Books: Midsummer Night’s Waking

NIGHT AND SILENCE WHO IS HERE? by Pamela Hansford Johnson. 246 pages. Scribner. $4.50.

Cobb College is a rich New Hampshire institution, well stocked with preposterous pedants, campus lagos, academic racketeers and addled eggheads. As such, it is the latest member of the poison ivy league founded by Mary McCarthy (Groves of Academe), Vladimir Nabokov (Pnin) and Randall Jarrell (Pictures from an Institution). It may or may not be patterned on Wesleyan University’s Institute of Advanced Studies, where Novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson spent some time with her husband Sir Charles Snow as visiting British fellows.

Not surprisingly, her hero, Matthew Pryar (Eton and Oxford), contributes some British one-upmanship to the stock drama of poet and pedant. He finds that all is alien corn on the Cobb campus, is daunted to learn that the faculty does not drink and dines on unspiced food at 6:30 p.m. Pryar is one among seven visiting fellows. Each of them is a distinguished specialist in some recondite field, or rather is a monomaniac locked inside an ever-narrowing preoccupation —Andean Spiolus, patristic hagiography among the Slavs, Emily Dickinson or whatever. These learned freaks (the Slavonic specialist is a midget female dipsomaniac; the spider man talks like a Pennsylvania Dutch commercial; the Emily Dickinson man has discovered from the lady poet’s “image clusters” that she was a secret drunk, etc.) offer good clean fun to the middlebrow.

Pryar himself, fashionably enough, is a nonhero. A man-about-town who knows writers rather than writing, and women only socially (“He never much liked their shape”), Pryar has sidled into the academic racket as the world’s only authority on the world’s worst poet, a gruesome Australian mother of seven named Dorothy Merlin. How can he be released from servitude to this distant termagant and become director of the Institute of Visiting Fellows? This is the question the plot turns on, and it looks like a Snow family specialty —academic power politics. However, all the characters at Cobb behave even more oddly than called for by the requirements of campus comedy.

Who Is Bottom? A clue to Novelist Johnson’s intentions is the title, which is given in the epigraph as from M.N.D., Act II. If the clue is followed up, it will be found that Pryar and all the characters at Cobb comprise the cast of a Midsummer Night’s Dream in modern academic dress with Cobb’s Boosie House as Theseus’ Palace and the New Hampshire forests as “a wood near Athens.”

In fact, Night and Silence is not only a novel that can be read with pleasure as such, but an ingenious literary game in which the characters are given an extra dimension by association with their Shakespearean counterparts.

The game is not easy. Midsummer Night’s Dream itself, being an English fairy story within Greek mythology and a play within a play within a play, is complicated enough. Add a novel, and the result is likely to murder many a midsummer night’s sleep. Who is Bottom? (Emily Dickinson’s man?) Who is Puck-Robin Goodfellow? (Surely, as the name suggests, Dr. Herman Wohlgemutt, professor of mathematics?) Then the novelist has fashionably provided her nonhero, Pryar-Lysander, with ambiguous sex but pretty much turned the genes of everybody else Bottom side up. Who are the fairies in this Midsummer Night’s Dream and who are merely pixilated? The women are heroes to a man. But, as in the Shakespearean play, every Jack in the novel has his Jill. And the hero Pryar is saved for solvency and heterosexuality by a fairy princess, the richest woman in the U.S. waving that modern magic wand—a checkbook. Shakespeare to one side, there has been nothing like the mind-boggling sex-swapping and role-shuffling in Night and Silence since Nigel Dennis’ Cards of Identity.

Only Bubbles. Unhappily the solution to this Double-Crostic of a novel does not spell out, as with Shakespeare, “Magic is the Lord of All these Revels,” but a lesser truth: Pamela Hansford Johnson is a Very Clever Woman.

On a more realistic level, Miss Johnson fares only slightly better than most British comedians working with American speech, which can totally elude a master of English like Evelyn Waugh. “You’re the most,” for one example, is outdated—probably by the length of time it took Miss Johnson, a careful researcher, to get it authenticated. Also, those who deplore the gap between the scientific and literary cultures will point out that it is not chlorination that makes the water foam from some American faucets: it is a patent device that forces atmospheric bubbles into the more or less pure H²0.