BLESS ME, FATHER....
McCabe, Bernard
BOOKS BERNARD McCABE Transatlantic Blue* WILFRID SHEED Dutton, $9.95 Pendrid Chatworth, or, as he is renamed in real TV life, Monty Chatworth, is a bit of a devil. As a...
...It doesn't matter...
...He is now a fully corrupt success...
...It's Sheed's best so far, and has to be read...
...And he has made his career of it by exploiting a sort of reverse chameleon effect...
...By contrast in this complex novel the flashbacks and flashforwards the rapid sceneshifts and timeshifts, the movement from historic present to real present as we nip in and out of Chatworth's personality at various ages— in short the general jet-laggery—generates an atmosphere in which the fusion of past and present attitudes, of naivete and sophistication, of confused half-lost boy and raddled successful middle-aged man, brings Chatworth to life in extraordinarily effective ways, a triumph of the Sheed method...
...he is in some sort of state of grace, "until" as his last words inexorably remind us, "the next time...
...And, as for a moment I'm carping, "Father Sony"— the name—sounds a mistaken bit of whimsy to me...
...Never mind...
...Nobody wants the job so he turns on Father Sony, his tape-recorder...
...Chatworth's ultimate ironic blasphemy, for instance, is to use his light Catholic training, his "spiritual insights" to get ahead in his TV shows, becoming a kind of public father confessor: "That was sort of like going to confession" 14 April 1978: 248 gushes a prominent actress, after one of his "probing" interviews...
...The book has other subjects not touched on here...
...Cheerfuller comedy comes in his account of selfprostitution for the media...
...I think here of Kingsley Amis, who from the English end, in / Want It Now (about a TV personality) and in One Fat Englishman (about transatlantic encounters) has profitably explored somewhat similar territory...
...A quick study, with a "passion for assimilation," he learns two languages and two cultures as fast and as superficially as he crams himself into Oxford...
...Chatworth does not want psychiatrist couch stuff...
...But it's no problem...
...Faced with postwar life in Old England he opts for America, becomes a West Coast disk-jockey, gets into TV, and is now in the jet-set big-time...
...There's another problem that really isn't a problem either...
...This voice business, with its compromises and velleities, is a symbolic as well as real version ("my voice is my confession") of all the other human deceptions and betrayals that lie heavily on his soul and are the main subject of his story...
...In earlier books, dealing with his hacks and squares and rightly always looking for a laugh, Sheed has never cared much about cultivating a detailedly consistent point of view...
...These true confessions provide a history of crushing private failures as well: failing his father and sister at crucial moments in their lives for example, or dishonestly wielding his thin Catholicism as a twisted weapon against his disturbingly honest lover (a brilliant chapter of dark comedy tells that story), and of course, failing himself, notably in relation to his father, who quietly dominates his conscience with his distant challenge of love...
...AH these are failures of love, and a great success in this novel is the balanced way in which sympathies are involved...
...Or to use a more restrained Catholic formula, he has made a good confession...
...Amis also uses satirical wit to explore feeling...
...Like his creator, Chatworth is the child of two cultures...
...He becomes in fact a perfect candidate for a Transatlantic TV career, a career based on the deceptions of his voice...
...With that education, and stemming as he does from an upright father whose ancient family is stately-homed English Catholic and from an O'Grady mother who is sister under the skin to Catholic Dublin his viewpoint is sharply idiosyncratic...
...His constant transatlantic jettings are a speeded-up version of what his nomad life has been since childhood...
...Sheed is better than ever in this novel, and funnier...
...Baring his soul to her he also bares his body and in a climactic passage, with Father Sony still working away, with his dead father (expert in primal scenes) there in spirit, and perhaps his quick-witted sister hinted at in Sister Veronica, a Mailer-ish procreation takes place...
...As he completes his tapes Chatworth knows that, at the height of his success, he is on the brink of decline...
...The insistent hardmouthed control ("When the M.C...
...Class plays its usual murky role, and Chatworth's voice reaches new levels of satirical irony as he confronts and rings the changes on all the traps of American anglophilia and anglophobia, of English pro- and anti-Americanism...
...he is too buoyant for the sin of Despair...
...It is not only that, with his carefree TV specials on the world's trouble spots, he has publicly sinned against sincerity and authenticity...
...Chatworth's voice, shrewd, sardonic, reductive—he is on to himself and on to everybody else—presents the AngloAmerican scene, and particularly the Catholic scene, afresh...
...Chatsworth is too "vibrantly superficial" to engage in the trapped masochisms of a Mauriac or Greene protagonist...
...he has had plenty of scope for working at the seven deadly sins...
...called me a wit with a heart, I broke into that silly grin again and it wouldn't go away") only underlines the novel's seriousness of purpose...
...Yet (and there is a large issue here about secular and nonsecular habits of mind) at the crucial moment he is likely to lower the cruel sword and let sentiment in...
...Sheed never lets this happen...
...It's a novel about language and a novel about the artist's predicaments as well as a novel about modern England and America and the Catholic Church and the media and love and death and a lot of other things...
...This life has made him a permanent exile, given him full-time foreignness...
...Sheed is uniquely expert at playing one dialect's incongruities off against its transatlantic opposite—though my wrinkled ear did catch a few slips...
...For these are exercises in contrition as well as confession...
...More than that, he has accepted the necessary penance of paternity and matrimony, absolution is at hand...
...lover, wife, sister and father have their exploitative failings too...
...So in the marvelous...
...sin is real...
...He has left England at 12, during the War, for a Catholic prep school in New Jersey, returned to England at 16 to have an "education" quickly crammed into him, then back to the States for a year of Catholic college, and back again to Oxford for three years...
...in twenty years time he will be "a trivia question...
...On a sort of private secular retreat in New Jersey he plays all his tapes to a young ex-nun, a visiting journalist...
...and then if I still haven't taken the hint and died, nothing at all...
...The novel ends in serious black comedy...
...drunken opening chapter of this excellent novel we meet him staggering about the firstclass cabin of a New York-London jet clamoring for a confessor...
...Literacy, "the conscience of television," in that Frosty-Cavetty world of "one-inch foreheads where the two-inch forehead is king," and some of the time he is ashamed about it...
...In the most poignant moments it still controls feeling...
...He has made his name as the Thinking Man, Mr...
...It never caused insoluble difficulties...
...Not much Sloth, perhaps, but lots of Pride...
...Most of the book, then, is a series of dramatized monologues, Chatworth in mid-life and mid-Atlantic, singing and recording his look-back blues...
...Yet the poles of his confession are self-hatred ("I satirize myself, a Catholic vice"), and self-esteem (once starved, but now well-fed by his audiences), and it becomes clear as his brilliant nervous gabble goes on that a more or less desperate search for a self is involved (as elsewhere in Sheed) with a real fear that once the onion is peeled away there will be nothing left...
...The voice gets sharper still as yet another excruciating Catholic struggle with sex is rehearsed...
...To borrow Chatworth's vocabulary, Shazam...
...The last chapters make the point...
...but there has been a "bloody apprenticeship," as a naive super-English schoolboy among hostile little Irish-Americans, a child gently terrorized into mimicry of his hosts, as a strident American adolescent awkwardly using his new talent amid the "aching, grinding flippancies" of the upper-class London young, and as a multi-voiced opportunist playing variations on each national role before an audience of bored Oxford undergraduates...
...But wit is the general solvent...
...Wit is never set adrift from feeling, though...
...the moment he stepped off the plane he became the country he had left...
...Hard to single out examples, but I'll recommend the accurately savage encounters Chatworth has with an awful American TV journalist and another with an awful English Underground newsman...
...As a muchpraised, triple-Emmy-award-winning spellbinder in both England and the U.S...
...Or, if you are flying the other way, Super...
...With whiffs of incense and incest wafting around Chatworth is reborn and reconciled...
Vol. 105 • April 1978 • No. 8
