Fiction

BY HERBERT READ

EVELYN Scorr is a writer of intelligence aud sensibility (I seem to associate her name with the days when the Little Review and the Egoist. were the evangelists of an experi- mental world), and I plunged into the eight hundred pages of her novel without any of my usual hesitant shivers before such unplumbed depths. For the first two hundred pages my enthusiasm mounted. Here, I felt, was a psychological romance on a grand scale which did promise to reveal the instincts and aspirations of a modern woman as, in their time, illadame Bovary and Anna Karenina had done. Those first two hundred pages describe the precocious childhood and adolescence of an American girl, and are extremely vivid and real. The prose style, though tending to over-emphasis and downright unpleasant violence (as when, in one passage, "half the foliage was darkly rusted. The rest was spotted red as if a dying man had spat on it . . . the poplars spilled a leprosy of leaves . . . "), yet when more con- trolled produces a visual imagery of considerable lyric beauty : . "Beyond the bedroom bow, rain fell softly and continuonaly out of a dissolute immensity of dying evening sky. Along the street, as far as she could see, the walls of houses were perpetually worried by the bright, unceasing flood. The rainy smells which floated through the open windows almost maddened her. The simmering sounds which broke upon a transfixed world stabbed at her, rousing her to inarticulate expectancy. She sprang up from the couch, where she had thrown herself, and, rushing through the dingying halls to reach the door, dared the veranda, where the shower beat, and sent up spray from widening pools. The sweet web of the moist coolness blew against her heated face. . . ."

There are many passages of equal beauty throughout the

first quarter of this novel, but then the style becomes fiat and uninspired, and, though occasionally the old vitality is re- covered, the general texture of the book is never re-animated. The reason for this change is fairly obvious. At page 200 we take leave of Eva, and begin all over again with a completely new outfit of characters, the hero being Hans Haaska, a complex amalgam from the American melting-pot. But he is quite incredible as a human being, more particularly as a male; and, though Miss Scott has done so well with the two callow lovers who disturb her heroine's adolescence, all the grown men in the book strike me as preposterous and unreal. Eva and Hans are brought into contact through the agency of the War, and a new section of the book is devoted to their thwarted love. On page 465 we leave these characters and begin all over, again in New Zealand with the youth and adolescence of Evan Garret, who finally reaches Europe as a painter—and such a painter ! "If art could contain no more than a nice drawing-room would hold, to hell with it ! He wanted something stark and sumptuous and dry and glaring and unlike all this." He is always saying christ ' with a small "c ", and is altogether a D. H. Lawrence young man. "Oh, christ, if Louise—they would get away from this. Go to .America. Walt Whitman, Indians—and playing Jazz. Americans had verve, at least. They made you think of raw,

• fresh paint on very clean canvas. The room was hot, and the walls had a wavering look. He felt remarkably unlike himself. He hated sugar in his tea." But Louise dies, and he goes to hide his grief in a French village, where Eva and Hans happen to be hiding their sin (for Hans was already divorced and married a second time when he met Eva). Somehow the love of this pair had never been properly con- summated ; Hans was not the complete he-man Eva's pas- sionate nature demanded. So Evan providentially supplies her need, introducing complications which take another hundred pages to unravel. But in these Pages Miss Scott's style recovers something of its early .freshness and vitality, and we end her long book convinced that she could have written a much better one. The faults are the old faults against which I ceaselessly inveigh : lack of focus, lack of font monstrous lack of economy. And these are not artistic failings merely ; for in art they constitute the lack of all reality, of all life.

Alelco, after Eva Gay, is like some precious fruit after a heavy Mear I do not knovi *hailer-to call it a codrageOnis or a silly book. It deals with the friendship of a schoolmaster for one of his boys. The author, in a letter to the publisher

which is printed on the jacket, says bluntly that the book is not about homosexuality. "I have been at Rains to show that neither Martin Grahame (the master) nor Aleko himself is a homosexual." That, of course, depends on the definition of homosexuality. The invert is not, scientifically speaking, a completely positive phenomenon. Rather we are all androgynous, and in the infinite variations of the degree of the male and female characteristics in us, there is the possi-

bility, as between any two people of the same sex, f9r infinite degrees of what is crudely known as homosexuality or lesbianisni. " Aleko is a description, done with a good deal of. psychological competence and lyrical feeling, of one state or stage in that infinity of gradation. Whether such a descrip- tion should be published as a novel (rather than as a medical case history) depends on the degree of artistry with which it is done. I do not think Aleko is very significant as a work

of art, but it is too well written to be confined to the laboratory.

The Mother, on the other hand, suffers from a too deliberate conception of style. It is written consistently in the following manner : "Now it happened that in the new summer-time when the mother had borne her fourth child, the most evil quarrel that ever was between the man and the woman came to pass. It was on a day in the sixth month of the year and it was early summer, and it was such a day in that summer as might set any man to dreaming of new joy, and so that man had dreamed the whole morning long. The air was so full of languor and soft warmth, the leaves and grass so newly green, and the sky so bright and deep a blue that scarcely could he wo4 at all."

The style seems familiar, and there is no need to seek far to find its -iiatt.ern "And thus it passed on from Candlemass until after Easter, that the month of May was come, when every lusty heart beginneth to blossom, and to bring forth fruit ; for like as herbs and trees bring forth fruit and flourish in May, in like wise every lusty heart that is in any manner a lover, springeth and flourisheth in lusty deeds."

Which is from the Morte D'Arthur. Now it is possible that

Mrs. Buck would justify her method by some theory of aesthetic distance. She is writing of a remote country;

(China), and her characters are peasants remote from the, types of modern civilization. By writing in 'dock Malory she may have aimed at creating this illusion, of distancei. required for the unity of her picture. But it is impossible to write continuously in this falsetto style without in the end! acquiring a falsetto imagination and a falsetto mind. In the' end, that is to say, her world is unconvincing. For style is so important, that actually it not only creates reality, when it is right, but also uncreates it when it is wrong.; There is more than one way of good writing, any one of whichl. may illuminate some aspect of fife ; but bad-writing is merely! bad, and the worst kind of badness is the faux bon.

Susanne is a Danish prize novel. No one who realizes the Conditions which determine the choice of a prize in a literary,', competition is likely to judge modern Danish literature by this specimen. Within the limits of its popular appeal it seems: captivating enough. It describes the rise of a baker's daughterf. into the ranks of the wealthy bourgeois, and there seems to be

plenty of scope for senthnental.comedy and tragic pathos int the situation thus created. But to tell the truth I had morei.

respect kir my eyesight than to persevere to the end of this novel. It is printed in small grey type on poor paper withl; scarcely any margins. There can be no adequate excuse fort. such deleterious stinginess. Good type is presumably as cheapl, to compose as poor type, and Mere length is no excuse. The eight hmidred pages of Eva Gay are clearly printed in legible,' . type on good paper, and if it costs a shilling more that is much! less than is due to its proportionately-greater length.'; Perhaps in the case of Susanne a saving is effected on the text of the-

book to enable the publishers to insert forty pages of adver-i* tisements, but though the consumer always has to pay for the; advertisements that disfigure_the articles he buys (as well as the towns and the country he lives in) it is a queer sadisticfj

turn of the screw to make him do this at the additional cost ot his bodily health.