Fiction
By WILLIAM PL OMER Peter the Great. By Alexei Tolstoi. Translated by Edith Bone and Emile Burns. (Gollancz. las.) The Snare of the Fowler. By Gerald Bullett. (Dent. 7s. 6d.) Jump for Glory. By Gordon McDonell. (Harrap. 7s. 6d.) Innocent Summer. By Frances Frost. (Arthur Barker. 7s. 6d. ) THE frontier that used to exist between biography and fiction has long ceased to be clearly defined, and Peter the Great, described on the dust cover as a biography, is in fact a historical novel. But it is not to be condemned as a sentimental fake, it is not a silly vulgarisation (though Hollywood is quite capable of acquiring the film rights and making it so) but a genuine attempt to dress up facts in local and period colour. The facts are of course anything but dry ; in the whole of history there are few figures more lively, more surprising, and more significant than Peter the Great ; and among contem- porary novelists there can be few better qualified to attempt to write about him than Alexei Tolstoi, who has written what is perhaps the best novel about the Russian revolution. Here, then, is a dashing impression of the tall and determined figure of Peter emerging from the old savage twilight of Muscovy, overflowing with vitality, full of appetite for work, pleasure, knowledge and power, consumed with curiosity, knowing his own mind, and imposing his own will. " He is a very good, and also a very bad man. From the standpoint of morals he is a perfect representative of his country," wrote the Kurfiirstin of Hanover in her diary, and the lady was not far out in her judgement. Naturally Alexei. Tolstoi gives us the more or less familiar anecdotes : to Raleigh his cloak and Bruce his spider, but Peter is most easily thought of with a pair of scissors in his hand for snipping off the beards of the boyars, or with a shipwright's hammer. And yet it is as easy to think of him holding a pen, a sceptre, a match to fire a cannon, a whip, or let us say the lobe of Annehen Mons's ear. It is only possible to think of him as restless and versatile, capable of appearing anywhere, in any role, but always a leading one. Tolstoi gives the feeling of versatility and movement by a rapid succession and great variety of scenes. I remember speaking of the general effect of his novel Darkness and Dawn as " turbulent and fragmentary " and saying that that was all to the good. This book is equally turbulent and fragmentary, as it had to be to reflect anything of the life and times of its subject, who stands out in it as clearly as in that not very good portrait in Kensington Palace, but better drawn, a freak of nature and of the Slav nature at that. The range of this book is really remarkable. It shows us the violent and bizarre world of Peter's childhood, when he took naturally to playing at soldiers " Natalia noted with a shudder the fury in his round eyes. He climbed up on the rampart and struck one of his make-believe soldiers with a musket. The man bowed his head.
' If it's not done as he wants, he'll kill someone,' Natalia said. ' Where does he get his hot temper from ?
The games began again. He put the long-legged youths with the axes in a line, and got angry again because they did not under- stand what he wanted."
Gradually the attraction of the German quarter in Moscow makes itself felt, together with the influence of Lefort. The military games develop, a fortress is built, " and there—oh, God and holy saints 1—there was the Tsar himself : not on a golden chair looking on at the diversion, but in knitted cap, German knickers and a dusty shirt, running along a board trundling a wheelbarrow." The favourite Menslulcov rises to power, the charming Annehen rises to favour, Peter marries, his enemies are busy inside and outside the borders of Russia, and he sets forth on his travels. In Holland, in the intervals of learning to build ships, working at forge and bench, he tipples in public houses and has stones thrown at him by inquisitive urchins. And so back to cope with boyars and Streltsi, to mass-executions and careful torturings, to the old pleasures and new ones, and the long attack on oriental, mediaeval and Byzantine habits and the laying of the founda- tions of modern Russia. As usual with Alexei Tolstoi, the design is broad, the manner spirited, the detail continually touched in with freshness, and the whole proceeding enter- taining.
To turn to a batch of English novels after this is a sad come-down. Where are the vitality, the movement, the outline, the frequent touches that lend point and colour ? They are absent. Two survivors of this week's batch are Messrs. Bullett and McDonell, who have something in common, First of all, each his attempted a task rather beyond . his powers : secondly, esch has brought to it only one of the needful qualifications, which has been developed at the expense of the others. It is a talent that is pre-eminent in English fiction today, but one that is perhaps only of secondary importance in the art of writing novels ; it is the gift for constructing a more or less neat and intricate plot, a gift which seems almost more mathematical than artistic, and which finds its chief outlet today in the writing of detective stories, to say nothing of crossword puzzles. Some attempt is made by both these writers to convince us that they are interested in character, atmosphere, the rewards of the senses, and so on, but they are ready to sacrifice everything to an ingenious plot, and do not even boggle at what Sir Arthur Eddington has called, in' a different connexion, " something much worse than a violation of an ordinary law of Nature, namely, an improbable coincidence."
Mr. Bullett, as a matter of fact, has chosen a violation of the laws of Nature, an Oedipus theme, as his subject. A more difficult subject to treat successfully in a novel it is hard to think of, and it cannot be said that Mr. Bullett has succeeded in lending it the airs of tragedy. Perhaps this is partly because his characters are not very gripping—one feels that it is A's or B's move next, and that C is sure to turn up a little later, but one's heart does not bleed nor one's brain reel on their behalf. However, Mr. Bullett is adept at telling a neat story, though his tone is apt to be old-fashioned, as in this chapter- opening :
" In the evening of that June day, ten years before Robert's encounter with Drusilla, Tom Cordwainer and the surprising Clara, with Polly the nag's benevolent co-operation, had put thirty miles between themselves and the railway station of Fallow Green in whose neighbourhood they had first seen each other."
Jump for Glory is introduced by its publishers as being comparable with that notable example of the tough school, The Postman Always Rings Twice. It is natural, in view' of the pervasive American influence in this country, that the producers of tough films and fiction should find imitators, but English life, speech, and ways of thinking are not on the whole at all well-adapted to these staccato rhythms and vigorous unmoralities. The best example of an attempt at such an adaptation is Mr. Graham Greene's A Gun For Sale, which has a life of its own and gains strength from a satirical intention and the skill of a practised writer with acute powers of observation. Mr. McDonell, who has, it seems, written stories for the films, has neither the concision and novelty of the author of the Postman nor the subtlety of Mr. Greene, but still, he is out to make things happen : " I stepped over Charles Fayne's dead body and took her in my arms."
That is part of the method—an abrupt juxtaposition of love and murder. Mr. McDonell's hero is a cat-burglar, who pursues an absorbing love-interest in the shape of a declassed lovely called Glory Ann : in spite of plenty of happenings, neither of them takes on much solidity, but there are good moments, as when the burglar goes to the pictures and listens to the Mighty Wurlitzer : " It started very softly and slowly, like a little princess walking by her first big crowd. Then a single boy's voice came from behind the moving clouds on the screen, singing words in Latin. After a while the music swelled louder and louder, and a whole choir of boys and men sang with the organ, until it seemed as though all the kings and queens of history were singing through the clouds . After the music had stopped I noticed a queer smell and found that I had lit the cork end of my cigarette."
Innocent Summer is one of those New England novels in which an over-developed sense of sin gets everybody down. Pop, the big killjoy, goes for the piano with an axe, dreadful things happen in the woodshed, Mom wonders how she can put up with everything, young girls read Tennyson as a preliminary to more practical tasks, the cow calves, the cat kittens, the boys grow up, the girls fill out, and domestio life is on this level : " Mom." Huh ? " Can I go upstairs and play now I ' ' Did you do all the dustin' t " 'Yap." Did you dust the rubber-. plant good ? " Yup." Well, go 'long an' don't bother me,' Mom said. ' I got to do a batch of doughnuts. Pop likes 'era.".
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