Fiction

By SEAN 0 'FAOLAIN

The Flesh is Willing. _By Richard Terrell. (Gollanez. Is. 64.) Wilderness-BlossomS. . By Russell Green. (Nelson. 7s. 6d.) , Period Programme: By, Guy Pocock; - (Dent.. 7s...Od.) Xiories of Contention. -By Frank- O'Coancr. . (Macmillan. 7s: 6d..) So Brief Years. By `Natalie. ":(Chaiiman and Hall.

. 7s. '6d.) • The Fleih is Willing, by Richard , Terrell, a firs.C.ncel and a striking one, has that quality of writing which we might • call- persuasiveness of personality that induces us • at-once -to cease as ourselves and begin as his character, Alec Barron.

He has fused himself with Alec : and the summer in Troon, the. Cornish resort, is for the most part experienced directly by the. Alec-reader-author-reviewer... We meet Mrs. Blubottl, the bungalow owner, Mr. Steinman, the sehoolniaker, Mr. Iluxtep the woollen_ merchant-. who " made .up a hankering for Venice, rather than Florence, in his outward appearance "

(the- self-eonsciouS" arid 'somewhat Blooinsbury elaborateness of the description _is typical), Audrey. Jones, who meets . Alec by getting entangled in his legs under the sea (" I didn't know

• you were there "—" Not at all, delighted I'm sure ") and,

omitting --others.. Lilian Peters (who plays. the piano at the restaurant. Alec does not meet them all directly but we get the feeling that they are a part of his composite impression

of Troon. He flirts with Audrey Jones, five minutes later meets Lilian) of whom Mrs. Blubottl has always felt " that girl will get into. trouble "—and " so to bed." The prose is the clue to the merit and weakness of this Seascape with Figures.

" Seen from a point on the moors, the country lies naked to the eye, a bare landscape, devoid of anything that is park-like, tradi- tionally English, or rotund."

I find a distinction in that sentence, due possibly to the word rotund, but also a literary unreality, due possibly to the same word. So, nothing happens vigorously, but every- thing happens gracefully ; states of mind predominate, mingled with erotic states of body, there is no objectiveness,

scenery is described with great skill, but we miss. the sincerity which should explore the implications of the whole ; abruptly

Lilian closes the book by jumping down a mine-shaft, which is to say that Mr. Terrell sneaks out the back-door at the end of the second act and leaves the audience gasping. _No, this book does not exhaust its own world. It is a graceful house of cards, a façade without the crude reality of girders, plumb- ing, joists, bathrooms, basements, • &c. Still, Mr, :Terrell has put himself on the map with The Flesh is Willing. If he has a mustard-seed of integrity the ball is at his feet. For the moment he has performed a lovely cheat.

Wilderness Blossoms is the career of young Roland Eyre, son of George Eyre, continues Prophet Witholit . Honour, and promises more. The author, in this case, does not fuse himself with his character : he records, mainly in a laborious style, the events in Roland's young life in Norby, a Yorkshire town famous for its cutlery, and, for which may he be accursed, all the important events of the century as they simultaneously occur. The trouble with Mr. Green is that he wants to leave nothing out, and it is a long odds that he will end by leaving Roland out. Every third paragraph opens with " And . . ." (" And so did the year 1898 draw to a close bearing with it such.incon-

gruous figures as Prince Bismarck . . . the very Rev.' H. G. Liddell. . . Mrs. Lynn Lynton . . ."); followed by—" But

. . ." (" But Georgg Eyre had also . . .") This exasperating style lands Mr. Green into such elephantine facetiousness as the impenitent Jessop had now firmly cemented his alliance with Alcohol," i.e., he took a drink ; while the method gives us, in the old style of the document humain (Forward M. Zola for the 1,000th time !) topical localisms about cutlery, Danfield butterscotch, Pontefraet cakes, boxWood pegtops, 'water-whistles, alphabet biscuits, popcorn, Diamond bicycles, Nelson Lee, lists of Roland's books,. actual documents reproduced

in facsimile, an analysis of the .co. ntents of the early Daily News, details us to how to make a kite, a magneto, &c., &c., all so true to life ! But :when, will novelists realise that there

is no such thing as being -true to-life ? There is only -one life, one world, that counts—the internal vision of life, and this is, for the most part, ignored by Mr: Green. But not always, and this very adoring love of " facts " is admirable in that

it suggests that-Mr.:Green loves that world of cutlery, klieg;

magnetos and so on, and as Balzac's descriptions of 111. Birotteau's bottles, Sylvain Pons' stomach, Madame Vauquer's dirfing-room, batters a sense of external reality into us, so will Mt. Green batter Norby into our minds in the end. (If we last !) But do not ask: Is it a good novel ? It isn't a novel, any more than six raw eggs are an omelette, which is an adequate description of Naturalism—uncooked food.

A sense of a world emerges, too, from Mr. Pocock's Period Programme, which may be safely taken as a very pleasing incjdent in a Cathedral town. Frank Delaway, jilted by his Gladys, starts an orchestra, his dramatis personae ; there are three marriages to end the adventure, and one sad event, but the progress of these courtships is barely adumbrated. Clearly the test is one of literary skill, and Mr. Pocock's handling is deft to the last degree. We see all these characters quite clearly, a triumph of economy, whether it be Mrs. Foxley the scandal-monger undulating like a fish as she pours out her revelatory gossip, or the slightly dotty Miss Appleby, the harpist, who gazes at Delaway with melting, poached-egg eyes, or the Dean with his merrythought wire legs. We are entitled to ask of Mr. Pocock, however, within his method and within his world, that he should have been more merciless with him;elf: and his characters, above all with their self- sufficiencies. Somebody like Jane Austen would have had no scruples about puncturing the egotisms of these good people. Mr. PobOck leaves them, intact while pretending to

reveal-them, iinir that inakes a third book whose world is not fully explored by its author.

. Bones of Contention is a book of short stories so good that half a dozen more like it will put the author among the immortals: granted, that is, the growth of mind and skill that one is entitled to expect from writers of the first order. These stories deal entirely- with Irish life, are 'mainly whimsical, uproariously fantastic, and come out of a personal vision of life that evidently sees, for the most part, foolish, vain, delightful lunacy. in the inass of men, and revels in it. Yet,

there is behind all of them, a sense of the sadness of life that is very Tchekovian, and the best stories are moody and sombre, though lit always by humour and tenderness. The best stories

are "The English Soldier," and "In the Train" : the first tells of a young soldier who is deceived by a girl into thinking that the house of a friend is her home : in his loneliness he visits the

house afterwards, is welco- _viith...a subtle complication of

kindness and frank embarraSsment by the people of the house, breaks down their resistance, until the very children love him and finds in the end a warmth that comforts him. " In

the Train " shows us a trainload returning from -a .murder- trial in. Dublin to 'Connemara, and a ,the corridor connects the acquitted woman with the witnesses and the police;

those lives that have been dissipated by the horror of the event coalesce again in the relief_ of the acquittal- but life will go on in Connemara, one feels, tinged by the memory

of the murder and shadowed by ,doubts, and that story is therefore, in every sense, organic, complete. There are

too many stories, however, which are merely farcical ; one laughs because the author laughs rather than because one sees the point : the judgement there is superficial, and the poetry thin. We who live may be a joke, but the joke is on us, and as with the laughing man whose joke we can't hear, if Mr. O'Connor turns too many things to farce the end will be that the joke will be on him. Tchekov makes us laugh. But he never did more, himself, than smile ; he knew that the end of laughter is tears. So Brief the Years is interesting for the accidental reasons of its setting. This Russian book is a thriller with a courtesan

as the heroine,: many :villains (whom she satisfies in the most casual way), and, naturally, a Prince for the hero. Specimen : " He could not hear the .lovely sight of her, leaning out of the window, all voluptuous flesh, terribly alive and greedy for joys under those silly girlish ruffles. The mouth and eyes of a courtesan, and the pure,.indeseribably chaste soul of her, gazing out of those green eyes, like a mermaid's." Throw in dirt, lice, knives, Ogpus, and storms and you know how tong t_ the absurd blurb which says that the end

" is in the of trite tragedy."