The Peripatetic Reviewer

EVERY editor, whether of magazines or of books, is aware of the sharp divergence in taste which exists between readers now in their thirties and those who are now in their sixties. This divergence is relayed to me in many forms: in letters from our older readers who have been shocked by an Atlantic short story; in comments after a lecture by those who have been bewildered by modern poetry; or in the words of my late mother, who, after struggling through one of the stronger modern novels, expostulated: “I just don’t see why I should be expected to hold my nose over an open sewer and pay an author five dollars for the privilege!”

Now, this war over sex in fiction has existed in varying degrees ever since the days of Pamela. I remember Mother telling me that she and her sisters were forbidden to read the novels of Thomas Hardy and that she used to hide Jude the Obscure, the most horrendous of them, under the mattress at the sound of the paternal tread. But her taste for authors who defied convention in the 1890s did not survive into the 1920s. She could stomach The Green Hat by Michael Arlen or Jurgen, that leering fantasy by James Branch Cabell, and she could recognize the truth in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories because her own daughters were soon to be flappers. But she disliked a war novel as candid as Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers, or a love story as sensual as Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence; she thought the authors were taking liberties, putting into print words and behavior that did not belong on the page. She never tangled with Ernest Hemingway, but had she done so, her rejection would have been as explicit as that of Dr. Hemingway, who returned in disgust to the publisher in Paris the five copies he had ordered of his son’s first book.

The treatment of sex, of course, is not the only dividing line between the generations, though it is certainly one which has grown sharper through the years. A more far-reaching and irreconcilable division occurs over the question of how the author takes the world. Dickens took it with laughter and tears, and Thackeray with suavity and seething indignation; but deep down in most of the great Victorians was the belief that if man persisted, in the end he would be able to fix things up better than they were, and this feeling of certitude, this trust in the perfectibility of man and society, extended into the twentieth century. Despite the growls of Mark Twain, the theory that things can be infinitely improved by new knowledge influenced everyone who had grown into adolescence before the First World War.

Readers now in their sixties may not consciously believe that science will produce a better world, but most of them believe that it ought to, and it is this which separates their taste from that of their children and grandchildren. For, very few — I was about to say “no” — young writers or readers believe any longer in a benevolent future. They see a world that has steadily been getting “unfixed” for fifty years. A man now in his early thirties remembers a depression, two hot wars, one interminable cold one, but no portents of a future promising stability. He shares the suspicious doubts of Franz Kafka and J. D. Salinger; subscribes to Murphy’s Law (if anything can go wrong it will); and would never think of asking a lady to “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.” T. S. Eliot, not Browning, speaks his mind: “At my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of the bones. . . .” He finds this state of mind natural because he has known no other.

Some of the cleavage can be traced to the changing style. I can recall my strong distaste for George Meredith when I was a Harvard undergraduate; I found his style so fudged, so artificial that I could hardly force my way through his books; yet Meredith’s contemporary, Samuel Butler, who had been virtually unread during his lifetime, spoke to me and my generation with a sharp, hard truth which we liked.

The mind must make a conscious effort if it is to respond to new styles, and this is particularly true in poetry. How many, I wonder, have missed the magic elision of Dylan Thomas’ lyrics and the music of the recording of Under Milk Wood simply because they were too lazy to make the effort? I suspect that the elderly reader turns to poetry in search of easy pleasure, that he does not apply the same close attention or the long patience with which he listens to a modern symphony. He overlooks the fact that the world has grown to be more intricate, and that poetry in its search for truth has grown more intricate too.

Yeats, like generations of poets before him, drew for ornament, illustration, and symbol on a body of generally familiar information, including the Bible, the classics, and European history. Any reader could be expected to identify Diana and recognize a fiery chariot; but the world of poetry today has been made complicated by mathematics, photography, the invasion of space, by anthropology and psychiatry, and one must work to keep abreast. When the reader comes upon the word “cellar” he may think of wine or potatoes, while the poet, a follower of Dr. Jung, is thinking of the racial unconscious. Is this unreasonable? I don’t think so. Poets have always expected some cooperation from their readers. I hey get far too little of it from the lazy ones today.

If one has any doubt about the responsiveness of a fine mind when taxed by age and distracted by pain, let him read THE BLUE LANTERN, COLETTE’S last book (Farrar, Straus, $3.95), admirably translated by Roger Senhouse. In her early seventies Colette vowed that she would never write again, but the habit and zest of communicating were too strong to be denied, and on the adjustable desk lightly astride her sickbed, she wrote this soliloquy of one who prized life and whose imagination continued to rove far beyond the confines of the sickroom. It is a miracle to see how much she makes of little things. Here, for instance, is the seedpod from some exotic plant: she watches it expel “a delicate silvery follicle weighted with a tiny seed and lighter even than thistledown,” and follows the feathery tuft as it floats up to the ceiling, pauses, and then is sucked down by the draft of the open fire. “It has no need of a label,” she says, “to take its place in my dunce’s museum.”

In her chronicle she touches affectionately on her addiction for the color blue, for cats (preferably Persian), for fruit and flowers (gentian, wild hyacinth, and edelweiss), and for the children playing in the Palais-Royal. She goes to Switzerland for treatment of her old adversary, arthritis, and savors the color and quiet of Geneva in her wheeled perambulations through the April dusk. The all-powerful doctor comes to her room each day, and so, too, do the sparrows, whom she entices with bread crumbs until they lose all fear and she finds a pair of them in a fold of the bedspread when she awakens from a nap.

Back in Paris, Jean Cocteau comes to record a conversation piece for the radio, and then goes on talking about his studio, where the cameramen have gone out on strike. In the silence after his going, she thinks with rue of some of the other old friends who she hoped would last forever, and for reassurance peruses the fan mail which comes later, on her seventy-fifth birthday. Though pain is her hourly companion, the gaiety and warmth with which she relishes her sunset are summed up in these words: “the Last Cat, towards the end of her life, gave every indication by the movement of a paw, by the smile on her face, that a trailing piece of string was still for her a plaything, food for feline thought and illusion. Those who surround me will never let me want for pieces of string.”

1 should be hard put to decide which of RUMER GODDEN’S books I like best. Each holds Miss Godden’s skill for describing an exotic place, her natural sympathy for children, her love for nice things, and what might be simply termed the body warmth of her characterization. But in THE BATTLE OF THE VILLA FIORITA (Viking, $5.00), despite the luster of its setting in the Italian lakes, I keep hearing a hypothetical note, barely audible at first, but so insistent at the heart of the story that I wonder if all this really could have happened.

An English film company descends on the little village of Whitcross for the country scenes in a new film, Haysel to Harvest, and in the course of the shooting, Rob Quillet, the director, whose good looks have caused a flutter in the countryside, suddenly finds himself enamored of Fanny, the wife of Colonel Clavering. Just why he should is never clear, for Fanny is full and forty and the mother of three. She never uses scent, knows little of the theater, has never had a flirtation, and is so innocently absorbed in her household at Stebbings that it is difficult to imagine what chemical attraction she could have caused in Rob. That Fanny herself would like a change is evident enough, what with her feuds with her mother-in-law, Lady Candida, and her as yet unrecognized boredom with her regimental husband. But she is so safely secured that neither her friends nor her family for months suspects the temptation toward which Rob is leading her. But I do. I suspect it because I cannot see what he would see in her.

When the lovers bolt, the scene shifts to Italy. The colonel wins the uncontested divorce on the grounds of adultery, and the custody of the three children. But the two youngest, Caddie, a chubby twelve-year-old much given to her prize pony, and Hugh, her fourteen-year-old brother, rebel against the decision, and by means which are only faintly suggested (this is the second big hypothesis) they find their way to the Italian villa where the battle for the capture — or recapture — of Fanny is renewed with all of the possessive cajolery at their command. Rob underestimates the odds against him, and it is quite a struggle, in the course of which Fanny’s conscience, always audible, begins to sound like Big Ben. There is an air of contrivance to all this, and it is accentuated by Miss Godden’s device of blending into the direct discourse remarks which her people made months later or only in the imagination. As a result, the speakers sound more self-conscious than they ought to.

Ken Purdy is an American editor and author with a passion for fast cars and for the custom-built cars of the past. He writes with authority about motoring, and one of those rare collaborations began when he and Stirling Moss, Britain’s most famous driver, became friends. Moss started racing at the age of seventeen, and in his first year won eleven events. In the fourteen years that followed, he lived on and for the racetrack. In all, he entered 466 races, rallies, sprints, and endurance runs. He set new records, and he won 194 times, a fantastically high performance and one that no other driver has approached.

Moss, who took curves faster than any other living man, had close brushes with death, and at the Goodwood circuit in April of 1962 had to be cut out of his car after a crash in which he nearly lost his life. It took him a year to recover, and then, on the same track, reaching a speed of 142 mph, he tested his eyesight and reflexes and decided after the run that it was no longer safe to compete.

It is doubtful if the knowledge, the excitement, and the skill packed into those fifteen years could have been called out of Mr. Moss without the friendly assistance of Ken Purdy, who knew the right questions to ask and where to keep pressing, and who had the editor’s knack ot preserving the rhythm and color of Moss’s speech. From their collaboration as come ALL BUT MY LIFE, STIRLING Moss’s autobiography as recorded by KEN W. PURDY (Dutton, $4.50), a book which does for racing and the great drivers what Death in the Afternoon did for bullfighting and the great matadors.