Fiction
By WILLIAM PLOMER The Foundry. By Albeit Helper. . (Cassell. 7s. 6d.)
The Land of Plenty. By Robert Cantwell. (Bell. 7s. 6d.).
Halcyon Days in Africa. By Wilfrid Saint-Mande. (Partridge, 8s. 6d.) The Irreconcilables. By Bernard Brett. (Methuen. 7s. 64.1.)
THE first two novels on this list have much in common. They both suggest that. American fiction is at present in a healthy state. In each case the author's intentions are serious, his manner outspoken, and his style fluent. Both writers have a sense of the dramatic, and what is even more important, an abundant sense of life. Both are concerned with actualities of the same kind, that is to say, the lives and problems of working people, and both prefer to take a panoramic view, not focussing attention on any particular hero or heroine, but realizing rather that nearly everybody today is faced with urgent difficulties, and is, if not something of a hero or heroine, at least a human being deserving of understanding and usually of sympathy:
The people in these books, like most people in every- day life, are chiefly concerned to know where their bread and butter is coming from : at the same time, they naturally cannot live by bread and 'butter alone. They work in factories—Mr. Cantwelrs turns out " timber products " on the Pacific coast ; Mr. Halper's is an electrotype foundry in Chicago—amid the smells of acids and melting wax, of oil and sweat and chemicals, scorched by steam, fatigued by overtime, in danger from machinery,. driven by the supposed_ necessity of continually having to complete ." rush orders," victimized to some extent by mat .competitive economic System in general and in particular by a want of imagination on the part of their employers or by some efficiency expert with a stop watch ; subject all the while to the rigours of climate, the demands of sex, the fear of unemployment or illness or old age, anxieties about persons beloved, and especially the long struggle to maintain self-respect and human dignity ; but managing to enjoy, nevertheless, some of the pleasures that the human heart was built to enjoy—pride in one's work or one's body, admiration, sympathy and love for others, family and domestic delights and the great gamble of hope.
Neither Mr. Cantwell nor Mr. Halper would be likely to claim that the salt of the earth is only to be mined in their own particular province, but certainly they have discovered considerable deposits. And they particularly deserve respect for not having attempted to lead us blindfold into those dreary purlieus of Utopia where the rich are always wicked and the poor arc always good, where an inverted snobbery idealizes the " worker," and where. a continual tattoo is beaten on the salvationist drums of conummism. In fact, they are principally concerned, as a novelist should be, with people and not with political or economic theories.
Since writing Union Square Mr. Halper has enlarged his scope and resourcefulness. His new novel is admirable in its construction, in its diversity of character and incident, and in its Chicago atmosphere compounded of city bustle, racial variety, climatic extremes, and sudden outbursts of violence. 'We have been getting a number of novels about working people in Ameriea : knciw of none more engrossing than this. If at times Mr. Halper is lavish of realistic detail, telling us the size of a man's collar and the price of his shirt, he is more cordial in tone than Mr. Sinclair Lewis. Sticklers for modernism will not perhaps approve of rhetorical ques- tions addressed to the reader or to the characters themselves, or of such phrases as " So passes old X. from the scene " or Before that hot .July slipped out of sight, various destinies began to settle in their grooves," but this is a small price to pay for a genial and continuously interesting narrative, as free throughout from anything vague or wistful as this vignette of one of the characters :
" His golden blond hair, brushed firmly back and parted in the centre, swept fiercely upward in a well-trained wave, and his tufted golden eyebrows stood out like little horns. His smooth, fat, satiny neck, round and sturdy as a column, was wet and shiny with perspiration, and his small, pale, fatty ears, which grew close to his.skull, reminded one of the boiled halves of little juicy onions."
If 'Mr. Halper has points in common with Sinclair Lewis, Mr. Cantwell suggests rather the tenebrous landscapes and interiors of William Faulkner. He at once makes it clear that he is going to enlighten us in the dark by opening his book- with the sentence, " Suddenly the lights went out." Whereas Mr. Halper's book covers a whole year, Mr. Cantwell is mostly concerned with the events of a single night. When the lights go out in the timber factory the succeeding con- fusion brings to the surface lurking discontents and latent hostilities, strains the nerves of the workmen and snaps long-strained bonds of patience. If one fact more than another emerges from Mr. Cantwell's pages, it is that, human nature and commerce being what they are, men do not work easily together. Fear, jealousy, unscrupulousness, the urge to protect one's rights as an individual—all these things are busy among the dynamos, furnaces, tanks and driving belts, and disillusionment with them :
" Something he had not understood before became clear to him. Somehow he had thought that people worked and rose in the world, In one swift glance at Walt riding importantly in Carl's car the picture was reversed and now in the depth of his bitterness he saw Walt rising in the world; S•es, but rising in the way that a corpse rises when it has lahtfor a long time under water, rising and rotting as it was pushed out by the strong cold currents at the bottom."
Mr. Halper's workmen maintain solidarity by means of a union ; Mr. Cantwell's try to assert themselves in a strike. The circumstances leading up to it, the personal destinies involved, the nocturnal horrors and interludes, are presented with imaginative power.
By comparison with these two finished American products Halcyon Days in Africa and The Irreconcilables seem immature and in other ways unsatisfactory. As novels they are, to be frank, bad, but they have their virtues, the chief of which is a certain energy or enthusiasm. Both authors have something to say, and it is perhaps worth trying to discover what exactly was on their minds and why they chose a fictional Medium in which to express it, for it is doubittil whether., either of them has the makings of a novelist. Mr. Saint-, Blonde seems to have 'gOne tb South -Afrieri and to have received (as can indeed happen to European visitors to that; part of the world) a great many extremely, disagreeable: impressions. There is probably no reason why a feeling of violent disgust should not be worked off successfully in a novel, provided that the emotion has been digested by the mind, and provided that the writer has some of the novelist's' special instincts for character and so on, as well as some of the artist's instincts for restraint and proportion. But Mr.: Saint-Mande has been content to abandon himself to a long and ferocious invective deCorated here and there with asterisks to show that he could be es-en bolder if he were allowed.' Anybody who his been made to suffer by the barbarities ol! South African life. will sympathize and often agree with him, but a prolonged diatribe is not a novel, and soon grows monotonous.
Neglectful of readability, Mr. Bernard Brett is not without ideas. The Irreconcilables (if only they could have had a neater name !) were " the English Nihilists " and had a; militant revolutionary policy which seems to be more or less= that of the communists. They were " irreconcilable to present-day England, implacably hostile," and would perhaps have been more at home in Barcelona than in Leeds. Looking: forward to a new life, a new England, they postulate the existence already of a million " outlaws " or " separatists " si-ho will go mad if they do not get what they want, for. England's like a prison driving everyone crazy." But is' it ? Does Mr. Brett convince us by his fable of any truths: that were previously hidden ? Does he bring Utopia anyi nearer? Has he succeeded in doing anything more than; remind us that the young are not all complacent ? And- -Oily did he, like Mr. Saint-Mande, choose to embody his soliloquies in an unshapely fiction ? Is it not simply for this' reason, that although first-rate novels are very rare, the term " novel " is also applied to' all kinds of outpourings which, reduced to their essentials, might make a pamphlet or a series of articles or perhaps a- short-story ?
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