Hedging Poetic Bets

...One only wishes that Toynbee had been content to follow the advice of his own narrator...

...Whether apologizing for his own poetic flatulence or sneering at his own lyric sentiment, Toynbee succeeds only in avoiding any commitment to his work...

...Every poetic statement of event is followed by a sort of footnote designed with a dual purpose: first, to help thickheaded readers who would have trouble following any poetic narrative...

...This little-Jack-Horner complex is unworthy of an author who is writer enough to do without it...

...As it stands, Pantaloon is a charming book, but too often a pretentious one...

...He not only talks poetry but insists upon reminding us of the fact at every opportunity...

...Here again Toynbee hedges his bets so thoroughly that there are few stakes left to consider...

...He tells us so often that the book is simply an "evacuation in silence" that it becomes difficult not to believe him -surely a Pyrrhic victory for any author...

...The poetry is clear, graceful, witty and in many places poignant-especially when dealing with the English aristocracy during the inter-war period, a way of life refusing to die long after it has become obsolete and, in this very refusal, somehow admirable...

...I live in the episode," says Dick Aberville...

...second, to reassure sophisticated readers that the author is sophisticated, too, and quite aware of such things as Oedipal complications, solipsistic paradoxes, masturbatory eroticism, and the origins of the fascist mentality...

...In surrendering the pretext of prose, Toynbee has freed 28 himself from the necessity of inflating it with huge doses of rhetorical turbulence...

...Unfortunately, Toynbee himself never really forgets that he is doing something clever, which results in a rather precious self-awareness...

...Dick Aberville, the aged narrator of Pantaloon, born at the start of World War I and preparing to die at the end of the century, reviews his life for a young man of the "class of 1998...

...The poetic narrative, furthermore, is recapitulated in "ironic" prose-ironic because the narrator analyzes the poetry and then strips it of lyricism, emotion and truth...

...The value of Pantaloon lies in its verse, especially the set-pieces, ranging from the glitter of Oxford to the joys of fishing...

...Certainly there are individual portraits and landscapes, lyric moments and comic surfaces that are completely delightful whenever the author allows them to speak for themselves...

...Aberville displays a combination of pride, coyness and self-depreciation...

...Despite all his philosophy, however, Toynbee is a preacher manqu...

...It is almost as though Toynbee, unwilling to be judged as a poet, had determined to enter the lists as a philosopher...

...The result is less turgid than one would expect from a virtuoso performance...

...The same three traits are present in Toynbee himself, who attempts to disarm possible criticism by anticipating it...

...Frankly acknowledging that prose is something a writer falls back upon when he is not being artistic, Toynbee reduces it to chapter-headings or connective tissue, and wraps the bulk of his story in verse...

...Each peak of lyricism, for example, is punctured by a socio-psychological smirk...

...His poetry is less labored than the work of writers who turn out books as though the very act of producing a novel were some sort of esthetic faux pas...

...6.00 Reviewed by STANLEY COOPERMAN Assistant Professor of English, University of Oregon Philip Toynbee's Pantaloon, a long, meandering "novel in poetry," carries the present tendency toward poeticizing fictional narrative to its logical conclusion...