The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 7

BOOKS Thursday April .13 1978 The Right's catastrophe BIKO, by Donald Woods (Paddington Press, 5.95). by Bernard Crick THE DILEMMA OF DEMOCRACY, by Lord ail sham Collins, 4.50). STRATEGY OF SURVIVAL, by Brain Crozier (Temple Smith, 5.50). IN DEFENCE OF FREEDOM, edited by K. W.

Watkins (Cassell, 2.50). WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE MODERN WORLD, by Michael Shanks Bodley Head, 3.95). Helen -'Suzman, who cry out against boycotts and blockades. He calls for the strongest international pressures, short of war. He is likely to be disappointed.

For he makes his call ultimately to the conscience and good sense of the West. And neither has been conspicuous so far in promoting effectual policies to confront white rule. -Except for a renewed- interest in prayer, which has a poor track record against apartheid, the most- notable' recent response has been a dance of alarm that Soviet cynicism may. be moving to exploit Western perplexity. All -this only serves, to remind, black South Africa once again that it must find its release in revolution.

It will-be-a revolution-. not made by proxy or by a mood. Whatever outside help it may be given, it will be made only by a pertinence of ideology and programme that musters the multitudes of black South Africa in the factories and mines, the townships and the travesties of independent tribal homelands. If there are those among the well-meaning who find this prospect unpalatable, it is at the grave of Steve Biko that they are required to offer their alternatives. Major Harold Snyman, in charge of Biko's final interrogation.

STEVE BUCO was a young African of much vigour and courage of imagination and wit and magnanimity. This emerges' clearly enough through a tribute which all but envelops him. The Black Consciousness movement, of which he was a principal figure, fired a', new generation of revolt in South Africa. Its ideology was a rag-bag of protest thought. There was the commitment to psychic liberation, or the Black is Beautiful theme, whose cross-currents stretch from the militancy of the American ghetto to the mists of Negritude.

Its economic dispensation, based on a more or less romanticised historical com-munalism, was once the remedy of the Russian Social Revolutionaries and has repeatedly recommended, without, being dispensed, by African leaders who feel safer in refining the past than in exploring the future. The reliance on moral rather than material force to defeat oppression belongs to a Gandhianism that was born in South Africa itself. It failed its first, and it has failed every subsequent test there. But then the Black Consciousness movement was not remarkable for any pertinent ideology, let alone programme, of change It reflected and fed only a mood. And that is why it was left at liberty for so long, until the mood itself engendered a measurable challenge.

What followed was predictable enough. The violence of- the police excited a rage of rioting: the rioting excited an increase of violence from the police stay-at-home campaigns of protest distressed a business community immune to moral disquiet governments of every colour abroad reissued their denunciations of apartheid the violence of the police, with backing from the army, restored order at last. There were certain differ- (oddiy meaning the Governments of Mr Wilson and Mr Callaghan). Some aspects of the fears of Winston S. Churchill, Lord De L'Isle, Stephen Haseler, Norris McWhirter and Robert Moss particularly, if true, might even cheer me up.

They are catastrophe men, all preaching (like inverted Marxists) that the whole system will collapse if their nostrums are not adopted. Oddly, the clearest thread running through most of the essays is the belief that income tax is excessive and a threat to our (their?) basic liberties. They seem obsessed with making money. Only Lady Morrison of Lambeth (Herbert's second wife) sounds a discordant anti-capitalist nota against the materialistic atmosphere" of a society that leads youth into promiscuity and drug-taking." Dr Watkins, though English, is an old American type the ex-Communist professional anti-Communist. I remember him as one of the best organisers of student, youth, and cultural fronts the party ever had in the postwar era.

Now he applies his old skills to another extreme. His own essay trots out all the old favourite Communist Party taas. only now with horror rather than relish. But there is no philosophical argument at all. The whole bonk is a hatv, badlv edited and mutually incoherent Odd.

of these threp polemical books, only Lord Hailsham's could possiblv change anvone's mind, rather than flatter existing prejudices. Michael Shanks, in contract, is a calm voice of the dead centre. To him the er'sis is economic: that of inflation and low investment, but the cures rannot be purely economic. A sense of fairness must enter into rewards, not simplv acceptance of market mechanisms, and of cooperation into work. He argues that we should accept corporative bargaining as a supplement tn the parliamentary process, but that its ranae must be greatlv extended to include consumers as well as producers.

He. comes near, without ruiitp gettin" there to nro-dticing a coherent theory of social contract'" and the mixed economv. The conclusions are abstract at least if one tried to follow them thev moulds not. unlike those of the other books, obviously make things worse. -T-v I rv i OflV War Smooth Lord Hailsham cover with stupid frankness; "the promulgation of a written Constitution (as suggested by Lord Hailsham, among others) would immensely facilitate the work of counter-subversion There is a Soviet threat, certainly, and there is a struggle for the allegiance or neutrality of the Third World.

But since the struggle is primarily for hearts and minds, to advocate closer cooperation with racialist, fascist and dictatorial regimes, to combat rather than encourage national communism to match intolerance with intolerance, seems so crazily counter-productive that at times one might ask, despite all Mr Crozier's standing with Defence Colleges and his Institute for the Study of Conflict, which side is he really on objectively speaking? Probably some of this is only to make the flesh of his patrons creep deli-eiously. The crisis for Dr K. W. Watkins's Second Eleven of militant individualists is the threat to our (their?) freedom posed by socialism The cold betrayal by Mark Arnold Forsrer NOTHING BUT HONOUR The Story of the Warsaiv Uprising, 1944, by J. K.

Zawodny (Macmillan, 6.95). The Russians have also always maintained that no one warned them in advance that the uprising was about to take place. On this second point, Professor Zawodny concedes that they are probably right, but says that this rievin; by RONALD SEGAL Steve Bike New fiction reviewed GREGOKY and Terry, who double the narrative in a way that makes Martin Amis's Success like a kind of two-way mirror, are foster-brothers and flatmates hut they couldn't be more different. Gregory is an elegant egomaniac with an abundant sex-life a man of parts, predominantly private. The less well-endowed Terry lurks in the shadow of this brilliance, gloomy and frustrated.

They make an exhausting pair. One moment we are skating along on Gregory's icy wit, the next we are floundering in the. murky depths of Terry's truly awful self-pity. No wonder Ursula, their unfortunate sister, is being driven out of her -mind. The style of this new and trendy version of the story of the.

smooth man and the hairy man is artfully appropriate. Amis uses a bland overstatement and a colloquial technique of saying things several times over; he says them once and then he says them again, with a slight shift of emphasis. This higher con-man's approach builds up an air of profound unreliability entirely fitting, since things are by no means what they seem. It turns out that the magnificent Gregory has been fantasising all the way and could no more dominate the bedroom scene than poor Victor the giraffe. Indeed, his real-life fate is hardly less sad.

It is the louche Terry recovered from childhood wounds, who plods on with new confidence and gets there in the end, where-ever it is. Poets are a worldly lot these days and can be expected, when they turn to fiction, to tune in with more than common accuracy to the authentic feel and flavour of the times. A. Alvarez seems rather specialised in his interests but Hunt does manage to convey a sense of current nastiness not so much the gambling world, which looks fairly hiiman, as III mM IPU'IV UP mm mm 1 ri" Kj P11J if 3 Ill THE PROVOCATEUR 1 by Rene-Victor Panes 'Fantastical, blackly comical, the novel cracks capitalism wide open the best anti-money novel to appear for 4.95 cased iveiv Statesman "I don't mind the sex it's the violence' film censorship explored by Enid Wistrich A sober and thoughtful critique which examines the role of film censorship and questions the rationale of repressive laws. 225 paper 5.95 cased Decoding Advertisements Ideology and Meaning in Advertising by Judith Williamson A fascinating account of how admen achieve their 3.95 paper 7.95 cased The Right to Useful Unemployment and its professional enemies by Ivan Illicit A timely analysis of the value of peoples work 3.95 cased NOT SO long ago books of political polemic seemed a genre as near to extinction as the pamphlet.

Only a few left-wing publishers kept it up, albeit in a highly internalised style of sectarian jargon. Now suddenly a literature" abounds, though every author seems to keep his own crisis and such books are less evidence of a crisis than of publishers feeling that politics is back, if dramatised grossly. Right-wing scare books, however, are at least written in good English. Too few socialists, despite Orwell, have seen the need to write in plain English, to convert the undecided rather than to exalt the elect. Lord Hailsham's crisis is a crisis of Parliament.

He argues eloquently that there are two theories of democracy, one of centralised democracy or popular sovereignty which leads to the elective dictatorship of our present system; and the other is the theory of limited government or of freedom under law." To preserve the latter against the former, he has come to believe that wj need a written constitution. Toryism used to accept the power of the State and worry only that it was in the right hands. Hailsham now stands revealed as a Whig, hostile not just to the abuse of power but to power as such. A Hobbes would argue that laws are made by the will of men and cannot bind the strong; and the Marxist would argue that judges may, indeed, be more representa tive of the governing class-than an elective parliament. He offers no answers to obvious objections but just forges on with a lively, well-written and quirky argument.

He is a great English character. But the advocacy, is that of a barrister an odd mixture of chosen facts and bluster. He has neither the temperament nor the equipment of a genuine political thinker. The crisis for Brian Crozier is expanding Russian influence. Their "target area" has got to work together; so South Africa, Chile, Shahs and Sheiks must not be ostracised but helped: Eurocommunism is no threat to Russian power, only to our own; and we are foolishly tolerant towards Marxist subversives in the media, education and industry.

He even blows Lord II a i 1 a ideological THE Polish nation has been haunted for centuries by tragedy, betrayal, and its unhappy location between the Russian millstone and the German one. This book is the first really meticulous account of the tragedy that befell the Poles during the Warsaw uprising in 1944 and of their betrayal by their allies in 1943. Some Poles will think that Professor Zawodny has understated his ease. For instance, he does not believe that the Russians deliberately held back from taking Warsaw so that the Germans might more easilv slaughter the Poles, but leaves the reader to evaluate the evidence, simply stating the carefully established facts. He does not say outright that Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin carved Poland into the shape that suited them, regardless of the wishes of the Poles, but the evidence he produces is damning.

And his account of the uprising itself, of the heroism of the people of Warsaw Communists and non-Comm-munists alike is the more moving because it is based on bald first-hand accounts. The first of Professor Zawodny's three main themes is the uprising itself and the Russians' failure- to come to the aid of the Poles who were risking their lives to attack the Germans. He does not spare the organisers of the uprising either. They took to the streets and the sewers' poorly armed, so poorly armed in fact that only about six per cent of those who were called on to rise against the Germans had any weapons at all. Among 60 people we had one rifle and nine pistols." Here, again, Professor Zawodny refrains from comment, though the commander who -calls people to arms without having arms to give them might certainly deserve some censure.

But the lack of arms only serves to rendiv the heroism more poignant. The Professor's second theme is the vexed one of Russian non-intervention. It is not a simple story. The Russians have always said that the uprising -was premature, that they had outrun their lines of supply, having advanced many hundreds of miles in a short period bet ore thev reached the outskirts of Warsaw, and that they were therefore in no position to take the city until they had replenished their supplies. in short The Inner Eye of Love, by William Johnston (Collins, 4.95).

A guide to the varieties of mystical experience and contemplative modes from many religious cultures by an Irish Jesuit and Zen scholar resident in I Japan. 1 ences from events in 1960. The scale- of the rioting and of the violence employed to suppress it was much greater; abroad, there was much less real or apparent popular revulsion the Government never lost its composure. The murder of Steve Biko was not predictable. But it was consistent with the deepening depravity of the regime.

The legislation against sabotage and terrorism makes no essential distinction between a disturbing moral challenge and the. challenge of, the bullet or the bomb. And the security police have been effectively encouraged to believe that even such accommodating laws need not contain their pursuit of duty or-pleasure. Steve Biko was the twenty-first to die in detention at their hands within less than a year. Donald Woods has produced an important book.

Much of the early part is a swamp of words. But the reader is advised to persevere. With the testimony at the trial of Black Consciousness leaders, he reaches firm ground. And there are memorable passages to come in his recalled reactions to the news of Biko's death; in the short account of the visit that he paid with Biko's widow to view the body in the description by his own wife, Wendy, of the scene at the inquest. And the record of the inquest must be read for every twist of the evidence, all the way to the blank wall of the verdict.

What is to be done Donald Woods has now gone beyond grieving; He. no longer believes that white rule only clenches the tighter at any threat from abroad. And certainly, it has never relaxed in response to indifference. He has broken with the delicacy of those, such as by Norman Shrapnel as we are separated by time." Half expecting all this to prove a recipe for total literarv boredom I was surprised to find it more gripping than the average thanks largely to, additives of myth and necromancy which are not, I suppose, strictly surreal. Richard Brautigan is established as one of the writers of our time who has deposited his style and registered his territory as purposefully as, say, a Damon Runyon or an Erskine Caldwell.

You grab all he writes1 'or you just don't look. Personally I grab, and Dreaming of Babylon is well up to form. The hero, so to speak, is a day-dreaming private detective so down on his luck that he can't even buy professional equipment like bullets for his gun, and his adventures some of them intensely chilling are told in Brautigan's disquieting sawn-off style. It is just over the border from surrealism and seems to me stranger and more unnerving. Perhaps it is that deadly calm.

Which is certainly not a characteristic of David Williams's Second Sight, a case of a good spooky plot clumsily mishandled. Now that new writers are dipping so lavishly into the Gothic deep freeze they should learn a few of the operating rules, and although Mr Williams's heroine is promisingly divided from her Victorian lover by a whole century, she makes such a fuss about her predicament, with so manv girlish quiverings and palnitations. as' quite to forfeit any reasonable sympathy or human interest. Perfect Master Teddy Ottinger, a butchissima aviatrix. Teddy has had her tubes tied in order to make a cheap point about the sterility of absolutely everything, these days.

An intrepid pilot, she also takes time off to score a cheap point from Erica Jong (see page 74). Indeed, the only thing that isn't cheap about this book is the price. Vidal's apocalypse is as cosily flabby as yesterday's salad, the plotting looks like kittens got at the knitting wool and a bouquet of invincible boredom rises from the ill-conceived pages as if. rather than writing it, Vidal would have preferred to have a nice time, if he could think of anything nice to do, that is. There is one good line in it.

but that looks like an authentic objel trouve from a California poolside "Hi! I'm Bettina. I'm into health food. water sports and bondage." by Michael Billington Shakespeare could not do was write a tolerable play for a nineteenth-century audience, Irving managed to make Macbeth, Othello and Richard III into popular successes in their original text's. The book is shadowy on dates and doesn't display that rare gift (which a critic like Trewin has) of making a vanished performance come alive before your eyes. But it gives a wholly sympathetic portrait of Irving as a man who devoted colossal energies to making the art of acting respectable and to improving his own technique when a blind man told Irving that in his Shylock he could hear no sound of the usurer in the phrase, Three thousand ducats." the actor straightway revised his reading.

fact by itself is misleading, since the Communist-dominated Polish Committee of National Liberation in Lublin certainly did know that the uprising was imminent because the Warsaw Communisits had told them so. Finally, the Professor describes with awful precision the process whereby Churchill (whose country had gone to war for Poland's sake) and Roosevelt conceded eastern Poland to Stalin. And without telling the Poles. Having fought, alone, to recapture Warsaw, the Poles woke up to find that their country had been dismembered around them. This is a tragic book about a tragic country.

Its immense mesit is the deadly precision of its documentation and its author's careful understatement of his theme. 500 years of Oxford books SUCCESS, by. Martin Amis (Cape, 3.95). HUNT, by Alvarez (Mac-millan, 4.95). THE STONE DOOR, by Leonora Carrington (Rout-ledge, 3.75).

the computers that have got us all taped and Old Uncle Kafka who is busy helping the police with their enquiries. His hero is plainly innocent. But that is no longer a security indeed, rather the opposite. It is easier to be guilty than innocent safer even, because then you know what you have to defend yourself against. Mr Alvarez is sound on poker as well as poetry and his somewhat torpid plot does what it evidently set out to do to communicate menace.

As far as can see it achieves little else. No poet could say, the JIM KELLY, a- blond, charismatic Vietnam veteran, hits the world's headlines when he claims to be the incarnation of Vishnu, a Hindu supermessiah, and announces the imminent end of the world. Lo and behold, on the very day Kelly, a.k.a Kalki, predicts world-wide, fatal pandemic strikes. Not so miraculous as all that KalkiKelly is a whizz at biological warfare, a one-man Porton Down, in fact, and contrives to preserve from the holocaust the Five Perfect Masters of sacred lore. These are the god himself, obviously his wife, a Grace Kelly lookalike with whom he proposes to people the world with Aryan offspring and three tutors for the as yet unborn divine babies.

The Kalkis move into the White House, for drearily satiric purposes, but. due to genetic ironv and Kalki's megalomania, the only little feet that eventually patter through A. Alvarez it mm Author's by P. J. Kavanagh LITERARY GENT, by David Higham (Cape, 7.95).

THERE ARE writers who write entirely for money, and when their efforts coincide with the needs and desires of the jnarket it is possible to think of these as the happiest of men. But by far the greater number of writers and readers, on the whole, seem not to know this write (presumably) because they want to, vaguely hoping that what they write will be wanted, bought, and thereby grant them a wage. It is for this second class of writers that a vast industry exists, the publishing industry (largely subsidised by the sales of writers in the first class) and there are not many writers who regard that industry, its expense account lunches and Garrick Club ties, without a mixture of deference and resentment: All this is based on us Faced with its amiable condescension, its occasional gentlemanly sharp-practice, they feel in need of help. Thus, since about the turn of the century, on the principle that it is a good idea to pay a burglar to guard your possessions, there has grown up between author and publisher a sort of buffer state, the trade of "literary agent." One of the surprising things is that the arrangement seems to work the burglar, who probably started as a publisher anyway, can be trusted to fend off predators, to put his- "client" first, and one of the creators of the confidence that does exist between author and agent was the doyen of the trade, almost one of the inventor-; of it, David Hi sham, who died last week within a few days of his hook being published. i On parade, a reluctant middle-aged soldier, King George VI asked him his profession and Higham told him, whereupon the King laughed loud and long.

It was only afterwards that it i occurred to -Higham that the King must have misheard, must have thought he said what he has made the title of his. book, Literary Gent. Complex Jewish family, I schooldays at Harrow, first I World War experiences, and then, the heart of the book, a job' in 1925 with one of the 1 first literary agencies, Curtis Brown (founded about 1898) 1 which led naturally, and com- batively, to the founding of his own firm. Pearn. Pollin- -ger and Higham.

Here is the first description an agent's life I have read, and he makes it sound fun; per- sonal stories of all the pub- lishers of the time, riilit up to the present, and of many authors. At the bottom of the book, I buried under the puns, there is more than a suggestion of i deeo feel inn, of respect for i talent and love for its productions. Mr Higham was also a devoted and performing musician fa singer) and his list of extra-musical cultural I pleasures is both unpreten- I nous an-i endearingly gentle; Leonardo's lw'nting, scones from War and Peace. Ar'ple Astaire. on china Fvh) dnoo.

George Herbert. Edward Thomas. He must hrve been fun to 'us clients. Ho ends A nd I have enjoyed myself." i 1ST Ml. ljv.

or scary DREAMING OF BABYLON, by Richard Brautigan (Cape, 3.95). SECOND SIGHT, by David Williams (Hamish Hamilton, 4.50). mm Martin Amis painter Leonora Carrington does in The Stone Door, that words are treacherous because they are This is a surrealist novel and I can't remember having read one before unless you count Alice, which is animated and held together by thai ruthlessly ordinary little girl. Here we gel the authentic props broken sculpture, gesticulating parchment, old boots and urns, a flute that bursts into leaf when blown, as well as various witchcraft emblems. And no Alice, though there is a girl who eerily stretches her hands tn her lover saying that she can't touch him Bored Vidal by Angela Carter KALKI, by Gore Vidal (Heinemann, 4.50).

it are those of a guileless troupe of simians, imported to witness Kalki's final decision that he has got his Hindu mythology mixed up and has never been benign Vishnu at all but, instead, Siva, the annihilator, the exterminator, all along the line. Since everybody else is dead, so glumly ends the human race, for whom Vidal has few good words, anyway. The first person narrator of most of this curious fable is HENRY IRVING AND THE VICTORIAN THEATRE, by Madeleine Bingham (Allen and Unwin, 7.50). hallowed trash instead of devoting himself to the new drama. But Shaw was writing about Irving at the end of his career.

As Mrs Bingham sanely reminds us, Irving had earlier waged his own war on vulgarity and froth. His Hamlet at the Lyceum in 1874 drew the intelligentsia back 'to the London theatre (only the Prince of Wales was bored) and helped oust opera bouffe, burlesque and equestrian performances from other London houses'. And at a time When Punch announced that the one thing 1978 Pure professional 'A book starts life with the bibliographic equivalent of a silver spoon in its mouth if it wears on its spine the colophon of three golden crowns encompassing a double-page spread inscribed Dominus llluminatio Mea. No doubt the Oxford University Press has sometimes published a bad book, though it is blasphemy even to whisper the imputation this year. But in general, sound scholarship, disinterested love of truth, and usually good reading as well make the OUP one of the great publishing houses of the Philip Howard in The Times We've celebrated our 500th birthday by publishing two histories of ourselves The Oxford University Press: An Informal History, by Peter Sutcliffe, 6.75, and The Oxford University Press and the Spread of Learning An Illustrated History, by Nicolas Barker, 10.

'Mr Barker's', writes John Wain in The Observer, 'is a lavish picture book with much information unobtrusively conveyed Mr Sutcliffe's a densely packed narrative enlivened by portraits and by reflections sometimes ironic. Both are fully worthy of the tradition of the house in printing, binding, and authorship. And both are exceptional value for money I hope someone will be writing the history of the Oxford Press in another 500 NO STARTLING revelations in this clear, concise biography of Sir Henry Irving; but then no loading of the dice either. If you want a blow-by-blow account of specific performances, then Laurence Irving's classic 1951 biography is still the place to go. But Mrs Bingham makes no bones about Irving's longstanding affaire with Ellen Terry, gives vivid sketches of the plays in which Irving chose to appear and treats his spectacular Lyceum productions (400 was spent on a single peal of bells in Goethe's Faust) as the cmh'odimentof Victorian self-confidence.

Today we tend to see Irving through Shavian eyes as- a vainglorious actor-manager wasting his time on.