Genteelism
Paul Ableman
The Sweet Dove Died Barbara Pym (Macmillan £4.95) It would have been kinder to have left Barbara Pym unrediscovered. The publication of this slight romance, written in a virtually unbroken sequence of genteel clichés, can only tarnish a reputation that was beginning to acquire at least the patina of affectionate nostalgia. Here and there a wrought line breaks the prefabricated monotony of the prose. The best is: 'Two litters of kittens. . were sleeping in the cage, twined and curled up into a great clot of cream and brown, with a blue eye studding it here and there like a jewel.'
The story opens with the meeting of Leonora with Humphrey and dear James, who are uncle and nephew, at a book sale where Leonora has plucked up her courage to bid for a charming little album of Victorian flower paintings. Leonora, although long past girlhood, is still a remarkably lovely and fastidious lady. Both Humphrey and James fall under her spell but she manifests the greater weakness for James although Humphrey is clearly the more suitable as well as proving himself, in time of stress, the more devoted. But naughty James encounters Phoebe, who is little better than she should be, at a party and commits intimacies with her in a vine-covered cottage. Leonora rallies and prizes James free from the clutches of the adventuress. But — would you believe it? — incorrigible James next allows Ned, an American with very unmentionable desires, to cart him off to,a sinister room with black leather chairs. Is Leonora worsted? Well, by the end — but no, I really mustn't detract from your pleasure by revealing what ultimately transpires. Clichés in this paragraph are by courtesy of your reviewer but their quality and incidence are roughly characteristic of the book.
The deodorised narrative can be sampled in the following scene: Leonora and Phoebe find themselves by chance at different tables in the same café. They have never met and so cannot even recognise each other which effectively prevents any unseemly element of conflict from intruding. Phoebe secures the last `marron gateau' which Leonora craved. After a little tizzy of disappointment, Leonora settles for a coffee eclair. At this point a new perspective is offered. A 'retired Brazilian diplomat' who happens to be 'sitting at a table midway between the protagonists, noticed the little drama, if such it was. Now what have I seen? He asked himself. Something or nothing? A beautiful woman disappointed over a cake, a mere triviality, really, and yet who could tell . . . ?' As a matter of fact, I could, and the answer, which can unhappily be extended to cover the whole book, is nothing.
Indeed, there is hardly enough substance here to fill a medium-length short story in a woman's magazine. It is as if the rude stuff of life were simply too coarse for Leonora's refined soul. The Sweet Dove Died contains no hint, no fleeting allusion, to politics or science or art (except as decor) or the gritty truth of relationships or anything else that concerns real people in the real world. With one notable exception. And it is because of the obsessive and pervasive recurrence of this exception that there will probably prove to be a large and enthusiastic readership for it. The one topic dealt with by Miss Pym that has a counterpart in reality is class. So, although even Sporus might have hesitated before trundling out a wheel upon which to break this paper butterfly, the chore is justified in the almost certainly vain hope of demonstrating that a devout tour of middle-class shrines does not a novel make.
In Leonora's vapid company we visit Harrods and Fortnum and Masons, where she succumbs to a sudden longing to 'move amongst' (not, perish the gross thought, eat!) 'jars of foie gras and bottles of peaches and brandy'. The Chelsea Flower Show is a mandatory port of call. Antique shops (Humphrey runs one) and auction rooms
• are also necessary stations of Leonora's patiently-borne cross of breeding. The book could, in fact, serve as the bric-a-brac room in the museum of English class myth.
Leonora, coccooned in what she takes to be the excellence of taste which esteems creme de menthe and painted glass vases, drifts about London and life suffering little traumata of revulsion. These are expressed by her creator in the obsolete negative mode of middle-class gentility: 'This was not at all the kind of thing Leonora liked'; 'Not the kind of place she would have chosen to live in'; 'Not the kind of letter one was accustomed to receive' and so on. It is almost touching, like discovering a left-over jar of pot-pourri in a country-house that has been converted into a trade union conference centre. The extent to which English is still a caste society is much debated but Leonora's world is as archaic as crinolines, Many years ago, after a wartime adolescence in America had blunted my sensitivity to the subtleties and ambiguities of English social life, a well-known literary critic assured me earnestly that a good novel might even be written about a duke. Aware that the world's greatest novels, those of, say, Tolstoy and Stendhal, are liberally supplied with dukes and even princes, I was puzzled as to his drift. Less innocent, I now realise that class has such fascination for many English readers that its intrusion into any work of art is likely to stifle all other values. Doubtless an excellent novel could be written about a lonely, ageing, genteel lady with a small private income. But probably only a foreigner, a retired Brazilian diplomat perhaps, could handle the job.
The Monkey King Timothy Mo (Deutsch £5.25) Crossing the Border Joyce Carol Oates (Gollancz £4.95)
Comparisons are, I see, already being made between Timothy Mo and V.S. Naipaul. These do justice to neither writer. Mo's talent and concerns are quite different. The Monkey King li.. first novel, is the story of Wallace, a `Portugese' from Macau, who marries into the Hong Kong household of the despotic Mr Poon. Submitting at first to the poor food, the hierarchical tortures, the taunts of unmarried sisters-in-law, he finally out-Chineses the Chinese, turns exile in one of the New Territories villages to dazzling entrepreneurial advantage and returns to take over the extended family.
With a foot in both camps, Mo keeps his Chinese tongue firmly in his English cheek with devastating effect. From the first, when you read that Mr Poon's house 'was furnished in two basic styles, classical Chinese and government surplus', you can guess at the ironies you are to encounter.
one of the events is funny: all of them are hilarious. The laconic refusal to treat tragedy as sad treads a fine line between cynicism and endurance; the daughterin-law Fong, attempts the traditional escape route from family oppression; a suicide attempt lands her in hospital: 'The lacerations on her neck and wrists had been quick to heal, but the fractured ribs and concussion she sustained when the ambulancemen dropped her on the stair case were more serious . ' Like those ambulancemen, Mo has a fine way of picking you up and dropping you when you least suspect it.
Things glimpsed in the corner of the eye hint at threatening depths of moral confusion in Joyce Carol Oates's new collection of stories. A priest's selfsatisfaction is destroyed by his attempt to rescue a neurotic student from accidie, calling it love; his weakness sucks him over a border into a limbo of confusion. A young housewife grapples with solitary terrors which mirror moral struggles; she's plagued by phone calls from a friend she has failed; haunted by the looming presence of a simpleton. But nothing happening is a deeper terror that a real event.
What Miss Oates sees is the way in which objective details can become, in the morally perturbed mind, ambivalently disturbing. The housewife, grappling with adulterous temptation 'stared out at the river, not seeing it, aware of one of the barges edging into the corner of her vision, aware of something happening, something mysterious and alarming. . '• In another story, still tempted, she avoids a leering old man in a picture gallery; only to realise his harmlessness when her private moral concerns are reduced to insignificance by a picture of a starving Indian. Moral terrors of a high order of intricacy.
Mary Hope
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