26 APRIL 1935, Page 30

Fiction

I3y WILLIAM PLOMER Minstrels' Gallery. By Raymond Burns. (Constable. 7s. 6d.)

IT is of course a mistake to suppose that a novelist's only business is to tell a story, and•that he must inevitably weaken it by moralizing. The late Sir Walter Raleigh remarked that almost all the great EnglisttnoMias of the eighteenth century, Fielding included, were " in their essence " moralists : the same is just as true of most of their great successors, here and

abroad, and a case Could Wrnade out to shoW that the best

novelists constitute a kind of priesthOod, making their opinions influential by means of parables,-earthly stories With,idealistic meanings. Certainly a "no'Velist's'firat business is to tell a story, and if he does that- well -enough the prOpaganda he wishes to make can be easily swallowed even if its taste is:dis- agreeable to the swallower. That:applies-to Herr Traven.- In The Death Ship and The Treeisuie of the ,Sierra Madre it Was perfectly clear that he . greatly disliked: capitalism and Christianity, but it is hard to:imagine even a true blue tradi- tionalist failing to enjoy those excellent stories. Herr Traven's double dislike, formerly inherent, has now become explicit to such an extent that the first two.-thlids of The"Carreta appear to deal very much more with fact. than with fiction and to

constitute indeed an essay on peonage or tract on serfdom amongst the Mexican Indians, and it becomes easier than ever to understarid why this author's books, whichhaVe been trans- lated into every important European language, have a larger sale in Russia than anywhere else. _ At the same tittle; it would be hard to deny that Herr Traven again " gets away with it," for if in essence a moralist he is also in essence an artist, an image-maker, and once again has made an image of great beauty, giving it something of the clarity and symbolism of a legend. Incidentally, if his facts are facts, a bigoted reader would be hard put to it to maintain that Herr Traven's

economic data are contemptible.or his obseivations on religion

blasphemous.

A carreta is a two-wheeled bullock cart used for the transport of goods, and Andrew Ugaldo, Herr Traven's central figure, was an Indian carretero, or driver, employed by a prosperous commission agent, and obliged continually to travel a road

that " was never anything but an unrelieved martyrdom." The first two-thirds of the book are principally a detailed and one might say a monumental account of that martyrdom. If most writers were to tell us that " without transport there is no civilization," or that •

" animals by the hundred thousand, men by the million must suffer to the limits of endurance and beyond in order that civiliza- tion may exist and be carried to the remotest corner of the earth,"

we should accuse them of platitude, but. Herr Traven has the rare power of making the commonplace exciting, moving,

and not easily forgettable. When he tells us that " Mexico today has the most generous and humane penal system in the

World," or that " in the American Continent, where the potato originated, it is one of the dearest articles of food," he is actually strengthening or decorating his plot.

The last hundred pages of the -bciok tell of the mutual love between Andrew and a runaway girl whom he meets at a festival. In itself the story of this affair is exceedingly touching and idyllic, tender and deliCate but= -although primitive people are capable of great tenderness and delicacy, the story is a little hard to believe. It is certainly unusual for young

men in tropical or sub-tropical countries to remain sexually unawakened until they are gthwri 'up; and what on earth

would the author of The Pliiined Serpent have said of an American Indian courtshipUn these lines, devoid of so much

as a hint of the Dark Within _

" I will never say anything to- you but what is beautiful,' he said softly. ' Then I shall always be happy,' she answered."

A suspicion arises that this writer, of whom I write with feelings of admiration and respect, is gradually falling in love with that old and ambiguous image of perfection, the rather too Noble Savage, nowadays the Noble Worker.

In contrast with The Careta, )vMch isthefruitof a strictly disciplined masculine imagination, Mrs. Mitchison's new novel, which also has to do with the Noble Worker (noble, it seems, even as an assassin), combines, a „Seetch earnestness with a feminine exuberance, both of course very useful qualities. She describes it as a " historical novel about my own times," and leads off with a dedication to a mixed though modish bag. of alphabetically arranged " comrades " including Comrade Gollancz the publisher, Comrade Gerald Heard, Comrade (ci-devant Prince) Mirsky, and a " girl in the train between Odessa and Kiev." This is .followed by a formidable .list of characters of various origins:that takes up nearly 'three pages. The period of the story is 1931-1933, and the scene shifts about from a country house in Scotland to an industrial town, to London, Oxford and Russia. The subject is, broadly speaking, the adventures along the borderlands of socialism and com- munism, in the more or less rosy light of the Red Dawn, of Dione Galton, a generOus-natured, indefatigable and infinitely humourless upper : middle-class Scotchwoman, wife and mother, a heroine who seems to want mankind to turn into a great big jolly chattering family all romping together towards the millennium in a confused atmosphere noisy with forced bonhomie, false with- inverted snobbishness, and vaguely glamorous with what used to be called " free love." From a melee that seems like a vast bargain-sale where Utopias arc going cheap Diane emerges somewhat bruised to enjoy a vision in which the crown of martyrdom (at the hands of Reaction) seems within her grasp, and one is only left regretting that Mrs. Mitchison did not include among her quotations from the poets Blake's vital reminder that although great things are done " when men and mountains meet," they are not done by " jostling in the street." Jostling apart, however, the book is a very interesting study of a phenomenon which is now having a good deal Of influence on society—uneasiness of conscience on the part of a Have who is keenly aware of the Have-nots. Mrs. Mitchison's vitality should buoy up and carry along most readers who are of an enquiring turn, and her practised hand may be relied on for some vivid scenes, but it may be because she " takes the socialist, unindividualist outlook for granted " (I quote from the dust-cover) that she has not allowed herself the leisure to explore very fully any of the characters except Dione.

Jason the Magnificent has nothing directly to do with group consciousness or the needs of the proletariat or the example,Of RuSsia. It takes us to a New York publisher's office at the height of the boom, with money flowing like water and alcohol flowing like water in flood-time. ' It tells of the decline and fall of Jason Pertinax, America's most:suecessful Publisher, whose open-handedness was only.: equalled by his insatiable

for. wine and women;:and, it _ affords an 'unusually

good example of the present. American ,way of telling: a story. The style is terse, streamlined,- epigrammatic' and witty, and the action has the rare but necessary; :virtue Of seeming inevitable. The. life which Mr. Harilizte writes. about is at once so circumscribed and moves at such a pace that the people have only time •to be functional, but that does not prevent them-front-being human and-so-capable of arousing

sympathy. • •

Minstrels' Gallery is an English attempt to produce some- what the same kind of effect. AS in Mr. Hanline's book, a hopeful young man is suddenly brOught in touch with metro- politan life, loose rather than high. In this case he is Michael Jerome, a composer of dance tunes, who leaves Newcastle,and the protection of a Watch Committee uncle ifor London, life and liberty, or at least to become involved in " the lives of those queer people who are responsible for the, light and sophisticated music of our time." If he had pursued his nephewi-the uncle would have found.rather too many offences to obserVe, more indeed_ than he could have imagined, for always " moro water 4lideth by the mill

Than roots the miller of." - ,

Mr. Burns gives us lome _rapid. sequences from the lives of agents and producers, actresses and prostitutes, describing a world which has been strongly influenced by America but is weaker in impulse and less hard and brilliant just as his writing is much weaker than Mr. Hanline's.