Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER

Michael and his Angels. By Lewis Gibbs. (Dent. 7s. 6d.) Edna his Wife. By Margaret Ayer Barnes. (Cape. 'Ss. 8d.) Life with Father. By Clarence Day. (Chatto and Windus.

• 7s. 6d.) Out of that Dream. By Katherine Newborg. (Heinemann. 78. 6d.)

EVERY now and again a reviewer opens a novel which cannot be easily classified, which is imaginative and surprising, and which delights him by its expression of a curiously individual attitude to life. Such a novel is Joy Court. So far removed is it from the ruck of contemporary fiction that one is at first tempted to wonder whether one is not perhaps the victim of

an ingenious leg-pull, but the temptation quickly vanishes, and the entertainment proceeds. The book is peculiar in con- struction, in style, and in outlook, a mixture of the old-fashioned and the advanced, of propaganda and surrealism, and might almost have resulted from a collaboration between Mrs.

Humphry Ward and M. Max Ernst on a theme borrowed from one or more of the brothers Powys. The author, whom I judge to be a woman, reveals a blend of naivety and shrewdness ; she has that air of simplicity which is often alarming because it seems like sophistication. turned inside out, and you cannot always be sure whether she is being ironical or not. What is the book about ? It is about people in Suffolk before the War, and the careful chapters, prefixed with quotations,. mostly from Tennyson, and conducted in a slightly stilted style, produce a subtler illusion of the period than is usually achieved by our numerous cavalcaders. There is a married middle-class

couple named Joy. Amelia (" the last of the • Bowlands of Whistling Well ") is a capable and admirable woman, but her

husband Septimus is feeble-minded, and they have two daughters, Pansy-Sarah and Daffodil-Jane, who take strongly after the father. Frustrated in her existence as wife and mother, Amelia finds scope for her energies first in converting a ruin called Log's Hutte into a dwelling, then in putting up a number of cottages called Joy Court, then in taking an interest in the lives of their notably various tenants. Her husband, who has " an almost inordinate predilection for pedestrianism," suddenly disappears, and her daughters, who raise poultry, discover a human hand in the hen house. Then :

" Smack, smack,' the resounding slaps delivered with angry vehemence by Daffodil-Jane on the face of her sister, Pansy- Sarah, rang through ' Joy Court ' " ... • - -

for they were quarrelling over their macabre discovery. From this point we are confronted with a mystery, for nobody seems to know how or why the hand (part of "the leaden shell of a forthfared spirit ") got into the hen house, or even whose it is. Naturally a close enquiry has to be made into the lives and characters of the tenants of Joy Court, and subsequent events give Miss Layland-Barratt a chance to show her knowledge of human nature, her delight in human individualities, and her gift for saying much in a few words. When the mystery is solved and the tale ended it is easy to remind oneself that, judging by the dull standards of realism or the precise ones of the detective story, she has not burked digressions and improbabilities, but it is a great relief to find fiction as strange as truth, and an author to whom originality of expression seems to come naturally. If Miss Leyland- Barrett wishes to compare a " bright-eyed little woman " to a wren she calls her " reminiscent of a sonsy Jenny Wren to those

persons who had a knowledge of British birds." And who else could write such phrases as " through all•her privations her

feet retained their symmetrical shape," or " she prepared his supper, watering it with hot burning tears not perceptible to his palate," or " the soundless sorrow of 'a soul is the most pitiful pulsation in the universe " ? Wko else could have so neatly described a village Lothario ?

" Love blinded the Saxonby girls who were so incautious as to look into the deceiving blue eyes, fringed in curling black lashes, of the elusive Stewart Swinehead."

He " left his two legs behind in a base hospital in France," and on returning home characteristically remarked, " If I had to lose something I'd rather my legs than any other part." In the course of the book I note allusions to nearly

sixty deaths, but that is only a fragment of the evidence of z_ If Joy Court is for connoisseurs, of the• unusual, Michael and his Angels is for amateurs of the conventional. Mr. Lewis Gibbs has long since found a way of being unpretentious without being dull, and his novels are remarkable for decent feeling, nice-mindedness and kindliness. Michael was the son of a poor clergyman, and, largely owing to the fact that his father was jeered at in public-by guttersnipes for having only one eye, he grew up with a feeling of inferiority. His father died, his mother married' again, and at the age of seventeen he found himself penniless and at a loose end in London. He obtained a job as a clerk, and later as an instructor in a business college, found friends, muddled a love affair, went to the War, came back and worked in a factory and, though living amongst people suffering from the aftermath, managed to work out his own salvation to a happy conclusion. Filling in the detail of such a not very exceptional existence, Mr. Gibbs is at his best. He knows what a rainy Bank holiday is like and the limitations of a lunch hour, he sees clearly the difficulties and troubles that beset the lonely, the poor, the conscientious and the unprivileged. In his ability to face grimness without bitterness he is peculiarly English, and he never forgets that although " to anyone who looks at them from far enough away, most hurnan affairs have a lunatic appearance . . . to anyone close to them, or better still, concerned in them, they- have a remarkable show of detailed order to offer." Thus; " of all the- varied, uncertain, trivial, or purposeless things that Michael had done in his life, of all he' had 'thought, said •and seen; 'there remained so little--half a handful of withered grain," but

there was a knowledge in his heart, like a half-smothered but inextinguishable fire." •

To the average novel-reader I should recommend Edna his Wife rather than either of the preceding boOICS: This is a smooth and efficient American comedy, which begins with a brief close-up of Edna Jones; fat grids fiftyalivel- getting out of her car in Broadway at eleven in the morning in order to go to the cinema in search of vicarious romance. The rest of the book, which is long and unflagging, traces her career from the time when she was only a stationmaster's daughter in Blue Island, Illinois, trying to look like a Gibson Girl. It is the story of a homely, unambitious, sentimental and not at all clever woman mated to a go-getting lawyer. They live in Chicago and go up in the world, and people say :

" Wives of great men all remind us

We should leave our wives_ behind . .„4 a r. , They move on to Washington and then to New York ; Paul goes up and up in the world, and Edna; nicknamed Paul's Plight, tries to keep up with him, but gets left behind. Her children grow up and marry, and very much alone, she divides her days between beauty-culture and a Russian 'gigolo. " She had been thirty years married," and " Paul did not need her— even as a housekeeper . . . yet her days must be filled." Then comes the discovery that Paul has been unfaithful to her for fifteen years, the painful readjustment, and by way of compensation, a chance meeting with the man she ought to have married, a railwayman. The situation is ably presented, and the conspectus of a streak of American life convincing, though. I- don't believe that Freud was a topic at the dinner tables of Chicago business men before the War.

Life with Father deals with the same class in the same country, but takes us a little further back in tithe. In a series of pleasant, intimate sketches Mr. Clarence Day builds up a portrait of an energetic paterfamilias in his • domestic setting. There is art in his apparent artlessness, but in Out of that Dream the process is reversed. Miss Newborg pops a self-satisfied young woman on a ship bound from Cannes to New York, where she is to be married. All the characters rhapsodise to one another about the sea, and in the fog of hot air thus engendered the heroine becomes the divine necessity to everybody that many young women oa boats would like to be, but for the male reader there is very little satisfaction to be had out of that dream.

Miss Layland-Barratt's abundant interest in life, particularly in-the sorrows of women and the selfishness of men, in social distinctions, in the minds of children, and in the importance of heredity.