FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN
Beware of Pity is a novel of unusual interest and merit. In a foreword its author explains how recently in Vienna he met an Austrian officer who had covered himself with glory
in the Great War, and whose name was a synonym for bravery. This man spoke cynically of courage and of the motives which drive men to face physical danger, and told Herr Zweig of an extraordinary experience of his own as a young lieutenant which, he believed, induced that reckless- ness and indifference which had won him the Order of Maria Theresa and his legendary fame. And here we have the novelist's re-telling of that experience.
In November, 1913, Lieutenant Anton Hofmiller, of the Austrian Imperial Army, was stationed in a small garrison town on the Hungarian frontier. He was twenty-five and, according to himself, an undistinguished, typical product of the ancien regime military academy and cavalry mess. He was bored, and, for the fun of the thing, got himself invited to a great house nearby, inhabited by a sad and very wealthy little man, who bore a name out of the Almanac de Gotha, to which, as is later made clear, he was not very honourably entitled. The young lieutenant enjoyed the luxury, the friendly atmosphere and the good wine, and, at the first party he attends in the Schloss, he asks the little rich widower's only daughter if she will dance with him. There is the most appalling scene. She is a cripple, has been suffering for five years from some form of spinal paralysis, for which all her father's wealth has been unable to purchase a cure. She believes that he knew of her malady and sought, drunkenly, we must suppose, to mock her. She sobs and screams, the whole party is horrified, and the young man hurries from the house.
From this pitiful and, in some ways, almost farcical episode there arises a story of weakness, goodness and confusion of motives, of vanity and scrupulousness at odds with natural egotism, of the pressure of events on sensibility, of panic's assault on ordinary, untrained sanity, a story of mistakes and climbing misery which has to be read to be believed—but, read as presented here, will be believed. For the kind young man, shattered by his mistake, seeks, in order to placate his own ego as well as to reassure the girl, to make such amends as he can. In doing so he becomes a friend to the house and to the pathetic old father, and the unhappy invalid girl falls in love with him.
She presents him with this development in a well-written scene which is acutely painful to read. Somehow there is a particular painfulness about the eroticism of the ill and help- less which makes them almost indefensible as subjects of love stories, and were Edith's tragedy the central theme of this book I do not think that it would be justifiable. But she is important here only because of the awful accident of sensi- bility in a stolid young soldier, which makes it possible for her to plunge him into miseries of doubt and shame, and to mark him tragically for ever.
It is a tragic book, not because the poor girl destroys herself, but because the boy who wrestled so generously on her behalf with his conscience, and with his other conscience, Dr. Condor, is left, at the outbreak of war, without friend, understanding or peace of mind. And although this Dr. Condor is a beautiful portrait, full of life and winning goodness, one reader at least did not accept his exactions on Anton. It seemed to me that his determination to hold the young man to a false and ghastly situation was completely unjustifiable. Nature cannot be out- raged, and wisdom could surely have found some way of saving good-nature from itself.
But the book's high merit is in the presentation, through his own half-humble, half-pompous and entirely humourless narration and reflections, of the young man, Anton. Against the background of his tradition and its picturesque stupidity, against his own fleshly health, he grows in confusion, vanity and reluctance to a memorable height of tragedy. He seems a victim of the capricious gods. Quite unwittingly he makes us feel his goodness. Beware of Pity is a book which one can not merely admire and ponder for a day or two after it
is read, but of which I believe one will retain a dear memory for many years.
Passport for a Girl comes salutarily upon our brutal, stupid times, and, written by a novelist whose life is probably lived among Government circles in this country, it is a brave book to have written. For Miss Borden does not mince her words over the events of the last two years in Central Europe, or, more importantly, over the bungling and inactivity of Great Britain in reaction, or non-reaction, to them. She has a sad story to tell, one of millions, of a Viennese family in relation to the Anschluss. Rich Aryan father, beautiful, cultured Jewish mother, sturdy little Jewish grandmother, and hand- some, hopeful young journalist son. On these four, and on the warmhearted, sensitive English girl who loves the young man, the Nazis work their blood-lust, and Miss Borden makes a painful, only-too-true-ringing tale of it. That she manages to find a hopeful ending for the boy and girl is a mercy
which we do not quarrel with, but as Hans has been a long time shut up in Dachau and as we are not allowed to meet
him again after his release, but only to feel, from the tone of April's letters home, that he is not any longer the Hans of the earlier pages, there is not even here in this personal case much compromise with present-day brutality.
All this side of the story is a good, hard-hitting record, with knowledge behind it, and no quarter given. The other side of the book, dealing with April's family—Foreign Office and Diplomatic Corps class—is not so good, being a little too exclusively upper-class in its approach to the immediate situa- tion of our society, and somewhat too enamoured of that cosy atmosphere in which hard-faced nannies and adoring footmen work out their claim to an eventual "Faithful Service " notice in The Times.
The Open Sky is, I believe, Mr. L. A. G. Strong's twelfth novel, but I can only say, having read three of the first eleven, that it is not by any means up to his best standard. It has, I suppose, an interesting enough story—of the nervously broken young doctor who is forcibly brought by a friend, another doctor, to have a sort of solitude-rest-cure in a desolate hamlet on the West Coast of Ireland, and, bit by bit, resisting all the way, he is brought, by a series of odd encounters and adven- tures, back to something like sanity and control of selfishness. Mr. Strong can always evoke landscape well, and he makes his wild and lovely setting very real. He has also made one con- vincing, full-size portrait—Father Morrissey. This priest is not necessarily typical of his cloth in Ireland, but he is a real person and a real priest, and his rough vigour and intelligence are satisfactory. But the rest of the natives left me unpersuaded- and I know the West of Ireland. Least of all did I believe in the girl, Sheila, who worked such a change in the egotistical hero, and made him, oddly enough, fall in love with his boring wife again. It seems as if Mr. Strong, knowing Dublin Bay and that region in his blood and bones, has taken an imagina- tive chance with the West—since, after all, the island is small! But it is a fling that has not come off. Owen, John, Elizabeth, Peadar, Old Kate—not one of these people rings true. There is something false, something forced in each of them. And, to be captious about a trifle, no Irish Catholic girl would ever, outside her private prayers, speak of " Mary, the Mother of Christ." She would prefer not to mention this figure at all in conversation, but, if she had to, she would say, " Our Lady."
Blind Man's Ditch is the second novel of Mr. Walter Allen. The author flings his net wide over a number of characters working out their lives more or less unsatisfactorily in an English provincial town. He is at his best with the least happy, or anyhow, with the humblest of his characters. Eugene Lorimer, the young mechanic with literary leanings, a dull sweetheart and a wretched home, is a very touching creation, in whose growth we are truly interested, and whose tragic development distresses us, even if we are not quite sure that it is true to character or to life. The villain, too, James Bartholomew, is a demonstration of vigorous talent in his author. A Dickensian character, a grotesque, but we can do with more of his kind in fiction. He is, perhaps. a little overwritten. but his flamboyancy is entertaining, and he is probably the most promising and original piece of work in a book that is readable throughout.
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