Word: mankowitz
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Thus with proud self-derision the Old Contemptibles* of 1914 sang as they marched to battle. British Author Wolf Mankowitz has written a superb novel about an Old Contemptible who has lived beyond his era, beyond World War II (when everything was "more efficient"), and on into the Welfare State. The old fellow recalls the recruiting poster of World War I, "Kitchener Wants You," and adds his sardonic comment: "He's about the only bastard what does...
...Author Mankowitz might well be Britain's answer to the Schweppes Man, proving that the language of England is not a clipped and snooty modification of the inarticulate. Born in London's East End, the son of a Jewish shopkeeper, Mankowitz took himself on a scholarship to Cambridge, ran a shop, became an authority on Wedgwood china, worked as a film scenarist. He writes best about what he knows best: the cockney. His unforgettable cockney Quixote belongs not (as Novelist Elizabeth Bowen suggests on the book jacket) with James Joyce but with Joyce Gary's articulate...
LAUGH TILL You CRY, by Wolf Mankowitz (127 pp.; Dutton; $2.50), puts a shipwrecked English drummer on a tropical island and leaves him there when he makes the discovery that he never had it so good. When Ronald Rantz comes ashore, he takes with him his salesman's sample case. His stock in trade: exploding cigars, invisible itching powder, the usual assortment of smoking-car killers that are guaranteed to make you "Laugh Till You Cry." The island, a between-trade-routes speck somewhere near the Caribbean, looks like paradise, but the seemingly innocent natives soon prove...
...trade winds, and love is as free as coconuts. This is for Rantz. Joyously he explains his bag of tricks-which may or may not symbolize civilization. The natives realize that instead of being dread magic and tools of humiliation, the Rantz line is really for laughs. Versatile Novelist Mankowitz, a scriptwriter, playwright and dealer in Wedgwood, is too soft a man for tough satire, and lets his shrewd observations on the human condition melt into sugary fantasy. In the end Laugh Till You Cry falls flat somewhere between Walter Mitty and Dean Swift, but it is good...