Allan Massie

Roger Scruton has called Les Orphelins by Louis Pauwels the best French novel since the 1939-45 war. Since it seems unlikely that even Professor Scruton has read all the good French novels of the last 60 years — after all, who among us has read all the good English or American ones? — this really means little more than that he thinks very well of it. He is quite right to do so. It’s a remarkable novel. I’ve just read it a second time and think even better of it than before. It was the approach of the 40th anniversary of the Paris events of May ’68 which prompted me to read it again.

The subtitle is ‘The Erika and Klaus Mann Story’, and the shadow is that cast by their father, Thomas Mann, the greatest German novelist of the 20th century. Erika and Klaus were the oldest two of his six children, and, while it is fair to say they lived in his shadow, they were not obscured by it, being extraordinary people in their own right, Klaus at least a remarkable writer himself also. Andrea Weiss, an American film-maker as well as writer, an associate professor at the City College of New York, tells their story with enthusiasm, sympathy and insight, in a style mercifully free of the clotted jargon we tend, not always unfairly, to expect from American academics.

One may make a distinction between two types of novel: the self-enclosed and the open. The distinction is not absolute. Such things never are. Genre fiction may merge with what is called the literary novel, for instance. Still the categories I have in mind are useful, or at least interesting. By the self-enclosed novel, I mean one which makes no reference — or almost no reference — to anything beyond itself. It belongs to its age of course, but it does not appear to be set in time. Time naturally passes, as it must in a narrative, but there is no suggestion that events in the world of fact beyond the novel might impinge on its characters, influence their behaviour, or affect the course of their lives. The doors of the novel are closed against the winds of the world.

‘Have you your next book in mind?’ ‘Not yet, I can’t fix on a subject,’ my friend replied. ‘What about Ouida?’ I said. Actually this exchange has taken place a couple of times, and on each occasion my suggestion was received without enthusiasm. Perhaps it was thought patronising: Victorian romantic novelist, suitable subject for a clever young modern woman. But it was not intended as such, for Ouida was a remarkable woman and a remarkable writer, and I would dearly love to read a good new biography of her. She is, I suppose, largely forgotten, and I doubt if anything she wrote is in print, though you can pick well-worn copies of her books up cheaply in second-hand bookshops. She was born in Suffolk in 1839 to an English mother and French father.

Why do we write? Dr Johnson had no doubts, or pretended to have none: ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’. This is manifestly false, unless you make writing for some other reason one of your definitions of the word ‘blockhead’. In any case it’s not true of Johnson himself. Despite the indolence for which he reproached himself, he was an assiduous correspondent, writing long thoughtful letters to his friends. Likewise, there are those who — obsessively — keep journals or diaries without, until recently anyway, expecting ever to profit from them. The American novelist Jay McInerney has suggested that writing comes ‘out of a deep well of loneliness and a desire to fill some gap.

In the forthcoming volume of his Smoking Diaries (not out till April, but I’ve been reading a proof copy) my old friend Simon Gray makes a brave admission. Well, he makes a number of these, but this particular one struck me. ‘I haven’t read him [Henry James] for years. I don’t believe I have the powers of concentration any more, at least for the late ones, The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors.’ ‘Something in that’ was my immediate response, though actually I haven’t read The Ambassadors since I was 17, and persuaded myself, though frequently bored, that it was a masterpiece. Now all I remember is Strether’s advice ‘Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to’; and this only because I have seen it quoted.

Klaus Mann’s Journals don’t pretend to be a work of literature; they are jottings, records of day-to-day existence, full of names many of which will mean nothing to readers today, even, I suppose, to German ones. ‘I suddenly thought,’ he wrote in January 1933, ‘that these notes could seem terribly superficial to anyone who chanced on them, since they consist of no more than facts such as they are, in no way developed.’ Yet it is precisely in the lack of pretension that the fascination of these Journals rests.

The transition from iconoclastic youth to crusty age is common enough. The emergence of Martin Amis as a critic of Islam (at least in some of its manifestations) may be an expression of solidarity with his old friends Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens, or it may be that, as Terry Eagleton suggests, he is turning into his father. Certainly Kingsley may be held to have gone that way, and many of us, as the years pass, do indeed find ourselves resembling Dad. This must be a disturbing thought, often, for our sons. Those whom the gods love die young — before that happens. ‘When Mozart was my age,’ as Tom Lehrer used to say, ‘he’d been dead for years’. ‘Lucky man’ is the unspoken thought.

A Kipling novel that still defies comprehension  ‘Listen, Bill,’ wrote P. G. Wodehouse (in a letter published in Performing Flea), ‘something really must be done about Kip’s “Mrs Bathurst”. I read it years ago and didn’t understand a word of it. I thought to myself, “Ah, youthful ignorance!” A week ago I re-read it. Result: precisely the same.’ Wodehouse is not alone in finding the story baffling. At once rambling and compressed, told entirely in reminiscent and speculative conversation, it is powerful but murky. You may feel it is a masterpiece yet be unable to determine just what happens. Summarising it is difficult, but, for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t know the story, here goes.

Andrew O’Hagan wrote a very nice piece about Norman Mailer in the Daily Telegraph last week. Affectionate and admiring, it was just the sort of tribute a young writer should pay to a senior one, and it was pleasant to learn how encouraging Mailer had been to O’Hagan and indeed to other young writers. This is as it should be — a handing on of the torch. No doubt this was easier for Mailer than for less successful elderly writers who find themselves elbowed out of the way by younger generations, and quite possibly dropped by their publishers. Nevertheless it’s commendable, jealousy or envy being sins to which writers are prone. I only once saw Mailer.

Raymond Chandler praised Dashiell Hammett for having given murder back to the sort of people who commit it. Given that he himself followed in Hammett’s footsteps, this was an understandable remark, aimed at what might already have been called the classic English detective novel. ‘Can’t read Christie,’ he told someone who had sent him a questionnaire. This wasn’t quite true. In one letter he analyses, intelligently and judiciously, Christie’s Ten Little Niggers; elsewhere, in an essay, ‘Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel’, he wrote that he was ‘quite unmoved to indignation by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’s violation of the rule that “the suppression of facts by the narrator ...

In his criticism of Sainte-Beuve’s biographical method, Proust observes that it ‘ignores what a very slight degree of self-acquaintance teaches us: that a book is a product of a very different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.’ I would not enter the argument stirred up by Professor Terry Eagleton’s attack on Kingsley Amis if it weren’t for the fact that those who have leapt — gallantly in the case of his second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard — to Kingsley’s defence have spoken of the man, rather than the writer. This is understandable.

There is a brand of Toscano cigars called Garibaldi. Until given a new design recently, the packet proclaimed him as ‘the hero of two worlds’ as well as a devoted smoker of cigars (‘naturalemente Toscani’). The description was fair. Garibaldi was the most famous man of his time, the most famous since Napoleon. His image was everywhere, like Che Guevara’s in our time. A Polish historian has called him ‘the symbol of popular revolution, and a model of a people’s military leader’. When he died a French newspaper described him as a citizen of the world. Like the knight errant, the medieval paladin, he had as many homelands as there were oppressed peoples.

A couple of weeks ago I was at the Wigtown Book festival where I had been invited to give the first Magnus Magnusson Memorial Lecture. Magnus had been a great supporter of this festival — and no wonder, for it is quite charming — ever since it began when Wigtown was chosen as Scotland’s official book town. That selection was a surprise, partly because this small Galloway town on the Solway Firth is ill-served by public transport. (‘What’s the quickest way to get to Wigtown from Edinburgh by public transport?’ Answer: ‘Fly to Belfast and take the ferry.’). Nevertheless it has been a great success, and the little town seems more prosperous on every visit.

On Capri in 1925 Scott Fitzgerald met his ‘old idol’ Compton Mackenzie and found him ‘cordial, attractive and pleasantly mundane. You get no sense from him that he feels his work has gone to pieces. He’s not pompous about his present output. I think he’s just tired. The war wrecked him as it did Wells and many of that generation.’ Fitzgerald himself survives, on the strength of two and a half novels and perhaps a dozen short stories, but, except in Scotland, Mackenzie is, I surmise, more or less forgotten, and even in Scotland it’s only Whisky Galore and perhaps his Highland farces which keep his name alive.

‘The Craftsman’ is one of my favourite Kipling poems: ‘Once, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid, /He to the overbearing Boanerges /Jonson, uttered (if half of it were liquor, /Blessed be the vintage!)’ ‘The Craftsman’ is one of my favourite Kipling poems: ‘Once, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid, /He to the overbearing Boanerges /Jonson, uttered (if half of it were liquor, /Blessed be the vintage!)’ Then, in four stanzas he has Shakespeare reveal originals of his most famous female characters: Cleopatra, Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, until: ‘London wakened and he, imperturbable, /Passed from waking to hurry after shadows . . . / Busied upon shows of no earthly importance?/ Yes, but he knew it!

Simon Raven’s first novel, The Feathers of Death, was published in 1959 Simon Raven’s first novel, The Feathers of Death, was published in 1959 when I was in my second year at Cambridge. We fell on it with glee, as I remarked, a few weeks after Raven’s death, to a fellow-novelist, somewhat to her amazement. ‘I’ve never read any of his books,’ she said. ‘I think my husband has.’ Not so surprising perhaps. I doubt if he ever had many devoted female readers. What attracted us to the novel was not so much its for the time decidedly daring story — army officer’s affair with blond, blue-eyed drummer Malcolm Harley — as the tone and style. This was nicely summed up by the Sunday Times reviewer, J. D.

A novelist is rarely well-advised to write his masterpiece in his fifties, unless his position at the top of the tree is secure. His themes and style are no longer likely to be in fashion. A younger generation of writers is occupying the attention of reviewers and speaking with greater immediacy to the public. This was Eric Linklater’s experience. He had achieved popularity and critical respect in the Thirties with Juan in America and his best prewar novel Magnus Merriman, and maintained his position after the war with Private Angelo and Laxdale Hall. But by the mid-1950s, when he wrote The Dark of Summer, he was, if not in the wilderness, at least on its fringes. Yet this is a great novel, beautifully crafted, its themes sombre and important.

Francis King’s new novel was published a few weeks ago. Francis King’s new novel was published a few weeks ago. Nothing, you may say, remarkable about that. He is among the most professional of authors; writing novels is what he does. Well, yes, of course, but it is certainly worth remarking that his first novel appeared in 1946. A career spanning six decades: not many can match that. What is equally remarkable is that this new novel, With My Little Eye, is as fresh, perceptive, lively and moving as anything he has written. Ford Madox Ford, in one of his splendid books of rambling reminiscences, wrote admiringly of an old Kentish countrywoman, Meary, who, near the end of a hard life, used to tell him that the only thing to do is to ‘keep all on gooing’.

Everyone, I suppose, now knows that Gordon Brown was the first student rector of Edinburgh University. Though based on Continental models, the rectorship is a peculiarly Scottish institution. The rector is elected by the students, and elections have often been lively affairs. (The plot of John Buchan’s Castle Gay turns on the kidnapping of a newspaper magnate in the course of one such election, though this is a case of mistaken identity.) The rector is entitled to chair the University Court and serves as the representative of the student body in relations with the university authorities. A new rector’s inaugural address used to be fully reported in the Scottish press and some of them became famous — J.M.