FICTION
By FORREST REID
MR. HAMPSON has always been interested in problems of form. From Saturday Night at the Greyhound on, each of his novels keeps austerely to a predetermined method of presentation, though the method may, and in fact does, vary from book to book. And it is easy to see that Mr. Hampson takes a pleasure in these formal patterns. So, I admit, do I, though to the novelist indifferent to them (Tolstoy is usually dragged in to justify the indifference) such niceties probably seem the sign of a rather finicking mind. Yet the most artless novelist must to some extent select and arrange his material, even though his purpose have nothing to do with art. Mr. Hampson, in fact, only selects and arranges with this dissimilarity, that one of his principal aims obviously is to achieve shapeliness of outline.
Let us glance at the construction of his new novel, Care a/ "The Grand." It is divided into seven parts—one for each day of the week. Each of these parts contains three sub- divisions—morning, noon, and night. Again, the action is presented through seven persons—four of them members of the hotel staff, the other three visitors—and each of these characters is given a morning, a noon, and a night You will see that the planning has been pretty thorough.
Now all this may appear quite unimportant, and doubt- less would be so, did it not contribute to the success of the novel as a whole. But in my opinion it does. The object of the book is to show us, both from the inside and the out- side, the life and working of a big provincial hotel, and I cannot see how by any other method than that he has employed Mr. Hampson could have given this with an effect of unity. The material in the raw is fragmentary and amor- phous; by giving it form Mr. Hampson makes of it a work of art.
There is the question of the story, and there is either no story or else there are seven stories. Certainly there is no single theme in which all the characters are involved and which is worked out to a dramatic climax. In a sense, when the book ends everybody is carrying on as before, except a couple of the visitors who depart to fulfil their destinies else- where. Nevertheless, a change has taken place—things are not the same on that Sunday night as they were on the previous Monday morning. Problems have arisen and been solved, anxieties set at rest, the veil has been lifted from seven private lives, and it is left to our imagination to work out a future from what we have already learned and seen. These characters have all been completely realised, with the exception, perhaps, of the Government Inspector, who, for me at least, remained a rather vague figure. The rest are as living as may be, and one among them—Seth, the kitchen- boy—is among Mr. Hampson's finest creations. He ranks with Tom of The Greyhound. Moreover, I do not believe that any other novelist could have drawn him with the same knowledge, the same sympathy. That strange mixture of crudeness and sensitiveness, of toughness and innocence, is absolutely convincing ; but to reproduce it required a par- ticular kind of understanding. There is charm in the por- trait, there is beauty, there is pathos, yet it would be easy to be blind to those qualities, in which case all would boil down to an impression of a rather grubby, weedy, small boy scared to death of losing his job. Of course, Mr. Hampson was right not to make the whole book Seth's. I myself could never have resisted doing so, but then it would have been a different book, lacking the breadth and solidity of the present chronicle. We should have seen nothing of the hotel as it really is, but only Seth's very unimportant place in it, his experience of one tiny corner of its multifarious life.
Etarny and Sally is a much simpler novel than Care of "The Grand," but there is this resemblance between them, that not the slightest attempt is made to create interest by means of an invented plot. The characters and their work are all that matter, and if we are not interested in these, then the book falls to the ground. Now, Mr. Hampson has a peculiar gift. I cannot analyse it, but when he writes of a kitchen-boy scraping carrots or eyeing potatoes we are mys- teriously interested in those carrots and potatoes—to the point that nothing could induce us to skip a word. Arnold Bennett possessed the same gift, and it is a gift, for I am quite sure the writer himself could not explain it. Mr. Williams is less fortunate, yet I recommend his novel—it seems so true to the actual struggles of the small fanner. I wish there had been only that, but the scheme of the book is to present the encroachment of a modern mechanical world upon the ancient pastoral world, and this can only be done through a kind of synopsis covering some fifty years, with certain events standing out as landmarks—the Queen's Jubilee, the Boer War, the advent of the motor-car, the Great War, &c. To me this historical pageant was much less interesting than the private scenes. Actually, the best thing in the book is the treatment of the attachment between Bamy and Sally. In middle life Bamy acquired Sally, who was then a foal half an hour old. He brings her up himself, and they grow old together. Sally survives his wife and son and daughter, and is dearer to him, I am afraid, than any of these. In the end, at the age of thirty, she is killed by a motor-car. I liked the novel—or, at least, parts of it. The picture of the changing social and economic con- ditions has been done so often before that it has become some- what stale, but the rest of the book is fresh with the peculiar freshness of nineteenth-century pastoral romance.
I suppose it would be possible to take As for the Woman as a satire on impressionable foung men, though I do not think that was quite Mr. Iles's intention. The blurb describes a love-story "between a young man and an older woman, idealistic on his part, semi-maternal on hers," but that romantic conception is rather out of keeping with the character of Mrs. Pawle, a woman who mingles sensuality with religion, and comes to businesslike terms with a de- generate husband. Mrs. Pawle left me dubious. She begins as a sympathetic character and ends as the contrary. Or is it that Alan is deceived in her at first, for he is only twenty- one and rather foolish? His is, at any rate, the best portrait in the book.. We see him as delicate and slightly effeminate, and in thought, word, and action, for the most part he rings true. Not always, however. Hopeless rabbits at tennis do not suddenly become brilliant players because they happen to be " in a cold rage." Nor, after he imagines he has killed Dr. Pawle, do I believe he would have allowed Mrs. Pawle to dress him up in woman's clothes and send him out on a wild attempt to evade the police. That lady's conduct is most peculiar. She knows that her husband is not in the least dead, and the whole episode smacks of sensational melodrama. But I dare say I am grumbling at Mr. Iles for not writing the romance of the blurb, and giving us instead the study of an " affair " that might easily have termi- nated in one of those sordid criminal trials which seem, while one reads them, to be so strangely removed from normal life. I am quite sure Mr. Iles could write a novel containing no sensational element The opening some when Alan is with his family, the scene when he discovers that he no longer cares for Kathleen—these, to my mind, are not only better, but much mare interesting than the erotic entanglement which so nearly proves fatal.
A good many people will like Dr. Norton's Wife, yet the subject is painful, the kind of subject that used to be asso- ciated with Ibsen and Bjomson. And undoubtedly there is something genuinely tragic in the situation of the invalid wife who knows that her disease is incurable and eventually will lead to mental deterioration. Then, too, there is the attractive sister, who looks after the house and is in love with the husband. But this is an American novel and takes anything but a Norwegian course. The tale, which is well told, cannot be happy, but Dr. Norton is a conscientious and decent man, and the whole thing somehow produces a pathetic rather than a depressing effect.
Previous page
