Fiction
The Brigand. By Giuseppe Berto. Translated by Angus Davidson. (Seeker and Warburg. 95. 6d.)
Christina Claimed. By Giles Romilly. (Putnam. sos. 6d.)
POTENTIALLY we are all novelists, which is no doubt why we quarrel with even the good novels that we read. All the same, there are quite objective reasons for thinking that The-Brigand, for instance, or Arrow to the ffeart..each a telling work in its kind, might have been better than it is. Both are-done with imagination, both corn. municate a vivid sense of familiar moral anxieties and a -sincere and undemonstrative 'compassion, and yet both bring too little of the authority of mind and feeling which is the better part of talent to the treatment of material which has been genuinely experienced. This, I suppose, is a long-winded way of saying that both novels have a live theme but fail in creative power. They make their point but do not affect us as-deeply as it was evidently intended they should. The Brigand, in particular, a story of peasant discontents and disturbances in Calabria after the last war, just misses a, real effect of tragedy through ignoring until it is virtually too late the psychological, as distinct -from the social, determinants of a tragic situation. Signor Berto is, I think, worth watching. Vbave not read his war novel, The Sky is Red, which has been very'well spoken of indeed, but this second novel shows a truthful and humane mind contemplating the after-war peasant scene of poverty and land hunger in Southern Italy. The descriptions of village manners and the sketches of peasant types are soberly persuasive, and, if the returning soldier who takes to the mountains and a knight-errant violence is always a little dark and dim, the girl Miliella 'who as a child falls. in love with, him is charmingly realised. The lively humanity of the story and an all but innocent note of satire occasion- ally bring to mind the film BicYcle Thieves. What one looks for in vain is something of the poetic fidelity and tragic force of Verga's Sicilian stories.
Clearly the worst of drawing directly upon personal experience in a novel; as Herr Albrecht Goes gives the impression of having done in the very short Arrow to the Heart; is that it tends to stifle invention or even, more solemnly, to substitute nature for art. This is the story of a Lutheran pastor in the Ukraine in 1942 who is summoned to attend-the execution of a German deserter, a simple, well-behaved youth, who had attached himself to a widowed Ukrainian girl and her child and followed them when they joined a group of partisans in the forest. During the night before the execution the pastor shares a bedroom with an officer who has been ordered to fly to Stalingrad and who knows that the order is, in effect, a death sentence. He is joined for those few hours by the girl he would have married, a hospital sister, and- departs almost at the same moment as the execution takes place. That is the whole story. It is told-with simplicity and restraint and in an unaffected mood of emotional self-questioning about the- values of existence and so on. And 'yet, for all the simplicity of statement, the thing does not quite come off. The treatment—the scene itself—is pas- sionless, too much a matter, I think, of barely expressed sentiment and of Germanic sentiment at that. Or let me withdraw Germanic, since I remember the scene of execution in Sergeant Grischa.
Mr. Giles Romilly's first novel, though light in texture, appears to be carefully considered. - It is about young "people of middle to somewhat higher station in. society after the war, at a time of, to "quote the wrapper, "blurred values and doubtful landmarks"— their manners, their -parties, their love affairs. The book is intelli- gent and often entertaping and might well be considered in some respects of documentary value. As a novel, however, it lacks a centre ; the portrait of Chriftina, " a vague immaterial girl," is indeed too unsubstantial to hold the composition together. And Mr. Romilly's narrative style suggests rather too plainly the habit of critical writing and is not nearly free enough for the ordinary purposes of fiction. However, there are spirited passages of comedy and some nice descriptive phrases (" he was a tiny sparrow-like man with a healthy complexion brightened by spirits "), and Mr. Romilly will no doubt get more fully into his stride in a second novel.
M. Julian Green's latest novel is disappointing—very. if:ow much the 'unexpected choice of a drably circa-nscribed American setting —a small-town college in the South—may" have to do with am not sure. The period is the-1920s, and these American youths talk only sex' and obscenities when they are not talking religion. One of them, the eighteen-year-old Joseph, brought up in the hills, has apparently been reduced to a sort of gibbering puritanicai hysteria bytBkble-reading. Tempted by an artful piece, he sees red and slays. It is all, I fear, thin, weak, devitalised.
Here; finally, in an edition revised and corrected by the author, is " the only authentic'and unexpurgated version of Edmund Wilson's famoirstook." Memoirs of Hecate County is very much the work of an eminent AmericaIt literary critic and positively drips with the most 'sophisticated literary cultivation. But in their pernickety tray the stories are often acute in observation and comment, while the " frankness "-of the sex passages is a matter of mere taste rather
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