain the same, so do the sorrows. The ordinary human pains don't lapse with the years, but increase. The relationship of Mrs Trollope and Mr Wilkins, for example, is made and unmade by Mrs Stead with a quiet persistence that sees to the heart of their particular mystery. The last words of the novel — "I do not know if they ever saw each other again" suggest a tone that pervades the whole narrative.
Peter Ackroyd is the Literary Editor of The Spectator.
Previous page
