IBCHDKLLJST‘
unpopular views on race and class, labels which she insists are of little importance. Perhaps being successful has made her unwilling to stick, like those who don’t see any alternative, with their roots. (Dilys Rose).
0 A Tourer of Class Fiona Pitt-Kethley (Mariscat Press £3)
Publishers are keen on concepts. It gives them something easier to market than yet another indefinable volume of poetry. A Tower of Class offers a deadpan rendering of reheated legend and, so we’re told, olde-time jest. Ms Kethley seems to have contented herself with cribbing, satisfied that the pieces are curiosities in themselves for which she can take the credit. Whether or not she has reworked her source material, she has done nothing interesting with it, unless it is to reduce many of these quaint little pieces to bathos. There is a quirky humour which admirers of , say, Glen Baxter, might find appealing, but they lack the illustrations for which they seem, from their flatly prosaic delivery, to be little more than captions. (Dilys Rose),
0 Grants 17, Autumn 1985 Edited by Bill Bruford (Penguin £3.95)
0 Night and Day Edited with an Introduction by Christopher Hartree (Chatto and Windus)
A few weeks ago in a secondhand bookshop I found a copy of an early Granta, published donkey‘s years before it was adopted by those awfully nice Penguin people. At the Edinburgh Book Festival, its editor, Bill Buford, suggested testing its durability by fluttering the pages with the spine turned upwards. I did, and I can confirm that the glue used was not tip to the challenge.
L_____u__
«The List 24 iaii L's—fies,
Now seventeen, Granta hangs together better. Smartly dressed in a snazzy jacket, it is neatly and clearly printed and has an air of cosmopolitan self-confidence. It’s also keeping the right sort of company: Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, Milan Kundera, Heinrich Boll, John Updike, Nadine Gordimer and Amos 02 for starters, but there’s also room for stories by Marianne Wiggins, Kazuo Ishiguro and Alice Munro, extracts from They, ‘the Polish underground best seller’, photographs of South Africa by David Goldblatt and some fine political journalism. No other British magazine can parade such spoils, yet without denying Granta’s excellence, I prefer to read, say, the London Magazine, which springs more surprises by constantly recognising emerging talent and encourages loyalty because one feels comfortable within its pages.
Granta, by contrast, is not so much a magazine as an anthology, a place (like Olympus) for the great to convene. Of course, not everybody wants to play roulette with £3.95, and because of its mix of political conscience and literary excellence, Granta is clearly a sound investment. Several of the contributors illustrate this well, but none more so than Patrick Marnham in his account of an abortive attempt to interview Idi Amin. A brooding sense of fear and danger mixed with farce overhangs the episode, revived when, as Marnham is heaving a sigh of relief at his escape from Uganda, finds his plane from Kenya refuelling at Entebbe. Not surprisingly he feigns flu and refuses to disembark. And again, in Kundera’s ‘Prague: A Disappearing Poem’, where he writes of the effect of a political predator on a small nation’s literature: ‘It often strikes me that the known European culture harbours within it another unknown culture made up oflittle nations with peculiar language, such as the culture ofthe Poles, the Czechs, the
NIGHT AND DAY
(Illa (lUi'Ili'e (lI'inhie—ghe
Sfile 0! (gnu?! lzofa
I’ll". owners ofa child star are like leaseliolders—rheir pm- pertv diminishes iii \aluc
every year. Time's chariot is at their back. before them acres iifaritirit'riiiti'. “'hat is _laeltie Coogati now but a matrimonial squabble; Miss Shirley 'l‘eniple's ease, though, has peeultar lIlIt‘IC\I' iiifanev with her is a disguise, her appeal is more secret} and more a fatiev little pieee {real iliildliood, I think, went out after The LIN/(i! Rein/fr
trousers with the mature saggntii-e-
Alreadv two vears ago she was
In (firphmr Yunnan she wore
ness ot a l)l(‘Il'l\ll her neat and well- deseloped rtimp twisted in the rap- danie her eyes had a sideloiig seartli- Now iii If}! [fr/[Ir
U'mhe, wearing short kilts, she is a
eompli te totsv, “'ateli her swaggeriiig
stride .it'tnss the Indian l‘attzlth-
square hear the gasp ol‘ e\tited ("\pettatloti from her antique .iudtettt e when the sergeant‘s palm is raised watth the way she measures a man ssith agile studio eyes, with diriipled dtpraizts' .'\dult emotions oi lose and grief glusade atross the mash ot \ hilillzond, a t hildhood shill-(lt‘rp.
It is tleser, but it taunt)! last, ller .lillllltt"\ Huddle-aged “it‘ll and \lt'tgvttlt'n I(\I\illtl h) llt't tlltl‘ll‘l:\ k‘IlllkII‘s', to Illt‘ sight of her Well- sizats d and des:ral'le little body, pat iced with. tl‘tllllirlus \zfalitv, oiils hdause the stir it' t uttaiii til stori .itid dialogue drops IRIVH‘ill their intelligente and their \l\\II(' "\“l‘\ are -.-ou making "‘l' .\luiiiinv trill what t'oiild be pure! Il‘.|.'l that; .'\tul Ilit' sst'tit‘ when \I.’('\\\\l in .i wliire Ill,:llI\lI('\\ slit begs grandpa to take Mommy to a dariee —- wltat tould he more sirgxrial; ()ii those lines liir new pitture, inade l‘v 'l’lllll Ford, whodiretted The Infcrmer, is liortiliiiiglv sniiipttent It isn't ham! to stay to ilit last prairie and the last snh 'l hi stairv- ahoiit aii .\lgliari
Es a long
r-Hst l"l‘.'-t'II(\l lw “.m- \\‘;::lm to (lie lliitzsli Rat
V~.t\ alter Kipling llut we needn't
be sour about that. Both stories are awful, but on the whole llolli‘wood's is the better.
It's better cinema ans-way than The Life of Emile 70/4. More pompous thati Pattern and far more false, this pit'ture's tlietiie is supposed to be truth——but truth to the tilm mind is the wind will sec on “th posters \Ve begin iii i862 with Zola starving in a gatret with Cezanne who keeps on popping up irreles'atitly from then on. Zola meets Nana, and soon she is going him her diaries and her lette's. but not - -what apparently Zola parti- s’iilarli' “ants-s -ra l‘ahv's itst ("'I a’ae all, ali but this"‘ 'I heti ('e/aniie poLes his head round the door, and Zola wrztes Nani: whteli is an enormous siittess ~lIe had teallv, t‘l-tlllllu', l‘eeri a \llt\’('\\l'lll writer for about eiglttr 3!:
esetvthing in this pittiire
\‘ea.’s before he wrote Nam:~ happens suddenly intludzng ('e/aniie
\HII‘.(\ ssat. Soldiers in the street.
'I WAS IN SUCH A HURRY I HAD TO SHAVE WHILE I ATE MY BREAKFAST'
explained Ford'vt (
“e do not need to lnov why [ordvee war in
symtiathised ()Il;ll‘ia"1l, arimaiiria
' 1b Koclr! ila
OCTOBER 28. W37
THE FILMS BY GRAHAM GREENE
a woman says "\\'here are tliev all going’" and a man \H’) "I’IJYCII'I vou heard’ “'ar's been deelared." Zola says "Never tlirl I tliitik I should lis'e '0 we Frame groselling iii the dust under the (iernian heel " Cezanne pokes. his lirad round the door—«tr doesn't he? .-\nvwav the war's over. Xola'; middle-aged at Mention, though his wife‘s not \ hangeth .ill ('elatiiie looks round the door again. "The old struggling earelree days." He taltn an ugly look at the tlla'll‘lll'd and starts awav. "Paul, will you “‘tlft';” "No, Dreytus ease, and on the night before
but l will remember."
l)rr\'l-tt\'\ rehabilitatzoii Zola »— he's an old man now » dies ‘II.\ more than un- studio, it's uzi- -\iiierti.iii to ll\(‘ another two \‘(‘Jts\ l’atil .\liirii .it‘ts Yola quauitls', and lots ot old friends turn up in lanes dress hut quite them- sel\ es as the (inst-mot of Paris, (Ilt‘IIH‘lht'Jll, Colonel l‘iipiart, Count
lsterlian'.
SCHICKWDRY SHAVER
Stocked by all the better stores
Price 3 gns.
Graham Greene‘s defamatory Night and Day satire.
Catalans and the Danes.’ And the
Scots?
The tone ofthis Granta, and others oflate, is pessimistic; one has to look hard for a laugh. Ridiculous then to say that the titbits reprinted from Graham Greene‘s pre-war diary, in which the manic depressive rummages among ads for rubber sheaths and corsets, were most amusing and augur well for when he decides to let us have more. In the
Left: a period-piece cartoon trom Night and Day.
Black.‘
meantime, we will have to make do with snippets, and there‘s plenty in this sampler from the short lived Night and Day, which Greene co-editcd. It first appeared in July 1937 and shut up shop in December of the same year, when GG libellcd the nine year old Shirley Temple in his review of Wee Willie Winkie. Christopher Hawtree has reproduced that review here, but presumably the former infant star still feels litigious, for an ‘Important Notice‘ informs us that it has been included ‘only for reasons of historical interest and without any intention of further maligning the good name of Mrs Shirley Temple
It is all very sad, and smacks of the recent case involving Ms Charlotte Cornwell’s posterior. for Night and Day, modelled on the New Yorker, was smart, witty and literate. Its contributors were all first eleven: Evelyn Waugh wrote inimitable, wrist-slapping book reviews. Greene : himselfwas the film critic, Elizabeth Bowen went to the theatre and Osbert Lancaster, Anthony Powell, R K Narayan, Stevie Smith, William Empson and Antonia White all contributed, often imaginatively. outwith their known spheres of reknown. But, as Graham Greene rightly acknowledges, Nightand Day's real strength lay in its deft doodles and cartoons, which too many magazines now eschew in favour ofoften unrecognisable and usually irrelevant photographs.(Alan Taylor)