Fiction

THE difference between authors who can write but will not take pains and authors who are willing to take any amount of

pains but cannot write is that the first sins against God and the second sins against man. In the first novel I opened this week I came, in the first few pages, on this sentence—describing a young man's arrival in a famous city :

" A great noise was going on outside the station and he had difficulty in freeing himself of the many porters who offered him their services, but finally managed to fix up with a reasonably responsible looking person who procured him a car."

There, in one fiat sentence, is enough to show that this is an author who is not an author. Fifty words „and not one single detail to fill ear or eye ! " A great noise . . . was going on ! "

" A reasonably responsible looking person ! " Yes ! Person ! " Who procured "—Procured !—" him a car." Yet, of this novel, the publishers inform us that Mr. Beverley Nichols writes : " I can honestly say this novel has great merit." Well, it has, or rather its author has, the merit of sincerity and earnestness ; but I fear his merit as a writer is very small indeed.

The astute publisher of The Uncertain Glory, a book of the

other sort, knowing possibly that it is a novel by a man who can write but has not taken the trouble to write as well as he

might, offers us no account of the book ; he prefers, instead, to " instruct the reader "—just like that, " instruct the reader, to take it down from the shelf and read the first few pages." His implied opinion is absolutely sound, for Mr.

Marshall writes with punch. Obediently we open the book and find ourselves in a Scottish church listening to a hell-fire sermon on urban morality. Presently we come to this paragraph :

" Alec McRobbie, the Treasurer's elder son, still feeling stiff and sore after yesterday afternoon's football match, stretched out his legs so that the pale blue trunks of sock stuck out more than ever from under his dark blue trousers, and thought into their criss-cross Pattern a whole concatenation of bewilderment and uncertainties. First of all, he wondered what on earth religion had been invented for, if it was going to stop a chap having his bit of fun with a hint every now and then. Secondly, he wondered what it must feel like to be a minister, and never be able to say ' bloody' or wink at a pretty girl when you passed her in the street. Thirdly, he wondered if tho mater understood all the tripe Biblethumping Bobbie was spewing out. Fourthly, he wondered if Nessie Purves had really meant it when- she said she would meet him outside the Burns Picture house at six o'clock tomorrow night. Fifthly, he wondered what Biblethumping Bobbie would say if he knew about young Bannock (his son) having shaken a leg in the Haggis with Maggie Wauchope (a prostitute) only a fortnight ago. Sixthly, he won- dered what-the congregation would do if he were suddenly to get up on his hind legs and shout out : ' Bobbie, you old liar, the Haggis is a jolly decent place and so say all of us.' Seventhly, he began to wonder all over again what religion. had been invented for."

There again, is the whole quality of a writer in one paragraph' his force, satire, brand of humour, credibility, and vulgarity. For his novel of life in a Scottish city, that might be Aberdeen or Glasgow, is in the style of that paragraph a powerful cartoon in lurid colours, packed with, figures, every one of which impresses us with his or her, perhaps rather obvious, reality ;

men and women with whose follies, ambitions and miseries we cannot but sympathize—scheming Scottish and Irish poli- ticians and their simple honest wives, churchmen of all creeds, loose women, university professors (virtuous and otherwise), slang-tongued, blood-warm, ,whisky-drinking, knee-displaying daughters, and callow young. men like ,Alec MeRobbie. And yet, for all that, and though it is all done with gusto, with

infectious energy and a shrewd acid wit—a long list of virtues in any one writer—it is exasperating in a manner difficult to describe, which expresses itself -in the feeling that we see: in Mr. Marshall a fine writer selling for the cheap, quick effects that are the abomination of the modem novel, all that is meant, in satire as well as everything else, by restraint of phrase, balance of emotion,.suspension of judgement, and that reticence which is nine parts of subtlety.

The pertinence of all this admittedly depends on- whether Mr. Marshall has or has not buried his talents. If I am

wrong, and he can be no better than a topical cartoonist, then what I have said is as futile as to complain that Mr. Epstein could make better wax-flowers if he tried harder.

But a critic can do no more than express the faith he has in him, and in that faith -I do regret the polder of the modern racket in literature to vitiate so utterly the undoubted qualities of such potentially great writers of fiction as this. However, if it pleases Mr.. Marshall, we may say that he is another Cronin, and likely to hit the bell just as resoundingly, before, like so many more, nzoriturus nos salutat.

The Spanish-American racket produced and killed Concha Espina, whose Agua de Nieve, Melting Snow (1911), is here translated under the somewhat inept title of The Woman and the Sea. This restless, passionate story of one of the oldest types of unwomanly women, the steel-hard and acqui- sitive egotist, who abandons the man she loves, steals a husband from a friend, and virtually sends him to his death, is offered us as one of the foremost works of a famous Spanish woman writer. If it pleases Northern readers it will be more because it is written with verve than because -it. evokes any deep echo of interest in the strange character it dissects. I am not sure, indeed, that it is written with " verve," unless that is the word to suggest a style of writing that applies to the heroine, Regina de Alcantara, such a list of turbulent adjectives—all taken from-the same two pages—as : passionate, deep, ardent, caressing, insatiable, pale, agitated, lithe, slender, beautiful, sensitive, musical, seductive, half-mocking, vibrant, and more besides. If it suggests, rather, the purple of Mrs. Elinor Glyn, nobody can deny that we at least get our money's worth of Southern passion and colour. I under- stand. however, that Concha Espina. has - done better with more homely subjects.

From these two eager novelists who can write but,

here at any rate, do not, we turn to The Johanna Maria, by the Dutch writer Van Schendel. Here is O. remark- able novel of Dutch sailing-life, slow and steady as a sturdy ship, sedate in its lyricism, phlegmatic as with the sediment of thought, as lovely as a Dutch land- scape, as familiar and homely as the other books in this list are essentially modern and vulgar. Its heroine is the ship, 'Johanna Maria,' who in her forty years of life passes from hand to hand and sea to sea. But its hero is the real hub of the book—Brouwer the sailmaker who follows his beloved until he possesses her ; only to find, though it does not hurt his love, when he berths her at last in Amsterdam, that she has become a curiosity in a world she has long outlived. It is a somewhat sad book, with its suggestion of vanished times and vanished men, but when it breaks, occasionally, into a little subdued song, then it becomes one of the loveliest books of the sea that the heart could desire.

I do not know what it may sound like in Dutch, but the translation is in sensitive English that is most pleasant to read. In his introduction " Q." wonders whether it is a book that will live. If Van Schendel has written a few more like it—since 1.uthappily, In these days, quantity counts as well as quality for immortality—I feel that it has a claim to be remembered by at least all lovers of solid books.

'Szzas. O'FAOLLIN.