Epistle to the Mugs

THE LONDON NOVELS OF COLIN MacINNES (CITY OF SPADES, ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS, MR. LOVE AND JUSTICE). 626 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $7.50.

On one side is "the great community of the mugs," also known as yobbos, taxpayers and sordids. They are all those sober, serious folk who "just don't want to know" but who live in the illusion that they are the real inhabitants of London. On the other side, opposed to the mugs, are spades, teenagers, whores and their ponces and pimps, coppers and their narks, junkies, gangsters black and white, seamen, Asians, layabouts and homosexuals. They are natives of the swinging London that no tourist sees, the ever-shifting, dodge-through-it city on a salt estuary, rich to eye and nose, whose alleys once throbbed for Defoe, whose street cries ring back to Thomas Dekker. This is the London of Colin Maclnnes, the one literary man who sings the city's cries today.

Over the past decade, Maclnnes has celebrated his city and its way-in outsiders in two fair novels and a third that is superb. The three have now been reissued after long neglect, enabling the reader to roam the nightside of London with Maclnnes. Such trips involve whispers, a confusion of lights, pound notes exchanging hands, presences, but most typically a shabby street that could never be found again and a plunge down a dim staircase. At the bottom, a door. Closed, heavy, guarding the Platonic idea of door. Inside, music, smoke, cadenced talk as pungent as the smoke, and with it a sniff of corruption, a hint of menace. The scene may actually be a TV director's fashionable flat. It may be a club where acid-heads meet. It may be an African gambling house. Wherever it is, Maclnnes' name and rangy, white-haired frame get one through that door. Known in queer world and straight world alike, Maclnnes is passport and safe-conduct through the black communities of London. At 54, he is the oldest living member of the youth underground.

Rescue by the Army. Maclnnes is a native alien even at home, a man bred to the observation of outsiders from inside. He is a Scotsman born in London, reared in Australia. His mother was Novelist Angela Thirkell. Maclnnes escaped Australia and a law scholarship in 1930 at 16, spent five years in Brussels, a businessman by grace of a family connection, but by nature a bohemian who spent much of his time "consorting with writers, painters, musicians." For three years in London he studied painting, "until I was rescued by the army." After the war, he joined BBC Radio and began to write.

Each of these three books begins where a cold sociological observation rubs against a poetic perception of slangy slumside talk. Teen-age talk particularly. Years before anyone else had noticed, Maclnnes stopped and listened to the English kids. Their songs and entire culture, he saw, were rocking out in accents more than half American. Years before the Beatles, he predicted (in the memorable essay "Young England, Half English") exactly what the Beatles would sound like and be like.

Mr. Ronson Lighter. The imaginative leap from adolescent affluence and argot to a perception of teen-age attitudes is what gives Absolute Beginners its moral energy. The novel would be no more than a cheerful nature walk from the Elephant and Castle to Notting Hill if Maclnnes did not see beneath all the apparent irresponsibility. What he finds is the fusion of caring and a concern for style that leaves young people unimpressed by questions of race or war or money.

Away ahead of public concern over civil liberties and possible abuse of constabulary power, Maclnnes knew that he did not like policemen. So, in Mr. Love and Justice, he contrived a minuet about how the police and vice prey on each other. Born policemen, Maclnnes believes, think like born criminals. Both move through the world of mugs with alert and total mistrust.

The joy and triumph of Maclnnes' trio is City of Spades. Maclnnes was one of the first whites to say very loudly that black is beautiful; the light-heartedness of his evidence still rings out. When he brought a character named Johnny Fortune from Lagos to London twelve years ago, few people in England were thinking of racial tension or predicting an Enoch Powell. Maclnnes set Johnny and a white friend loose in an African and West Indian shadow world full of jouncing characters with cross-rough names: Mr. Peter Pay Paul, Mr. Karl Marx Bo (a future Prime Minister for sure), Mr. Ronson Lighter, and villainous Billy Whispers. The result was British high-low comedy, presented with affection and delight. When he took these people among whites who even then self-consciously affected Spade guests, the satire said everything that could be said about white liberalism. And because Maclnnes abandoned his tape recorder, relying on his ear for syncopation and dislocated verbal wit, the language, no matter how angry, is lilting and indelible.

Maclnnes' ear for the issues is sound too. His robust sympathies never crush his judgment. Beneath the charm and humor, sadness lurks. Mr. Karl Marx Bo says, looking around the Moonbeam club: "Serious individual as I am, I cannot always resist the lure of a little imitation joy." By the end, the tinsel has peeled for Johnny Fortune. After a police frame-up and a month in jail on a marijuana charge, he sets out to join his family in Lagos--full of shame and defiance: "Let them kill every Spade that's in the world, and leave but just two, man and woman, and we'll fill up the whole globe once more and win our triumph!" In this novel, Maclnnes is more than a mugs' guide to a city and a race he loves and mourns. He is a fond pioneer explorer of the almost reachless gap between the races, and what manner of reconciliation may be possible.

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