One Way to Wall Street

THE END OF AN OLD SONG (269 pp.)--J. D. Scott--Knopf ($3.50).

Catherine Harvey "smelt faintly of newly washed wool and . . . Johnson & Johnson's baby powder." When her dark eyes "snapped caressingly." young Patrick boldly drew her into a brief clinch. Little did he know, poor fellow, that 15-year-old Cathy was already well on the way to becoming what his friend Alastair called "my favorite nymphomaniac."

Aglow with "the phosphorescence of sexuality." Cathy keeps streaking over the horizon of this novel like a flying saucer pursued by satyrs. And yet no one could call The End of an Old Song a sexy or sordid story. Author John (The Way to Glory) Scott, who is literary editor of London's dignified Spectator, is simply not the kind of novelist who grapples with nymphomania like a Melville with a whale. Though interested in elemental things, he is more interested in the sound of his clear prose tinkling over them. Moreover, this time, his main theme is the decline of Scotland.

Out of Scotland's moors and grey cities comes annually a host of dogged youths who fight their way into the white-collar professions--and then bustle away to hunt the big money of London, Toronto and New York.

Alastair, son of a down-at-heel Scottish laird, is Author Scott's example of how the process works. While his school friend Patrick shines up old claymores and dotes on mossy manor houses, Alastair claws his way to the top of the class and gets to Cambridge University--"a wee Scottie on the make." he gleefully calls himself. He takes Cathy away from Patrick as briskly and heartlessly as a cat would snatch a piece of meat, and he declaims his creed in the mocking tones of one who will never be shackled by ties of tradition and sentimentality. "We spit on Bonny Prince Charlie and Flora Macdonald. on Rizzio's blood and Mary Queen of Scots. [But of all Company Directors in the City of London and overseas ... of Scottish origin we lick the shoes; all Scotsmen who have succeeded at the English bar are remembered nightly in our orisons."

World War II is the answer to Alastair's orisons. A nice job in the British Treasury puts him in contact with the moneybags of Washington, and by novel's end. he is heading smartly for Wall Street after deliberately (and symbolically) burning to the ground the romantic home of his ancestors.

Cathy becomes Alastair's wife--a neat alliance of sexual and mercenary cupidities. But for all Author Scott's efforts, neither Cathy nor Alastair strikes the reader as being highly qualified in their respective fields. This is because, like the characters in so many other well-bred British novels, they are nothing but a pair of author's notions dressed in well-cut suits of prose. Asked to play the role of human beasts, they answer, quite rightly, that they were never destined to be anything more than their tailor's dummies.

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