The Well-Wrought Churn

TWO BROTHERS by Philip Toynbee. 158 pages. Harper & Row. $6.

Oh, enigmatic, labored Toynbee, twisting time in the prism of

memory into strange, unnatuerlich, artificial

frames of furry verse! Quelle raison for this Audenesque

acrostic?

To justify a common tale of self.

Of such is the verse form Author Toynbee has invented "after many experiments" to carry the narrative of his eighth novel, ostensibly the reminiscences of an old Anglo-Norwegian attempting in the year 1999 to recapture and finally comprehend the essence of a brother who died in 1936. Lest the reader fail to appreciate Toynbee's poetic virtuosity, Toynbee provides a pretentious introductory gloss that is almost a recipe. Take "first a very long and discursive line of anything between 25 and 35 syllables (but never either more or less), followed by two lines of five stressed syllables each." The first line must be finely chopped until "purely descriptive and richly adjectival," the second "pared to the bone, neat and direct," the third a dream or memory. And so on.

This exotically self-styled chef d'oeuvre has been shaken well, with generous borrowings from Auden and Dylan Thomas in style and imagery, sprinkled liberally with French and German phrases, and overgarnished with italics in all the most hortatory places. The result is intended to serve as "a mosaic of insights, a constellation of enlightening moments" as the two brothers tour prewar Europe, from Bonn and its dueling societies to Paris and the Cafe des Espions.

But Toynbee, son of Historian Arnold Toynbee, and literary critic of the London Sunday Observer, has in fact got so preoccupied with his craft that he has left out the most essential ingredient of the poet's art: passion. Neither Dick Abberville, the old man re-creating in memory his long-dead elder brother Andrew, nor Andrew himself, part "Marvelous Boy," part "romantic ass in diplomatic dress," ever becomes compellingly alive or even psychologically distinct.

Moreover, many of the Brothers' allusions are rooted in Toynbee's first novel-in-poetry, Pantaloon, which was even less effective and provided at best an all-too-private mythology on which to draw. The most notable passages in the book ring like Toynbee's own experiences as a youth traveling in Europe in the '30s, raising the suspicion that the author's mannered tricks of deminationality, time future, and exaggerated technique--even the device of the too neatly counterpointed brothers themselves, two peas split from the same psyche--are perhaps only artful foils permitting him to luxuriate disguised in that oldest literary indulgence of all: autobiography.

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