Jocelyn Brooke is an English author who has written novels, autobiography, poems, and books on flowers. The Dog at Clambercrown, subtitled “An Excursion into Autobiography,” is a mixture of travel journal and variations on a theme from childhood. Half the book is an account of a journey to Enna in Sicily, arranged in sections. Alternating with these are sections describing a young child’s world, an adolescent school period, and some time in the army.
What holds all this material together is the romantic theme of the search for the remote, the “other.” It all has the flavor of Rimbaud: “La vraie vie est absente.” The child, the youth, the man, each is restricted or lacking in some way and seeks compensation or completion. The physical limits of the young child’s world are narrow, and he is always attended by his nurse, Ninnie. He is “frontier-conscious”—alert to each boundary and speculating about what lies beyond.
The physical limits naturally come to represent other limits. Brought up in a genteel, female society, the child yearns for the rough, male world of pubs, the hunt, war, or men beyond the class barrier. He conceives “erotic” passions for the gardener, the baker’s boy, a hunter. These seem to him profane loves, as opposed to sacred love, personified by Ninnie.
The evocation of that other life was most compelling at “The Dog-and-Clambercrown”—an old inn situated in the heart of the country beyond the frontiers. The inn was populated by his fancy with the heroes of his profane loves and set in the shadowed country “haunted perpetually by thunder and the crying of horns.” It was, clearly, the hub of that other life—wild, free, male-from which he was so completely secured. When the child becomes an adolescent, he goes to see Clamber-crown. This part of the book reaches a climax in the excursion of the lonely, bookish youth, in the throes of “an abnormally delayed puberty.” The penetration of the frontiers of the unknown probably dramatizes the experience of growing up-becoming an independent male. The youth experiences an emotional climax, at least symbolically sexual, alone, during a storm. But it ends in disappointment. It is not, after all, a discovery but a confirmation of his sense of futility. His arrival at the inn is anticlimactic. At a small house, closed as an inn six months before, he is greeted by a woman. She offers him, in place of the “masculine” ale he had hoped for, a glass of milk.
Parallel to this excursion is the journey to Enna. Enna, where Proserpina was carried off by Dis, lay behind another childhood frontier. The myth had a special significance for the child: the feeling of homesickness, “the ruined spring,” the terrible underground, and Ceres’ (Ninnie’s) search for the lost child. But when the man arrives at the shores of Lake Pergusa on Easter morning, he finds Proserpina un-risen, the spring unborn. He botanizes a little; he finds an anemone, an orchid or two; he remembers Clambercrown. He is not enthusiastic.
Mr. Brooke’s subtitle seems a disclaimer—even an evasion—more than a description of the book. The reader is warned not to expect an autobiography. But he may wonder when he finishes the book what “an excursion” is. Does it bear the same relation to autobiography that Graham Greene’s “entertainments” bear to novels? When the reader thinks of the author, returning from the army to live with his mother and Ceres-Ninnie, he may find the dictionary definition apt: “a short trip taken with the intention of returning to the point of departure.”
It was prudent not to label the book autobiography. What it lacks that even a second-rate autobiography must have is people. Mr. Brooke explains guilelessly, “I am … more interested in places than in people.” Perhaps it is fitting that the landscapes of childhood contain only occasional figures. But there is a curious privation about an entire book in which no one who means anything to the author is more than a figure.
Further, there is an overbalance of means to end. Much of the book is trivial or downright boring. During the trip to Sicily we are spared none of the tedium of travel. En route Mr. Brooke weaves in observations on contemporary literature which have neither weight, perceptiveness, nor the charm of eccentric personal observation.
Mr. Brooke needed to find some form for the wit and the nuggets of real experience in the book. The short sketches in such a book as Colette’s My Mother’s House are, beyond anything, fresh and clear. Achieving clarity, she has no need to make the experiences of childhood echo and re-echo. The world of the English child, it may be objected, is more murky than pastoral. But it can still be caught without double plots. Graham Greene, for example, gets the quality of a spoiled garden of Eden in short stories and in the autobiographical preface to The Lost Childhood with fine economy of detail. The lyrical sense of places as presences, the nostalgia for what “we never can directly know,” does not require the balance of tedium. We know that well enough.
THE DOG AT CLAMBERCROWN
By Jocelyn Brooke.
Vanguard. $4.
