Fiction

By PETER BURRA

Cambridge Blue. By Sarah Campion. (Peter Davies. 7s. 6d.) Murder for Love. By Sarah Salt. (Peter Davies. 7s. 6d.) Child of Light. By Mrs. J. L. Garvin. (Cape. 7s. 6d.) Pie in the Sky. By Arthur Calder-Marshall. (Cape. 8s. 6d.) Fighting Angel. By Pearl Buck. (Methuen. 7s. fkl.) Miss Boris: has for some time been known to us through the magazines rather better as short story writer than as novelist, but The While horses of Vienna is the first collection

to be published in this country. There is a story in the book about Ireland, Rondo at Carraroe, of which one's first laughing reaction is to say that it is plus Irlandais que lee fr Remembering, however, in time that nothing, of course, could be that, we find ourselves provided with a key for understanding the elusive qtiality of this writer's art. She is an artist not of parody,.caricature, or any kind of exaggera- tion, but of quintessentials. Contrast, for example, with Miss Boyle's Ireland, Austria, France, Australia, or her own America, the Cambridge of Cainbridge Blue which is emphati- cally more Cambridge than Cambridge, and just a very guy piece of feminine satire about everything from University Societies to traffic jams, conveying its subject by thoroughness and excess. Miss Campion is sly enough, but Miss Boyle is a cunning artist. Being evidently possessed as every true artist must be by an instinct towards abstraction, but recognising the unhappily indispensable requirements of rational literature, she has made the usual compromise in a personal way. She chooses her material from wide fields at home and abroad ; but instead of attempting to transcribe a scene by completeness, like Miss Campion, or photographically, she raises it, so to speak, to the nth power.

That does not make her stories more or less true ; but it makes them almost feverishly vivid. Story-telling for Miss Boyle is the picking up of beautiful pebbles from the shore of reality. She just goes along picking up the most beautiful ones, or the most curious, one fast after another, polishes them brilliantly, and puts them straight down in her stories.

It is a kind of literary pointillism, with the reality of the scene heightened by its division into brilliant points.

One is led by her stories to the conclusion that Miss Boyle is affected almost exclusively through the emotions, and this is at once her distinction and limitation. Her sensuous perceptiveness is extreme, and the best part of her writing is the poetic record of it. But it is not only the details, it is the whole conception of her stories which is the outcome

of a purely .emotional reaction. " There is only one history of any importance and it is the history of what you once believed in," she writes ; but the continuation of the paragraph

proves that what she means is " sensations you once experi- enced." Almost anything, therefore, which catches her attention is capable of affecting her equally strongly, and even overwhelmingly. She is like the boy in her story Career, who out of sheer emotion at the spectacle of a water-diviner is just. knocked " flat on his back " as soon as he has the wire in his hand himself, "with his mind wiped out for whatever else would come." Miss Boyle is also just knocked flat by the sheer excitement of things. Thus she can write in the title

story, as she did in Death of a Man, with trembling emotion about the heroism of Nazis in Austria, and put down such a phrase as " marvellously living flowers of fire springing out of the arid darkness "—burning Swastikas on the mountains, if you please. It is clear from the characters in the story and the novel that some personal emotion has affected Miss Boyle's attitude ; and in Life Being the Best she brings anti-Fascist

emotions to the picture of refugees from Italy. In the political and ethical aspect of her stories she has, I think, no interest whatever. Because of that indifference she is rightly able to elaini that " any subject in the world " may be proper niaterial for writing. That of Count Lothar's Heart is of extreme distinction, and the story is one of amazing beauty.

The material of others—Keep Mar Pity, Dear Mr. ll'airus, Your Body is a Jewel Box—is Grand Guignol, but acting on an imagination of such quality that the resulting beauty is seldom less than that of Count Lothar's Heart. Contrast Murder for Love by Sarah Salt, which consists of two macabre stories of mental unbalance, the first resulting from an

undetected murder, the second ending in an all too obvious one. They are just such subjects, as might have caught Miss Boyle's wandering fancy, but Miss Salt makes of them nothing but crudely realistic studies in neurotic psycholOgy. Mrs. Garvin is, like Miss Boyle, more strongly affected by an emotional approach to things than an intellectual, but Child of Light is, in effect, the history of various struggles against confusing sensations with beliefs. It is a novel of exceptional graciousness, balance, and gentle beauty. If there is nothing new or of particular weight in the sub- stance of the tale, it is seldom that the flesh and spirit of fiction are so perfectly -integrated. There are assembled and .developed side by side a number of personal histories,

spiritual or otherwise, admirably chosen for the purposes of contrast, yet perfectly fixed in their narrative setting,

front the Catholic convert and simple ascetic, Chantal; and Marietta who temporarily deserts the faith under the stress of personal calamity ; to Jean-Lou, the latter's unfaithful husband, Sheila, the lovely shalloW sensualist—" one just hears the music and one's off "—and Lady Cook, the social optimist. As a spiritual study it is made with direct and immediate reference to the material order of life. Here is a group of persons whose individual existences are insepar-

ably involved with a. comparatively easy and gay system of living. What does each one make of it ? The results are of course predominantly 'feminine, and if Lady Cook is a social optimist, the authoress is certainly a spiritual one. But she is not so through any avoidance of facts. A pattern

of art and faith has been imposed upon the mess of life and persuaded life into obedience without distortion.

Mr. Calder-Marshall, the week's solitary male in all this feminine company, more than manages to hold his own,

and is, as the occasion demands, affected in the first place by the ethical and political importance of things, more than the emotional. He is also something of an experimentalist in the forms of fiction and offers us through the mouth of one of his characters an account of the method on which Pie in the Sky is more or less based.

" I'm not so interested in the pattern of single lives, but the pattern that many different lives and things make together.. . . A wire cable is made of a lot of strands of wire twisted together. The novelist like Dickens picks out one strand and says, Here's this man's life '. What I want to do is to cut the cable and show all tho threads interrelated."

Mr. Calder-Marshall is -evidently bothered that no novel can ever be quite as large as life ; but the " wire-cable "

method is after all only a slightly more complicated kind of selection than the usual one, and the difference between it and Dickens is infinitesimal compared with the difference between either of them and reality. However, it suits Mr. Calder-Marshall's vital talent very well. Pie in the Sky is by far the best hook he has yet written, and he gets right

inside the inner and outer significance of -men's lives indi! vidually and collectively in the modern world. Its .title i$

taken from left-wing mockery of the "starvation army's" promise of a " pie in the sky when you die," but Alexey,. who deserts the party when the shady temptation of money comes to him, applies it to Communism itself. " All we talk about, the worker's state, it's all by and bye. And its just as much a lie as all the rot the capitalists talk. In this world when you get a chance, you've got to take it." The writer is an imaginative realist who not only covers all the

fields of activity he can cram into his novel, but also all the possible attitudes which men hold to their activities, of faith

in illusions as ultimately possible realities, or disillusioned acceptance of the present reality. It is enormously ambitious, and splendidly sustained in a biting contemporary style.

Fighting Angel is an extreme example of the " single strand " picked out of the " wire-cable." It is the life of Andrew, the missionary in China, whose wife Curie has already had hers told as a single strand in The Exile, and is an extended character-study rather than a circumstantial biography, the facts being used almost incidentally to develop the history. It subtly suggests the common egoism of the fighting saint who satisfies his owa .spiritual needs in a perfect illusioned 'faith in Vac value_ of his, works. . _