Fiction
By V. S. PRITCHETT Ma. O'DomsELL's new novel describes the successful attempt of an emigrant, returning in destitution to his native village, and filled with Socialist ideas, to set up a Co-op. in com- petition with the local shop. By forcing all the peasants into its debt, the shop has a stranglehold upon the community ; the shopkeeper, of course, has the priest on her side, and so, in a few pages, we are in the midst of .the passions of small town politics. The end, of course, is riot—the end of the book, that is ; for one imagines the disturbance still going on. It is left bravely like this Phil Timony was sitting on top of a chimney, his corduroy trousers dangling above the heads of the crowd. And when he spoke the great throng beneath just tilted their faces upward and listened. Dan Boyle raised his fists into the sunshine in a silent cheer. And then he pushed into the crowd, and the othSrs filtering into the stilly throng set up little swirls of tense faces."
Irish writers excel in fresh and shining pictures of men and women as animals in action. They are seen as athletes, fighters, angels, gods and heroes—with their corresponding opposites. The surface of the physical, but not its interior sensuality, these writers render as no others can. They are continuously eloquent and high:spirited. " She exulted."
`1- She railed." She cried." " She cheered." " Her body cheered." Such phrases occur on almost every one of Mr. O'Donnell's pages. One thinks of him as yelling at a hurling match and not writing a noveL When the cheers die— writing at this pitch has its monotony—they are replaced by a delightful tenderness and gentle observation. For example, n speaker, appealing for the shop, cunningly begins to talk about the larder, the kitchen and all the agonies of the peasant wife's economy. Mr. O'Donnell observes :
" A woman here and there hid her head behind a neighbour, shy to have her mind laid bare like this."
Mr. O'Donnell's virtues and defects as a novelist are those Of a good talker. His eloquence arrests and beguiles, and then annuls itself by its very abundance. Sometimes he is only garrulous. And while, like most brilliant writers who give one-a vehement; close-up-physical sense of the scene, he rewards most when read slowly, it must be confessed that his tale is a trivial one.
Here I must pause to note an inevitable English prejudice. The rise of realism in the peasant novel has caught the English novelist virtually without peasantry to write about ; he has been driven to invent a highly stylized rustic—see Mr. Coppard and Mr. T. F. Powys—who, whatever his poetic and allegorical virtues, could never have any political or social business or place in anything but a world of "gossips" and "neighbours." It would be ridiculous in England to obtrude the small town detail of the peasants' affairs ; at least, the English peasant of literary tradition is an urban recreation. The correct comparison-in-aid-of-judgement to make with the work of a writer like Mr. O'Donnell is rather that of foreign writers from countries which, like Ireland, are " On the edge of the Stream " of the European tradition and not in the midst of it. I thought of the small town Spanish people of Ramon Perez de Ayala who measure them- selves and their affairs against the modern world with as little self-consciousness as Mr. O'Donnell's people of Derry- more, and without the shrinking stylization of Mr. Powys's Dorsetshire men and maidens or the debased quaintness of the inhabitants of Thrums. The great revolutions and changes begin, it has been pointed out, at• the• edges of civilization.
Mr. Neil Gunn writes at one meditative remove from his eighteenth-century Highlanders who are shown suffering
the agony of the evictions. It is difficult to write about this book, because Mr. Gunn tells the story so obliquely and obscurely that one has to turn back again and again for the lost threads ; on the other hand this is the obscurity of a writer of subtle and moving poetic intuition, whose imagina- tion has profoundly grasped the atmosphere of the glens, the changes of life and climate in them, and the tragedy of the peasant remnant who were lured away by false promises to useless wars and whose families were driven off to make room—for sheep ! In the centre are the stories of Mairi, the old peasant woman with the long, pagan memory of the race, of Elie and her child, outcasts on the road, of Seonaid and Murdoch—another Beatrice and Benedick of the glens. It is a grave and sombre book, now clouding over with tedious obscurity, now illuminated by jabs and flashes of excellent narrative. It is, above all, a book of atmospheres, of essences touched and brought to sight by intuition, in which the unconscious ties that bind people and the unconscious impulses they obey are most delicately made clear. This may be seen at its best in the study of the yielding and devoted Elie, the growth of whose love for Colin is beautifully observed. To write lyrically about love is the easy way out of the difficulty—if it is ever considered a difficulty at all : on the whole, one would suppose that we think it easy, misunderstanding the self-hypnotic pleasure—but to put down the pain and apprehension in great happiness requires a serious pen. Here Mr. Gunn's weakness as a story teller and architect becomes his strength as a poet. I was baffled by a book which was so confused in movement as a whole and so good in parts.
The Devil, Poor Devil is nothing like as good as its title. The devil, incarnated in a youth whose grandmother has disappointed him by rising from the dead, goes with the lady into the country and there attempts to become the rival of a young novelist for the heart of a village maid. This wench Fenella, who—I must confess—is a very affecting young woman, seems to have stepped straight out of Mr. Powys. In case I am doing Mr. Constantine wrong, she must be quoted : " For though pigs, the grown 'uns, be greedy and unkind, and a sow ate the hand off a baby in this village not two years past, and I love them the least of all our handled beasts, yet humans be more swinish than they and for all their dirt and smell the pigs' housen be better than Barley Cottages. And I did ought to know, for I was born in 'un, bred in 'un, and couldn't get free no shape till my school time were over."
The devil is unhappy because no one believes in him, and I cannot say that Mr. Constantine's allegory in disintegration made the problem any clearer. Perhaps we must call the book a pretty and wayward decoration, and leave it at that.
Mr. Laver's slick picture of art, artists, connoisseurs and models is not hanging in the most advantageous company. He is a smooth, facile, witty and agreeable writer, the much concerned with what—after a bout of earthiness—one is inclined to call the mere cosmetics of living. He has taken Du Maurier's world and thinned it down until there is not much more than all the things Du Maurier would have died rather than mention. Mr. Layer's naughtiness is fairly amusing, but how much better the whole thing was done in the farouche Antic Hay. Was Mr. Laver a little afraid ? Background for Venus has, however, within these strictures many virtues. It has a good, well-told intrigue, which I found engrossing to the end ; and its two women, the ex-model and Bella, the working model, are very well drawn. Bella's night journey down to Southampton on a lorry is a good piece of writing ; and very good, too, is the account of the visit to Mr. Perridan, the collector of snuff boxes. If I had not had the feeling that Mr. Laver was ill-at-ease in his sophistica- tion, I should no doubt have appreciated his ingenuity, his inventiveness and his amusing Bond Street spit-and-polish more.
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