Three British Novels
COSMAN, MAX
Three British Novels By Max Cosman Contributor, "Commonweal," "Nation" JOHN WAIN'S second novel, Living in the Present (Putnam's, $1.25), was published in England some five years ago, before his...
...If P. H. Newby's characters are more recognizable, it is primarily because they are more fully realized...
...It is also unafraid to name abuses and, in a period like ours, when anarchy is apt to be considered normal, makes the rather important effort to order life...
...Brought back, however, he helps to make A Guest and His Going (Knopf, $3.75) a real treat...
...Even those Wain approves of, Marabelle, the free-living soul, and Catherine, the loving one, are beyond him as flesh-and-blood creatures...
...Along with this aim, Mountjoy recalls every pertinent occurrence in his life: his birth to a semi-prostitute, his rearing in a slum, his youthful depravity (during which he makes an effort to desecrate a church), his adoption by a clergyman with ambivalent desires, his connection with the Communist party, his seduction of a schoolgirl friend, her eventual madness, his marriage to a Communist comrade, his capture in the war, his particular form of torture and the understanding it brings him...
...Another is in Perry's interior monologue...
...Three British Novels By Max Cosman Contributor, "Commonweal," "Nation" JOHN WAIN'S second novel, Living in the Present (Putnam's, $1.25), was published in England some five years ago, before his more mature efforts, The Contenders and A Travelling Woman...
...Edgar Perry, whose foreign experiences we followed in Newby's The Picnic at Sakkara and Revolution and Roses, is home now, running the Helvetia School of English in a suburban house owned by Napier Hillingdon, an old mama's boy...
...Is it perhaps no one but himself...
...The first, at the beginning of the book, says: "Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him...
...In this emphasis on an immediate, homely good in preference to a distant and grandiloquent one, Wain obviously is on the side not of ideologists but of humanists...
...After all, why did one yearn so much to see the world from the foreigner's point of view...
...Nick Shales, the lovable rationalist...
...Rowena Pringle, the hateful teacher of Scripture...
...Or as Mountjoy puts it: "Perhaps reading my story through again I shall see the connection between the little boy, clear as spring water, and the man like a stagnant pool...
...The time is critical: Nasser's seizure of the Suez Canal has made Anglo-Egyptian relations very delicate...
...But though Wain is a perceptive self-critic—he recognizes that the weakness of his book lies in its undue adherence to plot—he does not put his finger on what is fundamental: his lack of empathy...
...that is, in their oddities or reprehensi-bilities, which means that he must treat them, willy-nilly, as humors, as characters in a 17th-century sense, rather than as whole human beings...
...It appears now in the U.S...
...The moral," he says, "is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however...
...Part of it comes in a complaint made to Perry: "You're so busy understanding the other chap's point of view, you haven't the time to develop a point of view of your own...
...Poisoned whiskey fails because of an unexpected circumstance...
...It is fast-moving, a noticeable part of it done in what Wain has himself accurately called "a tearaway picaresque manner...
...He sees his people only in their peripheral aspects...
...One yearns to see the world that way because brotherhood requires it and survival demands it...
...Whether it is because of his Moslemic logic, party politics or natural vainglory, he all but gets away from the author...
...Free Fall is another installment in his continuing effort to relate the nature of human society to the nature of man...
...and with an author's preface distinguished by candor as well as good sense...
...The second, virtually at the end, reads: "Death destroys a man, but the idea of life saves him...
...A Guest and His Going, however, is no mere tale of a mercurial Egyptian and some sad-sack Englishmen adding to the confusion of nations...
...Although these events, especially the earlier ones, are treated with that realistic lucidity which has marked Golding's work, the exact point at which Mountjoy changes from free child to prison-shaded man remains unclear, and who can be assigned guilt for Mountjoy's present condition remains equally doubtful...
...Somewhere, sometime, I made a choice in freedom and lost my freedom...
...The concept is valid enough to take a writer's whole career...
...to use Colin Wilson's term, Wain is very much an outsider...
...Muawiya Khaslat, to take one from the "Egyptian" novels, is as colorful as he is solid...
...It is a quiet and sober look at early English thinking about Nasser, and especially at what might be called the liberal's share in that thinking...
...Newby's conclusion is unexpected...
...Like many a critic-turned-novelist (recently he has himself written this of Edmund Wilson) his vision of personalities, particularly those different from his own, is critical or expository rather than imaginative...
...In so doing he justifies a somewhat guarded comment in his preface that more is intended in his novel than meets the eye...
...The change in phrasing is slight, but tremendous in implication...
...Nevertheless, Living in the Present has much to offer...
...The best chance of all is lost when he chooses instead to save the life of an obstreperous child...
...other opportunities are nullified by Banks' personal weaknesses...
...Perhaps," he meditates, "one got on all the better with foreigners by remaining quietly inside one's own national skin instead of allowing so much empathy to flow that one almost lost one's identity...
...With a Machiavellianism not grasped by his hosts, he wrecks Hillingdon's car, takes sanctuary in the Egyptian Embassy, becomes an international issue, but, alas, fails to get the martyrdom he has sought...
...The story line is comic...
...Newby, to be sure, knows the answer as well as we do...
...Golding has spoken of his desire to trace the defects of society to the defects of human nature...
...The English play it cool...
...Like Living in the Present and A Guest and His Going William Gold-ing's Free Fall (Harcourt, $3.95) is a study in social relationships, but with the sort of metaphysical nuance that conditioned the Albert Camus novel whose title it echoes...
...Was it his earthy Ma...
...Father Watts-Watt...
...Since the medium is melodramatic farce, the execution is necessarily light, but the intent is serious enough as two key statements indicate...
...In Samuel Mountjoy Golding posits the eternal Adam, long after the fall, looking back to find the cause: How did he lose his primal freedom...
...At this inauspicious moment, Muawiya, Perry's one-time student (the friendship between them is similar to that of Fielding and Aziz in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India), comes to England under the auspices of the British Council...
...Living in the Present is the story of Edgar Banks, who despairs of life and wants to make his suicide worthwhile by ridding the world of Rollo Philipson-Smith at the same time...
...Thus Rollo Philipson-Smith is no more to Wain than a stumpy neo-fascist, McWhirtner a lustful poet-manque constantly ready to soak up liquor, and the Crabshaw family an assortment of pestiferous creatures right down the line from hen-pecked husband to enfant terrible...
...apparently logical or respectable...
Vol. 43 • April 1960 • No. 16
