MR. ORIOLI AND SOME OTHERS
Once a Commissar. By Vladimir Koudrey. (Hamish Hamilton. 'cis. 6d.) I Look Back Seventy Years. By E. H. Lacon Watson. (Eyre and Spottiswoode. los. 6d.) So What ? By Charles Landery. (Dent. 8s. 6d.) As the Sparks Fly Upward. The autobiography of Patrick Alex- ander. (Jonathan Cape. los. 6d.)
THE ever-victorious army of autobiographers presses forward rank on rank, like the marching men of the news-reel who tramp Red Square or the Templehoff. Their column stretches from the inarticulate adventurer on the right, scarcely able to put together two sentences, to the verbose hack on the left flank who has never stirred from Fleet Street. They tell anecdotes, they teach lessons, they plead causes ; they describe their childhoods, their souls, their friends, their natives, their mistresses, their betters ; they amuse, they instruct, they bore, they nauseate ; but how rarely do they produce something that can claim to be judged as a work of art.
Mr. Orioli is the exception. He is detached, witty and frank. He knows how to write. His book proves incon- trovertibly that he also knows how to live. He starts from the time when he was nearly (but not quite) born in the lunatic asylum at Imola ; and ends fifty years later in his native village, wondering how his life compares with that of his friend, the boy Bastaniello, who went to South America and brought back fifty thousand francs for his parents. In the three hundred pages between, he contrives to give an impression of development and—what is so uncommon in autobiographies —a sense that the author has been alive all the time ; and was not galvanised into some sort of sensibility by war, revolution, love, success, or solne other external cause.
He began at fifteen as a barber's assistant.
" Among my clients was the dwarf Mingule. He was the smallest man I have ever seen. The top of his head reached exactly to my hips."
" This head was a normally shaped and even fine one, with brown hair which he kept beautifully parted. I had to curl the front of it every week with a hot iron, and the ends of his moustache as well. He dressed with elegance, wearing patent-leather shoes on his tiny feet. Mingule had been carefully educated by a priest. He never went to school : in fact very few people had seen him at all, since his family did not allow him out of the house." " From time to time his brothers took him at night in their cart to be shown at some local fair, though he was not on view at any of the fairs at Alfonsine. They stayed away often for weeks in the provinces, travelling with a small tent into which they put him when he was on.show, and finally returning with a sackful of money. I never found out what was charged as an entrance fee, nor what the dwarf did when he appeared before the public. He probably made a speech as he was a good talker and actor. He also knew French, and I once found him in his little chair reading a volume of Maupassant."
Mingule was kidnapped ; but enough has been quoted to show the lively style. After his military service Mr. Orioli came to England where he starved, taught languages, and had some distinctly queer adventures. Eventually he estab- lished himself as a bookseller, a profession for which he has evidently outstanding gifts. He has met a number of remark- able people, both known and unknown, and when he writes of them he manages to convey their personalities, together with his own views on them, clearly and economically. Adven- tures of a Bookseller may be recommended to all in search of a book that contains not a word of politics and a great deal of wit and good sense. If a critic may be permitted a somewhat highflown simile, it is like a delightful picnic among sunny ruins with lots of long loaves of bread, salami, fruit and several litres of red wine.
Is there a single Russian emigrant, White or Red, cavalry officer, engineer, countess or agitator, incapable of constructing something fairly readable in the way of a life story ? It may be doubted. Literacy was confined to a few in the days of the Tsar, but that few seem to have no difficulty whatever in putting their careers into narrative form. These histories are often shallow, overcoloured, and improbable. The fact remains that they bear some resemblance to books. Mr. Koudrey's parents were divorced and his mother's second husband was Krassin. He was therefore, when a boy, familiar with revolutionary plottings as an intermittent background to family life. He himself was not specially interested in such matters, but when the revolution came he was caught up with it and at one point was made a commissar. Later he was sent to England and worked in Arcos. He had plenty of opportunities for studying the effects of the new regime, and, having formed an unfavourable opinion of it, he was lucky enough to find himself in a position to escape. Once a Commissar is not a masterpiece, but it contains some interesting first-hand material.
Mr. Lacon Watson's memoirs are so unpretentious that the weapons of criticism are blunted. He has written a number of novels and general works, about which he is unusually modest. After an education at Winchester and Cambridge, and some indecision as to what career he should take up, he became a schoolmaster. Then he took to authorship. During the War he became a censor and Reuter's correspondent in Italy. When he lived in Staple Inn he knew Festing Jones who sometimes, but not always, allowed him to speak with Samuel Butler.
Mr. Charles Landery, described by his publishers as a " white-collar " tramp, removes us at once from the intense respectability of Mr. Watson's surroundings. At the age of fifteen Mr. Landery went from Scotland to join his parents in Canada, gave up his job there and worked in garages, theatres, hotels and farms ; he sold fish and refrigerators ; he sowed buttons on spats ; and he decorated windows. His story is competently expressed ; but, like the life he has lived, formless.
Mr. Patrick Alexander, who appears to be of Irish origin, has a literary personality that many will find uncongenial. " Lords, knights and squires were frequent visitors " (p.49) to his father's house. Contact with the great seems to have done little to mitigate the father's irascibility or indeed his son's. There are moments when it is hard to decide whether Mr. Alexander junior behaved as he did because he was so frequently beaten and kicked ; or whether Mr. Alexander senior's lack of control was induced by the invincible tire- someness of his son. Anyway, the author went to South Africa and South America on a cargo boat, served in Egypt as a private in the Guards and saw active service in France and Russia. His adventures were numerous. We leave him drinking " old sparkling burgundy," a suitable prelude to the rigours of a campaign in Waziristan, the projected sphere for
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