THE LAW OF DELAY by C. Northcote Parkinson. 128 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $4.95.
In his eighth book, Cyril Northcote Parkinson continues to tell people—especially businessmen—what they already know. This time he offers the Law of Delay, which holds that "delay is the deadliest form of denial." Let the man who never postponed a decision until too late cast the first stone.
There are other flashes of crisp satire in this collection of essays. In a modern version of the Christmas carol Good King Wenceslas, the king's good intentions get lost in a bureaucratic maze. When Parkinson analyzes beards through history and finds them to be a sure indicator of lack of civilization (a thicket behind which older men could hide their uncertainties), he is at his bluff best. But the crotchety professor can also be dull. His strident common sense often sounds simply pompous; and his habit of describing imaginary conversations seems contrived. Parkinson's biggest problem is best described in another law as yet unelucidated by the master: iconoclasm amuses in direct proportion to its originality.
JOURNEY FROM THE NORTH by Storm Jameson. 792 pages. Harper & Row. $15.
In the past 50 years, Storm Jameson has published some 40 novels, ranging from expert entertainments to books worth reading twice. In this autobiography, she demonstrates once more her considerable talents for evoking place and time, as she sketches the literary and political scene in England and Europe since World War I. There are flashing glimpses of the famous—H.G. Wells, Walter de la Mare, Jan Masaryk—as well as of obscure middle-European writers fleeing Nazism whom she tried to help. There are the sights and sounds of cities in crisis—Munich, Prague, Vienna, Budapest—as well as the bare cliff tops and mute-hued moors of her native Yorkshire coast.
Out of it all, Miss Jameson has produced what may become a minor classic of feminism. She tracks the single-minded drive essential to a woman who insists on being more than a private person, even though she understands all too well the peculiar costs to herself and to those she loves. The slow flowering of the "necessary egoism" of the born writer gradually enabled Storm Jameson to avoid domesticity, slough off a first useless husband, sporadically put aside a much-loved child in favor of work, and deliberately miscarry another. Egoism mastered diffidence, countered improvidence with "confidence in my strength and cleverness," and channeled all energies into the prolific output of well-made novels.
Yet looking back at 80, Storm Jameson is aware of a continued fault. "Always the same failure," she writes, the failure "to love enough."
THE SCARLATTI INHERITANCE by Robert Ludlum. 358 pages. World. $6.95.