Appassionata. By Fanny Hurst. (Cape. 7s. 6d. net.) IT is
all very well for Miss Hurst to seek to disarm the reader by a title. Her story of a hysterical girl swinging between an unhealthy attitude to religion and an unbalanced interest in love and marriage should more properly have been called morbide=a than appassionata: - Consider one paragraph alone, chosen from many lavished on a description of Laura, the heroine, rising in the morning ;-
" Hallelujah ! The grey day of the slanting poles. The grey day into which you shone like a lamp. Hallelujah ! You, said it, with your flesh, if you were as fair as Laura. The hallelujah of the pink, the purring flesh."
Now this is silly to a wise person and shocking to an innocent one distasteful to both. Most of the book is like it. Laura's family is presented in a peculiarly repulsive way. Her brother Frank had flaps under his eyes, her married sister " was soft as
mud with warm fat," the mother of the family had " the de- flated look of the empty bean bag," and-not to spare us any- thing in this hospital of a home-the servant had " perpetual fever blisters on her lips." Only Laura the heroine is exquisite- ness and beauty themselves, though so far as one knows there is nothing more seriouly wrong with her fiancé than that he
presses her till her waistline aches. He also had the peculiarity of smelling like snow, " especially his hair, when he leaned." All this is not merely ridiculous, and like all silly things also very wearisome : it is most definitely bad fiction. Miss Hurst is a clever writer, and in Lummox achieved a powerful and moving study of a dumb and unlovely workwoman. But there are signs that she has been over-impressed by a certain school of writers who are in every sense the worst models for others, whatever literary merit they may in themselves posiess-novelists like James Joyce and the inimitably absurd Gertrude Stein. Miss Hurst has been woefully led astray without possessing either the originality or the sophistication of her models, and she also makes the mistake of believing, or seeming to believe, that there is a special merit in being sordid.
When she is not sordid she is lush, and the most painful part of Appassionala is her treatment of -Laura** frankly unhealthy religious ecstasies. Even a thoroughly impious person could not fail to be distressed by many passages.
A bad book by a bad writer is negligible : a bad book by a peison of talent like Miss Hurst is a tragedy. The kindest thing her admirers can do is to leave Appassimata unopened,
for any normal person who reads it will be apt to feel in need of a bath and a toothbrush.
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