A drunken American historian once lurched over to David Caute at a party and told him: 'Having read your last novel, or part of it, I'd advise you to give up writing fiction - if you weren't such a lousy historian.' Caute, a connoisseur of masochism, tells the story against himself (in Contemporary Novelists, 1976). The insult was unfair on a number of counts. Not least because it assumed that Caute the historian and Caute the novelist were divisible. One of the author's more quixotic aspirations in his varied literary career has been to make a genuinely historical - or, as he used to call it in his Anti-University days, 'radical' - novel: that is to say, fiction which will not just understand the world, but change it. (On the good Brechtian theory of erst fressen, Caute has also written money-spinning soft-porn thrillers as 'John Salisbury'.)

LRB 20 November 1986 | PDF Download