Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER

Men and Brethren. By J. G. Cozzens. (Longmans. 7s. 6d.) X plus Y. By E. F. Bozman. (Dent. 7s. 6(1.) South Riding is bound to be widely read. It is long and lively ; its publishers consider it to be " unquestionably the greatest

novel " they have produced ; it has been chosen by the Book Society ; it is very English and very characteristic of its author. Winifred Holtby in person and in print gave an impression of cheerfulness, energy, generosity, and concern

for the welfare of others, and the same impression is given in these pages, which were completed just before she died. Broadly speaking, South Riding is about local government.

As she herself said, it deals largely with " the effect of by-laws and resolutions on the lives of people like haulage contractors, corn dealers and small-town drapers. It is full of hunting and agricultural shows and relieving officers and drainage schemes and all the things that make up country life." Local govern- ment, she said, is

" in essence the first-line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies—poverty, sickness, ignorance, isola- tion, mental derangement and social maladjustment. The battle is not faultlessly conducted, nor aro the motives of those who take part in it all righteous and disinterested. But the war is, I believe, worth fighting, and this corporate action is at least based upon recognition of one fundamental truth about human nature—we are not only single individuals . . . wo are members of one another."

The fact that Winifred Holtby was able to grasp this truth and bear it in mind saved het from falling into the fashionable habit of representing that all evil flows from those who employ and all good from those who are employed. Nobody could have a more genuine anxiety than hers to prevent corruption and relieve suffering, and few people are so free from class- consciousness of one sort or another. Her strength lay not in any adoption of the doctrines of the extreme left, nor in dangling a delicious future before the eyes of a dissatisfied world like a carrot in front of a donkey, but in an unresting devotion to immediate defence against " our common enemies."

One can see many of her traits in Sarah Burton, the school- mistress who takes a leading part in South Riding, and inci- dentally plays a role in some respects analogous to that of Jane Eyre in regard to Mr. Rochester. Sarah

" knew how to teach ; she knew how to awaken interest.. . had initiated debates, clubs, visits . . . had organised amateur housing surveys and open-air performances of Euripides (in trans. lotion), she had supervised parents' conversaziones, `cabinet meet- ings,' essay competitions, enquiries into public morals or imperial finance. Her official `subjects' were History and Civics, but all Jowls led to her Rome—an inexhaustible curiosity about the contemporary world and its inhabitants."

Sarah hated " indifferentism, and lethargy, and the sort of selfishness that shuts itself up into its own shell of personal preoccupations." She said that we must have courage :

" if the law is oppressive, we must change the law. If tradition is obstructive, we must break tradition. If the system is unjust, we must reform the system."

So much in the foreground are Sarah's public spirit and personal enterprise, and so much do they suggest the same qualities in her author, that one may say that the personality

of Winifred Holtby dominates the entire book. She could tell a story and had a sense of the dramatic, and South Riding will

affect the reader continually with touches of comedy, true observation, or " emphasis upon human affliction." As a humanitarian novelist she more than holds her own with, let us say, Doctors Cronin and Brett Young, but it is as a humanitarian rather than a pure novelist that she has made her mark.

Mr. Ralph Bates appears not less anxious that the hungry

should be filled, but his experience and his masculine talent have led him to produce quite a different sort of book. I suppose he is almost the only English novelist of any im- portance capable of writing about the life of working people in Spain, and The Olive Field makes it clear that in power over language and force of imagination he surpasses most of his contemporaries. " This is a novel," lie says, " of the Spanish Revolution. It is, however, the human drama and spiritual conflict of that revolution which has moved me. I have therefore tried to keep political matter out of this book save when it becomes a dramatic reality." The story is played first

in a small olive-producing district in Andalusia and then in

and round Oviedo. and the mining valleys of the Asturias at the time of the revolution in October, 1934. I should imagine

that even those who know much about the Spanish character and recent affairs in Spain will find that Mr. Bates enriches their perceptions ; to those who know little he brings the country and the people alive with a vividness that reminds one of D. H. Lawrence. I do not know whether in fact Mr.

Bates has actually felt Lawrence's influence, but there are moments (especially at a passage on pp. 207-8, eloquent but perhaps not quite in character) when it seems patent. A less uneven and didactic writer than Lawrence, he has fewer bees in his bonnet, or perhaps no bees at all, but the sun seems to have got into his veins as it did into LaNirenee's, and to have lent fire to his native vigour. In any case he is not in the least a derivative writer, and has understood Spain and the Spaniards for himself. His chapters succeed one another like ringing blows on an anvil ; each has the point and finish of a well-told short story, while continuing a long one. The book is largely a story of violence, partly because it is about revolu- tion in a country where violence is not exactly unknown, and partly one may suppose, because scenes of violence—a riot, a fight, a storm, torture, passion, or pain—call out Mr. Bates's

best powers. In a sense, one might say, his subject, like that of South Riding, is local government ; it is also the effect on

particular persons in particular places of the conflict between Catholicism and Communism, between tradition and reform, between power and hunger. A far more conscious artist than Winifred Holtby, he carries the reader a long way from the old romantic Spain of bull-fights and mantillas and castanets. Don Fadrique, the ruining grandee, Argote, his formidable mayordomo, Caro and Mudarra, the two anarchist friends, and the girl Lucia arc characters endowed with warmth and solidity. And when Mr. Bates writes of the soil he does not yearn over it, but accepts it as something into which man's

sweat falls and out of which his bread comes. He is• a

" powerful " writer, but not one of those who spend a lifetime in trying to convince the public of their own virility. I wish

he would write a novel about England, though I cannot imagine what it would be like.

After the generous Winifred Holtby and the full-bodied Mr. Bates we are left with two bottles of light dinner wine. Mr. Cozzens is sparkling, Mr. Bozman still and neither dry nor sweet. Mr. Cozzens, who has been described by Mr. Desmond MacCarthy as an " imaginative realist," gives us a slice of the extremely full life of an up-to-date American clergyman who has adapted himself to the mad rush of present-day life so well that he does not hesitate to put a woman in the way of pro-

curing an abortion when he thinks it meet and right so to do. Men and Brethren has pace and sense, and I recommend it to those who are wondering whether to take orders or not, and

indeed to anybody who is interested in the Church's place in contemporary life.

Mr. Bozman has presumably chosen to call the protagonists of his first novel X and Y because he is interested in algebra :

" Algebra, the card-index of the philosophies' the remover of irregularities, the enunciator of uniformities, the disentangler of tangles, the discoverer of harmonies amid chaotic discords ; algebra, the philosophy that puts sheep and goats in separate compartments, that distinguishes black from white, that can analyse the thickest muddle into residue and filtrates ; algebra, the philosophy that is able to suggest a meaning in universal chaos . . ."

He is also interested in music, in mountaineering, and no doubt

in sport, for he gives us particulars of scores at tennis and cricket. I can imagine his X being described as a " first-rate

chap," and his Y as a " topping girl." X is a schoolmaster (which fits in nicely with the algebra, mountaineering, and

cricket scores), nice-minded, anxious to do the right thing (even " inclining to take impetuous action for the sake of an idealistic principle "), preferring teaching to learning, distinctly sentimental, and believing in " a peace that England offers only to Englishmen, like the deep peace that a woman offers only to her lover," a .peace " integrated," it seems, " from green fields and white flannels." When Mr. Bozman makes a joke, it is good enough for Punch--e.g., the comic foreigner who replies, when asked if he plays golf, " I have never madi it. But I will prove. Have you a rink here ? "