Guilt-Edged Bonds

THE VINTAGE (310 pp.) -- Anthony West--Houghton Mifflin ($3).

It certainly looked like a good proposition. Life on beautiful Cape Sable was one long holiday and here it was being handed to him for eternity--swimming and boating, good food and plenty to drink, handsome, leggy girls and no questions asked. But John Wallis turned it down cold; he ran away from it straight into a private hell of his own choosing.

Some time before he made this unusual choice, British Colonel John Wallis had shoved a .45 into his mouth and blown his brains out. As a barrister on the British commission investigating war crimes, he had helped hang German General von Kenelm; Wallis' overwhelming sense of guilt had pulled the trigger. So, in British Anthony West's first novel, The Vintage, Wallis is first seen on a mortuary slab. The rest of the book tells of his guilt-and conscience-plagued pilgrimage through the purgatory of which Cape Sable is a part.

Imagined Purgatory. Like his famed mother, Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, The Meaning of Treason), 35-year-old Anthony has thought earnestly and long about the tincture of guilt that has seeped into the stream of consciousness of modern man and created a field day for the psychoanalysts. Like his father, the late great H. G. Wells,* he has a considerable talent for creating the geography of a make-believe world to suit his fictional purpose.

In The Vintage, Author West explores two worlds: 1) an imagined purgatory which borrows nothing from such Godfearing models as Dante's Inferno but has much in common with the Godless statism of George Orwell's 1084; 2) the real British middle-class world of John Wallis seen through numerous flashbacks. Neither exploration is wholly successful. Wallis' purgatory, with its concentration-camp pall and forced pleasure-resort atmosphere is skillfully but too obviously contrived. Wallis' real-life experience, with its high quota of banal woman trouble, comes close to being boring.

What becomes more important than either world is West's exploration of Wallis' guilt-stabbed consciousness and the whole problem of man's.moral responsibility for his conduct. Ironically, Wallis' assigned partner through purgatory is General von Kenelm, his legal victim. He too reveals his past: that of a ruthlessly ambitious soldier who first murdered his best friend and then whole masses of people. At first, true to his nature, Kenelm is willing to settle for a soft spot on Cape Sable. In the end, like Wallis, he feels the need to exorcise his evil conscience.

Wallis' life turns out to have been not so much a web of calculated evil as of thoughtlessness and stupidity. He was always at odds with his conventional father, almost from the first had too much money. In purgatory, what seems to bother him most is his haphazard sex life and the scars it left on him and on his women. One by one they are brought before him and Wallis realizes that through his earthly life he was incapable of real love, behaved badly with wife and mistresses alike.

Pleasant Devil. When the devil, in the guise of a pleasant-mannered guide named Ransome, offers him "freedom from guilt, freedom from sin," Wallis refuses. He has come to realize that only by remembering "every little petty lie, every deceit, every shame, from the first to the last," can he expel his torment of guilt and find the way to God.

The Vintage, for all its superficially dramatic grappling with the problem of sin, merely points up man's well-known moral fallibility. It leaves untouched the problem of expiation of sin by those whose conduct, however understandable, is morally and socially damnable. And its major thesis, that man, to win salvation, must boldly examine his acts and probe his subconscious for their meaning, is hardly more than a fictional plug for the value of psychoanalysis.

*The identity of Novelist West's father, long known in English literary circles, was publicly acknowledged four months ago in the London Times's Literary Supplement, in a publisher's ad for the English edition of the novel. West is currently working on a biography of Wells.

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