New Novels
A Single Pilgrim. By Norman Lewis. (Cape. 12s. 6d.)
8s. 6d.)
THERE is something truly poetical about Mr. Prokosch's story, the feeling one has in dreams of a reality larger than waking life. An aeroplane flying over the Indian Ocean makes a crash landing on the South Arabian coast and the passengers have to make their way to Aden. But only one arrhts; he is the young American called David. The Arabs, who will help them for money, love Miss Todd ; she is a middle-aged English lady, rather like Forster's "Es messis Moore." She has lived long in the East and is without fear and is good ; they think her "lucky," but she soon dies, carelessly, fading to death in the heat after "eating something." The young girl Sylvia, returning to Cheltenham and lacrosse, is also English. Idris, the charming mischievous Arab boy, lakes "little madame" but none of the Arabs like the middle-aged American archaeologist, Dr. Moss ; they hound him down outside the little town they have come to, that is "holy" and hates the Nazarenes, dtid kill him. By camel; by ship, by walking, the travellers have .come to towns, deserts,
shining black cliffs, oases and tombstones ; they have met the friendly and unfriendly people. The petty sultan invites David and Sylvia to dinner and she asks David to make love to her "because we are all so wicked in Arabia," but after the brave journey "little madame" dies at Mukalla in her terrible fever, "like a wheel that has stopped revolving." And all the time there has been the heat and the night prowlings and the desert blowing up like powdered glass and the little pet snake that Idris keeps in his bosom; it is poisonous but has bitten him three times and now he is immune. One seems left in Arabia long after this book is finished.
Mr. Lewis's problem is Siamese. It is after-the-war and the interests of an English timber company are threatened by national feelings and communism. John Crane is a quiet hero, loyal to the company, devoted to his work and longing to get on with it because he cannot face the make-believe of his married life. This married situation is vivid; he married a young girl but now after his many long absences she is middle-aged and rather neurotic. His weekly letter to his wife—"the stranger"—is an honourable penalty. The Communists are now infiltrating, there are battles, John 's friend the Major, a little yellow-brown man with a careful English accent, is shot (a delightful creature). Crane's English colleagues are subtly drawn. There is the suburban "nervy" one who joins the Communists—the captain who fetches him tells him he will not want any luggage. There is Bellairs who sees life in terms of Punch, 1910. 'What do you make of our American member . . .?" "A bit of a bumper perhaps, but no real vice I should say." (A bumper in 1910 was a common fellow Ao only rode horses on Margate sands on bank holidays.) This American, Confelt, is complicated. He is an anti-Communist agent, a rich tycoon's ruthless son. He wants to apply the scorched earth policy by dropping napalm bombs and firing the villages, he thinks the English are soft and talks of the higher mathematics of true humanity—the expendable thousands, the end Notifying the means. It is in an understandable, if not perhaps recognised, suicidal mood that John, after the arrival of his sick wife, goes on Company business to the front line town and gets shot by the Communist, who first wants to hear about life in London.
The Estrangement is a short novel about a French girl and a Polish young man falling in and out of love on a holiday university course at "Oxbridge," which might as well be given its true name as it certainly is not Cambridge. Luce is a flirt but she is also serious and cannot make out how she feels about Michel. Her glum friend, Claire, is sardonic. She is "ungainly and badly propor- tioned" and always goes off to bathe alone. Michel is vain and full of national feelings which are easily hurt. It is a touching and amusing story and gives a picture of Oxford as unusual as Jean Fayard's novel of the Twenties, Margaret et Oxford. In her book there are also two excellent short stories, The New Pair of Spectacles, about a middle-aged restricted lady who finds a particle of a love situation trying them on at the respectable oculist's—she thinks he is tickling her ears, and Rather Common, in which a Free French pilot is thinking of the young girl he loved. Lise seemed older in London than she did in Cornwall but still too young; he scrupled to make her his mistress. She was French, though at first he thought she was English because she "laughs aloud." Thinking of his scruples and how, because of them, he saw her off on a bus that was hit by a V.1. bomb, he feels it is like the kind lady who saw the little Jewish orphan off on the bus to save him the walk with the older prisoners to Auschwitz and did not know the bus was taking him to the gas chamber. This author writes with a yery effective simplicity.
Is this simplicity a new fashion? It is delightful after our long self-consciousness. Mr. Patmore has it. His story is preposterous perhaps with its continental titled ladies of more than Old Russian grandeur and their smell of moth balls and the Almanach de Gotha, but it has charm and a basic truthfulness and this enthusiasm which is so fresh. Everybody is in Granada in a rich hotel, but in the famous Gypsy's cave there ares the skilful and erotic dances that madden the clients, and the gypsy herself is the old lesbian lover of the Parisian noble lady who has "aristocratic" features and, of course, long fingers, and dresses and hats assembled in a mournful but keen-eyed mood. The English people are a young rich man and his wife who was a model and at once has an affaire with the gypsy's husband until he beats her and she "feels so humiliated" and must come back to complain to her husband about it. There is also a delightful couple of elderly English ladies, the companion of high middle-class, the employer rather low, from the north of England. The employer has an eventful past; they all "tell their stories;" it is like the Arabian Nights' Entertainment. One hopes the air of simplicity and grace the book has is more deliberate than it seems, for one will look for it in Mr. Patmore's next novel and if it came by chance one may not find it.
STEVIE SMITH
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