FICTION

By WILLIAM PLOMER Kit Brandon. By Sherwood Anderson. (Hutchinson. 7s. 6d.) Death Without Battle. By Ludwig Renn. (Seeker and Warburg. 6s.) Men Without Mercy. By Alfred Dublin. Translated by Trevor and Phyllis Blewitt. (Gollancz. 8s. 6d.) A Penny for the Poor. By Benoit Brecht. Translated by

Desmond Vesey. (Hale. 7s. 6d.) MOST of the American novelists who are not busy writing with a " proletarian " intention seem to have become infatuated with the South at the time of the Civil War. Admittedly the old South was picturesque, and a civil war must always abound in harrowing adventures, but possibly there are subtler reasons for this choice of subject. Is it that life in that place and period seems to these writers to stand for something they have lost and would like to recover ? Or is it that they recog- nise, more or less consciously, that that crisis which arose from the presence of the negro was about the most important thing that has happened in the United States since the Declara- tion of Independence ? Whatever the reason, the attraction remains, and the success of a book like Miss Mitchell's Gone With the Wind shows that it is strongly felt by the American reading public.

Those who found her heroine a little too resilient under the blows of fate, and her manner rather too much that of the enthusiastic female middlebrow trying to get everything right, as well as those who have fallen back exhausted from Mr. Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom ! ought to be pleased with The Long Night, a well-built, well-written and compelling adventure story. It has all the gunnery and horsiness of the railway bookstall or pulp magazine Wild Western story without any of the trashiness—no prairie virgin to be snatched from the Butches of hoodlums by some two-fisted super-moron, no maddening dialect. There are many moments as snappy as this : " The barman dropped like an ox. With a continuous movement pa lifted and balanced the dandy shot him hire a bolster over the tops of the heads. The pretty man fell on a corner table. There was a crash, a light echo of breaking bottles and glasses. In an instant knives and pistols were out. It was a free-for-all now."

The first two-thirds of the story are about a vendetta, and greater pains to avenge a wrong could hardly have been taken. An honest man is killed by a gang for knowing too much about their activities in the way of speculating in-slaves, and when the dead man's kinsmen assemble to discuss what is to be done our sympathies are at once engaged.

In the revenge motive Mr. Lytle has found a perfect formula for a tale of action, and the successive bumpings-off of the gangsters, who include a rich planter and a judge, become an absolute necessity to the reader. The main part of the " sacred " task is undertaken by the dead man's son, Pleasant Mclvor, but before it is done he is involved in the Civil War and also in one of those unconsciously homosexual relation- ships that sometimes mean so much to the " normal " man. In this case it is a somewhat exalted comradeship with a fellow-soldier, who is killed. "Twice he had loved—once the dead, once the living, and each by each was consumed and he was doomed." That is the only love-interest in the book to speak of. Mr. Lytle has a masculine imagination ; he excels in descriptions of horses, men, boys, man-hunts, ambushes, sorties, killings, woundings, hand-to-hand fights, and battles.

Both Mr. Lytle and Mr. Sherwood Anderson would have us know that their stories are founded on fact. Even Mr. Anderson cannot get away from echoes of the Civil War and scions of old Southern families, but his tale is of the more recent past, the days of prohibition. Kit Brandon is the freebooting daughter of a horse-coping hill-billy in Tennessee. She takes to high- powered motors like a duck to water, and gets mixed up with bootlegging. One .imagines her in a beehive hat and a low- waisted, knee-length skirt, one of those old-fashioned adven- turesses of the nineteen-twenties.

" What nice eyes ! They could be soft and apparently gentle and yi_lding at times. They could be hard, shrewd eyes. Kit was having her being, her young womanhood, in the period immediately after the World War in America . . . "

The little explanation and the three dots are a favourite device of Mr. Anderson's, and a trying one. The dots are like prods in the chest with a didactic forefinger as Mr. Anderson keeps buttonholing the reader and delivering a lecturette on some lofty theme like human nature or the United States. But he has a woolly, humourless mind, his occasional attempts to be fashionably revolutionary are not helpful, and one is left murmuring to oneself, " So what ? "

The other novels on my list are European, and all of them are about revolution. No wonder, for they are by exiled Germans. Death Without Battle is the best of them. Simple without

affectation, tender without soppiness, and manly without hearti- ness, it is a quiet and horrifying picture of Hitler's Germany Private events are seen in relation to public ones like the burning of the Reichstag, the trials of van der Lubbe, Thalmann, and Dimitroff (when Goring lost his temper and shouted, " You're a blackguard who ought to go straight to the scaffold ! "), the murder of Rohm, the murder of Dollfuss, the lying propaganda,

the concentration camps In the world where these indecent things have been possible Herr Renn traces the fortunes of

decent individuals,. and there is no mistaking the quiet accents of sanity, truth, and compassion. This is just the book for those who find the truth shocking, for it will shock them. It is also likely to move them not only to sympathy but to sterner feelings.

Men Without Mercy, by the author of Alexanderplatz, is a less impressive book. Here the story, though realistic enough, is shifted a little away from realism towards allegory by various devices,- and we are not even told in what country the action is supposed to take place, though it is not very hard to guess.

Left a Widow 'by an iniprovident husband, a woman migrates townwards with her children and shortly afterwards, appalled by misfortune, tries to kill herself; but fails. On recovering, she develops a possessive attitude towards her eldest son Karl. " Her yearning for a human being, for this human being, so young, so full of sirength and promise, the determination to keep him for herself as her protector and shield-bearer,

suddenly became overwhelming." Meanwhile- Karl, who

has been getting odd jobs in the street markets, comes under the influence of an older youth named Paul, who is a revolu- tionary. The mother's jealousy is aroused, and she resolves to hold him at all costs : " the whole of the rest of his life was decided upon, and with it the lives of many other people who were to come within its orbit." There is a stern scene when she locks hiin indoors at a moment when she knows he must not fail his friend in a matter of life and death.

Paul disappears, and the family life gets less and less jolly :

" At this she stared at him, moved over to the sofa . . . and burst into a fit of almost demented, hysterical weeping, so that Erich, who was half undressed, rushed in from the next room. Karl tried to push him out of the room, but Erich kicked him, and scarcely had the boy gone up to his mother and seen her distorted features as she took her hands from her face, before that old ghastly, choking, sobbing scream issued from his throat, his mother jumped up, seized him, but his lips were already blue, his eyes staring and rigid, that terrible, paroxysmal scream rent the air, shrilled horribly through the room."

For the next couple of hundred pages or so we are shown the degeneration of Karl into a more or less wicked capitalist, his unhappy marriage, empty life, &c. A quarter of a century elapses, and Paul reappears, the sentimental revolutionary's dream-man, complete with " gaunt, stern head . . . watchful eyes . . . ironic smile . . . the bold, masterful face, the easy attitude, the low brow, the stern, tense look, the sparse 1;:ond straggling hair, and the eyes, which were now opened wide and glittered like cold steel." It was a little late,

however, for Karl's final desperate gestures of appeal to the Left.

A Penny for the Poor is a mixture of satire and fantasy based on The Beggar's Opera (Herr Brecht is the author of Dreigroschenoper) but with a setting in an oddly imagined late Victorian London. As I find it wholly unreadable but believe it to be admired by persons whose judgement is to

be respected, I must say that its publishers describe it as " a rollicking, full-blooded story " and " an unashamed and outrageous epic of roguery triumphant."