Fiction

By V. S. PRITCHETT

So Red the Rose. By Stark Young. (Cassell. Is. 6d.)

White Angel. By John Heygate. (Cape. 7s. 6d.) Bid Time Return. By Dorothy Easton. (Seeker. 7s. 6d.)

" I sometimes think that never blows so red The rose as where some buried Caesar bled."

Ma. STARK YOUNG'S novel about the life of the Southern planters during the American Civil War, is a potpourri of the fragrance of buried Caesars, if one may put it that way !

It is an odd thing, this fragrance, which arises when the cold, draughty reek of history has been treated with " period " oils. The rose is valued not for its one-time redness but because it has faded ; and faded history is popular history. It is not therefore surprising to discover that So Red the Rose has surpassed the success of Anthony Adverse in the United States, for the '60's have at last faded to the colour which stirs pathos. An English novelist who gave an eye to the Crimea (wasn't there last year such a book called Gentleman, the Regiment ?) might make a fortune.

Mr. Stark Young has the advantage because the word gentleman has not yet, apparently, become a term of abuse in the United States. A character lice Malcolm Bedford, planter and tippler, with some relics of scholarship, a hater of democracy and having the whimsical habit of writing obituary notices about his living friends and relations, is a gentleman without that note of apology which has now crept into English speech. There is a robust, sardonic ring, a touch of Peter Arno toughness in the American use of the word. These Southern planters were sui generis. They had sufficient passion and independence for a civil war which, as Unamuno once said, is the cleanest kind of war, and on the side unpopular to middle-class moral interests. So Red the Rose is not a narrative of the South in action. The war is seen from the drawing room. General Grant appears, but he is seen only by one of the ladies in the distance. It happens that she has the same dentist as the General. Sherman appears also, but he is pacing jerkily up and down a Southern drawing room, confessing his shame at the looting by the Yankee troops. The war is a family affair ; civil wars always are, and in the South it was most intensely family. Mr. Stark Young a man for this family gossip, for following the talk of the big houses, concocting atmospheres,

and hinting at the rage Jenny Lind was in New Orleans. He works in all the political chat as well, and young gentlemen

ride off to their Waterloos a /a George Osborne. One needs to soak in the book rather than to read it ; and people with experience of best sellers will not be surprised that it is the sentiment and not the narrative of the book which has sold it. Mr. Young is no narrative writer. With the greatest

difficulty does the eye crawl from page to page. But the reader can, as it were, soak somnolently in the book until the dull and often rank bad prose style has given off its full aroma of bric-a-brac history. Nearly every page has some- thing worth reading on it, but one would need the leisure of a Southern planter and the persistence of a Yankee to get through its 400 pages one after the other. It is a book with an agreeably acid humour.

The tear that is dropped after reading So Red the Rose is wistful. Something of the same effect should make itself felt after A Thing of Nought, for the full thunderclap of tragedy is missing from it. It is the tale of an old Welsh peasant woman's unhappy love and unhappy marriage— a sad, vivid piece which somehow fails to stand on its feet.

Miss Vaughan is so obviously writing down to her subject ; we are touched whereas we ought to have had our hearts wrenched from our breasts.

Mr. John Heygate makes a virtue of insufficiency of emotion. At first, in this account of a politician's holiday in the Tyrol, he seemed to be as dull as his politician if he was then it turned out to be a dullness of unnerving impressiveness. Repressed emotions are more ominous and disturbing in literature than m life, and Mr. Heygate has known in the latter and more exciting pages of his novel, how to get the best out of repression. A pompous, urbane and observant young politician takes his young invalid

wife out to a primitive gasthasts in the Tyrol. With appalling detachment he watches his own jealousy bubble, as she becomes the friend of a Customs' Officer and the mistress of a smuggler. The rendezvous is—a little grotesque, perhaps, but then the English are abroad I—a cowshed. Says the wife to her lover, speaking of her husband :

" He mustn't ever know—never, never, never ! You can't understand, but it would be terrible if he knew. I think he would die. He hasn't anyone but me. . • ."

She returns to her room : " She did not even glance at him, or she would have seen that his eyes wore half open."

And he keeps up his jokes with the smuggler, his persiflage with the innkeeper, his dead, patient, weary, unreal solicitude for her health. Mr. Heygate's novel is a good study of two dull, unhappy people whose woe has become ingrown. But they observe the kind of things dull people do observe when they go to the Tyrol, reserve seats, book rooms, hire guides, buy outfits—and here, of course, the reader may want to part company. On the whole I think it worth his while to persist, because of Mr. Heygate's humour and the stiff upper lip he shows to the conventional Tyrolese holiday romance. Romance has been succeeded by psychological brow-knitting, and why should the Tyrol escape ?

Bid Time Return is a great deal more romantic than I imagine its author would care to admit. In George Gale, the gentleman farmer and musician, with his mop of red hair and chalk blue eyes, and his uncontrollable temper, we have another Mr. Rochester—a creature dangerous to the female novelist. We see him killing off his first wife by his hopeless temper, driving away his children and killing off a second wife too, when she has lost a child and has fallen in love with his son. Miss Easton seems to have understood all her country characters except her Rochester. He comes in with a roar, stops short like a flabbergasted bull and then goes out with a roar again. He is never anything but impos- sible, a creature bellowing with the pain of his wounds. This is both monotonous and unilluminating. Our interest drifts to the characters who have more subtlety and no less a capacity- for passion and pain. Here again we have a book of scenes, chapters and pages, rather than of continuous, consecutive interest, and the final chapters are the best. This is very common among modern novelists. Working away with their psychological knitting needles, comparing the work with the original pattern, they do not begin to get a real understanding of their subject until they are two-thirds of the way through the job. Then the story moves, and the characters live. This is true of Miss Easton's book. The portrait of Kenneth, the son, overworked by his father on the farm, terrified because he has fallen in love with his step- mother and nevertheless, in a simple obstinate way, exalted by his love, is very good. Miss Easton is in fact most suc- cessful at those intolerable situations which arise between sensitive and honourable people. She knows how the mem- brane of awareness widens and becomes more delicate as the screw of pain is put on.

The end of Mr. Gale is flat. Miss Easton leaves him farming, losing money and facing a hostile family as if she knew she had not seen all round him and wanted him for further reference. She has the air of writing an essay about him, and that is fatal to novelists. But her Margery, the young second wife, is a character of exceptional interest and is well-handled. She is a young woman of our times : intel- lectual, well-educated, nervous, serious and alive ; she has reacted against the intellect and has turned to work on a farm, in pursuit of sanity. A fanaticism in her is attracted by the fanaticism of the artist in Mr. Gale. it is not until after marriage that she discovers the difference between loving him and being " in love " with him. The final scene in which she leaves the house to go for a walk and is encircled by watchers who have been sent out by Gale—he supposes she is mad—is terrible and very successful, if one cuts out the melodramatic jump from the roof. It is the kind of scene which makes one decide that a writer is a genuine novelist and not merely a readable observer of his neisrh- hour's character.