Fiction
Many Lands and Loves
Store of Ladies. By Louis Golding. (Knopf. 7s. 6d.) Tin.: scenes of these three books might be laid in three different planets, so incomprehensible would each set of actors appear to the others.
From Joseph Hergesheimer we expect some conflict, material and spiritual, of elemental people in remote, unconquerable places, where the darker powers of nature take part in the battle like the Gods of old, while shafts of irrelevant beauty break unheeded, and fragile exotic things appear haphazard where no virtuoso can save them. In such a crisis for body and soul we find one of these forcible, unreasoning folk, Govett Bradier, returned to " Tampico," the wicked new city of an oil-bearing area, spreading its raw greeds and cruelties over the ancient inscrutable cruelties and desires of Mexico. When earth surrenders some of her treasure, it is almost as if she wished to destroy her children, yielding more power than they are fit to take. The welling up of the immemorial oil of her corruptions seems to become the slow tide of destiny in the story, seeping heavily into the very springs of love and hate, lying sinister and dissolute in the consciousness of men. This is not the Mexico of the Incas, nor of the Spaniards. It is not the Mexico of a pre-Aztec civilization that cynically confounds the archaeo- logist with symbols he thought peculiar to incommunicable places. Nor is it the modern Meirico of D. H. Lawrence, heavily scented, hung with great flowers, secret with bright waters whence the Plumed Serpent raises his crest. The landscape is industrial. Here is Tampico, pretentious, intri- guing place of American offices and tawdry pleasure halls. There lies Zocamixtle, the hideous Mexican outpost of power and lust, a hell of mud whence seem to protrude Sosa's pretty hands, Adeline's lime-white mask of horror, Pacheco's shattered face, while a small sweet song rises far off to faint Chinese music.. The place seems to need a modern Callot. There, finally, is the sea-terminal, with its blocks of concrete building blankly facing the Gulf, which is the invaded image of Bradier's pride and honour.
Ile who was once a mythic hero in the days of " getting the oil through," because of his courage and unscrupulousness, returns now, his labours accomplished, merely to take away Vida, the wife of Corew, his successor at the terminal. But the spirit of the kaleidoscopic place, the subterranean intrigue of the oil, reclaim him suddenly against his will, against his desire, against his lassitude, for the spirit of malaria has altered his attitude to life. The physical weakness that softly robs Bradier of passion, of conquest, of pride, of revenge, and finally of all bitterness in defeat, is a kind of purification in its way, since, losing the fire of the senses, he sees Vida for the hard worthless thing she is, one with the courtesans in the temples of the new Oil god, not comparable with Teresita, that grave pale girl, who hides her burning heart with hieratic hands. It is Corew himself whose fine and forcible figure he gradually realizes as now significant beyond all others to him, not only for its own distinction, but because it is the centre of a new ethic of honour, a rare nobility.
The difficult relationship of the two men is, or should be, the central theme of the book. But it is here we are suddenly heartsick for a lost magic, and murmur the name of Conrad. He could have charged the unavoidable sympathy of these two men with rare unspoken chivalries, created the duskling violet atmosphere where every gesture carries a tragic dignity, and brought Teresita with a music of lamenting words to the beautiful end that was her due. As it is, we do not feel sure of Bradier. There is a point where the author seems to take a contagion of malarial weakness from his hero ; and every- thing becomes unreal, a mist of vague forms with the macabre face of Adeline staring in the foreground like the fragmentary detail of some forgotten and Joathlj,' discovery. In the end Bradier,. entirely defeated, is left at peace with the sea and stars, in a state of serene indifferentism. Again is it because lie has lost his body or because he has saved his soul.?
From Mexico, where so many ancient cruelties feed the nee, from " monte and malaria and the fanciest kinds of death,* it is dazing to pass to the detailed studies of the Mid-West the United States in Miss Ruth Suckow's People and Holum These grim, crude folk, living in ugly, ill-painted frame houses, struggling with a difficult soil, are reported at their fi moments of calamity with a remorseless .passionless preeisio of detail to which your reaction is at first a human revs against a society that permits the harrowing ejections of sue as "Mame" and " The Renters." You then realize that it tak a notable artist to wound you so deeply and with such a su bright blade. All the stories are evenly wrought ; and onl in much space could one describe their concentrated quality Unflinching as they are, they have their repressed tenderness and the gilded touches of decorative beauty burn the fps purely because of the author's deliberate parsimony.
To pass from Miss Ruth Suckow's stern and beautiful boo to Mr. Louis Golding's extravaganza concerning Belgravia Bermondsey, and an Italian island filled with " Store o Ladies "—mostly German tourists—is something of an an climax. A Belgravian widow is stricken as remorselessly Phaedra was by desire—for a member of Cashel Byron' profession. The sequel involves much gaiety, absurdity, a bitter interludes of suffering. The widow is not a queen] Phaedra ; and her overpowering passion for the boxer offen not morality, but taste. Mr. Golding, who, of course, descri his Italian island with much charm, seems to feel himself a times that a painful mania disturbs the bright air of comedy.
RACHEL ANNAND TAYLOR.
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