Copyright 1992 Guardian Newspapers Limited  
The Guardian (London)

January 30, 1992

SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 26

LENGTH: 469 words

HEADLINE: SERIAL VICTIMS

BYLINE: AFSHIN RATTANSI

BODY:

Portraits Of The Missing, by Julian Symons (Andre Deutsch, pounds 12.99)

HAPPY days, the thirties and forties. Every thinking person was a communist and the questions weren't so much prefaced by what's as when's. Symons says this book of character sketches may be incomprehensible to anyone under 40. Well, even if his friends weren't downing Chateau d'Yquem Brideshead-style, this under-40-year-old finds his book a fascinating account of the artistic wannabees who didn't go to Oxford.

Symons, now 79, modestly calls this a collection of characters he couldn't fit into his crime stories. He says he has been guided by Max Beerbohm's example in Seven Men of involving imagined composite characters with known names.

Three of the eight sketches concern Symons's time on The New Outlook, a left-wing magazine whose issues were akin to weekly boxing bouts between political and literary editors. This was a time when Isherwood's conundrum (should one support nice friendly people whose ideas are wrong or unpleasant people whose ideas are right?) had only one answer. Art was a ring in which politics merely wrestled.

A recurring theme of the book is "wanting to be somebody" or, as Marlon Brando said in On The Waterfront, to be a contender. There are bad poets who win their 15 minutes not by pentameter but by dying in action or by changing their name to Rudi Picabia to become hustling art-dealers. In the most striking sketch, Ella - A Success Story, Symons writes about an auburn-haired social climber he had met when at school in Lavender Hill. She would crop up in his life again and again, always announcing her faith that as her contemporaries worked in Sarf London factories, she was busily ascending the ladder of fame.

None of Symons's characters is a stereotype, each sketch being filled with light and darkness. The final story about the literary editor of The New Outlook is perhaps the saddest, Symons using the editor's dismissal from a paper where principles were sacrificed for circulation figures as a marker for the end of an era.

Portraits Of The Missing, despite its hilarity, chronicles death, not only of most of the book's characters, but of their political agendas. Reading it just two years ago, a reviewer might have remarked on how politically and artistically exciting those decades were. We catch only a glimpse of the burgeoning homogeneity of "world culture" when Symons talks of a friend going out to write films in Hollywood. But as for action, the political events of the 1990s, if more often bloodless, compare well with the days of the Spanish Civil War and the annexation of the Eastern bloc.

Symons's characters are being reborn. But instead of selling out communism for capitalism his media-types are selling out capitalism for nihilism.