Books: The Horrible Hatfields

THE TREND Is UP (474 pp.)—Anthony West—Random House ($4.95).

Manhattan’s literary sundowners, who read book reviews far more avidly than books, rate The New Yorker book critic Anthony West as a man with a high IQ—or Irritant Quotient. As critic. West insists on the old-fashioned but admirable principle that moral judgments can and should be made about books; as author, West moralizes, but in doing so, he ignores the first rule of Shavian dialectics: to edify, one must entertain.

In The Trend Is Up, West has written a modern immorality play about the allegorical bitch-goddess, Success. Hoping to do more, he has studded it with homiletics. A partial list: life defies theory; sex without love is self-degrading and love without sex self-deceiving; the pursuit of money corrupts and the pursuit of big money corrupts absolutely; to do good is a pie-in-the-sky illusion, but to be kind is a salt-of-the-earth reality. Author West’s error is to pursue these fairly elevated philosophic ends by low fictional means.

Trend’s hero, Gavin Hatfield, belongs to one of those patrician New England clans that devote the last vestiges of peasant tenacity to preserving their old houses and mellow wampum. But Gavin rebels against being the coupon-clipping ward of a diminishing trust fund. Unfazed by the Depression, Gavin heads out to make a million before he is 30. The little town of Maramee lies in a rusty heap on the Florida gulf coast just where the World War I boom and bust left it. As a buccaneering venture-capitalist banker, Gavin puts the town on its feet, and at his.

The Little Engine. Gavin’s mind and motives are as fiercely simple as the Little Engine That Could (“I think I can—I think I can—I thought I could”). His reach is his grasp. When he latches on to the “Grove,” a Victorian gingerbread pile, he promptly furnishes it with a wife. Ilona, a fellow New Englander whose father went broke playing the stock market, knows she is marrying Gavin for his money, and treats each night as a bill of sale. Two children have been born by the time World War II takes Gavin off to an English airbase for one of those idyllically illicit wartime romances in which the other man is a picture on the mantel. The chronicling of these events is often marred by lapses of taste and self-conscious he-mannerisms.

On Gavin’s return, Trend’s style and contents slide from Marquand Brahmin into Southern Gothic. Ilona broods and boozes. Gavin treats extramural sex as his second income, ranging from governesses to showgirls. His son proves to be a cool, flinty chip off Gavin’s own iron will. His elder daughter runs off with a man of Negro blood; his younger takes up with a beatnik who beats her. Though the proof is not entirely relevant, monstrous self-love becomes Gavin’s trap door to a soulless void.

The Motel Culture. Novelist West is too intent on castigating his characters to really create them. Like many a transplanted American, English-born West, the son of British Author Rebecca West and the late great H. G. Wells, is drawn to the neon glare of U.S. life, but he lacks the gift of a Nabokov for rendering the garish horrors of motel culture. Author West obviously intends his critique of the horrible Hatfields to embrace the present-day U.S., but one rotting family tree scarcely makes a national forest.