Forlorn Comedy

By John Skow

by J.P. Donleavy

Delacorte; 407 pages; $10.95

The ginger vanished from J.P. Donleavy's comedy about the time he got himself an Irish country squire's suit to wear for dust-jacket photographs several books ago. The ratty, malicious humor of The Ginger Man (1965) was unmistakably the effort of an authentic writer. Donleavy's recent works seem to be the chores of an author, necessary productions for the furtherance of a literary personage. Donleavy may not actually have dictated his new book while riding in the back of a rented Rolls, but the impression given by Schultz, a farce about an American theatrical impresario attempting to stay afloat in London, is of a novelist who believes that neither his subject nor his reader deserves close attention.

Sigmund Franz Schultz, formerly of Woonsocket, R.I., is the theater man, teamed with a couple of aristocratic young backers, one named Binky and the other called Lord Nectarine of Walham Green. Their firm is called Sperm Productions, and the show that he is trying to produce is called Kiss It, Don't Hold It, It's Too Hot. The funny names suggest that we are in P.G. Wodehouse country. So does the buckety-buckety pace of the book, as Schultz careers from misfortune to disaster in his efforts to produce what is evidently going to be his fourth straight flop.

Yet Wodehouse's absurd caricatures always made sense in their own addle-pated terms, and underlying each of the master's farces was the coherent comic statement that blithering idiocy was the finest bulwark of the Empire. Donleavy's figures are too slackly drawn to be believable as caricatures and the only statement made by the novel is not comic but forlorn: the author has nothing to say. He seems to have few thoughts about the theater and none about London, or about an aristocracy that refuses to notice that it has been extinct since 1914.

Schultz has the sexual attitudes of Sebastian Dangerfield, the Ginger Man, which is to say that he loves sex but resents the fact that heterosexuality drives him to the company of women to get it.

And Schultz is dazzled by wealth and privilege, just as wealth and privilege are made giddy by his own crude energy. But Donleavy seems not to have asked himself how he feels about these matters, and the disappointing result of this lack of viewpoint is a comedy that is mostly mere commotion.

John Skow

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