Books: Education of a Rich Boy

A SEA CHANGE (372 pp.)—Nigel Dennis—Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).

This novel was published in England last June as Boys and Girls Come Out to Play, a title that the U.S. publishers discarded as overlong and over-likely to suggest a book for juveniles. U.S. readers may nevertheless bear it in mind, for the book can be taken as an engraved invitation to a whole class of career intellectuals to break out of their nurseries. It is a civilized and at times a sardonically funny satirical novel.

The comedy in A Sea Change comes bubbling from the familiar old wells of human vanity, but the effect of this particular bucketful is to give the U.S. butcher-paper weeklies a good dousing. Dennis’ fictional magazine is called Forward, its wealthy owner is social-minded Mrs. Gertrude Morgan, and its readers are advanced, intelligent people who have no patience with old notions of simple, pre-Freudian goodness, pre-Marxian prosperity or purely American foreign policy. At pretending to know what they don’t know, Forward’s editors are impressive, and none is more so than swarthy, neurotic, tweedy Max Divver.

Take Soviet Ballet. Dennis’ full-length portrait of Divver belongs in the gallery of great comic figures. In his youth reduced by sneering Manhattan intellectuals to a self-analyzing jelly, Divver believed, or thought he believed, in Freud and historical Forces; his misery reached brilliant heights as he talked his first marriage to death. He went abroad to study life under Fascism, and found significance in everything from prostitutes to opera. Wrote Divver in his notebook:

“Opera composer views life from standpoint at odds with history. Knows work is artificial, ludicrous, does not care, or cannot help self . . . Soviet love of ballet quite different—freedom of movement, jumping, aspiring, etc. Probably otherwise under Czar.” But such happy jottings were soon to be interrupted. At a mass press conference with Mussolini, Divver was jostled accidentally and raised a protesting voice; he was ejected, shouting and waving his fist, and at once became a hero back home. Too cowardly to refuse his accidental fame, Divver became Forward’s expert on Italian affairs. Practice in the use of every advance-guard cliche made him, in time, an editor.

Take a Sunny Morning. The eyes that finally see through Max to his sad and waif-like soul are the sleepy eyes of Mrs. Morgan’s 18-year-old son Jimmy. An epileptic and a problem child who refuses to believe anything his tutors tell him about basic trends or the continuity of Western culture, Jimmy wears his mother down until she opens the nursery door, lets him go along with Divver on a trip to the Polish Corridor in the summer of 1939.

The ancient town of Mell, in Poland, where the travelers elect to stay, is a faultless work of pure imagination, a distillation of all European cathedral towns and watering places, with a few touches of South Africa and Greenwich Village thrown in. Medieval houses and cobbled streets fill young Morgan with wonder on his first sunny morning.

It doesn’t take Max Divver long to demonstrate what a lost soul he is. Then, in his shame, he unburdens himself to Jimmy, confessing bitterly that he really loves his wife, that he doesn’t give much of a damn for the working class, doesn’t believe in Forces or in any of the things he. has pretended to believe in, and wishes to God that he had never been educated and could say what he thinks.

Take Casanova. While Max goes off to get drunk and pick a fist fight with a Nazi, Jimmy is left alone to conduct—or be conducted in—his first love affair. Later that night, as he stands trembling in his mistress’ closet listening to the husband’s unexpected return, then as he flees naked down the hotel corridor, clutching his evening shoes and dinner coat, he remembers Casanova and realizes in a flash that this is what his tutors were talking about —the continuity of Western culture.

The summer wears away; the Polish Corridor becomes the hottest spot in Europe. A frantic cable comes from Jimmy’s mother. An old terror returns to him: he may have another epileptic seizure any day. But before he does, the Forces of history converge on Mell and kill Max Divver, their disillusioned celebrant, as he is making a last confused and furious effort to acquire personal dignity.

In its hilarity, and in the monumentality of the American type that it creates and satirizes, A Sea Change is something like Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, and like that book it is written with affection for the subject. But it has an art of its own that makes it rich and strange. The writer’s humor can be bland and surreptitious, or broad and biting. Of Divver’s punditry: “His views were not original, except in the field of military strategy and logistics.”

Of his Freudianism: “He knew . . . that it is honest to rape an old woman but perverse to help her over a stile.”

Author Dennis, a saturnine-looking Englishman of 38, is settling down this month in a Hertfordshire cottage after 15 years in the U.S. He has been a top reviewer of TIME’S Books section since 1942, before that, edited the book department of the New Republic and scanned movies for the National Board of Review. A Sea Change, his second novel (his first, Chalk and Cheese, was published under a pseudonym in England in 1934), goes to show, as history has shown, that a good literary critic may also be a good novelist. Not only has Dennis performed the rare feat, for an English novelist, of bringing American characters back alive; he has caught them in a story of human and universal comedy.