Fiction

By GRAHAM GREENE

News from Havre (Le Notaire du Havre) is the first of a series of novels dealing with a family called Pasquier, the upward struggle of the lower middle class, " three generations from the plough and two from the hoe." The story is written by Laurent Pasquier, who looks back from his security as a famous biologist to his worried childhood, to his feckless father who had made a fine art of bad temper, practising his rages like a singer her scales, to his silly heroic mother with her " passionately unjust justice " where her children

were concerned, to his mean brother Joseph, to stupid Ferdinand, to musical Cecile. The family are caught in a moment of suspended animation, rather in the way that a moving picture of a horse race is checked to show the limbs stretched for the leap. It is a moment of waiting ; the family are united in their cruel longing for a letter from Havre, even the small children, though they do not at the time know the reason for the anxious perusing of postmarks. The news of a legacy is daily expected, a letter from the lawyer at Havre stating that at last the death of two old ladies in South America has been proved. Meanwhile M. Pasquier recklessly anticipates, gives up his work in order to study, moves his family into a larger flat, borrows money and loses it in speculation.

M. Duhamel suggests the texture of memory not less skilfully than Proust. " If I consider, not so much my observations as a man of science and my researches to which I have given the best of myself, as my own life and my personal experiences, then I see nothing but leaps and bounds, right-about-face surprises, changes of mind, inspirations and retreats." The horse proceeds by jerks, takes the fence, and is checked again ; the rider loses his stirrups and is caught and fixed in the moment of falling. In a prose so beautifully clear that no more than a pane of glass does it divide the reader from the character, M. Duhamel places the Pasquiers as memory always seems to place the past—static, contempla- tive even in tragedy, not a succession of events smoothly following each other :

" Mother was for ever sewing, washing, darning. Sometimes, her eyes strangely wide open, her lips apart showing her fine white teeth, her little finger somewhat away from the other fingers as she plied her needle, she was listening to things that were out of our ken. Oh, simple enough things : the rumble of the gas under the pot, the 'trickle of the tap under the sink, perhaps she could even hear the living sound of the time passing, the approach of rent day like a rat, minute by minute, gnawing the slender savings, the imperceptible wail of shoes as they daily wear out a little more, the chewing of little mouths that must be fed, the call of the tax to be paid."

But the quality which distinguishes News from Havre, a work of art in the same rank as Le Grand Meaulnes, is M. Duhamel's power of conveying an inner symbolism without detracting from the reality of his story or characters. What

is said is always strictly relevant and true to objective life, but the words echo, they have the evocative power of poetry as when brave, desperate, silly Mine. Pasquier whispers to herself : " All those letters from the lawyer that mean nothing. I can't write to them, my poor sisters in Lima, as they are dead. And yet what we need more than anything is a personal letter, something that really explains everything,

something sincere from the heart." It is the urgent desire that has sounded through so much of the greatest literature, in The Cherry Orchard, through the mouth of the bewildered

Lear. One is reminded again by the simplicity and univer- sality of the main theme of Alain-Fournier's masterpiece. To call a novel " great " is only to beg the question : the word great " does not describe ; one can only say that M.

Duhamel's novel has qualities without which a novel cannot survive : a deep poetic sensibility and extreme technical ability. But survival is fortuitous ; the survival of a book, which is often taken as the only test of its greatness, depends . on disarmament conferences and general elections and poli-

ticians' promises as much as does a man's life.

Family Parade, too, deals with a single family. The central

figure is the old mother full of the lust of life, who rebels

the pompous son she lives with, deciding to sell all and end her days in Italy In the company of her chauffeur. But the effort of rebellion kills her. The novel is very competently put together and it is well written, though occasionally Mr. Oliver seems to feel the strain of writing well and takes a plunge into that murky underworld of prose in- habited by great cosmic abstractions. Take his very stormy storm for example. He hurls his clichés like little pompoms of Cotton-wool " fury of incalculable forces . . . mystery and magnificence . . . grim beauty . . . majestic valleys . . . tragic gloom . . . dramatic grandeur . . . cosmic violence . . . annihilating fury," all in the space of ten lines. But the general flatness of Family Parade, rather like the flatness of Galsworthy, is due, I think, less to lapses in style than to the fact that the family stands too obviously for some- thing else, it too obviously touches life at as many points as possible ; while it never becomes a very important symbol; it equally never becomes a real family : we are not convinced of the blood relationship of characters who have nothing in common, not a shared ideal or a shared affection or a shared Meanness. And the symbolism of the main theme, the rebellion of old age against the pomposities and shams of successful middle age, has not the dignity, nor the subtlety, nor the poetic value of that desire for " something that really explains everything, something sincere from the heart."

Is it wrong to demand of a novel poetic value ? I can think of no novel that has survived more than a few publishing seasons without it ; even the novels of Mr. Edgar Wallace have a certain accumulative poetic effect of an undefeatable justice to distinguish them, badly written though they may be, from the intellectual childishness of the detective story writers. By poetic value, of course, one does not mean poetic writing in the sense of a prose that has adopted the worn word- counters of verse in its decadence, and numinous words. One does not mean, to quote Mr. Croft-Cooke " Deep purple irises armed with green swords, lilac blooms lolling under their own weight, lupins that bowed beseechingly to purchasers, and big red peonies, like balls of dull fire." To be fair, Mr. Croft- Cooke does not often write as badly as this, and his story of the rise and fall of a Spanish street urchin can be recom- mended for the genuine tragedy of his central episode. Tombs, who had risen from pimp to waiter, emigrated to Buenos Ayres with the one object of earning enough money for his young wife to join him ; she was sick with consumption and needed to leave Spain if she were to live. At last Tomas earned the money- and she came to Buenos Ayres, but the health authori- ties would not let her land. She had to be taken straight back to Spain. A few hours with her on board was all that he was -allowed. After this very moving climax the novel seems to lose its meaning. It becomes a string of events like a bed- time story to a child. " And then what did Tomas do ?"

• " Tomas became a landowner." " And what did Tomas do then ? " " He bought a house." " And then what did he do ? " We are told everything and learn nothing. We are told that Tomas " remained at heart the lonely, wondering, baffled and rather likeable little boy " ; we have no oppor- -twaity to discover this for ourselves from his speech and actions, and therefore, except in the central episode, the character never comes to life ; he is carefully bound. between two covers. The novelist, in a phrase, is inventive not imaginative.

The scene of Mr. Kirwan 's novel, a boarding house kept by shady Herr Tonn in- Berlin; and inhabited chiefly by the ill- paid teachers of the Langweiler School of Languages, is arranged with a pleasant sense of sinister caricature. One - may doubt an English novelist's competence to write detailed ' studies of foreign chara eters, Spanish urchins, bull-fighters, gypsies : Mr: Kirwan has not• made that mistake. The disasters of the German inflation are seen generally through the eyes of the English teachers. But it would have been a better novel if Mr. Kirwan had resisted the temptation to digress ; reasoned philosophy is not revealing of character, if we suspect that the philosophy is really the author's. It is even doubtful if our knowledge of Macbeth is improved by su2h soliloquies as that on dusty death.

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