The Peripatetic Reviewer

by Edward Weeks

ALL ON A SUMMER’S NIGHT
by Maurice Edelman
Random House, $5·95

Maurice Edelman is a Member of Parliament and the author of ten novels; he is well versed in finance, well aware of the interdependence of government and big business, and troubled, as are many in authority, by the growth of a new octopus, the Conglomerate, that hard-to-resist accumulation of large companies, often ill-assorted, for the power, tax benefit, and profit that may result. In All On A Summer’s Night, Mr. Edelman has turned away from the House of Commons to dramatize one such attempted take-over, conducted on a sultry July night within the spacious beauty of Orme House on the outskirts of London. The transaction which has been the talk of the City, involving as it does two huge engineering firms and their subsidiaries, must have the nod of Mr. Budd, the Minister of Industrial Reconstruction, who, of course, speaks for the Prime Minister. The bid is being opposed by Sir Geoffrey OrmeCampbell, the prince of absenteeism, who with the acquiescence of his directors has been milking the vast holdings he inherited in coal, iron, and engineering until the parent company, “the O.C.E.,”is on the verge of bankruptcy. The bidder is an outsider, Harry Levenson, a bold aggressive few with the facts at his fingertips. Sir Geoffrey is the host at the dinner party; he expects to have an announcement for the press shortly after midnight stating that (with the compliance of the government) he will retain his control.

The man to watch in all this is Harry Levenson, with his tough hide, his competence, and his integrity. He comes accompanied by his lovely wife, Isobel, the widow ten years his junior whom fie married in middle life. She is “in” as he never will be, and he is not worried by what he overhears ("She’s so lovely, and he’s really a rough piece of quartz. So incongruous!”) . There is no man present that he fears, and he has come prepared to make a longnight of it if necessary; he has the lowdown on the directors, whom he knows are uneasy, and with his hard head for figures he has seen through the pretense of Sir Geoffrey’s report. All lie needs is the green light from the evasive, water-drinking minister, Mr. Budd, whom he challenges with the fact that O.C.E. is carrying more than 10,000 redundant men on government contracts paid for out of public funds. Much more than business is injected into this rivalry; the conversation, once the ladies have withdrawn, grows angry, abusive, and under the relentless prodding of Levenson, revealing. Midnight passes with the bidder pressing his advantage, Sir Geoffrey on the defensive, and Mr. Budd on the fence. The one man of whom Harry Levenson is jealous is his stepson, Jonathan, a fair, handsome young man about to enter Cambridge. He and his mother share an intimacy from which Harry is excluded; his brusqueness toward the boy is a cover-up of his generosity, and as luck would have it on this night of decision, he has blown Jonathan to a party at their country home, Marfield, and Jonathan has put on a psychedelic blast, with champagne, fireworks, the guests in costumes of the Regency, the island in the lake a dark invitation, and the music throbbing. To the ball Isobel returns when she can bear no more of the strain at the Orme-Campbells, and she is promptly cautioned by Jonathan not to make a fool of herself when she starts flirting with Adrian, one of his more sophisticated friends.

Mr. Edelman knows his younger generation, and he writes with authority as this party degenerates in the small hours and as the “twobacked beast starts prowling about,” as Jonathan puts it. Through the orgy, dispersing the hippies who have crashed the gate, go Jonathan and his girl, Henrietta, in love and in control. But the shambles which await Levenson on his return are not pretty.

It is quite an exceptional performance to have crowded into the span of one summer’s night so much of the present and past, so accurate a picture of the moral degeneration of old and young, and four such strongly defined individuals as Harry Levenson, Isobel, Jonathan, and Adrian.

A SEA CHANGE
by J. R. Salamanca
Knopf, $6.95

This new novel by J. R. Salamanca is the story of the disenchantment, the overfamiliarity, the mistrust of the future which seems to settle down upon so many American couples after their first ten years of matrimony. In some cases the husband has grown away from his wife in his interests and self-absorption; in others the wife burdened by closely spaced children has lost that sense of mystery and privacy which even the most ardent lovers need for their renewal.

In the case of Margaret and Michael Pritchard, the hero and heroine of Mr. Salamanca’s polished and often eloquent novel, no children but several complexes are involved. Michael had early alienated his father by refusing to take part in the family business of manufacturing artificial limbs. He was estranged from his brother and had no love for his mother, who was well on her way to dementia in his infancy. All of which is a complicated way of saying that Michael is lonely, self-encrusted, and a cold fish for anyone to bed down with. However, he proves to be a good scholar, a specialist in Eastern languages, and lie is about to receive his master’s degree and to go on for his Ph.D. when he meets Margaret. Margaret has a withered hand which she wears in a glove, and which is distasteful to him, reminding him as it does of the family interest in artificial limbs. But the rest of her he finds decidedly attractive, and after making love to her on a delightful cruise on the Chesapeake, he and Margaret decide to marry.

When the story next picks them up, the walls of their life are pressing in. Michael, who works in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, has become fussy and pedantic. They live at arm’s length in their tidy little Georgetown house, speaking with a facetiousness to which he has committed them and with a silence that does not bridge misunderstanding. As he explains in his self-defense: “We had not been separated by as much as twenty-four hours since the day of our marriage; she knew every book I had read, every play or film I had seen, every concert I had heard, every infirmity to which I was vulnerable, every confusion or enthusiasm to which I had been subject for the past twelve years.”

Michael tries the expedient of running off for a weekend with a luscious pickup. And when this is no answer, he proposes that they pool their savings for a three months’ holiday on the French Riviera to see if that will be a restorative. He is dimly aware that Margaret’s disillusion is as deep as his own.

Their stay in the dusty fishing village of St. Jean-Cap Ferrat makes up the second and better half of the novel. They explore the delectable little restaurants; they picnic, swim, and sun on the lovely terrace, and with the inducement of good wine, they make love. But each continues to be wary of the other, and Michael is on the prowl. It is in their casual friendships that their integrity is tested: they horse around with a raffish group of actors from the Old Vic; are entertained by an attractive English yachtsman who has his eye on Margaret, and by a cynical Spanish countess who makes Margaret queen of the masked ball. Margaret comes to life under all this adulation—and then to grief under the blandishments of an Italian poseur.

The author is very skillful in his picturing of the Riviera, and in his characterization of the flotsam who drift there, and he is so facile in his conversation that it flows on much too long. Michael is, of course, the real betrayer: with his improbable boyhood, his pretentious talk, his oscillation between sex and scholarship, he irritates the reader as much as he does his wife.

HOUSE OF GOLD
by Elizabeth Cullinan
Houghton Mifflin, $5·95

In the conferring of a Literary Fellowship a publisher hopes to signalize a new writer who will be accepted as “a discovery,” and in Elizabeth Cullinan, Houghton Mifflin has found a young novelist who is writing in the same vein as Edwin O’Connor, author of The Last Hurrah, if not yet as well. Drawing on her Irish-Catholic heritage, she has created a portrait of an American matriarch who lies dying as the story opens. In life Julia Devlin was a formidable woman with a willpower stronger than that of her husband or any of her large brood. She lived ostensibly for the Church (“What greater blessing would anyone want than to live across the street from the Lord?”) , and her shabby little house with its cobblestone yard was indeed facing St. Martin’s, although the back of it was so close to the railroad tracks that the house shuddered with each passing train. Her inspiration was also her buoyancy: two of her sons became priests, two of her daughters nuns, and living vicariously in their vocation, she could outtalk any neighbor in sanctimoniousness.

It was the children who remained at home, Elizabeth and her once gay, now subdued husband, Edwin, and Justin, the alcoholic son, who took the punishment. As for Tom, the son who became a major in the Army, he found happiness in being as far away as possible from the “house of gold,” the name of the home which serves appropriately as the title of the book. The name was bestowed when Julia and her husband celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and when the house throughout was refitted with everything of a golden tint, the roses, the portieres, the thin silk drapes, the floor covering—everything. Now in response to the urgent messages from Father Phil, the grown children return, still overborne by the silent figure on the bed as they sort out their memories and recall their rebelliousness.

Miss Cullinan makes the utmost of her power of observation, and her details re-create Mrs. Devlin’s illusion, which she imposed upon her children, that home was a special place of consecration. But that is not how they see it now. The house like the woman herself has shrunk, and the reader as he passes through this mordant exposure shares in the compassion, the blighted affection, and the irony bordering on rueful laughter. This book is a sensitive experience which will test the patience but not the credulity.

LET THEM EAT PROMISES: THE POLITICS or HUNGER IN AMERICA

by Nick Kotz

Prentice-Hall, $6.95

At this time, when the $20 billion overestimates of the Pentagon, the suspicion of our highest judges, the unconscionable pollution of air and water, and the penetrations of the Mafia make us wonder about the soundness of our republic, perhaps the most shocking revelation of all is that in this land of plenty there are so many who do not have enough to eat. That there should be 700,000 people on substandard diet in Massachusetts, the ninth wealthiest state, seems to me as appalling as the even more pitiable conditions which Robert F. Kennedy discovered in West Virginia and Mississippi. Hunger became a national political issue in 1967, but our well-fed middle class and the Congress which so often speaks for it are still short of doing anything serious about it.

Nick Kotz, a reliable Washington correspondent, first saw the realities of rural poverty when he visited his wife’s native state of Mississippi in i960, anil in the years since then his mind and sympathies have been engaged. He has witnessed the injustice which exists in a great breadbasket like Iowa; the Navajos, for whom “starvation is a continuing fact of life”; how hunger has been a whip in tiie rich fruit and vegetable valleys of Texas and California, and how “food aid programs were turned on and off to suit the convenience and labor needs of growers and planters.” His well-written, firmly documented, coolly indignant book, Let Them Eat Promises, is too disturbing and too factual to be brushed off as another troublemaker. It strikes at the most persistent mismanagement in our federal system; it traces the root of the trouble to those agricultural states, particularly in the South, where industrialization has driven the little farmer, black or white, off the land and into pauperism; it explodes the fallacy of paying a large landowner like Senator Eastland, who derives one profit from his fertile acres, a second for not planting other acres that might be productive. It traces the black migrations north and west, and as one Negro cynically concludes, “It seems you either have to starve or go to Chicago.” It shows the apathy of President Lyndon Johnson when faced with the unfulfilled promises made for the Cheat Society; it tells us that the Citizens’ Board of Inquiry classified 256 counties in the United States as “hunger counties” requiring immediate emergency assistance, and that the infant mortality rate in the United States is higher than that of fourteen other countries, including all Western Europe.

The hope held out by Mr. Kotz is that the citizens’ committees now up in arms will not be diverted, and that the government will at last face up to this near-disaster.