Fiction

By DEREK VERSCHOYLE.

is one of her letters Katharine Mansfield wrote : " I like such awfully unfashionable things and people . . . sitting on doorsteps, listening to the kind of music they play in public gardens, and talking to captains of shabby little steamers . . . but then you --see I am not- highbrow." Indulgence of such a taste, which is not uncommon, can be as easily found in literature as in life, and nowhere more simply than in the literature of the sea. The conventional " nautical writers " of the last century were always dis- armingly content to earn the epithet and cut their losses on the noun. "The tradition persists. In no branch of the art of writing (as Blackwood's Magazine survives to remind us) does literacy count for so little. Rarely modified by the vagaries of - artistic fashion, the literature of the sea has remained isolated, a thing apart. It continues to deal with the surface of events, presenting life solely in terms of observed, though not always explicable, phenomena.. We read of man and his encounter with the forces of nature, of physical dangers vanquished or triumphant, of the picturesque and the appalling, the " captains of shabby little steamers " and the storms that have enveloped them. Strange monsters may speak, without a transcendental point of view being adduced or illustrated. Events, under this convention, are recorded for their immediate significance, there is no syMbolism relating them to the rest of existence, there is no philosophical purpose implicit in their presentation. Mr, Hanley is not a conventional writer. He suffers, slightly, from an attendance on convention in his apparent , de:die to be true (on the scientific principle) to alt the facts available, not merely to those which are relevant to his imaginative conception of a situation. But he is less interested in the event than in the movements of the human spirit under its pressure. He has a fine sense of the poetic properties of language. In Captain Bottell he has written a magnificent novel, a valuable contribution to contemporary fiction. Nothing could be better than his descriptions of a storm. One remembers the characters, properly, as products of the narrative, not as intruders on personal experience. The only thing one can question is Mr. Hanley's use of dialogue. The interest the reader feels is determined, sometimes, by -the intrinsic value of a -discussion, not by its artistic merit as a product of the situation by which, theoretically, it has been evoked. It is disconcertingly literary.

. Captain Bottell is in charge of the Oroya,' a tramp sailing - with a miscellaneous cargo to Basra and the Gulf. There is one passenger on board, Mrs. Willoughby, sailing to join her busband at Mudros. Captain Bottell is irritated by her arrival. For the crew she is of significance, caught and isolated in the flow of their thoughts ; her presence steals inconsequence from their discussion. There is another stranger on board, a stoker named Mulcare, who shares with Mrs: Willoughby the interest of the crew, whom Captain Bottell cannot understand and hates. When Captain Bottell sees Mrs. Willoughby talking with him on deck, his control crumples under the weight of sudden jealousy. The impact of recognition huddles him into collapse.

" The whole panorama of events swept in a flood across his mind. The stoker, the woman, the dinner, their talk, his awkwardness, aloofness ; his frenzied hold upon the invulnerable, or what he thought the invulnerable, in himacif. It was as though someone had struck forth a light that revealed the dark corners, all the hidden things. And that something slowly stirring to consciousness in him. He laid his head on his hands and said aloud : ' I love this woman ! I love this woman ! '

The steward knocked at his door. Bottell did not know who it might be. He merely growled : go away ! ' What could he do? ' Christ ' he exclaimed. ' Who would have imagined it ? Me !

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Me ! Who would have imagined it ? ' He looked at himself in the glass. Then he laughed. It all seemed so funny ! It was really nightmarish. That he, Bottell, after all these years, should be con- fronted by this. He was so. helpless. So helpless."

When he declares himself clumsily to Mrs. Willoughby, he is told not to be ridiculous. He sees her talking again with Mulcare, the stoker, and loses his reason, visiting strange parts

of the ship at unexpected moments, supposing the crew to le an army of watching spies, struggling to block up an imaginary hole in the hold, scribbling naked figures in the log book, on

all fours snuffing like a dog outside Mrs. Willoughby's cabin. As the storm breaks over the ship and drives her to destruc- tion, his madness, like the agony of King Lear, is mirrored in the tumultuous onslaught of the elements. The last scene on the abandoned ship, where Captain Bottell, escaped from the man detailed to watch him, rages to his own ruin in the battered engine room, is more truly frightful, and a degree closer to high tragedy, than anything in the grey charnels of Elizabethan drama. - .

The scene of Ultramarine is also set on a cargo boat, but it is not specifically a book about the sea. It is an illustration in

particular of circumstances which share their effects with many others. Compared with Mr. Hanley's, Mr. Lowry's writing is disastrously mannered. He attempts to describe the mental conflicts of a sensitive young man who, on the rather speculative. assumption that the experience will be of spiritual value, signs on as deck boy on a tramp sailing to the East. The book suffers from a mixing of conventions. It combines the psychology of the more analytical type of school

story with a manner largely derived from Ulysses. Some of Mr. Lowry's scenes are excellent (notably his description of the ship leaving an eastern port), and his account of any particular episode is generally in .,itself satisfactory. But the different styles which he employs produce effects which are neither cumulative nor adequately complementary. There is no unity of impression.

Mr. Kimber is certainly not mannered. His very vigorously

written novel throws a searchlight on the conduct, in Wiltshire and in France, of different groups of people- under the stress

of warfare. His theme is of the collapse of humanity under industrialism. One of his characters thinks :

" He was the last of his generation. The old life was ending . The machines were winning. The new hungry generations would tread the old music down . . . Already he felt a dread of people, those of his own class . . . It was only among the working people, the labourers, that he felt at ease. And the rot was affecting even them ; soon they would be gone, a vanished race. As for the rest, the people of his own class, they were terrible • social beings, automatons. Not men and women, only social beings ; without hearts, hard, without tolerance. The towns had made them. Shielded from the onslaught, from storm and ,sunshine, they no longer suffered. He supposed that they lived a set life, limited by rules and a moral code, their hearts had withered. It left them devoid of pity, of tolerance—for he had noticed that they were all merciless to one another."

The theme is impressive, but the book is loosely constructed and lacking in economy. It is repetitious and relies leis on subtlety than on violence. Like his hero, the glib bastard

of a country squire, Mr. Kimber has to raise his voice in order to make his points, which are apt in the process to lose the saving grace of relevance. He passes too much Of his time and e-xpends too much of his energy in dexterously arigling

for red herrings : an occupation which, after a time, be- comes tedious to the spectator. •

L'Affaire Jones provides an hour's entertainment for those

with nlaste for light farce. It records the misfortunes which overcanle Mr. Henry Jones who left Windfall, Georgia, for the purpose of writing a treatise on French cooking. Owing to an error, recognized only a considerable time later, he finds him- self in prison for the alleged theft of an overcoat. The case expands swiftly and automatically to fabulous proportions.

The oVercoat'(by everyone except-Mr. Jones) is forgotten. A conspiracy against France is suspected. Political issues

become involved, and the affair threatens, as they say in Whitehall, to have international repercussions. Justice however, in a somewhat arbitrary and irreponsible manner, ultimately prevails. If the book is, as one might suspect, intended as a satire on the excesses of Gallic nationalism, one can only chronicle its failure. As farce, in spite of a somewhat

stereotyped form of humOur, it is entertaining. So-too is the publisher's bhub, which suggests a comparison with Zukika Dobson. Such an extravagance recalls a recent decision of Mr. Justice Branson : " It was obviously an advertisement.

No one could suppose it purported to say anything as a matter of fact."