FICTION
By E. B. C. JONES Theatre. By W. Somerset Maugham. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) The Bachelor of Arts. By R. K. Narayan. (Nelson. 75. 6d.) Hunt the Slipper. By Violet Trefusis. (Heinemann. 75. 6d.) Felicity Greene. By John Brophy. (Cape. 7s. 6c1.)
Women Must Love. By Julia Hart Lyon. (Faber. 7s. 6d.) Theatre is a full-length study of the histrionic temperament—of that sort of nature which, when it experiences emotion, with conscious relish heightens and expresses that emotion, drawing words and attitudes from other, similar occasions, from things read and heard, and, in the actor's case, from plays played in. The effect on the persons present is the measure of the emotion's success, so to speak. This trait must be distinguished from sentimentality. The sentimental man wants to experience emotion keenly because he sets a high value on sensibility ; it is his own opinion of himself which he sustains by cultivating his feelings. The histrionic man is seldom sentimental, frequently hard ; he does not court emotion ; but when it comes, his second self joins in, supplying the appropriate gesture, filling out the role, rounding off the scene. This double self, exempli- fied in several incidents in Theatre, is fully embodied when Julia, a successful, f&ed, pretty, middle-aged actress, is being thrown over by her youthful lover : She could always cry easily, and she was really so miserable now that she did not have to make even a small effort. She could cry, without sobbing, her wonderful dark eyes wide open, with a face that was almost rigid. Great heavy tears ran down it. . . . She hadn't cried like that since she cried in The Stricken Heart. Christ, how that play had shattered her. She was not looking at Tom, she was looking straight in front of her ; she was really dis- tracted with grief, but, what was it ? another self within her knew what she was doing, a self that shared in her unhappiness and yet watched its expression. She felt him go white. She felt a sudden anguish wring his heartstrings, she felt that his flesh and blood could not support the intolerable pain of hers.
This quotation illustrates the strength and weakness of Mr. Maugham. He has avowedly modelled himself on Maupassant ; but Maupassant would not have employed the superfluous, and therefore weakening word " really " even once, much less twice ; and his punctuation would have been more precise. To this undistinguished, sometimes slovenly, way of writing, and to the descent into cliché (" His features had a worn distinction. He reminded you of a head on an old coin that bad been in circulation too long ") is partly due one's impression that Mr. Maugham feels contempt for his reader. I shall indicate later the deeper cause of this impression. The strength
of the passage quoted lies in the skilful transition from Julia to Tom. The sentimental person is chiefly concerned with himself, the histrionic with his audience : Julia felt Tom go white ; she had brought it off. In noting this triumph
of his heroine's the novelist achieves a triumph himself.
The impression which Theatre makes of the writer despising his reader—as though a tired genius were saying " I can get away with this job blindfold and one-handed, and if they don't like it, they can lump it "—is mainly due to the method of the first few chapters. The book begins when the actor- manager Michael Gosslyn and his wife and leading lady Julia are at the height of their fame, popular, handsome, public figures. A youth is employed to audit the accounts of the theatre which they own, and, turning out to be a fan of Julia's, is invited home to lunch and given a signed photograph. (I must note in passing that during lunch a tiny incident about fried potatoes is narrated with the utmost brilliance.) The men depart, Julia is left glancing through the boxes of photographs. She comes on one of herself as Beatrice : throwback to her and Michael's beginnings. Next, Chapter V opens : " Julia
was now looking at a photograph of herself in her wedding- dress " : throwback to marriage and wartime. This technique, hallowed by the old-fashioned cinema, is unworthy of Mr. Maugham, and suggests that he was bored, or had not sufficiently assimilated his material. It is the sort of fault which the reader tolerates when the rest of the book is conceived on the grand scale—when greatness of theme compensates for inequali-
ties of performance. But Mr. Maugham is not such a writer. His subject matter is completely earthbound, his chosen game is to describe with accuracy, humour and detachment (a detachment impaired by a rather immature cynicism) the half-baked, the half-educated, the quasi-civilised ; and the reader, glad of this entertaining game, requires of him a perfection of means not required of novelists whose aim and subject-matter are of a profounder kind. At his best—as when, in Theatre, he shows us Julia in love with Tom, tor- mented by having to hide her feelings and retire in favour of her schoolboy son without protest—he holds us absorbed for pages and conveys extreme anxiety and discomfort ; but he does not, and does not attempt, to communicate or create a new synthesis, or to illuminate human nature. The reader thinks : How well I know that misery ! How admirably it is done ! He does not experience a modification of his outlook on life. And what is done in a smaller way has to be done better in order to satisfy.
Maupassant is Mr. Maugham's avowed master. The disciple is inferior in two respects : that of style and that of atmosphere. Mr. Maugham sneers, in one of his prefaces, at " the vague word atmosphere " ; yet one cannot analyse the best stories of his master's without using the word. In Maupassant the perception of physical appearance, sensation and quality is so intense that it lifts what Mr. Maugham . calls the anecdote on to another plane. -As in the realm of mystical experience to dwell fully in the moment is to dwell in eternity, so in the realm of literature, the supreme expression of physical sensation, combined with adequate psychological insight, can carry the work over into poetry. The heat, the scent, the fowls, the substance of the farmyard in Une Filk de Ferme are not " put in " to make the anecdote more convincing, they are part of the girl and her story ; and the way in which Maupassant creates the synthesis of inner and outer worlds makes him not only a fascinating raconteur but an artist. In Mr. Maugham's work there is no atmosphere, not even in Rain ; and thus although, in Theatre, we get to know Julia extraordinarily well, and feel with her, and believe in her behaviour, we never for a moment have a sense of her physical presence, or of the light, air and earth that surround her. This is what I mean—with only apparent paradox— by calling his work earthbound. He is often a fascinating raconteur, but never an artist.
The Bachelor of Arts is a very amusing and penetrating portrait, at once sturdy and delicate, of an Indian youth in a small Indian town. The conversations have that curious bleakness which was noticeable in A Passage to India and Hindoo Holiday, as though the Indian way of thinking was so different from ours that the translation of their thoughts stripped them of overtones ; one cannot even always be sure whether the speaker is serious or jesting. But conversation does not play a very important part, and there is control but no bleakness in the presentation of Chandran. Having passed out of college, he falls in love at sight with an unknown girl and persuades his devoted parents (both extremely well sketched) to make a proposal. His horoscope does not agree well with the girl's, and the marriage falls through. In despair Chandran runs away and becomes a sanyasi, one who has renounced the world and lives by begging—but not from conviction, merely as an alternative to suicide. Thus when "a remote village welcomes and believes in him, he is shamed. " He felt a cad, a fraud, a confidence trickster." This is a moving passage. He returns home and takes a job. There is no heaviness or pretension ; Chandran's ability to benefit by experience, and the customs and modes of thought of his parents, are presented without exposition, simply in the course of the story.
Hunt the Slipper belongs somewhat to the Colette type of novel, except that all the chief persons are rich, landed and leisured. It concerns nothing but their amours ; the characterisation is shadowy. There is, however, considerable wit : the heroine, asking her lover to write from abroad, adds : " I may as well tell you that I don't like landscape letters."
Felicity Greene does not show Mr. Brophy at his best. The career of a go-getting and finally best-selling novelist, a female Bel-Ami, is narrated by a devotee ; but this con- vention is not well-sustained, for at least in one place the admirer's view merges with the author's. The satire is heavy-handed. Women Must Love is a long, sentimental, amateurish, near-highbrow novel about a girl who falls in love with two married men and bears the second—a mixture of the two Lawrences—a child.
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