FICTION
By ADRIAN BELL Lois in Love. By Lewis Gibbs. (Dent. 7s. 6d.) Sunset at Noon. By Ruth Feiner. (Harrap. 7s. 6d.) The Late George Apley. By John P. Marquand. (Hale. 7s. 6d.) Alas, Poor Lady. By Rachel Ferguson. (Cape. 7s. 6d.) Cradle of Life. By. Louis Adamic. (Gollancz. 8s. 6d.) Alll's Son. By Magnbild Haalke. (GDllancz. 7s. 6d.)
Timm is no lack of words or ideas. Words have become, if anything, too serviceable, atoms whirling in the literary con- sciousness, crystallising the very suspicion of an idea. -And ideas increase and multiply. What, then, intervenes between the publishers' estimate of a masterpiece and the critic's ? Perhaps in the novelist's failure to feel when his idea 'has beCOme disconnected ..from its vital . impulse and seated itself in the head. There it evolves ingeniously, wordily : the theme takes possession : the people become silhouettes or at best bas-reliefs ; and the result is pure cerebration. The reader, hungry for life, is left with a specialised case.
Mr. Lewis Gibbs is a welcome excerition to this tendency. His little love story is distinguished for the fact that he dcies not try to overweight it emotionally. He has also succeeded in the difficult task of portraying a girl of nineteen, which is like sketching, a possibility. His Lois lives. She is not just any girl. She is afraid of life, a sanctuary-seeker, affection's cirphaa; yet possessed 'of an innate "graVity whiCh one feels is destined to show as courage later on. • One geti the impression of an inner integrity ; yet also of one whom life can make or mar. The other people in the book ..clo not matter greatly, though Weston, the older man with w. hom she falls in love,,is made to stand out by a few touches as a whole person. The plot -is slight and might have been the frame of half a dozen stories at different -levels. But this, too, is subservient. Only the climax :shows as too melodramatic : a fatal fire at the orphanage where Lois is a mistress ; resolving too drastically what would have become an ultimate incompatibility. ' But its crystallisa- tion of Lois's character into something fine which is felt from the first to be there, is entirely in keeping.
The heroine of Sunset at Noon is the very opposite of Lois, a pugnacious young feminist. If there is anything new about feminism as a theme, even treated ironically, Miss Feiner has failed to discover it. " In your heart of hearts you're nothing but an ordinary simple young woman," Stan zi's friend Dita tells her, in the closing pages. It is what we suspected all along, despite her obstinate protestations and tart replies. She seems to have the best of all worlds : she is both rude and attractive to men : she desires to be famous, and imme- diately writes a super-selling first novel. It is dangerous for novelists to make novelists their heroines : the temptation to indulge in wish-fulfilments is overwhelming. Finally the ordinary " Stanzi (the famous novelist " Constantine ") conceives a tragic love for the man she has been repulsing for most of the book, and charges a tree in a high-powered car in the old Green Hat manner " A doctor murmured : Not much hope, I'm afraid.' " But then she hears her name uttered by the beloved's voice. " A doctor . . . walked to the door. . . . ' Oh, nurse, you can tell the reporters Constantine will live.' " Which throws an interesting light on the working of the medical mind.
The Late George Apley is an example of satire under the guise of sincerity. By enhancing only slightly the idiom of ma odninernetereneadthe-cenes mind :prthovine manner of managed to convey by implication a clearer view of that kind of personality than. could be done_today by direct state- ment. This " biography " of a fictitious Bostonian (1866- such a way that it shows as positive. That light is the 1933) is a kind of negative photograph, catching the light in ofMrho.ldhiaring :lane picture isis the obliqueness of Mr. ..Marquand's method, posing as a Mr. Willing, George ,Apley's lifelong friend. It is a picture of Boston life from the middle of last century, an even more rigid mould of what to us is Victorianism. Business acumen
with philanthropy, conventionality with, insistence on
individual rights, adherence to moral stanards but a fear of public opinion—human motive divided and set against itself. These, coupled with the real strength of the pioneer business mentality,- are the background of George Apley's little world, We are shown, or made to realise by not being shown, young Apley's sporadic attempts to cast off the weight, to be himself. His " successful " marriage becomes for us his submission to ...that mould of society. He enters and inherits the family business. He has a son, John,' who makes a more spirited effort towards self-assertion among the easier standards of today. This is as disturbing to George as George's slighter escapades were to his father, Thomas. Have we then come round full circle ? No : George, in the letters to his son, _shows the impact of a changing woild_.. in a pathetic deiire not to become a fogey, feels how perhaps his life might have been - different, experiences a sort of rebirth of his earlier self. He even attains to failure to be shocked by Lady Chatterley's Loper.
Mr. Marquand has made a quietly skilful approach to a subject otherwise too faded, too overworked. The character might easily have been swamped by the background. But he maintains his angle, and in the latter part of the book particularly, keeps the human aspect central. In the slow late flowering of George Apley's personality it emerges from satire.
Alas, Poor Lady is also concerned with the effects of a . Victorian upbringing surviving into the present. It is the story of the making of a Distressed Gentlewoman, with a stress on the need- for that branch of charity which- assist's her. The Scrimgeours were a large family of daughters in the days when daughters had only one career, marriage. Miss Ferguson's pictUre of the Victorian parlour is all pointing ' forward to what Grace Scrimgeour's fate is to be-a spinster without. means and without qualifications. To that end the early family life' is represented as nothing but an-elaborate qngling for husbands. Miss Ferguson is artist enough to make this appear a convincing Victorian interior. But when one casts back to people one has known,, memories of those Victorian drawing-rooms, one is aware at once that the quality of the conversation that went on there reflected a much more rounded and varied view of life, even among the women. The causes leading to ultimate indigence can be quite apart (and usually are) from a poverty of inner resource such as is attributed to the members of the Scrimgeour family. That this is so is shown later, when Miss Ferguson finds it necessary to develop some character in Grace to make her a positiVe enough person to be loved and not merely pitied by those with whom she comes in contact. The one warm patch is when, as governess, she drops among the Wrenne family and suddenly finds herself considered indispensable. In Alas, Poor Lady Miss Ferguson has allied her ability as a writer to the pleading of a cause. The result, disguised ingeniously as Life, is nevertheless a special case.
If Cradle of Life were half its length it would say what it has to say just as forcibly. It is a thing well worth the saying; that is, the fundamental power of Dora the peasant woman. She rocks the wooden cradle in the hovel in Croatia. She and the cow are harnessed to the plough which tills their patch of soil. She is one who hardly differentiates between life and death ; she embodies both, she is the Cradle of Life. She is also one of those women to whom are handed fachooks (unwanted illegitimates) to be put out of the way. Rudolf is a fachook of noble parentage. Dora takes a liking to him and brings him up. When he is discovered and reclaimed to the patrician sphere, his experience of peasant life governs his. outlook. An accident puts an end to his attempt to satisfy his creative desire in art, focusses it again on Dora, as the central and symbolical fact of life, before and beyond art. He expresses this by marrying her daughter, and they turn the castle into a home for fachooks. Dora, the Croatian, is so basic as to be practically without nationality. She has vital being, remaining steady even through the spate, of words that tell of her.
A typical excerpt from Son : " Nothing was any better, no matter what she did. Everything was as it had been—every day—here on Bekkeroia." Everything, except that Alli's son Filing gibbers weird rhymes which he writes in a book, which Alli burns ; for which Ening hits her over the head with the tongs ; later begins to feel queer in the head himself ; strangles his sister ; and departs out of the book in a strait jacket. Sigrid Undset praises Alli's Son ; so perhaps to a future and possibly surrealist generation it will appear a masterpiece. To a world not yet confirmed in mental aberration it must remain, happily, a very special case.
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