17 AUGUST 1934, Page 25

Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER James Shore's Daughter. By Stephen Vincent Benet. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) The Lonely Lady of Dulwich. By Maurice Baring. (Heinemann. 5s.) Seed of Adam. By Violet Campbell. (Murray. 78. 6d.)

IF the best novels have something of the quality of poetry, second-best ones often have some of the qualities of good verse. The practice of writing verse is likely to be helpful to the novelist, for it at once disciplines and exercises his imagination, besides training him in the use and teaching him the evocative power of words. Both Mr. Maurice Baring and Mr. Stephen Vincent Benet have written verse, and this may be one reason why their novels are above the usual level of contemporary fiction.

James Shore's Daughter is not a long book, but to read it is more of an experience than is afforded by certain of the tomes that are turned out by some of our fictionists. Mr. Benet can conjure up an atmosphere in a few sentences and can treat of the lapse of time and the development of character without requiring us to plod through six hundred pages. His book is told in the first person by Garry Grant, a man who was "neither an artist nor a business man, neither American nor European," and who, at the age of forty-two, " had done a great many different things that came to no end in particular." Garry's mother was a formidable arty American (" I'm afraid we've drunk too deep of the waters of the cinquecento as a family," she would say) and his child- hood and youth were part of a life that had its own flavour : 'the flavour of a world not yet rocked to its foundations, in spite of the drums of manoeuvre and the hunger of sweated men. There was time to drive in the Bois and worship Satan and write poems about snake-charmers and Cynara, to ride bicycles and discuss Is mot juate, to be interested in coronations and anarchists and balloons and the New Woman. There was such a great deal of time. The gas lamps were not quite blown out, the first flimsy machines had not yet risen into the air."

Carry's story is chiefly the story of his lifelong love for James Shore's daughter. We seem to have met James Shore and his daughter Violet before : he is, in fact, another Gentleman from San Francisco, described less from the outside, with more sympathy and less power. He is the million-dollar man who did what he meant to do, because "it had been in his nature to do what he had done." Circumstances keep Garry and Violet apart, but affection and understanding keep them together. The relationship is conveyed with some subtlety. One might apply to it words used of another pair : "Each, by now, by the mere prceezs of life, had become irre- placeable to the other, not only as a person but a custom, an echo, a bundle of memories. For memory is the end and beginning, it outwears beauty and splendour, it endures beyond sympathy and wit."

Garry remarks of the Americans : "We all want something for nothing and we want it right away." How true that is It illuminates the book and the chart ct rs, the American search for love and power and culture and now " recovery," and especially the perspective of the last fifty years which Mr. Benet deftly sketches. Garry speaks of the magnates who had "played marbles for empire," and of

"the great, softly-lighted buildings, the secretaries of secretaries, the shibboleths and the slogans and all the priestly hush. And when the raw glare of the photographer's flashlight beat upon it, there was nothing there but stupidity and greed."

He realizes that all was not settled and finished "when they built the great machine . . . it was not even begun."

Mr. Baring also takes us back into the last century, and he keeps us there. The Lonely Lady of Dulwich is a tale of frustration, told quietly, simply, and with reticence. The characters belong to polite society : they keep on taking the waters at foreign spas and shooting birds on moors, and if a heart here and there is saignant et bridant it is not always possible to guess as much from the demeanour of its owner. Partly Irish, partly French, partly American, Zita Mostyn married in the eighteen-seventies Robert Harmer, a North- country Englishman, a successful banker. She was not in Dye with him, but" simply followed the dictates of common sense." After a time they went to live in Paris. Later, on the very point of running away with a French poet with whom she is in love, Zits changes her mind. She settles in Wimbledon with her husband and cultivates a tasteful garden. Separated from her, the poet deteriorates, but he would probably have done so in any case. Later still, Zita falls in love with a vulgar journalist who is not in love with her and abuses her confidence. Her husband leaves her. and she becomes the lonely and rather colourless lady of Dulwich. She had an " early Broadwood pianoforte, which made a wheezy tinkling noise like a spinet," and the walls of her cottage were " smothered in roes." Mr. Baring has chosen to play a tinkling, though not at all a wheezy piece, and it falls a little oddly on ears accustomed like Ours to over-emphasis, high colours and long-windedness.

That there is much to be said for a sure touch on the p:net is made plain by the frantic orchestra conducted by Mrs. Violet Campbell, on the dust-cover of whose book a Hack slug with a satyr's head curls itself round some scarlet lightning. Seed of Adam, described by its publishers as " a full-blooded, gripping novel of modern life," might alternatively be called a farrago of luscious crudities. It is irresistibly funny : "Mania, unbridled, stalks. . . . Perverse inexpressible raptures. . . . Wild tumult of chaotic sensation ! Necrophilio memories, inheritance of centuries, rise from the shine. Orgy of lust, orgy of death, orgy of madness ! . . . To gorge on hot, palpitating. moist, purple livers !--Sulsh-sulsh ! Sulsh-sulsh ! Sulsh-sulsh I " If the lonely lady of the circulating library wants to gorge on hot, palpitating, moist, purple passages, Seed of Adam will provide them. Like one of the characters, however,

she may find herself

" tossing into the air snatches of maniacal laughter. Wild and crazy gobbets of mirth, which the streaming eddies wrenched at once from his lips and flung into the mocking spaces of the dark."

It will be guessed that lure, mime ci volupte are not exactly Mrs. Campbell's forte. Everything must crepitate, bom- binate, gush, bounce and boom. In a single paragraph, describing the setting for an evening party, the huge heavens are crammed with stars ; the house and lawns are drenched with radiance that gleams in a million points, rivulets and cascades ; a glimmering sheen expands into the air, patches of brilliance stream and dazzle, and the notes of the band leap with a metallic glitter, and fall, curiously enough, like diamonds on the lawns, while gaiety is busy rushing upwards, like sparks, into the night. And here, at this slightly flashy party, is a woman like the one in the advertisement who used the right deodorant--- There is always a knot of men around her, fighting for the next dance ; and she can dance, too ! "—although the train of her dress is weighted with a lobster. And here is a man—" yes, always with horses, making, breaking, training, mastering; he had a touch that any horse, any woman, would obey ! "—the Ethel M.

Dell touch, in fact.

There is something reminiscent of Ouida, something almost " fragrant," about Mrs. Campl:ell's turgid, old-fashioned eroticism, her heroines and Guardsmen, and in her stylistic whimsies a hint of the authoress of Irene Iddesleigh : "Dick Fortitude, whom last we saw in Jermyn Street, had returned from Madrid ; soothed by the liquid and golden ease of life in that dear capital, and by who knows what yielding loves, to salve the smart of his unsatisfactory night in the Luxor Hotel."

There arc more exclamation-marks in Seed of Adam than there are seeds in a seed-cake (I have counted twenty-nine on one page), and accuracy is of course a mere bagatelle, so we get Lambroso for Lombroso, and " I must warn you that anything you say may be used in evidence against you. . ... Time- honoured phrase ! ' " Time-honoured, perhaps, in the pages of slapdash crime-novelists, but one never used by the police : there should be a full-stop after the word "evidence." On the whole one feels like the lady at the wedding (" Air, my dear, simply sodden with heat and sweetness ! ") and with a Mr. Coghill, "one certainly feels, one does sometimes feel, that Nature lacks social sense, in some ways. So—so little restraint ! "