Hugh Barnes

Show people pretend to be other people most of the time, they act out fictional lives. It’s nice work and reasonably well-paid. Also, if Beryl Reid and Candice Bergen are to be believed, they get to meet a regular mixture of super-rotters and superstars in far-flung corners of the world. But it must be devilishly frustrating. There are chat-shows, of course, and autobiographies (often complementary) to set the record straight, but these are poor substitutes. Is real life that important anyway? Both these books sport impressive supporting casts, which run into the glittering hundreds. Sir Richard Attenborough is the common factor. Bergen was his co-star in a film called The Sand Pebbles, shot on location in the Far East. Out of hours, while the other actors, Steve McQueen amongst them, were busy getting drunk and chasing women, Dickie (bless him) was ‘acquiring art and informing himself on the island’s politics, making underground contacts with the clandestine opposition on Taiwan’. Beryl Reid worked with him in less exotic surroundings, at the BBC. He probably spent his evenings at home with the telly. For the rest, their stories shed light on separate worlds. For instance, Charlton Heston dressed as Santa Claus was a feature of the Christmas parties Bergen went to as a child. Beryl’s heroes are a homely breed. She christened her cat Ronnie after Corbett.

Homesickness is fabulous magic. Even as the world shrinks and the epic edge is blunted, the resettlement myth persists. Ulyssean travelogues are few and far between in Caryl Phillips’s The Final Passage and the novels of Paule Marshall, but families uproot themselves. Their stories correspond, but not in time or place. Phillips’s travellers leave their small Caribbean island for Britain in the 1950s, when prospects were cheery. The white folks of the West had never had it so good: too good, or so their masters told them, to settle at menial labours. Since the publication of her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, in 1959, Paule Marshall has been weaving a delicate history of the Barbadians who emigrated to America earlier in the century. Stepping off the boats, though not all were so fortunate, the wayfarers arrived in their new homes with nothing to declare but memories and aspirations.

Briefly during the second act Michael Frayn’s stage-play, Make and Break, transcends its setting, a Frankfurt trade fair, touching on a general gloom. Mrs Rogers is treating Garrard, a goatish sales rep, to the fruits of Buddhism. It is late in the day. Elsewhere assignations are arranged, faces stuffed, drinks swilled. Mrs Rogers’s seducer is impatient of nirvana; besides his hand rests all ready on her knee. Although she cannot recall the ‘proper technical term’ for suffering, she’s certain it stems from desire. The exchange is heady and brief – more like a business opportunity than a seminar. Revels intrude. It’s a good example of the way Frayn makes us laugh, and of the absence of privacy that distinguishes farce and provides these two novels now reissued with a common theme.’

It has become fashionable to think sagely about Elvis, and to deliver such thoughts in mawkish turns of phrase. His biographers, who set the trend, promote it in order to make sense of themselves. Team spirit is otherwise uncharacteristic of them, and they quarrel passionately about everything except the music, which, for the most part, they ignore. Disagreements are harmless, of course, tokens of scholarship, and it would be churlish to complain. But with each new venture into the field Elvis undergoes modification and change. While his supporters, smarting at unsavoury rumours, maintain he stayed smart to the end, the rest speculate about unsocial behaviour and a diet which consisted primarily of pretzels and pills. So business booms, and eight years after his death Presley has been launched on a fresh and exciting career as the avatar of the good and the not-so-good, still travelling in the wake of Little Richard.

The instruments agree that Britain is running down, getting seedy or seedier. The novels under review pay tribute to our decline. They also find evidence of it in unlikely places. The most likely place, of course, is Whitehall and William Camp discovers rot setting in there or already set in: the unions hold the country to ransom, a handful of businessmen make a profit out of hard times, and politicians fall over backwards, sometimes literally, to disgrace themselves. Hooliganism masquerades as authority. Such a discovery, however, doesn’t surprise us any more. It wasn’t even surprising thirty years ago when made by a novelist who had no sense of humour. C.P. Snow’s Corridors of Power is a chore to read now, at least as far as the young are concerned. They don’t care very much that it struck a chord among a mandarin élite which was rapidly becoming disillusioned. Nevertheless, in the course of that novel Snow has Lewis Eliot observe usefully: ‘Countries, when their power is slipping away, are always liable to do idiotic things. So are social classes.’