Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

An acutely perceptive critic with many a string to his bow and a strong historical sense, Mr Jocelyn Brooke has described Mr Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men as ‘a kind of wry epitaph upon the twenties’. Of his own recent novel, Conventional Weapons, it might even more aptly be said that it is a kind of wry epitaph upon the thirties. In spite of its lively style and bitter gaiety it is also a haunting elegy. Were it not so vividly true in its factual details it could easily be mistaken for malicious satire. How many of the Communistic, fellow-travelling intellectuals of the thirties, ranging from crudest scarlet to pinkish mauve, were the products of families similar to the Tufnell-Greenes, shily-shallying — since they were seldom severed from a solid bourgeois security — in seasonal revolt against backgrounds similar to ‘The Grange’. This typical family and background are evoked with such humorous relish and economy of means that the novel is never dull for a moment: its tone is ingeniously autobiographical. The names fit the characters and localities perfectly, and apparently trivial incidents are fraught with a Freudian significance. Mr Brooke’s manipulation of clichés in recording the dialogue of his dingier characters is reminiscent of Bouvard et Pécuchet. Thanks to his humour, which is bold and decidedly broad, emitting sparks from the bleakest situations, the reader is never as depressed as he should be by this pitiless exposure of a pervading Philistinism. Pitiless? On second thoughts, considerable pathos is extracted from spiritual squalor: Mr Brooke develops a grudging sympathy for the characters he had loathed at first sight.

     Gross old Mr Tufnell-Greene, the prosperous paterfamiias of ‘The Grange’ and churchwarden of St Michael’s, who collects meretricious ‘salon art’ with a preference for Bouguereau, pronounced ‘Buggeroo’, and who indulges in furtive adultery, has the saving grace of financial honesty. His younger son Nigel, the protesting protagonist, remarks that his parent ‘knows next to nothing about Art — it’s good old Sex that he’s after’. But Nigel’s paintings betray that he is after the same thing. He confuses art with sex, sex with politics and with the idea of being a genius, one sex with another, subordinated to an ineradicable snobbery, in a manner altogether characteristic of the thirties. Mr Brooke probes this hideous confusion and analyses it with a surgical precision akin to genius. Art exploited as a mere pretext: that is the underlying theme of Conventional Weapons. I can think of no other novelist who has dealt with the subject so ruthlessly, with such skill and controlled imagination. The masochistic Nigel is, willy-nilly, representative of the blundering ‘intellectuals’ of his class and generation. More blessed are the modern Beatniks in comparison, ‘the Dead End kids’ — to quote Mr Gregory Corso — ’who fell in love with beauty’: for these enterprising youngsters embrace life spontaneously with their blue jeans a-bulge.

     Poor Nigel, floundering flabbily through his various phases of self-expression, is a more consummate fraud than Geoffrey, the extrovert elder brother who causes his basic bewilderment. Until he is maimed by an enemy shell in Malta, ‘dead from the waist down’, he is his own best dupe. Illumination comes with his mutilation, and he gives vent to his cacophonous swansong — a novel entitled The Taste of Human Flesh, which wins the praise of Mr Cyril Connolly and is published posthumously in a paper-back edition with an exquisitely ironical obituary on the ‘backflap’. ‘Could a minor work such as this,’ inquires Mr Brooke’s narrator, ‘justify, sub specie aeternitatis, the follies and miseries of a life such as Nigel’s had been? I doubted it; yet the fact remained that, from the dead wood of his discredited fantasies and his delusive ambitions, he had been able to create a work of art which, though crude and ill-executed, was in some respects unique.’ With all due regard to Mr Brooke — and our regard for his judgement is considerable — I must beg to differ here. Nigel might possibly have produced a human document of some psychological value, but it remained for Mr Brooke, with his technical assurance and retentive memory of past experience, to create the work of art, distilled chapter by chapter from Nigel’s follies and miseries.

     The vicissitudes of Nigel’s Communistic phase, when he calls himself Bert, cultivates a Cockney accent, and settles in a basement flat to be bashed about by Reg, an ex-soldier, boxer and gaolbird, who is ‘a substitute for the brother whom he hated with a passion so oddly akin to love’; his eventual rescue by Frankie, the buxom Bohemian wench whose parties in Acacia Road, St John’s Wood, tended ‘to operate as a powerful social solvent’: these are drawn straight from life and seen in contemporary perspective. Nigel’s innate snobbery is transferred to the proletariat for sexual reasons. With reference to Reg — ‘“He’s really a wonderful person, when you get to know him,” he assured me. “He’s so absolutely natural, you see. Of course, his parents were Real Working Class, which is such an enormous advantage, don’t you think? Reg is really a Child of Nature, he lives a genuinely instinctual life, if you see what I mean . . .”’ And the introduction of Nina Hamnett completes the verisimilitude. ‘“Nigel says he thinks with his solar plexus,” I said to Nina. “You bet he does,” she replied emphatically. “And my God, what a solar plexus, too.”’

     Mr Brooke has ploughed his English corner of The Waste Land between the two world wars with a dexterity that compels our harrowed admiration. The conventional weapons against the conventions had grown rusty, but he has polished them up and made them sparkle. He has made us hear ‘the dry sterile thunder without rain’ above The Grange, Four Winds, Fitzrovia, and Villefranche, while the political intellectuals were building flimsy castles in Spain instead of pondering the predictions of Mein Kampf. Then down fell the rain in torrents, shells and bombs, and Nigel was among the predestined casualties. We cannot in sober seriousness lament his passing any more than that of the decade he represents, a period quite as dead as the 1890s. Indeed, those who remember Max Beerbohm’s Seven Men will discern mutatis mutandis, a clear parallel between Nigel Tufnell-Greene and Enoch Soames, the Diabolistic author of Fungoids.