. . . and as a flawed God by a
bear
William Waldegrave
SAM PATCH: A BALLAD OF A JUMPING MAN by William Getz
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £10.95
have always been a sucker for bears in books. Baloo and Ernest Thompson Seton started it and it has always been a matter of regret that we didn't hear more of the promising bear in A Winter's Tale. Now however, the bear's proper place in comic literature is definitively filled, thanks to William Getz, by the central character in the funniest American first novel for years. People used to search for the next Great American Novel; they looked unavailingly amongst New York neuroses and Califor- nian fornication; obviously in retrospect Moby Dick's successor was much more likely to come from the animal kingdom.
The Sam Patch of the title (who existed, as of course did Bruin — Frances Trollope saw them) does what a man has to do, in his case jumping from very high places such as the Niagara Falls or out of Com- modore Vanderbilt's bedroom window. He is not distracted by women or by reduction- ist theorists such as communists or capital- ists who try to divert him by arguing that everything is for something else. Jumping is for jumping, or, as Sam puts it, 'some things can be done as well as others'.
Bruin, who worships this purity of pur- pose with the intellectual's usual obeisance before those who lack doubt, is full of all the anxieties which come from too much reading and too much drinking, skills which he learns while attached to the travelling phrenologist Dr Meleager. Meleager is the Iago of the story, who ultimately destroys Patch, for Iago's reasons. Bruin, however, has a more pro- saic horror to avoid: namely Davy Crock- ett who, you will remember, 'killed him a bar when he was only three' (and many more later) and who, having been once worsted by our hero, is relentlessly on his trail. Indeed Bruin's one lapse of dignity is his panic-stricken flight through a White House window at Jackson's post-inaugural party when he finds senator Crockett in the reception line.
This, however, is an unusual, if under- standable lapse on the part of a bear who develops far socially and intellectually from the early days when he believes the world to be made for bears. (Boulders worry him for a time. How do they help bears? Ecological study solves the conun- drum: seeds root in the moss on boulders and become trees, which are clearly useful to bears). Contact with the human race in the shape of Crockett and then Patch revises his ursocentric cosmology; in Patch he finds his God, though various aspects of human activity, such as their disgusting propensity to copulate face to face and their entrapment in quantitative and spa- tial metaphysics, show him that the human race as such is flawed.
Getz hardly misjudges once in crafting together the three or four intertwined literary satires he has running. A little pruning in the New York section might have been in order; but to create from what must have started as a literary exer- cise a comic novel of this quality which stands so confidently in its own right is high achievement in a first novel. More please, Mr Getz.
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