Tourist Trade

TO SERVE THEM ALL MY DAYS

byR.F. DELDERFIELD 638 pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.95.

One can almost hear the anticipatory sigh going up from book clubbers, jolly olde Englanders, lending-library faithfuls and everybody's Aunt Sally across the land: another good read from Delderfield. To Serve Them All My Days, a chronicle about life in a British public school, is certainly that. But a good read is not necessarily a good write.

The point may be irrelevant. Delderfield, an Englishman who died at 60 last January, qualified in publishing terms as a phenomenon, which by all accounts--and accountants--put him beyond criticism. He was a Victorian three-decker novelist born out of his time. After a middling career both as a provincial journalist and a London playwright, he settled down in the 1950s at the age of 44 to what he conceived as his true calling: "To project the English way of life in the tradition of Hardy and Galsworthy."

Having started late, he worked fast, writing 4,000 words a day under the thatched roof of his converted coach house in Devon. The books poured out--sturdy, spacious narratives teeming with secondary characters, subplots, detailed social background and satisfying verdant county settings. Too long, too oldfashioned, too English, thought American publishers. But then in 1964 A Horseman Riding By, the first of Delderfield's Devonshire family sagas, sold an impressive 20,000 copies in the U.S. By 1970 the Delderfield blend of history, sentiment and foursquare storytelling could make God Is an Englishman a runaway U.S. bestseller (60,000 copies in hard cover, 500,000 in paper).

God demonstrated the scope of Delderfield's ambition. It was the first of a projected five volumes in which he planned to trace the rise and fall and rise again of the Swann family, starting with the founding of its transport business at the height of the 19th century Industrial Revolution and running down through the investiture of Prince Charles in 1969. The second, almost equally successful installment was last year's Theirs Was the Kingdom. Next fall will see the publication of Volume III, Give Us This Day, which Delderfield finished just before he died.

Moist Gaze. Meantime we have Days. It is a characteristically hefty tome chronicling virtually every day in the life of an admirable West Country schoolmaster--a sort of block off the old Chips. Never mind the subversive rot that Waugh, Orwell and Cyril Connolly wrote about the English public school. Delderfield's Bamfylde is a cozy, character-building place. Pranks are played, faculty rivalries worked out, young minds awakened, while over it all Delderfield nods with the benign and sometimes moist gaze of an Old Boy. There seems to be a streak of self-identification in the author's portrait of his hero, David Powlett-Jones. An erstwhile young reformer, Powlett-Jones endures two marriages, a love affair, assorted births and deaths, and the splutterings of the board of governors to become a mellow headmaster who puts his faith "in tradition, in ripeness, habit and continuity."

Those values are sound enough. Delderfield's affection for his school and characters, moreover, is both genuine and often catching. Yet in applying such qualities to fiction, Delderfield writes as if such innovators as James, Proust and Joyce had never existed. The result is that he ignores not only the changing forms of the modern novel but also the changing sensibilities that those forms reflect. His books invoke the sensibility of an earlier age in the same way that the tourist industry in his home county of Devon trades on the quaint charm of an older lifestyle. In Delderfield's fictional tourism, the reader is given duty-free passage through a world that may resemble the all too real world back home. But the scenery is slightly too synthetic and the humanity too much at arm's length to do more than entertain him in passing.

Thus a book like Days is only partly faithful to its models: it is Hardy without vision, Galsworthy without bite. But for the undemanding reader --or for any reader in an undemanding mood--it is as comfortable as an old couch. The Aunt Sally in all of us is going to love it.

.Christopher Porterfield

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