Books: House Party Alternatives

THE PLEASURES OF PEACOCK (458 pp.) —Edited by Ben Ray Redman—Farrar Straus ($5).

Time: 1865. Scene: the library of a country house in Lower Halliford (among the books: seven prankish novels to be reissued in 1947 as The Pleasures of Peacock). Cries of “Fire!” A tall, handsome, irascible old man hurries in, followed by a curate who implores him to leave. “By the immortal gods,” shouts the old man, looking at his beloved books, “I will not move.” Several weeks later, he died of shock. Death had paid Novelist Thomas Love Peacock the compliment of imitating his style.

As a young man, Peacock, the son of a defunct London glass merchant, had become so disgusted with formal schooling that he elected to educate himself. He forthwith concentrated on the Greek, Latin, French, German and Italian classics—and was still at it when the fire broke out at Lower Halliford 60 years later.

From 1812 to 1818, Peacock gyrated in the circles of vegetarians, astrologists, freethinkers and other cranks who trailed his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley. Laughing uproariously at their disputes over how to reform the world, he got the notion of putting them into a novel. The result, Headlong Hall (1816), permanently settled the question of Peacock’s proper pursuit.

This first novel brought him considerable reputation but little money. Like many an English man of letters, he took a clerical job, and worked almost 40 years for the East India Company. Gryll Grange, his last novel, came out five years after he left India House.

Peacock’s short, genially satirical novels established him as one of England’s minor novelists. There had been nothing like them before, but there was to be something like them later; Aldous Huxley, Norman Douglas, H. H. (“Saki”) Munro and Evelyn Waugh would acknowledge their debt.

The pattern for most of Peacock’s novels is a country house party where violently opinionated cranks, in an atmosphere of high spirits, alternate between chasing pretty girls and discussing everything, contradicting each other, and settling nothing—except that they make perfect butts for Peacock’s gay, sometimes lethal, satire. Crotchet Castle and Nightmare Abbey, a goodnatured, witty caricature of Shelley as Scythrop dowry, the baffled lover, are probably the best of Peacock and least likely to bog the reader in temporary verbal swamps.

Critic Ben Ray Redman’s informative introduction to The Pleasures of Peacock lacks the sparkle of his subject’s prose. So do the “narrative bridges” with which he tries to repair his damage in cutting entire sections from five of the novels.