Fiction
For Love Alone. By Christina Stead. (Peter Davies. 12s. 6d.) Each For All. By Yuri Nagibin. (Hutchinson. 5s.)
For Love Alone is a title to scare most readers, but those who have met Christina Stead before will take the risk, confident of finding wit, truth, and startling prose. By the time they have reached the end they will have understood that the author has chosen a title which precisely describes her theme. Teresa Hawkins, a young Australian school teacher, is determined to find Love. She will not accept the school-marm's fate of spinsterhood, and she is equally disgusted by all she knows of conventional marriage. She saves up, starving herself in the process, to escape to England in pursuit of a selfish, verbose small-hearted intellectual to whom she fancies herself devoted. This unattractive and impotent exponent of free love leads her on and puts her off, dangling her on a string until the day when Teresa finds that Love has found her, in the shape of a clear-headed American business man who exposes by example the revolting clichés of her intellectual scarecrow. Teresa adores her American. But she is not true to him. The thought that she is free to love as she will ennobles the love that she has. Her love for him "is the only love, but not the first and not the last."
It is not Christina Stead's way to sketch a character with a few select lines. She has the whole matter out and examines each thought under a microscope. Thus Teresa's burning need to leave Australia is not stated with a few raw arguments such as some ordinary novelist might think sufficient. A hundred pages are spent on proving the point, the evidence piling up before the reader as it piles upon the shoulders of Teresa. All that contributes to the revulsion in her must be described—her selfish family, the vapid (but extremely amusing) conversation of Aunt Bea, the odious con- ventionalities of her friends' marriages, even the moonlit cliffs around her home, made loathsome by courting couples. The picture is painted and the analysis compiled in a torrent of language, apt and truthful, surprising, coarse and beautiful—an imaginative phrase like "the nights of pale sand" matched with the startling statement, "Of course she would never get a man, for she smelled and looked like an old pancake." Writing sometimes like an undisciplined Virginia Woolf or a disciplined James Joyce, she builds her story at length, determined to uncover every emotion, to examine every cause contributory to her argument.
It is a mighty undertaking, and the book, although remarkable, is not entirely satisfactory. The author has run her head against the old difficulty of how to describe the boring and the prosy without being boring and prosy. Jonathan Crow, the sterile intellectual, is a bore. Miss Stead has him taped, but it is impossible to enjoy the company of this blackbeetle, and the whole centre of the book suffers from the fact. After its admirable first quarter, we are irked by the long gullibility of Teresa. That we are immoderately pleased when at last Crow stands unmasked and discomfited is a proof of good character-drawing—but it does not alter the fact that we have borne Crow's company and his rubbishy mind a great deal too long.
The unattractive title For Love Alone hp sense. Some Trees Stand is one of those senseless titles which mean nothing clipped from the quotations to which they belong. "Generations pass while some trees stand" is what Sir Thomas Browne wrote, and those who recognise the phrase will understand that Some Trees Stand is a family novel of the good old school. This time it is about an old Welsh country family. Miss Roberts has a plain straight- forward style of writing with no nonsense about it at all, but her story concerns the old romance of a girl engaged to one man and married to another, and is not made less familiar by a ghostly harp and unnatural emphases on inherited characteristics. It is a curious reflection that the basic theme is not far different from that of For Love Alone, but the treatment is as far apart as Wales is from Australia.
Nothing is more difficult to write than a good short story. If a complex and convincing story is to be told in few pages, a particular impressionistic technique must be employed upon a plot of peculiar compactness. Few are successful in this kind. When the big writers apply themselves to the short story their feeling for character and description carries them beyond the confinements of brevity. The long short story of Kipling, Hardy and Conrad is something quite different. Neither Inez Holden nor Yuri Nagibin have the knack of the short story. What each of them is writing (in very different styles) is the short study. Yuri Nagibin's studies are all of one kind—portraits of men and women of the Red Army in battle. They are, vividly done—but as with most of the Soviet literature which has reached England lately, they are very serious. There is no flicker of the old humorous commentary on life which was the light and glory of the nineteenth-century Russian writers. The grimness, the urgency, the self-sacrifice of war, is in them— not the critical (and therefore humorous) analysis of character, which is the mark of creative writing. The studies by Inez Holden have this quality : she has a microscopic eye for the human heart.
The difference between these two widely different forms, the story and the study, is well illustrated in the first and best item in her book, "The Musical Chairman." Here Miss Holden records a brilliant piece of observation of the working of the Local Appeal Board, but in order to round it off in a neat way she adds a wholly .unconvincing little plot connecting, across long years, the chairman with an actress aunt of ht-rs. The study of character in the ordinary day's work of the committee is entirely convincing and very good. The attempt to clamp it into the false frame of a short story is wholly mistaken. Throughout the book this clash between the two techniques is evident, but it is the story technique which is the intruder. The main body of the book is the result of sincere and accurate observation of facts and people, and all this is uncommonly
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