Snapshots of Youth

Flawed and fragile early novels are often like youthful snapshots: a source of faint discomfort to the author, a delight to the doting fan, and a revealing glimpse into the past. Two such novels have now been issued in the U.S., one by Nancy Mitford, the British author (Love in a Cold Climate) who hates Americans, and the other by Christopher Isherwood, the British author (Prater Violet) who became one. The first is worth noting because of the surprisingly naive notions of its adult author, the second because it marks the jumping-off point in a talented young writer's abrupt leap to adulthood.

Medals & Marks. Nancy Mitford's Pigeon Pie (British Book Centre; 186 pp.; $2.95) was first published in 1940, and shows it. The book is a gay little farce about the early days of the war, and to Author Mitford, in that innocent year, war was something tiresome that men did. She wrote merrily: "England picked up France, Germany picked up Italy. Then Italy's Nanny said she had fallen down and grazed her knee, running, and mustn't play. England picked up Turkey, Germany picked up Spain, but Spain's Nanny said she had internal troubles and must sit this one out. England looked towards the Oslo group, but they had never played before, except little Belgium, who had hated it, and the others felt shy. The party looked like being a flop, and everybody was becoming very much bored, especially the Americans who are so fond of blood and entrails."

In spite of an occasional flash of gallows humor that sometimes sounds as if its author were not really sure what takes place at a hanging, the book trots on amiably enough. The pigeons of the title belong to spies, and Heroine Lady Sophia Garfield has some rousing cloak-and-dagger experiences. The most amusing touch is a supposed renegade who shatters the morale of Britain's pet-lovers by broadcasting that "few dogs and no cats carried gas masks, and gas-proof cages for birds and mice were the exception rather than the rule. The animal first-aid posts were scandalously few and ill-equipped."

Foil for the Lonely. Christopher Isherwood, who owns the most mellifluous name since Hiawatha, started All the Conspirators (New Directions; 255 pp.; $3) in 1926, when he was 21. It is a much better than fair first novel, although not a very robust one. It is really a school piece, full of ill-chewed borrowings from Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The hero is a sticky, artistic young man--a kind of underdone Dedalus--who rebels weakly against the smothering care of his mother. He gets some support from his friend, a medical student with the sour outlook but none of the roistering profanity of Dedalus' Buck Mulligan. But after a week's timorous escape at a seaside resort, the rebel returns and surrenders to his clucking parent.

The fondness for melodrama of an author still partly adolescent shows in All the Conspirators. Eleven years later, still moodily youthful but by then a seasoned novelist, Isherwood invented a foil for his loneliness--and created his best character--in the abundantly friendly Sally Bowles of Goodbye to Berlin.

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