Books: The Small, Clever Tongue

TWO NOVELS by Brigid Brophy. 253 pages. World. $4.95.

The falsest of truisms is that art is communication, as Novelist Brigid Brophy demonstrates with this admirably wicked little book.

Her writing suggests the play of a sleek, recently fed and slightly bored cat. The performance is brilliant, but the reader cannot feel that it is for his benefit; the glossy limbs would be stretched, the back arched and the bit of string stalked across the expanse of carpet even if there were no onlookers to watch.

Author Brophy, 35, is a classics professor at Oxford. She has earned respect for her catlike talents before this—not so much for her two previous novels (Flesh, Hackenseller’s Ape) as for her corrosive book reviews in English periodicals. (“The way Henry Miller demonstrates he is an habitue of Europe is to balk at the price of everything, including sexual intercourse.”)

Stretched Memory. As The Snow Ball (first and longer of the two short novels in this book) opens, Anna is in confused flight from a black-masked man who kissed her; and what she tries to remember is this: has Don Giovanni raped Donna Anna as the opera begins or has he merely tried to do so? It seems terribly important to Anna, costumed inevitably as Donna Anna for this masked ball in 20th century London, that she puzzle out whether Mozart’s soprano is telling the truth. The libretto seems to offer no clue. Possibly the music? The costume ball roars in her ears. Is she herself really running from the man masked as Don Giovanni, or trying to find him? In hot confusion she retreats to the dressing table of her hostess and redoes her makeup.

It may be that there is not another author writing English who could make a male reader watch so raptly as Anna smears herself with cold cream. It is a small talent, not to be made too much of, but in operation it is uncanny. The onlooker is fascinated as Brophy’s small, clever tongue darts out and strokes, as it were, a bit of fur into place. And with the same fascination, the reader watches as Anna begins idly to look for her masked Don Giovanni, then searches more intently, finds him, leaves for a rendezvous with him, then returns to the ball.

Press of Flesh. The intensity persists because Author Brophy herself watches with such wonder, as if it were all new—the press of flesh against cloth, the edging of desire past resolve. She stares at it solemnly and sets it all down. Every bad writer who ever described a large party has used a wave and ocean metaphor; Author Brophy uses it, and it is brilliantly fresh because it is no metaphor: it is her wondering realization that the party is swept by waves.

The second of the novellas, The Finishing Touch, is quicker and more prankish, a joke the author tells herself about the unsuspected versatility of a lesbian schoolmistress. But the catty quality continues. A little uneasily, the reader admires the feline arabesques and muses, as one does of parlor cats, about the damage Brigid Brophy could accomplish if she grew to jungle size.