Books: The Cape of Delusion

THE CORRIDA AT SAN FELIU by Paul Scoff. 277 pages. Morrow. $4.95.

The Corrida at San Feliu, surprisingly and mercifully enough, is not another entry into the endless bullring cycle. It is a novel about a novelist writing a novel. The work opens with a preface by a fictional publisher explaining that Author Edward Thornhill has died in an auto accident in Catalonia, and that what follows is two abortive beginnings of his last novel, the novel itself, a chapter of memoirs, and a short story. The resulting collection, though inherently multi-tiered and multi-baffling, is an evocative elucidation by British Novelist Paul Scott of the incestuous interplay of experience and art that is the creative process.

In the case of Scott's fictional author, there has been virtually no productive interplay until just before his death. For four years, his last novel had been stuck in the typewriter. Then what suddenly gets the plot moving is an act of infidelity by the protagonist's wife. It is not exactly an inventive solution; Thornhill, at 60, has just discovered that he himself has become a cuckold.

The reality that unblocks Thornhill also undoes him: his auto accident, the reader puzzles out, was actually suicide. Before he dies, Thornhill sets down his final truth: marriage, or any human relationship, is founded, and thus founders, on the "illusion that a man can care for someone other than himself." The artist's purpose, he concludes, is to uncover and exorcise all such illusion.

But discovery comes neither easily nor early. In the novel-ending bullfight scene, Thornhill perceives that man is as mesmerized by delusion as is the bull by the cape. At the moment of revelation—when he first sees behind the cloth of illusion—the sword is halfway home.