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Books: Celebrity and Its Discontents

4 minute read
R.Z. Sheppard

TRANSATLANTIC BLUES by Wilfrid Sheed. Dutton; 312 pages; $9.95

Americans have been grouped and groped, had their consciousnesses raised and their drawers lowered until it would seem there are no secrets left. There is one: the slippery, quietly gnawing matter of class. For those who have gone a long way on a knack and raw nerve, there are always night thoughts of doubt: “Are my credentials adequate?” “Is my background acceptable?”

This is an old story in England, where society’s lines, though wavering, are still anchored at both ends. Class-consciousness in the U.S. is considerably more baffling. Part of the reason is that Americans, particularly those of the college-educated middle class, are likely to see themselves in terms of popular psychological abstractions rather than as products of specific educational, religious and vocational realities. Psychology is, after all, more democratic: even an Ivy League Episcopal banker can have an Oedipus complex.

Television situation comedy does a pretty good job of airing and disarming class anxieties. Most modern American fiction, on the other hand, remains generally psychological. In contrast, British novels still draw their deepest breaths from society and manners. Wilfrid Sheed, a wily English-born Catholic intellectual, can work both sides of the North Atlantic. Sheed’s sharp, entertaining essays and reviews have earned him a reputation as one of America’s best literary journalists; he is also a judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club. His previous novels, which include A Middle Class Education, Max Jamison and People Will Always Be Kind, have gained him entry into that literary purgatory where the praise is high but the royalties low.

Transatlantic Blues is about a different purgatory: that clammy conscience-ridden cell between worldly success and a proud otherworldly tradition. Stylistically, the novel is the nonstop confession of Monty (né Pendrid) Chatworth, a British-born American TV interviewer. He is something of an Anglo-American Alexander Portnoy, but with a crucial difference. Portnoy, draped over a psychiatrist’s couch, complained that his lust was repugnant to his stern Hebraic morality and that his morality was repugnant to his sexual nature. Chatworth, slumped in his seat high above the Atlantic, confesses to his tape recorder (“Father Sony”) that his English sense of proportion and Catholic asceticism are at loggerheads with his outlandish success. Chatworth vacillates between such statements as “Conquer America—God what a shoddy ambition,” and, like David Frost contemplating a bust of Emmy, “This is the country I want to impress, not the other one, and its approval is now pouring out of the slot like gold.”

A 747 is Chatworth’s sanatorium (“For the busy man who doesn’t have time for a midlife crisis”), where he can indulge himself as “a born-again atheist,” a man torn between two continents, who should be buried in the Azores under a cruciform credit card. He sees himself as a fraud, “TV’s Amazing Thinking Man who speaks in little bite-sized paragraphs…cursed with a special sound, which disappears in a twinkling if he listens to other people too long.”

Chatworth’s adventures in cultural schizophrenia start when he is nine. As World War II begins, his family moves to the U.S., where he enrolls in a New Jer sey boarding school. Robbed of sharing England’s finest hour, young Pendrid must suffer a blitzing from unruly students who find his accent and manners fruity. His charades of Churchillian courage only complicate his humiliations. Back in postwar England, Chatworth once again finds himself a foreigner. There he plays the American with painful results. But in the U.S., Chatworth has tasted freedom from his crusty English Catholic past.

The fact is that Chatworth’s American schooling has left him rather ignorant. He must attend a “crammers,” a seedy institution where a man named Jenkins teaches techniques for passing exams. Henceforth, Chatworth is pre pared to “Jenkins” his way through life. Everywhere but at Oxford, where, he dis covers, “you can’t exactly Jenkins Oxford, because Oxford invented Jenkins. The whole system is a web of shortcuts so intricate they constitute an education.”

Transatlantic Blues bubbles with such amiably jaded wit—on the modern church, the absurdities of “making it,” celebrities as praise junkies, fake humility as an asset, indeed turning anything into an asset. Chatworth even considers publishing his confessional tape to “launch that new career as Mr. Honesty.” The novel is a promising departure for Sheed too. It is much looser and more vigorously humorous than his previous fiction. As a parody of personality packaging and what happens when the package is unbundled, Chatworth may be, as the author says, “desolately cute.” But his confusions raise an unsettling question: Did he sell out, or buy in?

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