Books: FitzGibbon’s Decline & Fall

WHEN THE KISSING HAD TO STOP (248 pp.) — Consfantine FifzGibbon — Norton ($3.95).

This jolly-sounding novel, which draws its title from Robert Browning’s account of the last days of the Venetian Republic, might more properly be called FitzGibbon’s Decline and Fall of the British Empire. With horrid persuasiveness, it looks forward to the moment, somewhere between 1960 and 1984, when Britain decides “to commit suicide” and becomes a Soviet satellite. Lest any reader think he is not reading about the possible, FitzGibbon provides a text from Lenin, who held that in war, it is best to wait “until the moral disintegration of the enemy renders the mortal blow both possible and easy.”

Skillfully skirting the borders of fee-fi-fo-flummery, FitzGibbon evokes both moral disintegration and mortal blow with a chilling casualness that sometimes has the ring of day-after-tomorrow’s newspaper. To achieve his grisly effect, he painstakingly puts together a mosaic of slight things that seem to have gone wrong in the commonplace of today—the “crack in the teacup [that] opens a lane to the land of the dead.”

Just Talk. The year the book opens is the year the Russians have 200 nuclear submarines and the U.S. a President who is devoted to Bach. It is also the year that Lord Clonard, the P.R. man of moneyless title through whose eyes most of the events are seen, notes that London’s girlie shows have taken a perverse, sadistic twist. Swarms of young men openly hold hands in the street and neck in Hyde Park, and prostitutes walk naked under their raincoats or furs. A dozen Reading Gaols would not hold all the homosexual offenders or 50 Bridewells all the convicted tarts, so that there is talk—just talk, of course—of “detention” camps.

So far, there is nothing fatal or final to point to. In Britain, the Tories still hold the husk of the Establishment and hope in the upcoming elections to make it “Four in a Row.” The new element is the familiar Anti-Nuclear Bomb movement of today, but in FitzGibbon’s time its pony-tailed and sandaled youth has swollen into the biggest political fact in Britain, led by zealots and exploited by those who know that pacifism cannot help but help the Russians. And when, in a landslide-election win, the anti-Bomb boys and girls take power, the fat of 1,000 years of British history is in the fire. In a few weeks, the Yanks with their hydrogen-warhead missiles have been moved back to their own hemisphere and Britain is free to become another peace-loving People’s Republic, with a Russian “inspectorate,” concentration camps and mass deportation from the industrial Midlands to “correct” the population imbalance.

Among Those Present. FitzGibbon’s vision of the last days of Britain is populous with credible characters, among them some who will seem painfully familiar to anyone acquainted with contemporary British politics. They include: CJ Leonard Braithwaite, “the Grand Old Man of the Left,” a white-maned old humbug in an open shirt, whose endless oratorical references to his son killed fighting in the Spanish Civil War cause embarrassment even among his Labor Party colleagues. As head of the Anti-Nuclear Bomb movement he takes over the party and the Premiership, and is, of course, an eager sucker for the Soviets’ opening ploy—an offer to dismantle Russian rocket sites in Poland (where they have a few) and Rumania (where they have none at all). A teetotaler, he ultimately perishes of the toasts at a Kremlin banquet.

¶ Canon Christian, whose ponderous pectoral cross lends its weight to the AntiNuclear Bomb movement. He gets to baffle the Russians just once. After offering some Soviet advance brass a dinner at his canonry, complete with vintage port, he benumbs them with a conducted tour of his cathedral.

¶ Mark Vernon, a former British Foreign Office official who has defected to the So viets long before the book opens. He is a “queer,” a “little horror,” a “traitor,” a “rather sad and lonely” young man, according to taste. To the Russians he is a man guilty of “sabotage through drunkenness,” but useful after being dried out and brainwashed for one last tour of dirty work in Britain before being returned to his labor camp.

¶ Felix Seligman, “really nothing, except rich,” a Jew who is a devout Roman Catholic convert and who doggedly maintains the rituals of the English squirearchy. As the world falls about his sensitive ears, the reader is led to believe that Seligman will cut his losses and emigrate to the U.S. Actually, he and only he survives with honor as the legendary “Captain Felix” of the Welsh resistance.

The New Morality. If there is hope in this grim fable, it is in the figure of Seligman, who represents three tenaciously held forces in opposition to Communism—private property and the family, Jewish tradition, Christian faith. But extending hope is not the purpose of When the Kissing Had to Stop. Author FitzGibbon clearly intends it as a somber warning of what could happen if the West loses the fiber to resist the self-destructive impulses at work inside free societies: the voices of cowardice, compromise without principle, and moral decay disguised as “the new morality.” Those who hold the new morality to be the finest flower of idealism can, of course, dismiss this book as political science fiction and a pure figment of the imagination. It is, however, some figment.