Fiction
THREE of these books—Mr. Sender's, Miss Alexander's and Mr. Desani's—are extremely ambitious. There is even a sort of tepid ambition about Miss Stern's, so that this might have been a remark- able list. And yet the most readable and enjoyable book of the lot is a reprint of a quite ordinary novel which was first published here twelve years ago. In the circumstances it is perhaps permissible to reverse the usual procedure and take worst things first. Mr. Sender, for instance. It is a "dark wedding" indeed with the bridegroom, Black Trinidad, shot in the back on his wedding night and his fresh young bride abandoned to an island full of convicts with names like Sixfingers, Lefty and Rustypants. The brutality and violence which dominate the story are heavily coated with symbolism and sprinkled with idealism. But in spite of the extra- vagant eulogy of Arturo Barea's introduction it is difficult not to find this book tedious and a little pretentious.
It is, however, at least an adult pretentiousness, which is probably preferable to the pretentiousness of Mr. Todrin's Paradise Walk, which is adolescent and therefore embarrassing as well as boring. The scene is New York, the hero a young American with literary aspirations. (He has written a play called Vigil at Madrid, which spends a lot of its time lying about in publishers' offices.) The story is about his love for his wife, whom he. wins +back after she has left him, and his love for the thirty-six-year-old publisher's assistant Martha Warren, who believes in his play, and about his effort to keep both going at the same time. This is harmless enough, if banal. It would be possible to write a great book with this, as indeed with almost anything else, as the central situation. What appals here is the desperate lushness of approach, the studied over-ripeness of style. " Somewhere still very far away the spark of Saturday night stood lit, and he. was slowly, as if through a nightmare quagmire, coming toward it." " She sat staring at the telephone for long tranced moments as if it was a crystal ball glowing with cloudy roseate hues." There is no doubt that Mr. Todrin has a lust for writing. When he has tamed it a little he may produce a batter book.
Miss Alexander is a second and more interesting American on this list. A Wife's Tale is a highly subjective account of a girl carrying her first child, and of her reactions to everything going on around her, to the passing of a street-car and a landscape seen from a window no less than to the departure of her husband to the war and the presence of death on the farm where she stays for a while. The climax of the book is the birth of the child which is described
vividly and movingly. Any such attempt as this to distil a state of mind and turn it into a novel is inevitably a dangerous one. The emotional intensity is that of a poem, and, though there is often evidence of poetic quality in Miss Alexander's writing, no one (reader or writer) can possibly sustain poetic emotional intensity unrelieved, as Miss Alexander tries to do, for the length of even such a short novel as this. One becomes satiated with the continual subjective meanderings. One longs to get away from Nessa and her child for a moment, even perhaps for good. Which is a pity because she is an interesting and sympathetic person.
Neither No Son of Mine nor All About Mr. Hatterr is really a novel at all. Miss Stern's book is a fictionalised portrait of a tramp (who is said to have existed) who traded on a strong physical likeness in himself to Robert Louis Stevenson. By making the tramp do a good deal of research into the life and writings of his supposed father, Miss Stern has been able to tack on to his story a good deal of research that she herself has done into the life of Stevenson. This fundamentally dual nature of the book remains an irreparable tech- nical fault in spite of all the trouble Miss Stern has taken to conceal the join. The best thing in the book is the development in the tramp's mind of the idea that the bogus relationship on which he is trading may in fact have been true. The worst thing is the cosy novelettish style in which much of it is written. It is difficult to believe in a tramp whose exclamations are " Gosh! ", " Jove, what a game! " and " Great jumping Jehoshaphat! "
All About Mr. Hatterr is a sort of modem Indian attempt to do what Sterne did in Tristram Shandy, to let a semi-cynical semi- humorous philosophical undercurrent seep through a mass of loosely connected anecdotes, dreams, parables, theories and other verbal fireworks. Unfortunately Mr. Desani's fireworks, although they certainly have a sizzle of their own, have none of Sterne's variety or accomplishment. His narrator, the half-caste Mr. H. Hatterr, says " Damme " and talks about " fellers " on almost every page, and too often puts the two together. His wit is of the monotonous facetious type which thinks it funny to talk about " optics " instead of eyes, " canines " instead of dogs, " spondulics " instead of money, and " plants of. the epidermis " instead of hair. This is certainly not a book for every taste.
Mr. Steth's book is just what its title implies. It shows the lives, with and without tears, of a number of London characters : an Italian woman organ-grinder, a neurotic middle-class intellectual run to seed, gin-drinking Aunt Flo of easy virtue, and others. The characters and incidents have the clarity and also the slight unreality of things appearing before one out of a mist. The trouble is that there is too much mist. The characters lead sketchy nebulous lives when they are not with us, so that, although the book is well written, as a grammar of life it can never be much more than a first primer.
Admirers of Mr. Forester will not need to have his modest well- made book, The General, recommended to them, but it would be a pity if this reprint reached only them. The way in which he has written such a readable and human book round such an intentionally wooden and unsympathetic central character as the General is a technical achievement of some skill. Nor does the fact that the book is mainly about the First World War mean that it is not topical. For its real hero is not the General but the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Englishmen who died at Loos and on the Somme and at Passchendaele, the victims not only of enemy weapons but also of calm, well-bred official indifference and conceit. And at a time when the word " war " once again moves glibly in and out of official mouths, it is topical to be reminded of that tragedy.
ROBERT KEE.
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