BOOK REVIEW : A Self-Portrait of a Young Twerp

Memoirs of a Public Baby by Philip O’Connor. (W.W. Norton. $18.95. 229 pages.)

If one mark of a good book is that it raises questions, then “Memoirs of a Public Baby” ought to be a good book. Questions spill out of virtually every page. To be sure, most of them are the same one:

Why?

Why bring over to the United States, 31 years after its publication in Great Britain, this portrait of the artist as a woolly-tongued young twerp, written in a prose that for the most part resembles a man making faces in a streaked mirror?

The dust jacket seems to foreshadow an answer: Praise from Richard Wilbur, Joseph Brodsky, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Paul Bowles and William Burroughs. It must be the first time that Miller and Bowles, or Bellow and Burroughs have shared a dust jacket. Such a disparate chorus of approval sounds promising if unlikely. After reading the book, I can only conclude that the chorus has more to do with the art of the blurb than the art of the memoir.

In the late 1930s, and in his late teens, O’Connor left what passed for a home--he was under the care of a kind but decidedly lower-middle-class guardian--tramped around Britain for half a year or so, and fetched up in a Bohemian quarter of London known at the time as Fitzrobia. Wystan Lewis and George Orwell frequented the neighborhood; so did a host of forgotten figures. Anthony Powell wrote about it in his “Dance to the Music of Time.”

O’Connor surely rates as one of the forgotten. Some poems he wrote after checking himself experimentally into a madhouse were printed in a collection of madhouse poetry. Sir Herbert Read, an influential literary figure, helped him out; and other poems were printed in little magazines of the era. He wrote, but did not publish, a philosophy of his own invention which he called interjectivity.

He then subsided into what he calls “conformity”; emerging in 1958 with the present memoir. Sir Stephen Spender, the poet, wrote a reverential introduction to it. Now, for the reissue, he has written a second introduction. They stand side-by-side; a breathless Tweedledum beside a breathless Tweedledee, and just as pithy.

Sir Stephen, for example, admires O’Connor’s account of sleeping as a child in the same bed with his French foster mother, and hearing the crash as she relieved herself into a chamber-pot. Such fearless vulgarity is to be applauded, he tells us: “Saints who slept with lepers must have known about it.”

It was a crash without a sequel. All that we are told about O’Connor, today at 68--the dust jacket again--is: “Philip O’Connor has been a vagrant, a poet and a journalist for the BBC. He lives in a mill in the South of France with his wife, Panna Grady.” It sounds as if Monty Python, not Spender, had invented him.

The memoir, which takes O’Connor from infancy to 25 or so, asserts the memorialist’s unrepentant unconformity, with acknowledged debts to Nietszche and D. H. Lawrence. He makes a point, though, of stressing his bloodlines.

He is descended, he tells us, from the Last High King of Ireland, the upper Dutch bourgeois, and a governor of Bengal. His father, though he decamped before Philip could remember him, went to Oxford and Downside, a top Catholic school. His mother was flighty, selfish and poor, but she had aristocratic pleasures and impeccable taste.

Philip was brutally bounced about. His mother lodged him for two childhood years with a French pastry-shop owner, repossessed him to her Soho basement for a few years more, and finally turned him over to Joseph, an ebullient but vulgar guardian. After he went off on his own, he took up with a young woman who earned a fee for taking baths with old men. Finally he met L., a rich, fey and frail daughter of a Northern manufacturing family. He helped her spend all her money and then left her.

There is one stretch of wonderful writing in the book. It deals with O’Connor’s two years in Madame Tillieux’s pastry shop. It is hard, high-colored and vivid; a description of a sea-side trolley ride--stopping now and then whenever a wave crashed over the track--is especially memorable.

Contrasting the energetic, vital Frenchwoman with his own loopy and inbred mother, he writes that the foster mother “appeared to wear ‘outside’ as flesh that thing which Mother had ‘inside’ as a soul.” Of the death of Madame Pillieux’s invalid mother, he writes: “Her absence thereafter made me a little uncomfortable, the fire having lost its friend.”

If only O’Connor had been left behind in France. His portrait of his guardian--kindly but a bore, even when he joined the Communist Party to assert his unconventionality--is amusing, but only a sketch.

And after that, as the writer goes into his adolescence and his life as a pseudo-artistic sponger, the writing sinks into grandiloquent muddiness. There is hardly a single specific place, person or incident in the book’s entire second half. It is all attitudinizing with a tin ear. When he develops a crush on an older woman with two children, he writes:

“Alas that I slammed against her the boulder of my mortal caverns, and scowled her graces from my heart and the sun from my life.” Of L., whom he describes as looking like a young Virginia Woolf, he tells us:

“She saw human traffic as a procession of moods, as a piece of musical counterpoint in psychic terms; as quadrilles of souls in a still social room with sunshine pouring through the open window where not a breath stirs the brocaded curtain.”

Nor, with France and childhood left behind, does a breath of talent stir this book. Only the low rumble of the blurbs.