Book Review : Novel OK, but Keep Dictionary Handy

A Little Decorum, for Once by William Spackman (Knopf: $12.95)

Three things must be made clear at the very beginning about this book. First, William Spackman has a far better education than any of his readers can ever hope to attain, and he will never, not for half a line, let any of us forget it. Second, Spackman has a linguistic theory, a way of recording the vagaries of oral communication, that might , if life were easy, make this novel akin to “The Red Badge of Courage,” but instead makes this little book almost as difficult to read as Russell Hoban’s “Ridley Walker.” (That is, the reader is reduced to reading aloud, to catch the drift of sentences; yet another way the author has of putting his readers in their respective places.) And third, we’re looking at a 113-page novel in which the word sweetie occurs (at least) 40 times, or once every three pages.

Spackman is a literary stylist of dizzying refinement. He makes John Updike sound like a brutish footballer, and Henry James seem like Theodore Dreiser. He also makes Updike and James seem as melting and soft in their sentiments as a couple of goopy greeting cards. For although Spackman professes to be talking of love here, his little book is dried up and snippy--altogether lacking in anything even looking like kindness.

Here’s the story. Scrope Townshend, novelist, has just suffered a bad heart attack, and is recovering in intensive care. He’s 60-plus, and is hereinafter referred to as old, old, old--older than God, old as the hills, mighty darn old. But no matter: “Scrope Townshend rang up his many-times-past love Laura Tench-Fenton and said angel look: not to be startled, but how about his doing that glossy high-fashion magazine of hers a couple of thousand words on adultery?--though clearly, in the circumstances, this would take any editor aback.”

Off and Running

Mrs. Tench-Fenton answers, “ ‘But Scrope sweetie what is this!’ ” And they’re off and running. Scrope, who’s always been a “marauder,” i.e., a womanizing swine, is fighting back at death by courting and preening and scheming. Laura Tench-Fenton is trying to run her magazine, and get Scrope out of the hospital so she can have a run at his brittle bones once more. One generation down we can check out a pack of 40-year-olds (Sibylla, Scrope’s daughter, who is writing a comic-Agamemnon; Alec, her handsome husband, who is a professor and modern poet; Charles Ebury, even handsomer, smarter, and a professor of Classics; and Amy, who lives with Charles, writes short stories, and is Sibylla’s best friend). Sibylla is falling in love with Charles, Amy and Alec are conducting a holding action. Three of them, like their elders, speak in an American dialect heavily laced with “marauder,” as in womanizing swine, “blessing,” as in any lady who will put up with a marauder, “fatuity,” as in anybody who has anything to do with, or say about, Yale, and “brood” and “dilemma,” and of course, “sweetie.” (And “Coasties,” for any of us who live out here.)

Their learning is considerable. “Well dammit Clytemnestra was after all Helen of Troy’s sister,” Scrope croaks feistily to his daughter from his bed in intensive care, “doesn’t she deserve a little self-expression too?-- aux jolis minois les baisers!” And later, out of the hospital, when he’s back on his feed, so to speak, Scrope can look at Mrs. Tench-Fenton and perceive her as “she stood there silent now too, gazing down it seemed at the fluted glass her hands clasped as in grave ritual before her, eyelids so vailed (sic) he could not see her eyes; she might have been an Attic Kora with Kylix, from the frieze of some ruined temple, of Artemis, or Roman Bona Dea, the long folds of her peplum motionless in time, a khoephora, perhaps, though the tiny garlands of bubbles the champagne loosed endlessly upward from nowhere a libation to Whom?”

Be sure, the ladies hold up their conversational end of things. Amy, at home, talking to her Charles, who will soon be off Sibylla, queries him thus: “Am I your very dearest frantic-over-decisions sweetie or ain’t I!” And a page later, Charles more or less replies--about Yale, and sociologists, “Of course there was that widespread intellectual fatuity at Yale to be compensated for--poor devils, you’d suppose they were refugees from the Cinquieme Arrondissement if they didn’t keep gabbing as if they’d brought the Arrondissement with them. So perhaps they did need these exotic solaces!”

Experiencing Disillusionment

And finally, the third generation of iron butterflies of the intellectual life: Scrope Townshend III, a freshman, rutting in borrowed digs with Mimi Hallam, Amy’s younger sister, who longs to be seduced by Charles, so that she can experience disillusionment and turn from a girl into a woman. The pair, because they are relatively unpolished, are the easiest lovers to take: “Mimi was sprawling on her elbows . . . drowsily listening to her bedfellow . . . explain in exasperated detail how his father kept bugging him!--last week snapping if he had to have an elementary something for an elective why in God’s name not Elementary Russian the way he had, what good was this Elementary Mandarin to anybody!”

At the center here are a couple of points Spackman is trying to make. One is the old-fashioned, nay, classic idea that Ovid put forth, that he who has two loves will become a slave to neither. Spackman would go further: he who has two loves will tire of neither; thus, adultery is a form of social glue, and actually holds society together rather than disrupting it. “Marauders” tend to take that position, of course. The second point Spackman goes after--with far more meat--is that he’s a genius with words. In fact, he appears to feel about words the way Caspar Weinberger feels about people: he’s willing to do anything at all with them to prove his point. And the reader who trails along, slowing for the French, looking up the Greek, feels like a fool from a community college creative writing class, asking, silently, aren’t you supposed to care about people in a novel? Aren’t you supposed to want them to have a happy life? It’s not that Spackman’s characters aren’t “real.” They’re absolutely real and absolutely cloying. Yes, this book is sweet . Like a truckload of mille feuilles . And as fatuous as Yale.