Fiction

• By GRAHAM GREENE

Kaleidoscope. By Stefan Zweig. (Cassell. 7s. Gd.)

7s. 6d.)

Hamm once wrote (he was referring to the paintings in the Dulwich Gallery, but his remark is equally applicable t3

literature) : It is not the addition of individual circum- stances but the omission of general truth, that makes the little, the deformed, and the short-lived in art," and it is the presence of general truth which distinguishes the. stories of Herr Stefan Zweig from the stories of Mr. Manhood, Mr. Carty and Mr. Alington. This has nothing to do with the old quarrel between the romantic, and the realist ; indeed Herr Zweig is more of a realist than Mr. Manhood, whose stories too often have the exaggerated brutality of the romantic (his prose has the ugly knotted quality of a Sandow strong man). But to Herr Zweig his story is a starting point for a long mental journey, while to the others, one feels, the plot is an end in itself ; the excitement the reader feels is the excitement of a kidnapped man, who beneath his bandage is aware of the long distance travelled but not of what his eyes may see when the handkerchief is untied.

He is carried sometimes a very long way. There is a story here, " Transfiguration," told in the first person by Baron Friedrich Michael von G., an officer in an Austrian dragoon regiment, a bored, blase man, whose life is trans- formed by the commission of a small unintended crime. The officer picked up a stranger's 'betting slip at the races and did not return it (the man's ugliness, awkwardness and middle-class air had irritated him) ; the horse won, curiosity led him to cash the slip, and he found himself in possession of six hundred and forty crowns. He did not need the money, nor was the man who dropped the slip poor ; no crude point of that kind is made ; but the Baron was quite unable to return the money without exposing himself to social disgrace. It is a nicely contrived starting point for the author's imagin- ation, for Herr Zweig has nothing in common with the episodic school of short story writers. He must wring the last ingenuity, the last subtlety from his subject. The Baron spent the evening on the Prater ; his small theft, by releasing him from the inhibitions of his set, drove him to seek companionship among a class he had previously ignored. But he in turn was ignored ; his clothes alone were enough to fill the common people with suspicion and constraint. When he followed an unattractive undesired prostitute, it was from affection and gratitude because by showing him :attention she seemed to offer him a chance to identify himself with her class. She was in league with two black- mailers who posed as police officers and threatened to aurzst him. He knew quite well what they were, he called their bluff, he recognized their hunger and disappointment.

" At this instant, however, I was overcome by a feeling of immense sympathy, of brotherly sympathy for these two fellows. After all, what had they wanted of me, the two hungry loafers ? . . . Two or three paltry crowns ! They might have throttled me there in the gloomy wood, might have robbed me and murdered me. Yet they had merely tried, in clumsy fashion, to frighten me into handing over some of my loose silver. How could I dare, I who had been a thief from sheer caprice, who had become a criminal because I wanted a thrill, how could I dare to torment the poor devils ? In my turn I was ashamed because I had played with their fears."

So Herr Zweig's comedy reaches its climax with the Baron's pretence of fear, his pleas for mercy, the two hundred crowns pressed into the hands of the frightened black- mailers. I took out my notecase. I opened it slowly and ostentatiously. It would have been easy for any one of them to snatch it and be off. But they looked timidly away. Between them and me there was a secret bond ; no longer a struggle for mastery, but an understanding, mutual confi- dence, a human relationship."

I have described this story at length, not only because it is an example of how Herr Zweig squeezes his orange to the last drop, but because its insistence that " whosoever is indifferent to any of the forms and modes of life commits a* crime " recurs again and again. These stories are the expression of class consciousness, not in the sense of class superiority but of class guilt. In " Impromptu Study of a Handicraft," the narrator :secretly follows a beaten unsue- . .

cessful pickpocket on his rounds, watesing. his methods, sharing his terrors, drinking riear him at the eaf6 where he goes to "buy a glass bf milk.

" At this moment, when I saw the pickpocket (a man who would be officially classed as a criminal) drinking the most innocent, the most childish of beverages, when I saw him gulping down soft, white milk—in some inscrutable way he ceased for me to be a thief. Ho was but one more of lee miserable., one more of the numberless poor and hunted and ailing and pitiable inhabitants of this blighted planet ; and I felt bound to him by ties far more fundamental than those of curiosity. In all the manifestations of our universal humanity—nudity, cold, sleep, fatigue—in every supreme need of our mortal flesh, a term is put to the artificial distinctions that lead us to class people as goad or bad, as reputable or ffisreiiittablc, as honest or dittranest. 'These artificialities fall away, and nothing remains but the unhappy animal which suffers hunger and thirst, which needs sleep and rest, even as do you and I and others."

' After reading Herr Zweig's subtle indirect contemplative stories, one is tempted to dismiss Mr. Manhood's crude brutalities too lightly. But Mr. Manhood, whatever his faults, takes his art seriously, and if his style seems to this reviewer unusually clumsy, it cannot be called careless ; every personification (" the dust of the yard rising gustily as if in horror -) is deliberate, .every simile misused to describe something definite by a comparison with something vague (" a cigarette drooping and smoking like the wick of a short-lived soul ") is intended. But my quarrel is not

only with Mr. Manhood's style ; Hazlitt's sentence is applicable to the material of such stories as Crack of Whips," where a gang of children revenge one of their number by breaking the wrists of an incredibly brutal animal trainer, and " Three Nails," where a baker crucifies his pious unfaithful wife. Realistic in detail, romantic in conception, these stories deal too closely with individual oddities ; they represent no general truth, and it is the general truth of Herr Zweig's stories which raises them to their very high level ; these are plots pure and simple.

Mr. Carty is more historian than novelist. He deals with the civil war in Southern Ireland between the signing of the treaty and De Valera's order to the irregulars—" Soldiers of Liberty ! Legion of the Rearguard!! ''—to lay down their arms. The principal character is an Irregular, but Mr.

Carty writes without bitterness, with an extreme modera- tion. Moderation can easily be mistaken for fairness, but there may be more fairness in a passionate partiality than in Mr. Carty's all good fellows, even when mistaken " attitude. This way of treating history through fiction has an obvious disadvantage : the reader is continually dis- tracted from his enjoyment of the novel by his wish to check the facts. (What authority has Mr. Carty for his version of Michael Collins's death ? Is his portrait of Mr. De Valera a little idealized ?) But this novel written by an eye-witness of the civil war is always interesting, often exciting, and presents what history cannot do, the curious mental con- trasts of a local, a provincial war, the shy romantic prudish affections of gunmen on the run.

Mr. Alington's satiric portrait of Aurelia Buttress, a famous actress of that stuffy kind which receives official recognition and feels most at home in Shakespeare, is very amusing, from her appearance as a Lady of the Court in Laurence Winchester's production of Hamlet (" A virile, organ-voiced Hamlet he made, whose self-communings must

have been clearly audible throughout Elsinore. To hear him conversing with his father's ghost upon the battlements was to hear deep calling unto deep ") to her final defeat by a young actress of the new Tallulah school. But his book suffers from a to) obvious pattern. Mr. Alington alternates the career of Aurelia with that of her unfortunate sch3o1- friend Ann (Ann marries a husband who " drinks " quite in the old temperance pamphlet style), and the eventual reunion of the old widow and the retired Dame of the British

Empire can be seen approaching with grim inevitability from the first pages of a rather. wordy novel.. .-