Poor Little Sod the Sioux By Irene Handl

By Paul Gray

The photograph on the dust jacket will look familiar to devotees of British comic films, and with good reason. Irene Handl, now 82, appeared with Peter Sellers in I'm All Right, Jack (1960) and with Terry-Thomas in Make Mine Mink (1960); she also played the deranged hero's mother in Morgan! (1966), in which she made a dottily poignant pilgrimage to the London grave of Karl Marx. In addition to these and other movie roles, plus extensive work in the theater and television, Handl found the time to write a novel. The Sioux was first published in 1965 and elicited glowing responses from the likes of Noel Coward and Daphne du Maurier. After initial flurries of praise, though, the book sank out of print. Now publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have decided to give it another chance.

The Sioux certainly deserves that, if only as a tribute to reckless originality. A stranger tale and an odder telling would be hard to confect. Vincent Castleton, 43, an English banker in New Orleans, has married Marguerite Benoir, also known as Mim or Mimi to the handful of people on earth she regards as equals. These include most of the Benoirs, an impossibly rich and haughty French clan whose members call themselves the Sioux, perhaps as a tribute to their own ferocity. Mim, in her mid-20s, has led a luxurious but troubled life. Her first marriage, to Cousin Georges Benoir, ended in a car crash that killed one of the world's most dashing multimillionaires and the father of her son. Her second union, to a Governor of Mississippi named Davis Davis, proved a three-month debacle. Her honeymoon with Castleton has been acceptable; now she anxiously awaits the arrival of her older brother Armand, who is bringing her delicate little boy back from France to live with his newest stepfather.

Young Georges-Marie, 9, has, as his cousin Bienville tartly notes, "more names than Jehovah," among them Moumou, Puss and the Dauphin. This spectrally beautiful, thin, pale child speaks a bewildering mixture of French and "Ol' Kintuck," the hayseed dialect he absorbed during his brief exposure to Governor Davis' three strapping sons: "O, he jest being plain bad. O, il m'echappe toujours!" All the Sioux are holding their breath to see how George takes to Castleton. Armand reassures his brother-in-law: "The Dauphin has a truly terrifying sense of gratitude. You'll be annihilated by it, my poor Vince. Nothing can stand up against this terrible, slow gratitude of the Dauphin."

Castleton is indeed unsettled by the shrieking, weeping and effusively loving behavior of this weird child. "Shut up, darling," he pleads during one attempt to comfort the little lad, who is, Castleton decides, "Pure Gold and all that, but inconceivably maddening." Worse, the new husband begins to take the true measure of his wife, who not only treats her servants as if feudalism still reigned and slavery had never been abolished but who hectors her semi-invalid son unmercifully: "Drink your porto and try and get a little color in your face for a change." She will make him a worthy Benoir, fit to assume his rightful inheritance of family leadership and at least (pounds)30 million, or kill him in the process. She rages: "You! You will drive me into the grave with those bones! It is ridiculous to be as thin as that! It is idiotic!" His frail physique does not prevent Mama from administering energetic corporal punishment. Castleton, who finds he cannot help loving the ridiculous Dauphin, grows increasingly alarmed: "Christ, she does wade into the poor little sod!"

Handl establishes the ground rules for this domestic mayhem almost entirely through dialogue interspersed with bits of indirect discourse and peeks into the minds of the characters who happen to be onstage at the moment. This method is undeniably exhilarating, the equivalent of being grabbed by the elbow and shoved into an especially deracinated cocktail party. But the fun grows a bit forced over the long haul; even the most bizarre conversations cannot forever hide the fact that not much of substance is happening. Handl's people are splendidly funny because they all, with the possible exception of Castleton, are permanently set in their absurd ways. Not much room is left over for suspense. A little more forward momentum might have made The Sioux a minor classic. As it now stands, or careens, the novel is a curiosity tres chic.