A Twiddle on the Fiddle

A PERFECT WOMAN (363 pp.)--/-. P. Hartley--Knopf ($3.95).

Many British critics think that the author of A Perfect Woman is just about a perfect novelist. At 60, Leslie Poles Hartley couples some of the skill and suavity of Somerset Maugham with a show of sympathetic interest, an emotion that Maugham controls to the point of asphyxiation. Hartley's technical aplomb helped to make The Go-Between (TIME, Aug. 9, 1954) one of the most admired novels of its year. In A Perfect Woman he demonstrates with good humor and feline subtlety how many ways there are for an author to tap and bat his characters around before crunching them jovially on the last page.

A Home on the Channel. Author Hart ley is profoundly interested in what happens to ordinary people when they let themselves go and get entangled in extraordinary situations. Isabel Eastwood, the "perfect woman" of this novel, is an ordinary woman who dreamed in her younger days of dedicating her life to something rare and wonderful. But just when she was getting the hang of Kafka and the tang of Joyce, she married Harold, a chartered accountant who regarded life as a sort of income-tax return and his Creator as an Inspector of Internal Revenue. The Inspector, as Harold sees Him, is not a Kafka type. He expects a human being's accounts to be extremely businesslike, and not entirely dishonest. If the main items -- church at tendance, Rotary, propriety -- are in order, the Inspector is sport enough not to query the "fiddles," i.e., the "legitimate" little gimmicks with which Harold saves his grateful clients many a penny and adds a few cubits to his own balance.

Harold and Isabel have two children (the Inspector insists on this) and are toying with having a third when their income can stand it. Their home is a neat little villa in a neat little town beside the ocean -- not the roaring, boisterous ocean, of course, but the tidy English Channel with its concrete esplanades.

This world is one that makes genius tear its hair with rage, the world that drove William Blake and D. H. Lawrence half-mad with revulsion. But Hartley is too bland to feel revulsion. Like a scientist who wants to see what will happen, he throws a wench into Harold's work and a wolf into Isabel's life.

Alec Goodrich is a tawny-eyed, well-heeled, philandering novelist. He lives in a wild part of Wales surrounded by "strange, Wagnerian scenery" and with the loud Atlantic roaring on his doorstep. He defies the Inspector (and shocks Harold) by traveling first-class with a third-class ticket and investing his money, his sacred money, in absurd companies.

Tenant for the Four-Poster. Fiddling for Alec, Harold finds, is hard sledding. But after Harold has done his best, the two of them go off to a bar, where Alec promptly falls for Barmaid Irma, a seductive Austrian who says "Please, yes" when she means "No" ("Rather a dangerous habit, I should say," remarks her landlord). Alec lives too far away to seduce Irma. but he thinks nothing of asking Harold to procure her for him. At the same time smart Alec, who has been sending him a batch of rich clients, hints that there may be more to follow on receipt of Irma. Soon poor Harold feels honor-bound to procure Irma, but before Harold knows what's hit him, Irma becomes his mistress. And wife Isabel, so long frustrated, soon finds herself filling Irma's place in Alec's four-poster bed.

The author draws multiple morals from this disruption of a staid, stable marriage. He shows deftly just how a woman's yearning for "culture" can drag her into fatal gyrations, just how an accountant's passion for a barmaid can whirl him high above the world of mere dollars and cents. The only trouble is that a sense of tragedy usually follows in the wake of such domestic revolutions -- and Author Hartley's talents do not stretch to tragedy. Harold and Isabel make the grade just so long as they are computing tax forms or dreaming of culture on concrete esplanades. Once they enter the realm of "Wagnerian scenery," they become mere toys in the hands of Britain's foremost literary juggler.

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