The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 9

THE GUARDIAN FRIDAY MARCH 18 1960 9 Vladimir Nabokn A HERMIT IN ESSEX J-'ICTIOX or THE WEEK JOYCE CARY a collection Shot in glorious Nabokolor Webb administrative error, the boy has been killed. Krug tears up the documents he is asked to sign, goes mad, and the novel dissolves in a very refined trick ending, with the author himself stepping in from the wings where he has been lurking as obtrusively as an officious prompter for much of the performance -to bring down the curtain with a few kind valedictory words for poor Krug." Sinister differs from Iaj in various externals, but the are obvious and significant. The grand climacteric of Lolita is Humbert's protracted assassination of Qutlty. with every wound and detail done in gorgeous colour black, gold, royal purpie. and pink within a hundred word? or so.

The climax "Bind Sinister" shows Krug learning how his son died in the Institute for Abnormal Children," where, to quote the adequate blurb, brutal psychopaths and criminal sadists are allowed, for scientific purposes, to vent their ferocious and repressed desires upon young children, in front of cameras." First a typical session Is described to Krug he is allowed to see part of the film which particularly interests hun and finally there is the splurge of Nabokolor again The murdered child had a crimson a'iri gold turban around its head Lis f.u'e wus skilfully painted and a mauve blanket, came up to its i There are even more precise correspondences I took aim at his head, and he retired to the master bedroom with a burst of royal purple where his ear had been rXoZita). Krug dodged the embrace of the Buird. Then the left side of his head seemed to burst into flames 'that first took off part of his earl Sinister). And so on. Lolita has no moral in tow." wrote Nabokov in an essay on his novel a few years ago.

For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as with muscles street. Instead, as a working man, he finds a society where it's I'm-all-right-Jack. where the class structure still dominates, where words can be twisted by magistrates and other nobs to cheat you of justice, where money talks. The social reportage of the first half of the book is often admirably firsthand. The second part, the thriller, in which Milis and an old comrade execute a violent train robbery, is grippingly well devised.

If one pauses to look for weaknesses, they can certainly be found. The two halves do not quite make a credible whole. The transformation of the idealist into thug is much too mechanical. The author accepts the hero's chip-on-the-shotilder as a piece of solid British woodwork he pushes his views much too uncritically and the strain of truth in them is obscured. But if Mr Barlow can keep up this standard of readability his publishers will have a new success on their hands.

Roy Phrrott. bv W. L. VTO one is the English Loiita after all, it seems, uiiich have encouraged N.coori to carry on with their plans intro-'iuce some of Nabokov's oarlier novels to the This ought to mean trial, frew! from "oncem for Naljckov the victim rl Mrs we down to the Lininiiihiteri of Nabokov the Unfortunate. the i- lo sinipie than it sou For Br nil Sinister, the first to lul i.j) raises again tne wnu'e oinp.ex of problems about art and mora'ity and -ontent and style to wnic-h no one but Grundy, a Marxist, or a detached ivory tower tenant has eay answers.

It was written in the midd war vars, shortly after Nabokov had arrived in America on the second leg of his lifelong refugee journey, and iDefore he turned his creative attention 'to the American scene. The story is given a much more luxuriantly fantastic treatment than Humbert's narrative received, but it can be outlined simply enough. Revolution has just established a dictatorship in an imaginary Slav country (lavishly supplied with an imaginary Slav language) and the regime is anxious have the endorsement of Adam Krug. the country's leading philosopher, to give it a respectable look abroad. Krug, however, sealed off from the world in the shock of his wife's death and anxiety for his young ion, emerges briefly to dismiss the suggestion with contempt.

Gradually the world closes in on his private world of grief. One by one his friends and colleagues are imprisoned, until finally he himself is arrested and then, roused and racked by fear for his child's safety, he agrees to accept, sign, endorse, inythinK. Unfortunately, through an Jimmy Porter JAMES BARIXnv'S The Patriots (Hamish Hamilton. Ids) is the sort novel that can be strongly recommended to the general reader without any weighty second thoughts. Mr Barlow offers a good, solid plot; he ran make a story rattle along.

Ho knows how to be entertaining and often exciting he also attempts to be truthful abuui his characters, with a very reasonable degree of success, and observantly honest about backgrounds. His story is a skilful Attempt to mix a social document with a detection-thriller. The hero, Reg Mills, is almost fhe ideal character to tempt the reading public just now: half of him belongs to the anti-phoney school of contemporary social observation; the other half is man of action a Lucky Jim or Jimmy Porter who likes to use his muscles. As a paratrooper at Arnhem. fighting shoulder to shoulder with his mates.

Mills apprehends the possibility of similar comradeship in civvy It mi- wnat I sna b.untly call ae-itiietic Tnese echoes of :i.r-:;:eiit and -tyle between novels more tnan ten years apart, and their urainat.i.' siting, seem to demonstrate trial lor him as an the contemplation of and v.olence arc conducive to the creation of aesthetic states. For reasons of taste, moral scruple, or wnat you w.l! many readers wili be unable to share in such joys. What damns both novels for me as works of art. however, is that this sort of preoccupation seems to be reflected in his style even -when he is dealing with other subjects. One can get a kick out of small doses of what used to be called "felicities" such as the notion of a cat rising like boiling milk" under a stroking hand and many others no less striking as one can be thrilled by a tricky angle shot in the cinema.

But with Nabokov it's kicks the way. until one's sensibility is black and blue and crimson and gold and royal purple and everv other ghastly colour in the Nabokov palette. The violence, perverseness. and relentless exhibitionism of the style are as radically anti-art as the interests on which it feeds are anti-life. Deviationists TM1ERE is nothing of major import--- ance in this collection, but an instructive spectacle of two clever women writers dealing very differently- one plain, one fancy with eccentrics.

One of them discusses deviation dispassionately, sitting at the bottom of the tree, as it were, while the other tries to communicate it and, bravely forcing human nature out on a limb, comes a cropper herself. The Head of the Family (Faber, las), by Eilis Diilon. at least emerges as an excellent, bitter comedy a little horror-comic about human nature. An old writer, an aged lion, one of the great figures of Anglo-Irish literature, lives in a big house in Dublin with his children and grown-up grandchildren, all in some measure crippled by his dominance. He ooens his old diaries to a visiting American scholar, and lets ioose the demons of his past misdeeds among this tribe of corroded, eroded victims.

Some of the family Miss Dillon leaves pathetically peripheral, though vivid little squashed victims of poverty and pride. Others develop alarmingly the hypochondriac son and heir, who mostly stays alertly in bed, and the charming, lazy grandson whose brains and affinity with his grandfather eive him the inverter! strength to be very nasty indeed. There are also two women who have withstood the old man, and an bv G. TPiHE scene is the muauier wastes oi Essex, in more senses than one. The action extends from the middle of the last century almost to the present day.

The dramatis personae include! yokVs. village nymphets. policemen, clergy, gentry, reporters, and Alexander James Mason. Jimmy's father was a sadist and even in church chastised his two sons. One of them may have poisoned the old man Jimmy at least tnougnt that his brother Tommy had.

but the accusation may have been made to cover a feeling of guilt about having done it himself, and about the homosexual love that he may have had for his brother. Leaving speculation for facts, we know that Jimmy was religious, fond of gardening, bees, and girls, whom he eavesdropped on. watched through telescope, showered with offerings of fruit, vegetables, and letters, but seldom if ever spoke to or met. The odd thing about him was that for the greater part of his life he was a hermit, and there is no surer way of drawing attention to yourself than by trying to be that. Hence, while he was alive, the children throwing stones and the newspaper prying, and, now that he is dead.

Raleigh Trevelyan's biography, A Hermit Disclosed (Longmans. 30s). Mr Trevelyan became interested in Jimmy, the hermit of Great Canfteld, when at the age of 18 he found in the attic of his home (where the Masons once lived) Jimmy's diary for 1895-7. With the publication of this book, eighteen years later, it is to be hoped that he has got Jimmy out of his system. He pursued his obsession with the kind of amateur zeal that one associates, say.

with rubbing brasses. The diary was only a starting point. With a thoroughness of which he is obviously proud, he interviewed over 200 people in an attempt to discover Jimmy's inner secret. They included a psychiatrist, a psychometrist, a outsider, a young student who by love of the old man and his writing is unexpectedly redeemed from his own filial bondage. Miss Dillon handles the mechanics of the story very dryly so sternly repressing any intervention or indulgence on her part that at first it seems dismayingly flat.

It is only slowly that its teeth are bared, and begin to close. Hie deceptive artless-ness of the writing hides a powerful duplicity all the charmers are capable of cruelty, all the horrors demand pity, everything that seems comic is on consideration sad, and everything that initially shocks also encourages appalled or unalloyed laughter. By the end, just about every shade of selfishness, from.innocent vanity and pomposity to deep, greedy egotism, has been faithfully, impassively riddled. This is a very cunning, dreadful little tract, and tremendously enjoyable. Miss Kathleen Nott's Private Fires (Heinemann, 18s) also deals with the raging dangers within the ordinary human potential but whereas Miss Dillon walks into the jaws of the danger and discusses the state of its teeth Miss Nott hangs around outside, making rather high-flown comment on the smell of its breath.

Her intention was evidently to show the desolation of individual loneliness, and the destructive or reassuring powers it may engender. For this, she uses primarily an old woman lodging-house keeper, at heroic grips with dustmen and Rent Tribunals, and steadfastly banking down her own desperation a homeless boy who comes under her wing and a suave, upstart Mephistopheles, an incendiarist by occupation, under whose spell the boy falls (they even visit post-war Cologne, to enhance the sense of ruin, but not very meaningfully in terms of the story). There are also some incidental clowns, and some local government officials of not much more than usual involution who thereby touch the reader much more closely than the inspissated central figures. For the sad thing is that the principal specimens never escape from the tight, conscientious cocoon of the grotesque and eccentric in which the author wraps them. They indulge in elliptical conversations, and in nervous, jumpy, strangely uniform interior monologue and they stay bogged down, inert, in a sludge of sensitivity, pumped round them by the highly self-conscious prose.

Never for Analysing bv Werner AMERICANS, to judge by the number of books they publish on Germany, are more interested than British readers in looking at the evidence of changes in that country they are less content merely to recite the terrible list of Germany's previous convictions. The Death and Life of Germany, by Eugene Davidson (Cape, 35s), is a record both of the author's study of Allied and German documents and publications and of his personal impressions of German post-war society. He retells the story of vast and unimaginable criminality committed when Neanderthal man stepped out of his glass case in the Bonn museum and took over the weapons and techniques of modern Europe. The confusions and antagonisms of Inter-Allied relations oefore and after the defeat of Nazi Germany, above all the absence of any clear Western plan for the future of the country, are well described. He re-creates the atmosphere of the Nuremberg trials, with their consciousness of conflicts to come between the Powers whose representatives sat judgment.

Around them, a nation, more conscious of hunger than of political responsibility, was groping its way through the ruins, to be denazified ana democratised by administrative processes. This is primarily an account of the American occupation, and although it reflects some of tr.e American taith in social engineering is by no means uncritical. Above all. it never loses ight of the man in the street the workers and shopkeepers, the teachers and housewives and their reactions to the slow revival of hope. Sometimes, indeed, Mr Davidson goes in for unnecessary detail, but he has a tening and.

on the whole, lucid to tell. Heartening, tnat is. for West and for those Germans who were lucky enough to be on the Western side of the Iron Curtain who largely owed their rapid return into company or Western nations to tne Russian threat and the division of country. Freedom and prosperity tnrust upon them, and their enemies turned into al'les ave they their Mr tdson is certain that they have. giving this confident reply, he is haps too mucn uic.med to think of sian pressure as tne most re.iable force for keeping the Germans in the Western illiar.ee.

Seddon grapnologist, an astrologer, a medium, the doctor who saw Jimmy's body, the gruvedigger. and the undertaker. Mr Trevelyan, however, did not have the body exhumed, and in my sloppy, sentimental, old-fashioned way I am glad that he boggled at that. (Comparative safety of tomb and womb.) Beaten at home, bullied at school (because he was Jimmy was already pretty odd in his teens. He Jived in a private world haunted by demons and religion, instead of exorcising them, added to them.

He loved with emigration, but in fact found physical escape first in the corrugated iron hut that he built at the bottom of the orchard, and then in another hut more isolated from the village and more hevily barricaded aga'ust the outside world. It takes more than barbed wire, however, lo keep out the demon of sex and the terrors of a persecution mania (not to mention the attentions of the press), and one is left to imagine the horrors endured in nearly forty years of almost unbroken solitude by this gentle, sensitive paranoid schizophrenic. Or were his torments assuaged Did he, becoming more and more religious, find in God the protection that he needed just as the accumulating copies of the Christian Herald piled round the walls of his tin hut helped to keep out the draughts. Not all Trevelyan's posthumous peeping, can throw any light on this or indeed reveal anything but a 'mass of bizarre facts and the way they were unearthed. Reading this book in a week that included Chessman and Fylinijdales, my sympathies are all with Jimmy.

Lord, release me." was the agonising cry in his diary, and when the Lord did not he had to turn to corrugated iron and barbed wire. If I am driven to follow his example, however, I shall leave no diaries lying round in attics. And I shall be cremated. Mv biographer might not have Mr TreveVyan's ultimate delicacy'. bv Anne Duchene a moment can one forget the author's invention and intervention and begin to see the people independently of her will.

The result is an exasperating book, as it is full of vexatious little shafts reminding one of what a good writer Miss Nott can be when she is not trying to be a kind of Mother Joyce Cary. The remaining books are much less complex arguments. If It be Love (Michael Joseph, 15s), by Stanley Kauffmann, does, certainly, try to suggest a young American's discovery that truth is relative, but in such alternately vague and archi-romantic terms he comes to England and discovers some prevarication in the English director of his advertising agency, and falls in love with an emotionaLly over-charged American pianist already loved by a highly neurotic Italian aristocrat that his problems do not finally detain one very long. The Crime of Giovanni Venturl (Peter Davies, 16s) implies a much greater threat an American writer being comical about a Roman restaurateur. Giovanni digs a tunnel from his own doomed trattoria to the kind of superior Joe Lyons on the corner, and helps himself he also discovers the tomb of Lars Porsea on the way, and becomes a notable Etruscan expert.

In fact, Mr Howard Shaw easily avoids the worst pitfalls, and in spite of a slightly arch never-never-land detachment has written an amiable comedy. There is little remoteness about Alan Clark's Bargains at Special Prices (New Authors, 15s), all about sharp practice in the hinterland of the Stock Exchange when some shares in a worthless London hotel suddenly become an interesting property-value. The shares pass between the capering characters in a splendid handy-dandy of ignorance and greed, and one does become involved in their ridiculous fate. Mr Clark seems to know the City as well as sleazy Chelsea, and this is a sprightly, mundane addition to the Hutchinson stables. The Marigold Summer (Michael Joseph.

13s 6d) continues Elizabeth Avery's felicitous childhood story begun in "The Margaret Years," and most beautifully re-creates the sensations of being in hospital in childhood's terms, but since most of us become rather childish upon going into hospital, none the less aptly for that. a miracle Burmeister That there has been a striking transformation cannot be doubted. Can it also be measured Karl W. Deutsch and Lewis J. Edingcr have attempted to do so in Germany Rejoins the Powers (Oxford, 52s).

What kind of country is Germany to-day What ideas and what groups determine her actions among nations How free are her Government and her people to shape their conduct in world affairs What burdens can German society and German democratic institutions safely bear What would be the most likely German response to an international crisis These are the questions which the authors have set out to answer. Perhaps they involve more than anybody can safely answer now even the Germans with their newly acquired cult of public opinion polls. But here are the replies which Germans now give, together with a close study of the interaction between these attitudes and the various interest groups and eiites which operate in their society. The authors have used their materia! with modesty and wisdom. In their sober and scholarly survey they have naturally included studies of actual political behaviour.

And they show a healthy awareness of the fact that foreign policies in general, and German foreign policies in particular, do not always follow the prevailing trend of public opinion. Thus the Germans got rearm iraent. although only a minority wanted it. Even now. they are less enthusiastic about it than is commonly assumed at moments when their Ministers are discovered looking for supply bases abroad.

(At other ttmes, their Ministers got blamed abroad for being too slow especially when they do not buy our weapons N'atura'ly. the evidence presented in this study does not always provide e'ear-cut answers and cer-tainiy no final ones. But it shows a gradual strengthening of humanitarian and democratic traditions in German life to-day and of the constitutional svstem of government. Whether "these traditions can strike deeper roots will not. of course, depend on the Germans alone.

This is a most valuable book of reference for those people in this 'otintry. especially in the opinion-lorrning minority, who have sometimes had to bae their attitudes not on any careful analysis but on hunches. and emotions. Alas, it mav have no effect at ail on others who merely wbh to pander to existing prejudice. of stories Spring Song (is.) ROBERT HOLLES his brilliant novel Captain Cat (i si-) CLIFFORD MAXWELL his witty novel on the niceties of divorce I Married the Girl LIONEL DAICHES his amusing record of a Russian visit Russians at Law (21-) MICHAEL JOSEPH The Truest Poetry An Essay on the Quest ion What is Literature LAURENCE LERNER Exceptionally lucid, unaffected and intelligent." frank KEHMODE (Guardian The most interesting new critical essay that I have read for some years." Raymond Williams (Neiv Statesman).

Book Society Choice for March The Patriots JAMES BARLOW "Compulsively readable: an electrifying tension. As real as Simenon and a.i exciting as Ian Fleming." j. d. scott (Sunday Times). He cares about human beings and makes us care about them too." RICHARD LISTER (Evening Standard jrd Imp.

printing. 16s. Act of Mercy FRANCIS CLIFFORD This fast-moving story packed with adventure and tension should be a winner." GEORGE MILLAR (Daily Express). Vigorous, concise and fresh." The Times Literary Supplement. 1)1.

6d. -HAMISH HAMILTON It is so beautiful in THE CM SONS Cngadine A decern r-j write: once called tnjj ho! i cay reg.cn tie n-iirrored redecT-on of Switzerland-" He wanted To express tne fact tnat the Orisons offers infinite variety mountains anrj vaUeys. lakes and glittering ice anJ sheltered btcssed with all the cnarms ot tne Soutn endless forests ancient culture, a b-end ot the Teutonic No'f aid rhe LaTn Scufh It is at re same fe me region wftcre ff th contrasts of nature, climate, people and language ar most vivid'y expressed The network ot the Rhaehan Rjitway passes throtgn the mam part of the region a dozen Alpine roads mvtic toon by car or buses Guests are wed Jooked after al hoters. from the simpUi inn to Large establishments A ROSA DAVOS ST. MORITZ FLIMS KLOSTERS PONTRES1NA LENZERHEIDE-VALBELLA SCUOL-TARASP-VULPERA Spa ia r.ar.y sryai'er ma'j-ilin tcu'it forward to a sit frorn vra.

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He describes his LIFE IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE an Organization Man who had to quit. ,8,, Lome's hard, brig ht international colony is introduced by irwin siiaw with "a high degree of Intelligence'. TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN is a 'penetratingly incisive', 'a deeply satisfying novel' and a Book Society Choice. j8s. eyond the frontiers of Afghanistan, ronald praser's interplanetary adventurer, Trout the butler, continues the battle with the powers of TESTAMENT Is the latest of Fraser's strange, serious fantasies.

15s. irst published in 1938. William flomer's selection from the diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert was described as 'a new classic. KILVERT DIARY, 'a permanent addition to English literature', is now re-issued in one volume.

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Mr. Heseltine is a lively writer with a quick and observant eye. His book is, from the topical point of view, timely iiusfratrci London News. Illustrated 276 net. Great Companions by Max Eastman Individualistic recollections of some of the more outstanding personalities of our time, including Freud, Chaplrn, Trotsky, Hemingway and Bertrand Russell.

These memoirs have delighted me." Sunday Times. Illustrated 21- net. The Jet Lighthouse by Gafbraith Welch The story of the beginning and develoDment of the first negro republic, and a lively record of what Liberia is to-dav. Illustrated 25- net. Bobby Fischer's Games of Chess The first collection of tournament games of the remarkable chess prodigy, the youngest international grandmaster of all time.

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