The Pursuit of Style
CURLEY, DANIEL
The Pursuit Of Style ONE OF THE FOUNDERS By P. H. Newby Lippincott . 285 pp. $4.95. THE DEATH OF WILLIAM POSTERS By Alan Sillitoe Knopf. 318 pp, $4.95. Reviewed by DANIEL...
...Newby, however, is a master of the classic elegance of the English novel , whereas Sillitoe flounders to disa ster in a prose reminiscent of the less happy moments of Hen ry Miller or D. H. La wrence...
...Frank discovers "you not only had to live but you had to survive as well...
...Frank is very hard to believe at all points, but his new man in particular seems to stand for futhless egotism in spite of his protestations about the ages coming after him...
...patches of tedious analysis, exposition and description, and expanses of dialogue as realistic as a medieval debate between the Body and the Soul...
...This may point to a difference between Sillitoe's world and Newby's, but it also suggests that the language of living is ill-suited to the description of survival...
...Newby's hero, Jan Hedges, is the Education Officer for the city of Perstowe...
...But these elements are not to be kept separate...
...The key to its success seems to be in the relationship between its central character and the manner of narration...
...Reviewed by DANIEL CURLEY Author, "A Stone Man, Yes," "How Man)' Angels...
...What Sillitoe does not yet know is how to write the kind of prose Newby makes look so easy...
...He has affairs with two married women, leaving the first because, he tells himself, he ought not to force her to give up her son, leaving the second because, he tells himself, he must go into the desert to find himself and to fight the French...
...Further suggestions of the close inter-relationship of Hedges' public and private lives can be found in the fact that he first gets the idea of the university when Prudence says her father is trying to start a university in a rival town nearby...
...Newby's hero has been abandoned by his wife, and Sillitoe's hero has abandoned his...
...Hedges' continued pursuit of Miss Styles-much of it on one footmakes up one of the major elements of the novel...
...Since what Newby is concerned with is the nature of truth, this method is clearly much to his advantage...
...In cutting himself away from his roots, Frank is going through a stage which may be necessary to the growth of a man, but that same stage is certainly an awkward one in the growth of a novelist...
...It enables him, for example...
...Even the duel at Lack Hall -perhaps the most remarkable bit of sword play since the death of Leonard Bast-even this ritual blood letting for communal health becomes (perhaps) merely a cuckold's revenge...
...Both heroes attempt to estab lish new and more meaningful relations with the world, symbolized by women in both cases, and the success of the attempt is indicate d in each case by a pregnancy...
...Frank Dawley is utterly alone...
...Both heroes are engaged in the most rigorous of self-examinations as a condition of their regeneration, although Newby's hero stays close to home and Sillitoe's wande rs out of the North to London and finally to Africa . Both novels are also conspicuously devoted to the pursuit of style...
...One of his professional duties, which begins on the first page, is to consult with Prudence Styles, a teacher, who complains that the headmaster of her school has been making passes at her...
...Nelson Algren once observed that if he wrote about Chicago the critics said, "Why does Algren always write about the same thing...
...His alter ego, triumphed over at the end, is the legendary Bill Posters, whose name appears on walls and fences: "Bill Posters Will Be Prosecuted," or as we would have it, "Post No Bills...
...but finally "All a man could do was not deny or declaim too much but send out his insignificant shaft of love and only sink his teeth into anybody"s throat when it was that or too much hell for too many...
...The story is told in the third person with the author in urbane control at every moment...
...It has polish, wit, and timing which can only be admired...
...The Pursuit Of Style ONE OF THE FOUNDERS By P. H. Newby Lippincott . 285 pp...
...As a final illumination...
...that Hedges' wife's second husband not only borrows money from him but also plans to pick up some extra money by tape-recording all conversations about the university and selling the tapes to the BBC as a document of the time...
...THE DEATH OF WILLIAM POSTERS By Alan Sillitoe Knopf...
...to allow Hedges to pass from illumination to illumination and to make each illumination convincing: First Hedges will immolate himself to awaken a community consciousness, then he will offer up his wife's second husband...
...Of course, in the long run what he attempts here may not be an error at all...
...Hedges has been obsessed with the idea that people should be more open with each other...
...IT WOULD be difficult to find two novels more different in appearance than P. H. Newby's One of the Founders and Alan Sillitoe's Th e Death of William Posters...
...But in spite of this there are curious simila rities...
...Furthermore, it is not afraid of ideas but manages to deal with them in a graceful self-deprecatory manner...
...Another major element of the novel is Hedges' involvement in an attempt on the part of various interests to establish a university at Perstowe...
...and, finally, that all Hedges' public gestures seem to him explicable as the rationalizations of his private dilemmas...
...In pursuit of openness, he attempts to kiss Miss Styles and gets his foot punctured by her stiletto heel...
...Caught in this impossible situation, Alan Sillitoe has chosen, in The Death of William Posters, the error of not sticking to what he knows...
...Briefly, Frank Dawley leaves his wife and his children, his job and his car, and goes on the road in pursuit of himself...
...Since the totally unexpected discovery of the faithlessness of his wife...
...That she is a girl worth pursuing and a character of some originality-in spite of the fact that she is writing a novel-is suggested by her refusal to marry him at exactly the moment when a girl usually insists that a man has to marry her...
...This is a thoroughly engaging novel...
...Once Bill is dead, Frank sees his own life in this way: "The old man doing violence to himself and others without knowing it, but the new man knowing it, already committing violence against nature by wanting to overpower the wild stallion of nature that must be held down, gelded, hobbled, and put to use...
...The point of view, however, is so closely identified with Hedges that his passing fancies, false starts, and complete misunderstandings are presented as being among the solid truths of the book...
...Both novels start at a watershed in a man's life, and in both cases the break with the pas t is indicated by a mar ital break...
...A writer must be expected to grow and change, and probably the kindest thing would be to leave such a book unnoticed until it could be fitted into the pattern of the writer's subsequent career...
...Ian Hedges separates himself and Prudence from the world...
...Ultimately William Posters had to die in Frank's imagination because he "was too English for this world," and because he "whispered that since something in life was unattainable you had to stop reaching for it, that it was better to rot among the slums and ruins of a played-out way of life, persecuted and prosecuted, flitting from well to shadow whither your own demons pursued you in an ever narrowing maze with misery and failure in the middle...
...He seems ready to sink his teeth into anybody's throat, and it is useless to search in him for any shaft of love...
...The two fragments quoted above may give sufficient warning to the reader, but one could compile a list of the book's faults, including crudely forced metaphors...
...and that if he wrote about anything other than Chicago, they said, "Why doesn't Algren stick to what he knows...
Vol. 48 • November 1965 • No. 22
