Rogues and Rascals

Press, 24 June 1978, Page 17

Rogues and Rascals

The Assumption of Rogues and Rascals. By Elizabeth Smart. Cape. 123 pp. $8.50.

This autobiographical novel owes more to the discipline of poetry than to the conventional techniques of the novel. Elizabeth Smart, journalist and author of “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept,” again acknowledges a debt to T. S. Eliot with this convocation of memories, meshed through free association of thought, over a period of 20 years. Internal and external realities become fused as the author strives to trace her emotional, spiritual and creative progress. From weary postwar London, where she is “just another woman in a fish queue with her bit of wrapping paper waiting for her turn,” to the peace of an English countryside where “owls cry walnut trees sway and pigs bang their pens,” the theme emerges of a woman struggling to fulful herself as a creative individual. Because it is such a personal account, much of the book is elliptical and obscure. There is little logical sequence of ideas. Conversation, anecdotes, svmbols and images are placed in perplexing juxtaposition. But iust occasionally the author is brilliantly illuminating, in evoking a scene or situation. A pub in Soho, the London Underground, the south of France spring forth with all the economy, wit and dexterity of a highly skilled poet -—DIANE PROUT.