UBIQUITOUS OBLIQUE
951
suburban types and their pleasures, a catalogue of everything that
Sansom had never before been able to approach. He is determined to let
no chance of describing actual experience go by, and once he gets the
feel of things, he forgets when to let go. The story is often by-passed.
This is about Henry Bishop, a middle-aged man in a London suburb,
who suffers an episode of jealousy and delusion, suspecting his wife,
Madge, of an affair with the next-door neighbor, Charley Diver. But
this theme is neglected for the treatment, and adultery sinks to the level
of any stock anecdote, murder, blackmail, the missing papers, upon
which one can play suspense. Sansom comes near the thriller in his ab–
sorption with special effects: in the background there is always a
freak show, trick lights, the grotesque. Only once does he work free
of this strain, in the chapter where he takes his characters boating on
the Thames. Here, Bishop's suspicions and maneuvers to trap Charley
and his wife take on reality from the natural setting, the writing has a
sweep it lacks elsewhere, the writer has no need of intellectual passages
to proclaim a meaning lest the story fail. Only in this section is suspense
carried by a deeper current, the movement of human emotion.
The strange thing is that this break-through into actual experience
should leave Sansom's writing not richer, but thinner than before. The
abundance of sensations is no gain. In throwing off Kafka, he has de–
prived himself of a ready-made ordering principle, the intellectual form
that the latt<,:r's style provides. He freed himself with a vengeance;
in
his eagerness to write a novel redeeming experience, he cast away the
earlier concepts, forgetting to provide any of his own. But there is not
only an intellectual vacancy;
The Body
lacks directQess, it comes at ex–
perience obliquely, from the surface, with a glancing blow and a shower
of words that seldom pierce through. The oblique is an endemic disease
of contemporary English fiction, it is the style of the lowered capacity for
life, and
The Body,
like all the other novels, is thoroughly spotted with
it.
Except for
Two Worlds and Their Ways>
which 'is so thoroughly
spotted that it no longer shows. Ivy Compton-Burnett breaks all the
categories by exceeding them. She has .....never had to go looking for
renewal, being a placid writer, content with her corner of the novel;
her contentment shows in every line. There is none of Sansom's dis–
traction in
Two Worlds and Their Ways,
no casting about for effect.
Nothing occurs to her that does not have effect ingrained. Completely
the artificial writer, she does without the artifice of highlights, pacing,
purple or intellectual passages, scenery, descriptions; her manner comes
naturally to her
in
a steady trickle, and there her commerce with nature
