Fiction
By V. S. PRITCHETT Interval Ashore. By Horton Giddy. (Jonathan Cape. 7s. Gd.) The Camel. By Lord Beiners. (Constable. Gs.) A Feather in Her Cap. By Barbara Worsley.-Gough. (Cassell. 7s. lids) •- Sea View. By Norah C. James. (Jarrolds. 7s. Gd.) .
THE growing habit of writing novels entirely about foreign people has serious dangers. Interesting and entertaining books of this kind may be produced, but they would all be more interesting as travel books, political or otherwise, where no pretence of omniscience—which a novelist must, always have and is entitled to claim when he is writing about his own people—is made. I know that the objection-of-Henry James will be made,- and one certainly feels that novelists of the highest rank are freemen of the world. But. James usually had his leavening of American character which lie understood in his bones, and the rest of his people belonged to our curious international society of super4ourists. When he turns to the life of ordinary people in foreign countries the novelist cannot fail, to some extent, to be superficial and misleading. The fact is that he may observe them, but he cannot know them as he can know people. of his own class and blood. Any German, Austrian or Spanish critic, for example, who has read foreign novels about his country will confirm this view. The information may be correct, but the people will be subtly wrong at their best and at their worst libellous marionettes. One has only to see a writer, as sensitive to environment as D. II. Lawrence was, pumping the passions of a Nottingham puritan into the Mexicans or getting the Australians just not right in Kangaroo, to realise the dangers of the foreign subject. In the modern political novel one sees even more clearly that it is a case of the tourist novel having taken a new form.
Miguel of the Bright Mountain is the kind of novel about foreign people which illustrates the point very well. Its account of life in a small Mexican village has a certain tourist interest and novelists, who are as sly as any other kind of radesman, are alive to the fact that there is nothing like an exotic scene for distracting a reader in a tedious narrative. Mr. Otis is not a distinguished novelist, and therefore the dis- traction is not complete. Like many gentle and sympathetic writers, he labours the obvious and never goes beyond it, though clearly a book which sets out to dc4ribe the spiritual conflict in a Mexican youth who is torn between the attraction of condemned religious practices and enlightened orthodoxy is dealing with exceptional matters. Mr. Otis, for all I can tell, may know Mexico inside out, but the task of getting into as young Mexican's mind is beyond him. All he can do is to give it a light coating of childhood memories and youthful t roubles imported, I suspect, from New England, the mixture thinned down by the patronising sympathy we reserve for foreigners to whom we wish to be kind. Here Mr. Otis is seen diligently at work ; Miguel is in church : " The other man was old and drowsy and had to be reminded to put his candle out. Te "Miguel this was a profound annoyance as ho felt- like kicking the old man, or going up himself and pinching out the flame, neither of which he would have dared to do,,liad his life depended or it.. For he was a boy and these were 1t1011, serious and intent upon a mystical business. It was none of his affair ; if they even suspected dissatisfaction with the way thing were done they would put him out of church without asking how he liked it . . .," &c., &c.
This nursemaid attitude to character and the lullaby pace of the narrative are part of a method surely discredited by now. Miguel's father and mother are rather well-drawn but Miguel, in love with three women and haunted by the attraction of the strange religious practices of his village, is almost any nice Anglo-Saxon young man trembling on the brink of Buchmanism. - The material is here but not the imagination even to distort as Lawrence distorted.
After Mr. Otis one turns to the brisk and economical Interval Ashore with relief. Here are foreign people again, White Russians and Bolsheviks at the beginning of the revolution, but the chief character is a young English naval officer; and the writer pretends to be nothing more than a reporter writing in autobiographical manner. I think of asking Mr. Giddy to join the board of a company I am floating which will go through contemporary fiction sentence by- sentence Sentence and remove superfluous words. Five out of ten Will come out. Mr. Giddy has presurfiably rend his Hemingway, retaining that reporter's virtues without coking his worst vice of pseudo-toughness. The naval. officer:Ai in at the evacuation of Odessa and a surprising note at the end of the book explains the mysterious echoes of.theoopiotts literature about this event. Bolsheviks capture the young man. He escapes with the help of a White cadet who is a girl in disguise and proceeds from adventure to adventure back to the coast. It is romantic and yet; if YOU have read all those books, not improbable. Mr. Giddy has convinced me that wild, courageous, devoted girls like the cadet may be found in any Russian emergency. The excitement is intense, the adventure properly domesticated, the episodes most skilfully managed. The naval officer is a nice, honest, naif fellow not really very happy when he's drunk and pleasantly conscience-stricken in a muddle-headed way when he thinks of the girl who has trapped him in England. One small touch showed me that Mr. Giddy was no pseudO-tough. Going through the streets of Odessa at the height of the anarchy the hero sees a woman's head lying on the grouni.. Looking more closely he sees it is a plaster east. In the tough school that would have beeh a real head and would have ruined the effect of the awful shooting scene which comes later. Interval Ashore is an eminently likeable book ; Mr. Giddy's skill ensures that. We come to the question of dialogue. Here the method is. less certainly. successful. There is an excellent scene with an imprisoned Jew which shows how good it can be, but the opening pages of the first chapter reveal the snags. Comparison indicates that naturalistic reporting of dialogue depends either on exotic vernacular or the interest of the speaker, or again on the interest of the situation. As an indiscriminate habit this reporting is to be discouraged.
There is a surprise on the last page of Mr. Giddy's novel and one at the beginning of Lord Berners'. He has chosen. the well-known device of setting the preposterous suddenly to work among the blameless. Oae morning in the winter a camel appears at an English vicarage ; it was a stranger and they took it in. One may regard the story as a cautionary story or as disingenuous flattery of Mr. David Garnett, but whatever the arriere pensee, Lord Berners is amusing. Not vastly amusing because at times the satire on the county is on ground inO well-worn. The Sitwells -have thinned out those admirals and wealthy parishioners. Lord Berners pleases more when he plays with the gentle and godly. The slyest piece of fooling is the camel. The goodness of this beast is the devastating trait, its dog-like devotion :
The animal's countenance resumed its former expression of humility."
For the vicar's delightful wife, who had audacious day- dreams about being carried off by an Arab sheikh, the camel was a reminder of her missionary youth in the East. It was " . . a visible symbol of the Orient. It was a tangible re- evocation of her early memories which now, in her middle age, were beginning to assume a sentimental aspect. In addition to this the animal seemed to be genuinely attached to her. Camels have never had the reputation for being affectionate. On the contrary, even in the most benevolent of natural history books, they are described as arrogant and 'egocentric, and it seemed that she was being specially privileged in being favoured with such an obvious devotion.
The animal, indeed, began with sinister affection, to ascertain and fulfil her disconcerting unconscious wishes. This is Lord Bcrners' " second turn of the screw " ; after the first chapter, it is seen that the blameless—armed with the appalling intuition which a fixed devotion gives--has appeared, among the preposterous. - My opinion of A Feather in Her Cap is the same as my opinion of the ice-cream soda : it is all froth and no kick. A few talkative young creatures go to Austria for a holiday, the women are jealous of each other's hair and there seem to be some young men. It is all bright banality and trivial satire. Mrs. James is much more readable. She is kind to dull people and observant of them. This tune they are the families who own two rival hotels at the seaside. Sea View is comfort- able, pedestrian reading with the curious, neither dead nor alive quality of snapshots five years old.
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