New Novels
`To Shakhat and his seed, the males, for ever.' So reads the dedication of a tomb on the hillside above Palmyra, in stark non• classical contrast to the tall Corinthian colonnades that so delighted the eighteenth century. The words imply a warning against two popular fallacies, a warning which applies in some degree to Mr. Peter Green's lightly fictionalised life of Alcibiades. `Remember first,' an archaic voice is telling us, 'that in spite of our columns and cornices, in spite of the Hellenic fads of our queen Zenobia, we are desert Semites here. We worship Baal and grow rich on camel caravans. We do not think like Plato or Aristotle or Zeno or Epicurus, nor yet like Virgil or Cicero or Hadrian. We were no more transfigured by words spoken in Athens than by the spears of Alexander, and if you will look up and down the lands and centuries of the classical antiquity you dream about, you will find much, not only in Tyre and Carthage but also in Latium and Thessaly and Arcadia, that is anything but classical. Remember second, that even in full maturity our ancient world, despite the skills of hand and brain that still dazzle you, was in spirit far less modern than some of your novelists seem to suppose. It Is rash and seriously misleading to liken a later Roman eques to a stock• broker, an old sophist's pathic to a flighty undergraduate, or an Athenian war archon to a brigadier. It is sometimes as well to recall the points of resemblance between a Spartan mora and o Zulu impi. . . .' How does Achilles his Armour, drawing heavily as it does on Plutarch and Thucydides, emerge in the light of these maxims? Not badly by any means, though not as well as Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. Well served by historic sources, we follow the Peloponnesian War from beginning to end. Most of the infinitely complicated strategic and diplomatic detail reads excellently—though it is odd to find Melos, who paid for her resistance to Athenian demands in massacre and slavery, described as a free ally—and the hideous compact little battles, notably Sphacteria and the Spartan galleys racing across the Dardanelles to their final victory at /Egos-potami, are often memorable. So also are the Olympiad, the armed procession to Eleusis, the sinister hospitality of the Spartan Kings and the flogging and dancing rites at the shrines of Artemis. This is an antiquity as authentic as it is unknowable. In matters of character and dialogue, faced as he is by his source with so copious and stubborn a record of speech and action, Mr. Green is less success' ful. The nervous modern idiom he uses is expeditious and read• able, though occasionally irritating, and the constant play of ideas, unjustifiable in another historical setting, is backed by the facts of Athenian culture, but here, imperceptibly, we are 00! far from the level of a well-directed film scene, with plenty 01 supers (not to mention such untypically Athenian properties as silk clothes, candles and wine glasses). The brain and the body of Alcibiades are often very close to us in these pages, but his emotional and moral life, like that of his companions, distant after all by twenty-four intractable centuries, are as elusive as ever. His affair with Aspasia is a dubious improvement on historY.
Something of the shadowless cruelty of the later Greece survive in Miss Manning's London. She recalls its parks, its streets and seasons with tenderness, but strikes out at a part of society with a heavy, sharp and occasionally erratic sword. 'Ellie, aged eighteen, has come to London in search of life' sayi the blurb on the jacket. 'She believes that to be Ellie is to be young. yet by the end of her year of discovery time has placed a feather touch upon her.' This is a forbidding remark to make of any novel, and more than enough to inspire misgiving. But Miss Manning dispels it, for in contrast to the well-judged innocence of Ellie she has focused her main target, a group of highly self-con- scious dilettanti from pre-war Chelsea or there- abouts, in a satisfying light of contempt and pity. We watch them intriguing and gossiping, exploiting Ellie and dropping her, twitching idly at each other's nerves and senses, despair- ing and receding into. limbo. There are some fiendishly -adroit scenes in the studio of an establishment run by Alma, sometime mistress of Quintin, which operates with casual ruthlessness in the Regency furniture racket and to which Ellie is precariously promoted from a dogsbody's job in the basement. There are sessions in pubs in which real life and bad literature achieve an inspired coalescence.
'Too much talk, darling, too much drink.'
'How else can we forget our enemies?'
'Enemies, darling, have you enemies?'
'Indeed, yes. Three. The psychiatrist, the mad-house and the grave.'
In dealing with a social group who really spoke like this the baldest realism acquires the force of savage satire, if the focus is accurate, and here it is. Inevitably, though, it precludes com- passion. The desolate world of these people is closed to Ellie; via cheap digs and milk bars she succeeds to something simpler and more hopeful, and also, one supposes, a great deal duller. The real distinction of Miss Manning's novel lies in its calm, clear treatment of desolation.
'Space forbids more than a word on two war novels—one by Heinrich Boll on the disinte- gration of the German armies retreating before the Russians; the other, by Jere Wheelwright, on the fortunes of a shrunken and exhausted company of Confederate troops at a late stage in the American Civil War. The first-named has been hailed as, the greatest war novel to come from Germany (presumably since 1918). If true, this is lamentable; it is an intense but rather disjointed affair, though some of its episodes rise to poignancy. The commandant of a death camp, an ex-musician, husbands his choir like a pack of beagles; the orderly pur- sues his fated love affair with a Jewish girl; with the Russian tanks approaching, the for- lorn attempts at release into humanity and forgetfulness proceed in the torrid flybloWn Hungarian town. Mr. Wheelwright's book is an unpretentious tale of courage, suffering and endurance, almost in the manner of a mobile Journey's End. Within such limits it is admir- able war writing, These are the accents and reactions of distinctively Southern soldiers at
Previous page
