BOOKS AND WRITERS
WHEN I write about a new novel by Miss Rose Macaulay I hope I shall be forgiven—by Miss Macaulay, among others—if I take a glance backwards in time. For Miss Macaulay belongs to a generation of novelists, some of them very good novelists, though they are often forgotten nowadays when literary garlands are bestowed, which first attracted notice some forty years ago. Not a lost generation, but a generation mislaid among the wars of fashion. Its members were born towards the end of Queen Victoria's reign, when skirts swept the dust and horse- buses trundled the streets, and when the Queen herself, pathetically old, white-faced and pink-nosed, was no longer a romantic figure or a bore, but a symbol of the close of an era of greatness. They belong to that era. You can still see the horse-buses and the trail- ing skirts and the ageing Queen in their work. They still ask not, perhaps, Can You Forgive Her ? or Ought We to Visit Her ? but Can What She Did be Explained in Terms of Character ?
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That is to say, this generation of novelists was still Victorian in its preoccupation with ethical problems and the individual. It had learned that Progress could be made backwards, and, by way of Shaw from Butler, that parents, grandparents and the Victorian age should be derided. But it had no wish to systematise life, and hardly any inclination to bate, despise or chivvy those it disagreed with. It did not complain, as Mr. Aldous Huxley did in After Many a Summer, that novels showed " no general theory of anecdotes, no explanatory hypothesis of romance or character " and " no co- ordinating philosophy." On the contrary, it found life extra- ordinarily interesting, and the novelist's own early years (following Tono-Bungay and Clayhanger), in particular, packed with matters for delight. Only Miss Macaulay and Mr. E M. Forster, among its members, were fastidious enough to bring a cold wind of intel- lectual dissatisfaction into the novel.
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I have sometimes thought this, in the case of Miss Macaulay, a matter for regret. Her very great natural gifts, her sincerity and her sensitive response to many kinds of beauty would seem to have fitted her for greater deeds than any she has performed. She writes deliciously ; she has humour, kindness (a rare quality permitted only to those who are free from jealousy) and candour ; and her crisp intolerance of shams and sillinesses is often tonic. But her judgement has been too strong for her imagination. Even in her first book the heroine said : " You see, it always rather riles me to see people behaving in what strikes me—well, as a foolish manner of behaving, you know." And although Miss Macaulay is far too wise to be riled for long (she may be, with me, when she reads this ; but I hope she will forgive), it is, I think, true to say that she has been more apt to see and mention the foolish things that people do than to proclaim faith in their nobility and high endeavours. Over and over again, for example in Dangerous Ages, Told by an Idiot and, explicitly, in that very fine novel, And No Man's Wit, she has left us with the verdict that the answer to man- kind's various ills, follies, disagreements, persecutions and perplexi-
ties " would appear to be a lemon." _ * * * *
I do not think that is an intellectual or an imaginative conclusion ; and so it seems to me, who admire Miss Macaulay's intellect and imagination, that it does injustice to her talent, which is far superior to the talent of many extolled contemporaries and far superior, I feel sure, to defeatism. Yet in The World My Wilderness, the novel published this week by Collins (8s. 6d. net), the answer is still a lemon. And while the theme might have been handled as a problem in politics, or psychology, or metaphysics, or as a poignant tale of young innocence amid the ruins, Miss Macaulay remains staunch to her original Victorian concern. The book is about ethics in a world of chaotic moral values. Has a mother, who is also a libertine, the right to let her daughter run wild without protection and discipline ? Miss Macaulay gives an effective speech to the
lady's first husband ; she seems disposed to find a solution to every- thing ; but in the end she shrugs her shoulders and says, almost in so many words: " Well, what are you going to do about it ? " She has the lemon in her hand.
* * * * The book opens with a lovely description of a villa in Provence, of " strawberry pink, with green shutters shaped like leaves, and some green bogus windows and shutters, with painted ladies looking out of them." It takes us into the home of a large, beautiful and immoral woman who is just sending home to England an adoring but ignorant and unkempt child of seventeen. The woman, we understand, has been divorced by her distinguished English barrister husband, has married her French lover, who, after collaborating with the Germans, has recently been drowned, and now wishes to rid herself of the girl. Barbary, the girl, is entirely dominated by maquis notions, draggles about in sneakers and a short cotton frock, loves only her mother and baby step-brother, and has hardly more sense than a wild animal in captivity. In other days she would have been described as a gipsy.
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This child next comes to England, to the ultra-respectable home of her father and his new conventional wife. She is naturally unhappy there ; but she finds a new maquis atmosphere in the rubbish and rubble of what was once the district of shops and offices and dwellings about Moorgate and St. Paul's Cathedral. She and a French boy meet and consort with young thieves, steal, prowl and - denounce the powers of authority. She takes to shop-lifting under skilled tuition ; but grows too bold, is pursued, caught, escapes and at last falls almost fatally into the well of a ruined building. She is taken to her father's home ; her mother is sent for and arrives by air with her newest baby ; there is general hubbub—and I shall say no more. The answer is a lemon.
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But what a delightful lemon Miss Macaulay offers us! Or, rather, what a fine, clear-sighted, delicate-flavoured and enjoyable journey we have in reaching our lemon! I have mentioned the picture of the Provençal villa ; that of a shooting lodge in the Highlands is equally evocative. The wilderness of post-war London and some of the strange doings and people (not quite all of these) met with in its heart and mystery are brought immediately to the eyes. There are brief glimpses of poetry and scholarship, charming sketches of character (best of all, in my opinion, Barbary's undergraduate brother, who is perfect), from the aristocratic and lecherous slattern to the barrister and his brother-in-law, the nerve specialist, and a general feeling of quick intelligence and understanding which, to me, will always make a novel by Miss Macaulay better worth reading than most contemporary novels. I did not quite believe all I was told about the London maquis, but perhaps that was my own fault. What I admired beyond expression was the atmosphere of the three homes, in Provence, the Adelphi and Arshaig.
* * * And Barbary ? , She had, a number of years ago, a forerunner whose name, I think, was Tessa. Readers who relished The Constant Nytnph will probably relish The World My Wilderness, and the title of the other book will be often used by those who praise Miss Macaulay's. But The World My Wilderness is a courageous and original novel, and it will be a thousand pities if that fact is obscured in facile comment. Barbary is used as the symbol of youth, of helpless, ignorant youth which has been left to find its own level in a world terrible with savagery and compromise and indifference. She is not idealised ; she is shown as blind, dumb, full of fear and friendless. What is to be done with her ? Circumstances have made her a rebel, a thief, a liar ; and, apart from her adored mother, she is doomed. A romantic novelist would give her a future. Miss Macaulay does not. Once again, having searched the auguries, she says, in effect, " The answer would appear to be a lemon." Is it 7 FRANK SWINNERTON.
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