BOO KS
101
I returned this farewell and pushed the knob back." In his first novel,
Lucky Jim,
Mr. Amis provided a merely nominal love story as a frame–
work for such comic effects (there was, to be sure, an apparently serious
study of a neurotic woman, but it seemed like a mere mistake in that
novel). H ere, however, Mr. Amis has tried a more serious story. Some–
times, disciplined to this story, the comic sense achieves an almost
Graham Greene effect ("As soon as I was outside the door the wind,
an old enemy of mine (like vanity), sprang at me. .. ."). But most
of the time it is running wild on its own, producing set pieces of comedy
or quite marvelous parodies (like the one of Dylan Thomas which be–
gins: "When in time's double morning, meaning death,/ Denial's four–
eyed bird, that Petrine cock,! Crew junction down the sleepers of the
breath,/ Iron bled that dry tree at the place of rock, .. ."). Funny as
these things are in themselves, they are irrelevant in the serious novel
Mr. Arnis is writing about his hero; or else the serious novel is irrelevant
in this comedy. But I think the first statement is really right, for there
is every evidence that Mr. Amis wants to write the serious novel, and
he is so gifted a writer that it is hard not to hope he will learn, as Auden's
Prospero did, how to suffer without saying something clever about
suffering.
Both the remaining novels do not seem to me to come off though
carefully planned, skillfully made and remarkably thoughtful. Much the
more interesting is certainly Miss McCarthy's
A Charmed Life.
Miss Mc–
Carthy is one of our most brilliant essayists, and she has, in the past,
made something quite wonderful, if possibly not quite fiction, out of
essays on her own childhood (in
Cast a Cold Eye).
In
A Charmed Life
she h as committed herself to a full display of her talents as a Jamesian
novelist. She puts before us a series of matched couples-some of whom
look vaguely familiar- from the artist colony of New Leeds; among
them the major tension is created by the meeting of Martha Sinnott
and her ex-husband Miles Murphy. After an evening in which Martha
and Miles alternate in lecturing us in full-dress classroom style on the
drama, Miles seduces Martha in a scene so grimly physiological that it
might have been written by the good Dr. Kinsey himself. Martha is
then killed in an automobile accident.
The narrative of
A Charmed Life
is projected through a series of
carefully arranged central intelligences, and given the character of Miss
McCarthy's talent, this appears to have been a mistake. The Jamesian
form forces her to minimize her gift for brilliant comment on life and
to try, instead, a direct presentation of life in alternating scenes and
meditations by the characters: something which, for all her intelligence-
