Decline & Fall

MY FATHERS AND I (253 pp.)--Eric Linklater--Harcourt, Brace ($3.95).

British Novelist Eric Linklater (Juan in America, Laxdale Hall) wore the kilt of the gallant Black Watch in World War I and has laughed in the face of reality ever since. His new novel, My Fathers and I, is an escape into the past. It is told by a degenerate descendant of proud ancestors who were greatly absurd but greatly revered. The narrator is Edward G. (for Gratiano) Vanbrugh, a seedily broke antique dealer in a shabby English provincial town. His principal stock, symbolically enough, was a menagerie of Staffordshire China figures--shepherdesses, sailors, heroes of the past. As his narrative unfolds, it turns into a gallery of historical portraits redone by a modern caricaturist.

All the Vanbrughs made fools of themselves in one way or another, but they did so in the grand manner. There was Eustace Vanbrugh (born 1834), a truly Victorian loony with an army of servants to command. (Linklater suggests that the servant class has disappeared only to re-emerge as civil servants taking revenge, in the name of socialism, on their former masters.) Eustace's lunacy revolved around the theological implications of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. He would bribe maidservants with a guinea in order to investigate whether or not they had tails: discovery of a vestigial caudal appendage of course would help the Darwinian faction. His scientific passion caused his social ruin during the visit of a German grand duchess whose family was reputed to be fitted with a Darwinian decoration.

Most of the other Vanbrughs had their troubles with women, too. Francis Vanbrugh (born 1772) was a frail and handsome man given to fainting fits, who spent ten long years being hopelessly in love with the proud Duchess of Avalon. When she finally capitulated and came to his room, Francis, "maladroit as ever," took the occasion to die. Then there was Thomas Vanbrugh (born 1861), a captain in Prince Albert's Regiment of Assam Light Infantry in India, who gallantly disgraced himself during a native uprising when he ordered a retreat solely to save the local British Resident's wife, a dauntless lady with a superior figure. Finally, there was Edward Vanbrugh (born 1891), the narrator's own father, who returned after long and distinguished service in World War I to a wife whom he had known only three days. She met him at Victoria Station, and the two went off for two blissful nights in the Regent Palace Hotel. Only after he left her did she realize that Edward had not recognized her at all and had left -L-50 on the mantelpiece.

As for the modern Vanbrugh who tells the story, he is a nobody, but he has a spiv's eye for survival, the derisive eloquence of a shameless man and the bogus kind of face that, as he suggests, would go well on a butler or a bishop. As Author Linklater tells it in his savagely comic novel, Vanbrugh spent a profitable war as a wingless wing commander in the R.A.F. and ends his career as a superior flunky in the household of a Texas aristocrat. Says he: "I see my destiny, I recognize my genius ... but England, I have not abandoned you. No more than Clive or Hastings, Raffles or Lugard . . . have I deserted you!"

Author Linklater's moral is clear: the past may be laughable, but the present is beneath contempt.

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