BOOKS
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and vitality which distinguish much of the work and make it a pleasure
to read.
Practically nothing distinguishes Pamela Hansford Johnson's
Night
and Silence Who is H ere : An American Comedy
except perhaps the
most stomach-turning set of adjectives describing colors (of very ordinary
things like hair, and the sky) that one would be likely to find in
recent fiction: "peacock," "glaucous," "butcher-blue" (
?),
"canary,"
"tangerine," "fawn," "mauve" (she is particularly fond of mauve ) ,
"turquoise," "hyacinth," "silver-gilt," and, of course, those old stand–
bys of vivid prose "scarlet" and "emerald" (red and green to you, clod).
The story itself deals with the misadventures of a middle-aged
English bachelor who comes to America as a Visiting Fellow at a New
Hampshire college. So far so good: we have the classical international
theme, and it should be Heaps of Fun, especially since the English
hero is not to be spared his share of heart-warming human frailities.
He's a dabbler, poor fellow, a dilettante, and like lots of upper-class
Englishmen, not very used to doing anything for himself. Breakfast
brought by the Manservant has been one of the mainstays of his
universe-so, naturally, it's going to be rough when he has, for the first
time in his life, to boil an egg for himself. But he struggles bravely with
such domestic upheavals: he is after all a willing chap. He struggles
on the academic front too: he doesn't really, the dear old fraud, know
anything about anything, let alone literature, but here he's in America
as the world's authority on a great minor poetess. This problem, though ,
he'll handle with true English savvy: he won't even try to make scholarly
noises; he'll just be wonderfully urbane and elegant, and the Americans
will marvel. Finally, he is moved to a struggle on the administrative
front too: much more fun to take over the college than continue faking
out his dreary critical book. True, ambition is a new emotion to him, but
rather pleasing: "he liked the feel of it."
The venial faults of this book are, apart from its coyness and over–
blown style, the predictability of almost every "joke," dialogue that falls
on the ear like cement blocks, and an abysmal ignorance of what is
either good, bad, or even indifferent about the American academic
scene which is the novel's setting and one of its presumptive satiric
targets. But the mortal fault is that priggery and fakery, uselessness
and dishonesty are elevated from the status of vice
to
that of folly, to
be
seen as forgivable, endearing, even adorable flaws of these creatures
that cavort in our brave New Hampshire.
Sallie Goldstein
