Cold Facts
A Prospect a Ferrara. By Giorgio Bassani. (Faber, 18s.)
'THE new situations of human consciousness'— ah! what else can the novelist write about? The reader pricks up and prepares for an eruption of his psyche. Or if not an eruption, a tiny move- ment at the base of his structured thought, something that will unsettle him, disturb him, perhaps give him a splinter of new vision.
This is what M. Butor is attempting in his latest novel, and it is what Pierre Vernier, the central character, is attempting in his novel about the lycee where he teaches. He will write `without any intervention on the part of imagination, a simple account of precise facts.' But this is impossible, Vernier discovers. He cannot be ab- solutely certain of what his students are doing unless he collects every shred of information from every teacher every minute of every day. 'Among these few certainties appears an element of irremediable doubt, which can be reduced only by multiplying my references.' So Pierre learns all the subjects his students learn; he cross-references timetables, shattering the separ- ate sequences; and each paragraph of his book is written as it comes to him, not as it occurs in time. And still there is uncertainty. So he enlists the help of his nephew in the class (also called Pierre) and later (when the other boys become suspicious) of his brother-in-law. Still the novel fails and Pierre withers away, defeated.
M. Butor has scrapped once for all all chatter about society and the soul. The theory seems to be this: every new subject calls for a new dis- covery in technique, and conversely a new dis- covery in technique reveals a new aspect of 'reality.' I like the theory better than I do the novel. I know that external phenomena is God now, and I know that M. Butor doesn't mean this. I know it is the awareness behind the ob- servation of the phenomena that matters. By page 15 I had an elaborate score-card of the names and relations (the class is interrelated in various tortuous ways); by page 50 I had begun the book again, this time with three score-cards: one for time, one for the relationships and one for the players. All I succeeded in doing was ascertaining that M. Butor was accurate in his fragmentation. It was like wandering in the Vic-
toria and Albert Museum at night with a pen- torch. Although 1 had learned by rote the entire timetable for the French lycee, and although I picked up a huge miscellany of in- formation, my consciousness had curled up into a tight ball, and 1 was left with little more than a respect for M. Butor's rejection of all the con- ventional frameworks.
Mr. Robert Penn Warren makes me curl the other way. Wilderness is about a Bavarian Jewish boy, Adam Rosenzweig, who leaves his native country to come to America "where he intends to fight in the Civil War. For liberty! Fiji. die Freiheit! He finds that America is not the land of the free and the home of the brave, that they string Negroes up on lamp-posts even in the North, that the simple struggle is cmplicated.
Mr. Penn Warren is almost kleptomaniac with his symbols. Adam (first man) Rosenzweig (twig of rose) has a boot for his club foot which has been made for him by an old Bavarian cobbler CI must have the knowledge that my boot has walked on the earth of America, through mud and dust'). The *boot crops up on every page. Mr. Penn Warren mentions it as often as he does Adam is Jewish. At the end a Rebel soldier steals the boot and Adam pulls on a normal boot and lo1 it fits. Because Adam has learned.
The book, frankly, is corny. Cornier than The %Cave, which was as full of symbols as a graduate seminar. Mr. Penn Warren fails to persuade me that he cares a damn about any of the people in this book, except to wrap them around his ideas, that he is interested any longer in human truth, or in anything but writing a novel which will sell.
M. Butor has banished character, but the English haven't. It squats on top of them like a toad. Even so. Mr. Vernon Scannell's The Dividing Night has the compelling reality one expects from a poet. John, a middle-aged pub- lisher, finds in his own village the embodiment of every man's dream: a nymphomaniac. While his wife is visiting Mummy in Yorkshire he has a furtive, heady affair with her. But for John (public school, 'a Puritan without a re- ligion') guilt and remorse become more than the words he imagined, and his perfect mistress is a little too perfect for his fuzzy, Calvinist conscience. It sounds like lending-library stuff. In fact, Mr. Scannell has achieved the near- miracle of making middle-class people human and of writing a very good novel about them.
Henry's War, by Jeremy Brooks, begins with wonderful comedy, a mixture of farce and satire, more generous than Lucky Jim. Henry writes thrillers and sleeps in his Gloucester Road flat under a mosquito net with a Potato-gun to hand. He is engaged to an intense, wacky, nineteenth- century girl called Veronica who is continually urging him to become a pacifist. But Henry is not a pacifist: he simply refuses to kill, having killed once, and he is unable to fit this vague repulsion into a coherent framework acceptable to his friends. Then Henry gets his call-up papers, and the novel gets its, too.. He flees to Wales and there are interminable debates on pacifism. The real concern swells above the surface, nudging the people out of the way until at the end the talk is touching the clouds and a micro- scopic Henry is entraining for Catterick.
A Prospect of Ferrara is about a provincial town in northern Italy. Giorgio Bassani writes with intricate care about the small, the lost, the furtive and the obscure. They are people with 'problems' certainly, but not the raw and final catastrophes. Things happen, but the tissue ol human relationships is not broken and the sense of injustice ultimately becomes the source of the Italian strength.
JOHN DANIEL
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