No More Than Human. By Maura Laverty. (Longmans. Es. 6d.)
HITHERTO when Miss Kay Boyle has written about human love— the major and testing theme for every novelist—her approach to it has been through symbols, by the way of the poet, through an intricacy of images and associations. Her manner has been very much her own, at once rich and guarded ; she set up a design of allusion, as if to protect the nerves of her story. This formalising device, very peculiar to her, and the mark of her best work, gave at once weight and restraint to her compositions, and often resulted in effects of great beauty. But now, in Avalanche, this distinguishing and carefully evolved manner has been flung aside, and we are given a love-story in the style of any highly-paid serial-writer. It is a curious and disconcerting switch-over. On the wrapper Miss Boyle's publishers tell us that " she has made an exciting departure, and written a story of espionage and adventure, whose keynote is sus- pense." She has certainly fulfilled the latter part of this claim, but I cannot think that her best admirers will feel that, from her, such a departure is exciting. It is not exciting, but depressing rather, to watch a seeker after loneliness and the fantasies of isolationism swim back to join the gang ; it is not exciting, but curiously depress- ing, to look on while a poet attempts to be a good mixer.
I am, indeed, at a loss in seeking to explain this book. I have always admired especially in Miss Boyle, even when sometimes it seemed to get out of hand and to defeat her, her solitariness, her willingness to be incoherent rather than surrender her meaning by glozing it over. But here she has chosen a theme which in its scenic nobility, its heroic beauty, and its reference to all that has been purest and best in these wretched years of war, should have well served her individualism and her power to present passion at once intricately and by the simplifications of symbol—and what does she do? Believe it or not, she writes it as a serial love-story, with fashion-notes which would be perfect for Vogue, and with an all-too- obvious eye on Gary Cooper for the eventual filming of the story.
Let me make myself clear. This is by plot a noble story—of the bravery and self-sacrifice of Frenchmen on the Alpine passes in the early days of the resistance movement, when from France's point of view the war was a lost cause, and only a personal sense of honour could force men into those courses of mad bravery which have, as it happened, resulted in the restoration to the world of France. In her presentation of this, of classic courage and of the necessity in young Frenchmen to give to France, never mind whether it served or no, what they knew was their plain duty, Miss Boyle makes no mistake, keeps all straight and heroic, avoids flippancy, and lets men say, as Frenchmen can, the classic, plain thoughts of courage that arise to them. But, it seems to me, she spoils all by her love-story. The young girl returning from America to find her lover, the Alpine guide, is pure magazine ; everything she says or thinks belongs to the world of gloss, of perfect shampooing, and of taxi-sentimentality. Indeed, this heroine—touching and nice and harmless if she were the offspring of just any of our best-seller entertainers, is a puzzle and a
worry coming from Kay Boyle. Pondering her bad mixture of casual, careless chic and the eternal Peter Pan, we are depressed, and wonder if we have lost for ever, or only for a mood, the author of Monday Night and of White Horses of Vienna.
No More Than Human is not yet the novel that admirers of Miss Laverty's Never No More can justifiably await from her. It is great fun, and very vivid and effortless, this tale of the adventures of a naive and intelligent young girl who goes out from an Irish village and an Irish convent education to confront all the complications of bourgeois Spanish life—and to confront them, moreover, from across the extraordinary bars imposed by the rules of governess life in Spain in the days when Primo de Rivera was holding the gap against civil discontent. Miss Laverty has a vivid, amusing and true story to tell ; and she tells it with verve and wit, and decorates it with rich detail of everyday life in Madrid and in provincial Spain. But she has not given her tale the deep perspective which the novelist must give ; she still stands too near to her central figure ; she remembers still rather than imagines. Somehow, gifted as this writer is, she does not seem able as yet to command experience—it still commands her. Therefore, rich as her material is, and appreciative though she is of it, she cannot quite compose it into a story ; it is still reminiscence and bounded by the "I." It is still raw material, shaped only on the top, as a sort of concession to form, but with no true, formal sense of how to refer experience to the testing fire of imagination. In short, the whole thing is rough, jolly and loosely confidential ; it is good and sincere, but it has not been composed into a fable, into a novel. But, leaving that technical failure aside, since this obviously born writer will have to fight it out with herself, and arrive at her own victory or compromise, it is meanwhile very satisfactory to read some plain truths about everyday life in Spain, and to find a Catholic writer speaking out with courage and good sense, w;thout fear or favour, on Spain's internal difficulties. This book of Miss Laverty's is not novelistically good, but it is true in its facts and its spirit, and it is fearless and lively and gay. I think it should give great pleasure to many readers, and simultaneoticly I hope that it will instruct some extremists both of Left and of Wght—for here is some- one who knows the Spain of which she writes. That is something one cannot say of many foreign novelists who write about Spain.
KATE O'BRIEN.
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