Five Failures
THE more I read new novels, the more I am convinced that what makes most of them so mediocre is a failure of sensibility in the writer -a failure which we recognise, in its many guises, as 'vulgarity.' A certain commonness of understanding leads to flawed expression. Too often and with too much charity, the reviewer will take a book to task for faults of technique when it might be more pertinent to suggest that the writer is blind, sentimental or pretentious, that he presumes too much upon his reader, that he exaggerates experience, and has eyes only for what is obvious to everybody and interesting to no one. In these five novels, there lurk at least five types of vulgarity.
Mr. Stewatt's vulgarity is the hardest to define and the most offensive. At the opening of An Acre of Grass, Gabriel Purefoy, a perhaps-great writer, has just been buried in Westminster Abbey. His wife returns to their country home and gathers round her three old friends and a young nephew. The MS of a finished novel by Purefoy is discovered. As it contains what appears to be a vicious attack on the wife, the friends plot to keep it from her eyes. And so, on. The vulgarity has something to do with the characterisation : the old friends are precious, stilted and sentimental-the familiars of an imagination that is essentially cosy and bour- geois. Transported from Berkshire to Brixton, they would simply cease to exist. The vulgarity is in the writer's indulgent and congratulatory attitude to these extremely limited creations. I had the uncomfortable feeling that Mr. Stewart approves of his narrator, who struck me in the brief moments when he came to life as a most detestable old fogey. Compared with other narra- tors-Salinger's Buddy, for instance-Mandeville seems wooden indeed, a character from whom any shafts of irony or criticism are deflected by the author's sentimental indulgence. Buddy, ex- posed to all quarters, bites the dust again and again, and this self-wounding and vulnerable quality is life-giving. Mr. Stewart has wrapped his people up in cotton wool and thereby he defends his own very limited perceptions. This defence is self-deception and inexcusable literary conceit, a vulgarity of embattled sentimentality and of self-enclosing attitudes.
Mr. Standees Strangers is the best novel of the five, yet it falls short of the accomplishment which it at first promises, by a less offensive, almost an accidental, vulgarity. It is set in a newly independent African state where the UN has intervened to help establish African govern- ment. The white mercenaries who helped the nationalists now find themselves interned, and they try to escape from the camp. In a larger sense, they are trying to escape from Africa, from a land in which they are trapped, but to which they cannot in the end belong. It is a good story and, taken as political parable, it is by no means crude or oversimple. And the prose is mostly sensitive (more than I can say for Mr. Stewart's). The vulgarity lies in the coarsen- ing effect of the action upon the people. The characters become the debased stereotypes of a TV thriller. An alert sensibility is snared by a vulgarising convention.
A Waste of Shame is about an Australian carpenter well on the road to alcoholism who forms a close friendship with a workmate whom he has provoked to fight and then beaten up. In the end he drives his friend to suicide and wrecks his own home. There are many fine things in the book-Mr. Turner could write a good novel, one feels. But here he at once gives himself away with 'histrionic diction and imagery. `True dawn gestured at day' . . . 'her love teeter- ing at a steep fall of hate.' His vulgarity 'lies in exaggeration. Characters are inflated, the movement is headlong, the prose is overblown: everything is emphasised-even the undertones. In aggrandising torment, Mr. Turner miscalcu- lates not merely his own skill and his reader's subtlety, but also life itself.
In She, Alas! a middle-aged woman meets her ex-sergeant and the sergeant's boy-friend, also middle-aged, in a country village. A triangular affair develops. In her exploration of personal and sexual relationships in middle age, Miss O'Donovan has pegged out new ground, and hers may prove a rich claim. But not this time. Her narrator, like Mr. Stewart's, is the victim of the author's limited, rather bourgeois vision. But her type of vulgarity lies less in self-con- gratulatory sentimentality than in her facetious- ness. `Aha, forsooth! Aha, oddsbodikins! Christ, would I never learn'-this is not merely the suburban facetiousness of a hundred lounge con- versations in the plaster-gnome belt of Surrey and Essex, it is a breakdown in communication. The writer presumes that we share the bouncy remorse of her leading lady, and that we are thrilled to read blasphemy and sexual frankness prickling in the naughty chatter of prim spinsters. But nothing, as it turns out, is quite so prim as the outrageousness of the sergeant, Ida Gravy. Miss O'Donovan's is the vulgarity of presump- tion: that the reader is such-and-such, and will therefore chuckle and gawp. Like all types of vulgarity, this one implies a false community of experience.
Chain of Command is all plot, so I won't say more than that it is about Intelligence, balance of nuclear power, spies and whatnot. It is vulgar in the most common of all ways-the lowest common denominator of vulgarity, what all the writers here, except perhaps Mr. Stander, have in common. It evades the dangers of reality by asserting a community of values and ex- periences that is a false and coarsening version of reality. The more people are gulled by it, the more they will attribute to life a simplicity which it does not possess, feelings which defend frigidity, and patterns of thought which make the individual safe from all those dangerous and unknown experiences which people do not have in common, and which, in good fiction, the novelist compels his readers, by straining their
Previous page
