Books: Cockney Dubliner

NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART—Richard Llewellyn— Macmillan ($2.75).

How Green Was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn’s richly human first novel about a Welsh mining family, sold over 375,000 copies in the U.S. The movie made from it was voted the best picture of 1941. None But the Lonely Heart is utterly unlike that first success. It is a stream-of consciousness novel about two feverish weeks in the life of a 19-year-old London cockney. It was written while Llewellyn was serving in the British Army in Africa.

But the novel has nothing to do with the war. The action occurs in the mid-1930s, though the exact period is obscure.

So is much else that happens to Ernie Mott, the bewildered, pimply-faced scrap of slum life whose emotions, frustrations and stumblings are narrated in a stream of his day dreams, illusions and misconceptions, expressed in a rapid-fire, highly cockney argot many U.S. readers may find hard to understand.

Low Type and High Jinks. Novelist Llewellyn apparently intended to do for London Cockney Mott what James Joyce did for Dubliner Bloom in Ulysses. Then he changed his mind, reverted to melo dramatic people and situations, but kept the stream-of-consciousness style and some phraseological high jinks.

Ernie Mott’s middle name is Verdun, because his tosspot, philandering artist father was killed at Verdun in World War I. Ernie’s mother keeps a secondhand furniture store, lends money and receives stolen goods on the side. Ernie is apprentice to a lithographer, is fired for laziness and ineptitude, becomes a hanger-out at the Fun Fair, a penny arcade replete with peep shows, pinball games, shooting gallery and a change girl named Ada —”a proper, right, straight up smasher of a bride” with yellow hair, red fingernails and a close-fitting sweater.

The owner of the Fun Fair also owns dance halls and nightclubs, manages a mob of burglars and gunmen. He teaches Ernie the fine points of burglary, but the boy, an inept pupil, is arrested after the smashup of a stolen car in which he is riding. The police discover Ernie’s mother is a fence (she dies the next day from cancer). Ada decides to marry her gangster boss. The novel ends with Ernie deter mined “to get His own back on the lot of them. … All He* had to do was sling that jack [into store windows]. Sling it hard and sling it often and pick up His money. Then He could dress His self proper and get a car for His self, and look the part, so as no bride, posh or not, would scream if he tried to chat her. . . .

He was going to be all right, lonely or not.”

The Author. Novelist Llewellyn is more interesting than his hero. His full name is Richard David Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd, and he is so professionally Welsh that a map of Wales is engraved on his cigarette case. Llewellyn wears a big ruby ring, foppish suits, tight-waisted overcoats with outsize boutonnieres.

Llewellyn has always been a little cryptic about himself. He likes to make remarks like “I have two birthdates, and the honor of choice between two birth places — London and St. David’s in Pembrokeshire”; “At sixteen I was sent to Italy to learn hotel management, starting in the kitchen”; “I should describe the years up to 19 as turbulent. Realizing a need for discipline, I joined the ranks of H.M. Regular Army.” But there is some biographical data Llewellyn does not hide :

as a boy he worked in Welsh coal mines ; he was down & out when H.M. Regular Army discharged him in 1931.

The Army had taken him to India, and it was there, Llewellyn claims, that he wrote the first draft of How Green Was My Valley. The final draft was writ ten on London park benches while he was jobless. In between he had been a boxer (his nose is slightly out of joint), a film extra, a reporter for a penny film paper, an assistant movie director and scenarist.

When World War II began Llewellyn became transport officer routing shows around for ENSA (Entertainments National Services Association). Early in 1940 he joined the Army, was soon made a captain. Later there was some kind of fuss.

Now Llewellyn is a lieutenant.

*By capitalizing the pronoun He, Author Llewellyn tries to emphasize Ernie’s egocentricity.