New Novels
The Time of the Fire. By Marc Brandel. (Eyre & Spottiswoode. 10s.6d.) THE first novel of Mr. Jarrell, poet, is the most exciting book out of America this year. Poet needs emphasising; for this is more—and less—than the usual American intellectual's novel, all construction, Connecticut and conversation; this is a coruscating, cruel, corrosive firecracker of a book where wit substitutes for plot, intuition for the cunning development of character and irony for Adler.
Pictures from an Institution describes the Assyrian descent of a Mary McCarthy-like novelist on the fold of the snobbishly, smugly liberal women's college of Benton. Her brief course on Creative Writing is used as a string on which to hang beads of character- studies, shrivelled heads that glitter with malice, diamonds of trope, jade grotesques, even—here and there—lambent, inevitable truths of pearls.
At first sight Mr. Jarrell's writing is as casual as a literate Bing Crosby's. The guts of the book anyway were written fast and hot, and read that way. But the final words have been polished as though by a Gautier ; and one realises that the pace arises from his use of poetic prose; no, not incantatory, more a post-Pound version of the eighteenth-century metaphysical (in the Eliot-Leavis sense), a condensed and concentrated prose tending continually towards the epigram.
Here, for example, is Mr. Jarrell pinning his first butterfly to the board: His voice not only took you into his confidence, it laid out a fire for you and put your slippers by it and then went into the next room to get into something more comfortable. Or he describes 'the peculiar gift of mimicry of Benton's Composer is Residence:
It was never the individual sounds of a language but the melodies behind them that Dr. Rosenbaum imitated . ... To hear him speak French if you didn't try to understand what he was saying, was as good as attending Phedre: he seemed a cloud that had divorced a text-book of geometry to marry Guillaume Appollinaire—when you replied, weakly, yes, it was in the accents of Matthew Arnold appreciating Rachel.
Or clumsy Flo Whittaker the good, good wife of Benton's Professor of Anthropology:
She was a sketch for a statue of Honesty putting its foot in its mouth. . , . After you had been with Flo .. . honesty and sincerity began to seem to you a dreadful thing, and you even said to yourself like a Greek philosopher having a nervous breakdown: 'Is it right to be good?'
President Robbins and Mrs. Robbins, the Rosenbaums, the Whittakers, Miss Batterson, Constance, Gertrude and Sidney, evert Miss Rasmussen and Mr. Daudier—marginal characters—all are alive and alone; and lovingly re-created by Mr. Jarrell. Pictures from an Institution is Donne out of Groucho Marx, Rochester out of Robert Benchley, Woolcott—putting it the other way round—with culture and without cant.
As you can see, Mr. Jarrell's trope is catching; and of course, as s whole, there's a lot wrong with the book. The relationship between Constance and the Rosenbaums drops on the wrong side of sentt. mentality. The fugue-like outline given to the interplay of characters is both pretentious and fuzzy. And, at times, the cleverness becomes strident, the jokes inbred, the language clipped and mannered; yes, at times Mr. Jarrell strains too hard at the gnat of effect and forgets what he's been meaning to say (and which one wants to hear) about someone. But, all this accepted, here's a book that's broken through that's witty and exhilarating and right, right in the inevitable way of a book you're not going to forget. So let's be excited about it. Pictures from an Institution marks the arrival of (if he can spare the time from his verse) a new American novelist of high importance. Above all it means, I should have thought, that Mr. Jarrell has convinced himself that he can write a longish book in consecutive prose. Happy us; happy Faber (and Faber); and even happy Book Society, whose—bless them—recommendation this is.
After all that, back to Mr. Linklater. Faithful Ally is as competent and easy as ever. Here's the Sultan of Namua, the better side of a Miltonic Satan, doing moral battle with Morland, the dedicated Colonial official, who's like the better side of Milton. Is to be responsible inevitably to be dull? Will the Sultan ever find the source of the fire which flickers behind his cindery magnificence? And, interpolating their own questions in the gaps between the issue of duty and grandeur, here come Mrs. Nottingham, a lady-like fallen woman; and Pemberton the anthropologist (from the same faculty as Kingsley Amis's lucky Jim) and a very different Whittaker from Mr. Jarrell's—all red face and Volunteer Reserve Commission.
The bland and urbane club-man's charm with which Mr. Linklater handles his characters inhibits any development of their own that might surprise the reader; or him. The twists of the plot are so well- ordered, the central melodrama so neatly contrived and the final resolution so airily, so tastefully not underlined that one is allowed, one feels, no nearer the story or the people in it than an annchait across a coffee-table from Mr. Linklater. The anecdotal charm, the narrative skill are still there; but the freshness of eye, the irreverence, the naiveté, the ' I must tell you this' of the Juan books have gone. Mr. Linklater could never become the club bore; but he is becoming a Good Member.
Lastly, another of these appallingly able little thrillers from America, half serious writing, half Hollywood Suspense. The Time of the Fire is about a sex-murderer in a small, sort of Mid-Western town. You know who he is about halfway through; the rest is a matter of how he works and how the people of Grantchester work. Mr. Brandel knows exactly what he's doing all the time and handles the whole boiling with great adroitness. But why, even though this is exactly the right length and weight for a train journey of an hour and twenty minutes, why won't he write a book about people being people? The injection, as raisons d'être, of a number of particularly unpleasant (and closely described) corpses, makes one mistrust Mr. Brandel's ability to trust himself. More and more of these professional and intelligent American novels tend to clutch hold of a race-riot or a rape or a robbery—any violence indeed—to throw the ordinary people the book is really about into sharper relief. This chiaroscuro of violence is beginning to cancel itself out. One of these days I'll be able to read abouLthese people in this small Mid-Western town where there isn't any problem with negroes or anything nasty in the woodshed and I'll be so suspense-filled I'll burst.
JOHN METCALF
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