Property Values
Scotty. By Christopher Davis. (Hart-Davis, 18s.) The Mountebank's Tale. By Michael Redgrave. (Heinemann, 13s. 6d.)
CHRISTOPHER Davis's first novel dealt with the ugly aftermath, social and personal, of a rape and was praised for its subtlety and detachment. In Scotty he brings the same gifts—a ranging, in- quisitive imagination, a cool narrative control, a fine ear for dialogue—to bear on an equally slip- pery theme: racial intolerance. The McKinleys, a Negro family of the professional class, come to live in an all-white suburb of Philadelphia. As Rachel McKinley, intelligent, self-possessed and militant, explains to the liberal Charleses: 'We moved to Courtland Park when we learned . . . that there were no decent or habitable places in all-Negro neighbourhoods at our income level.' The inevitable basenesses happen. Rachel is re- ceived on neighbours' doorsteps; 'For Sale' signs start sprouting; elderly Mrs. Gilray is afraid that twelve-year-old Scotty will breach her bedroom window. If these case-book horrors were the whole story, then the publisher's claim that it is 'as relevant to Notting Hill as to Philadelphia' would cover its effects and one could pass on with a rueful shrug at other people's fear-ridden malice. But there are compensations for the McKinleys: Rachel fascinates Sally Charles, and their children—the spoiled, highly IQ'd Scotty and young Kate—become friends. The compensa- tions soon waver and fail, and the book then sets out to examine the day-to-day depredations made on the liberal conscience. Rachel's prick- liness, instilled into Scotty, makes for disaster when the boy gives an 1-love-you Valentine to Kate and later scares her by throwing a fit. The well-meaning Charleses crack. 'Wouldn't it be nice to hate Negroes or something easy like that?' asks Sally pathetically, and finally bursts out to Rachel: 'There is no statute in the land that re- quires me to love you or requires Kate to love Scotty! . . . The idea was friendship, not a damned love-affair!' For all the spareness of the writing, there is great richness of character and context—the people of Courtland Park, the kind stupid schoolmistress, the 'Uncle Tom' Miss McKinley who is happier in the kitchen when whites call—are penetratingly there, mainly through what they say—and the sickly, exuber- ant boy, with his roof-climbing and precocious understanding, is done to the life. Mr. Davis cuts from scene to scene so discreetly that the shifts and deteriorations come with the numbing help- lessness of fact. It only jars, since the novel already takes its proper shape from the dilemma of decency caught halfWay between family ties and principles, that a plummeting death is allowed to end it.
Richness in The Cave is predominantly verbal, and a bit too much for my blood. The basic plot is the exciting A ce-i n-1 he-H ole one, about a young man who crawls into an underground tunnel and disappears. Around this Mr. Penn Warren has pegged a 'gallery' of portraits and a rumble of criss-cross plots. Jasper is the amateur speleolo- gist, a Christ-like Tennessee hillbilly, son of broken old Jack Harrick, once fatned in local legend for his tupping and other lifelike qualities, now dying of cancer. Our story opens like a camera lens on a pair of boots. 'The man had not, however thoughtlessly, abandoned the boots. . . . He had loved them a long time, putting on new soles before shapelessness had set in, wiping the mud off before it could cake. . . .' etc. The book tends to hold itself up on tableaux vivants, amorously described, and ornate prose and funny, crude dialogue rush one along from each of these stations of the plot to the next. If exuberance and a 'feeling' for language are all, then this will register with a satisfying impact. There is some strong satire of the commercial exploitation of the cave-mouth, wan announcers and whirling cameras dragging the good and bad local folk to dramatise themselves. But the various sub-stories could just as easily belong in other fictions (Dorothy Cutlick who lays herself down for the friendly Greek Papadoupalous comes to nothing after a long build-up) and the peace that old Jack attains at the end passes, I must confess, my understanding. Still it's a rorty book, however randomly assembled, and worth two or three Robert Ruarks.
The Mountebank's Talc reads like the work of someone who admires Henry James immensely without quite knowing why. After a hesitant preamble—how the author meets someone in his club who gives him a clue to a manuscript by dear old St. John Fielding—we get dear old St. John's MS which turns out to be about a famous actor called Joseph Charles who isn't in fact Joseph Charles at all, but someone called Paul Hammer of Sutton Coldfield. This Hammer gets taken on as a sort of doppelganger of Charles, who wants to get away from it all, and ultimately assumes his personality. Some doubt is thrown on this story at the end by a girl called Perdita, who has a four-octave voice and lives with the ageing 'Charles' in California. Mr. Redgrave does this nonsense with a promisingly restrained decorum which makes it all the more irritating.
JOHN COLEMAN
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