Native Wit

GOING NATIVE -- Oliver St. John Gogarty--Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($3).

Stately, plump Dr. Gogarty landed in the U. S. last autumn with his pockets full of Queen's Court cheroots and an unfinished manuscript in his luggage. Completed in the pauses of a strenuous lecture tour and now put forth as something resembling a novel, Going Native exhibits Dr. Gogarty's prose in a lively state of decay. It concerns the adventures of a Casanovian Irishman, Gideon Ouseley, among the English. About it hangs an odd flavor of the old Evelyn Waugh, not least in the dedication "to Alfred and Patricia Flesh of Piqua." It begins with a ripe and shameless piece of blarney in which Ouseley describes his parting with the late William Butler Yeats ("Grandeur is gone, Ouseley, grandeur is gone . . .") and a sufficient hint that Ouseley represents Gogarty himself.

Perversely Anglophile as ever, Ouseley-Gogarty leaves De Valera's Ireland to visit his old friend, the vicar of Mea Culpa at Waltham Whirling on the Thames. He discovers the vicar's niece Parmenis, who is as rude as she is beautiful. He reminisces about undergraduate roistering at Oxford; the result is a fair example of the unresting Gogarty wit and the chief Gogarty interest: "I could not help recalling the scene, near midnight one long-vanished summer, between the bridges of the canal behind the college, the silhouetted bowler hats of the proctors converging from each side; and the amazement of a local Ariadne deserted on the bank as I took unobtrusively to the waters which drowned love. It was better, I reflected as I swam away, that she should be astonished than that we should be surprised."

Goings-on of other characters afford the most protracted and admiring insult to the British upper classes that a notorious Irish ingenuity could concoct. As a novel, Going Native has even less form than probability; it becomes remarkably absent-minded in the last 100 pages; but till then it can be read with pleasure for Gogarty's bland, black irreverence, his loving literary effrontery and his careful bounty of wisecracks. Such as:

"Everybody was young once, including even American children and lady journalists."

"How wonderfully a platitude can be used to convey a faintly sinister significance in England."

". . . in Ireland they are endeavouring to be heroes in the past by being casualties in the present."

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