Hark, Hark, the Clerk

By Melvin Maddocks

CHARLIE, COME HOME by R.F. DELDERFIELD 299 pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.95.

The late R.F. Delderfield may have been the final heir of a tradition invented to while away long, damp English evenings: the multivolumed family saga. As the literary grandson of Trollope and son of Galsworthy, Delderfield industriously erected his own Barchester Towers, climbed his own Forsythe family tree. His mythical family, the Swanns, lived through everything from the Zulu War to the sinking of the Titanic. Writing seven days a week, from 10 in the morning to 1 in the afternoon, and from 6 to 7 in the evening, Delderfield produced an imposing series of doorstoppers, bearing such titles as God Is an Englishman and To Serve Them All My Days. Then in 1969, as if cocking a snoot at the world of Establishment and tradition, he interrupted himself to write Charlie, Come Home, a perky, funny, rather un-Delderfield sort of novel.

This slim volume (by Delderfield standards) would not hold even a closet door open. As far as the flag and the Empire are concerned, it might be subtitled To Subvert Them All My Days or The Devil Is a Welshman. Delderfield's Angry Young Man, 1929-style, is a young bank clerk named Charlie Pritchard--5 ft. 5 in. of meekness, with horn rimmed glasses. After six years of diligent work in his drab little Welsh seaside town, Charlie still boards in a room formerly occupied by a pickle salesman. He has barely risen to be fifth of six clerks. "That's a safe job," everybody tells Charlie until the poor lad, in quiet panic, begins to see 40 years to retirement stretching ahead of him.

A pair of women soon make a man out of Charlie. Ida, the bank manager's daughter, first seduces him. Delphine, the femme fatale waitress at the Rainbow Cafe, continues Charlie's education.

When he looks into Delphine's eyes--"midway between the underside of a periwinkle petal and the heart of a violet"--Charlie feels up to anything Delphine suggests, including: Rob the bank.

Up to this point, Charlie, Come Home is another worm-turns farce, starring Peter Sellers. But as the-tunnel lengthens from the cellar of the Rainbow to the vault of the bank, Delderfield's story takes on a certain serpentine depth. Charlie becomes disenchanted with Delphine and indifferent even to the pot of gold at the end of the Rainbow. Yet he perseveres. Why?

Delderfield's answer is hardly original, but coming from a saga writer, it bears a special weight. Looking back at himself 40 years later, old Charlie concludes that young Charlie was more or less right. A man must kick against the System--play the rebel, if not the outlaw--in order to become a man. Listening to Charlie, Delderfield seems staggered himself and hastily pulls back from profundity to close out his novel with a twist as old as one of O. Henry's. Still, it works, just as almost everything by Delderfield works. Who else could write a bright and brassy bit of entertainment that doubles as an old pro's epitaph on his own genre?

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