Who's Your Publisher?
The Big Tomato. By Raleigh Trevelyan. (Longmans, 25s.) The Octopus Papers. By Burt Blechman. (Peter Owen, 25s.) Girl With a Zebra. By Perdita Buchan. (Chatto and Windus, 18s.) A Terrible Freedom. By Eric Linklater. (Macmillan, 25s.) I Hear Voices, By Paul Ableman. (Olympia Press, 8s. 6d.) The White Flag. By Marcello Venturi. (Anthony Blond, 25s.) I FEAR that rather few serious authors actually love their publishers. The cliché about, the brain- child, gestated for not months but possibly years, and the commercially-minded midwife, that ' honey-tongued Christian-naming abortionist, >strangler, exposer at birth, remains fairly true. Now Mr Raleigh Trevelyan, an author who is also a publisher, produces The Big Tomato, a 'satire' which his publishers tell us—are they having their revenge?—is also 'fantasy' and 'farce.'
This, in fact, seems to be the trouble. Mr Trevelyan has a confusingly wide range of characters, an expert knowledge of the inner workings of the business (very little to do with literature, it seems), a dry, analytical style which generally eschews dialogue, and a saeva indig- natio which starts everything off at the highest pitch. Before comedy can develop, fantasy takes over: an elderly secretary attacks a junior execu- tive with a razor, although she only succeeds in slaughtering the snakes and lizards kept in the office; a partner dictates policy by way of seances with her late husband; a duchess steals a necklace; the whole firm moves to an Italian island which promptly blows up.
Mr Trevelyan has a fine savage eye for the social implications of women's dress, but all his energy scarcely produces a believable character and, although I imagine many will laugh their heads off, I found myself yawning at what I took to be the dull thunder of in-jokes. Satire, after all, deals either with figures and institutions we all know—the most social of the arts—or more generally with affectations and vices which must be allowed time to develop, a scale of values to develop against. I preferred Mr Blech- man's telegraphic, hit-or-miss and sometimes puerile send-up of the New York cultural scene in The Octopus Papers, an original little book with some sparkle.
We have by no means done with fantasy. It is at least an element in Miss Buchan's Girl With a Zebra. This story about students at Harvard is written with delicacy and wit. Emily, a biology 'major' from the Middle West, is child- like, beautiful and disturbingly grave; she keeps geckos in her room at Radcliffe, but soon be- comes identified with a larger and more exotic creature, the zebra Gazebo, of which she takes charge. Her boy-friend is the handsome, too- calculating Blaise, who first basks in the myth surrounding her and then shrinks from the de- mands of the relationship, preferring a lass whose kisses are as messy as her laugh is infectious and her bank balance huge. Seasons pass, parties are held, couples entangle (with or without the. provocation of Morning Glory seeds) and, while academics hover in the distance, Emily's friend, Miss Fogwort, elderly and eccentric, keeps an aviary in her house in the hope that she may one day breed a phoenix. All this could, of course, become tediously whimsical, but Miss Buchan has tact and perception; the story is believable because it is nourished by a lyricism inherent in the young and by an oddity as charac- teristic of dons and deans.
Mr Linklater's A Terrible Freedom is an essay in the Gilbert Pinfold country—it bears a marked resemblance to the late Evelyn Waugh's expose of the hallucinatory demons in pursuit of the comfortable and prosperous middle-aged. Even the style shares something of the sturdy good manners and mellow prejudices of the earlier book, although it has some clichés and its self-portrait is less appealing and perhaps not autobiographical at all. Evan Graffikin is a rich, semi-retired businessman, still very con- scious of the 1914 war, in which he was seriously wounded as well as losing most of his friends, bored with marriage, deprived of his mistress, heartily disliking one of his iwo sons, and con- sequently taking refuge in his talents as a dreamer (the real kind—when you're asleep). Many of these life-like dreams, which for a time occupy alternate chapters, are healthily con- cerned with the pursuit of a lost girl. But one also detects the odour of hobby-horses. One of these seems to be overpopulation : Graffikin dreams that he is dictatorially killing off every tenth man or discusses (with a dream to follow) the interesting suggestion that since the teaching of Shakespeare destroys a love of reading in the young, the pedantically detailed exposition of sex would put an end to excessive .procreation. A "mysterious, drunken . voyage in the Western Isles concludes a thoroughly entertaining story. Paul Ableman's I Hear Voices, first published in Paris in 1958, presents consciousness raw. Its narrator is mentally and perhaps also physically ill. Despite his encounters with a puzzling but beautifully suggested exterior world, his attempts to win the approval of an elder brother, his visits to a psychiatrist, his desire to become a philosopher or a penitent, it seems likely that he never leaves his attic bedroom and that, at the , end of the book, he has still not finished the breakfast egg served him in the opening pages. His visions and insights—far less paranoiac than Pinfold's—are often both striking and endearing; some of the oddity must remain, I think, im- penetrably odd; the language, although slightly mannered, reads well aloud.
Marcello Venturi's The White Flag describes the visit to Cephallonia of the son of one of the 9,000 Italians executed by the Nazis after Badoglio's peace in 1943. I must confess that I began the book with the gravest misgivings : there is a thumping misspelling of a Greek name —in Greek capitals—on the first line, followed by an inexplicable reference to Cephallonia as `Reisland.' Shortly afterwards I was not happy about a Greek offering his visitor 'cloudy water' or a half-Greek actually apologising for his in- quisitiveness. But the atmosphere grows more convincing and the tragic story, which I had never heard before, is told with some power.
PATRICK ANDERSON
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