Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER

Guest of Reality. By Par :Lagerkvist.. Translated by Erik Mesteito'n aiic):D. W.' Harding. 7s. 6d.) The Birds. By Frank Baker. (Peter Davies. 7s. 6d.) Figure of Eight. By Compton Mackenzie:- (Cassell. 75. ) Career: By Phil Stong. (Barker. 7s. 6d.) -

EmirrEEN months ago I had the pleasure of noticing in1hese pages ,

• • - a translationof a story by the distinguished. Swedish writer Par. Lagerkvist. Published at Cameidge, and called The Eternal Smile, it was an enquiry into the nature of things by means not of stark realism but of fantasy. It told of a variety of people who looked back after death at their earthly existence,- and then combined to ask God to explain it to them.' I suggested that it was an admirable expression of a Civilised paganism. It hinted at mankind's duty to be happy and at the need for loving life because it is " the one• thing Conceivable among all that is inconceivable " ; and whilst allowing for.evil in the scheme of thingS it was pleasant and comforting.' The Eternal Smile now makes a more public appearance in -company with two other stories, Guest of Reality and The Hangman. I recommend it now, as I recommended .it at if . only because Lagerkvist, in his answers to the question, ." What is life like ? " can be trusted, and trusted in a way slightly different front the way anybody else has ever been trusted—because, in fact, he is an artist. Guest of Reality, Ntilich Was written in 1925, is an unusually beautiful story of a boy's childhood and adolescence. Not banal nor crude nor sentimental, it catches. the rhythm of a whole way of living. The boy Anders was one of several children of a railwayman, and the central event of his child- hood was the death of his grandmother, who lived on a farm. Lagerkvist conveys perfectly the atmosphere of a loving family, and the child's delight in his existence mingled with dread of the unknown, that mingled dread and delight felt so intensely by the young. In spite of the social status of the characters there is not one word of political propaganda, and it is restful to read of working people who manage to pass their days without an overmastering sense of grievance, living quiet, simple, dignified and fairly contented lives. If there still exist people who like to boast that their schooldays were the best time of their lives, let them ponder the following passage : " kwas the beginning of youth, the most wretched age of man ...

the falsest, most unreliable, most worthless. Childhood, manhood, age, they can all be meaningful and real for us. Youth is something unworthy of man. A rootlessness, an irresponsible freedom, of per- sonality . . . insincerity, falsity, in life itself—but unworthy of men. No doubt that's why all the hollow phrase-mongers shout about it., they got on best then. It was their time."

The third story (1938) is again allegorical. It is concerned with the nature of evil, especially as it appears in contem- porary cults of political and racial violence. It has an extra- ordinary and nightmarish actuality and the grimmest kind of irony ; it reminds us, in terms of literature, that the world is largely run by persons who make Colonel Blimp look like a far-seeing statesman. Lagerkvist has caught the very echo of the noisy madness of the age : •

" On the contrary, sir ! Violence is the highest expression not only of the physical but even of the spiritual forces of mankind ! This is a fact which has at last, thanks to us, become perfectly evi- dent. And those who think otherwise we shall convince precisely by the use of this violence, and they'll certainly believe it then." Or again :

"Yes, it's essential that after a time mankind should pull down what it has built up ! Otherwise it lacks the proper childlike spirit. And the pulling down is more important than the simple,. purely mechanical building up. Those are the great, proud ages ! There will always be the little persevering drudges who build up the world, you needn't worry about that . ."

And this has quite a parliamentary ring : •

" You know where you are with a war, but a people at peace is menaced by all sorts of unknown dangers."

Now there are all sorts of devices by which a writer may try and show us how awful we are and how nice we might be if only we would learn to behave. The one chosen by Mr. Frank Baker is to let us suppose that life as we know it has been brought to a speedy end by flocks of malignant and remarkably intelligent birds. Long afterwards an aged survivor describes to his daughter -how. people used to -live

when he was a young man. That is to say, Mr. Baker, who is evidently a person of liberal opinions and something of an idealist, is free to give a satirical picture of the world today. Fables of this kind are generally best when short and sharp,

after the model of Candide, and depend largely for their effect on an outrageous candour, a pointed revelation of the obvious. Mr. Baker howeVer is a little solemn and elaborate, and he

makes too much of his mysterious birds, or gives us the bird too much, for he is better at home truths than super- natural ornithology. The narrator, an erstwhile clerk in a City insurance office, bullied, bewildered, and in need of fresh air, had as unpleasant a view of modern London as could be wished. He had found himself in touch with " a type of humanity from whom selfish ambition had squeezed

every noble principle that might originally have been present," *and whether he is discuSsing things 'seen and heard or the ideals which largely move us; the leiuiesfof his memory are mostly liver-coloured. He ;remembers us as " heavy with grief, unrest, ill-health, and pride," rotten

with ambition, a prey to nationalism, slaVes to the Press, to athletics, and to the herd-instinef: . • -

" Team-spirit encouraged them to believe, not inthe individuality of their own solitary beings, but in the individuality of the herd."

He remembers how words were thrown at us by advertise- ment, the wireless (" a permanent background of indis-

criminate sound which could, in some measure, drive away the utter dread of solitude or quietness ") and by novelists : " There were thousands of novelists in my day ; I can now only remember the names of three or four . . . they did not create ; they coldly contrived their books. How strange they were ; how unreal ; how full of deadly earnestness."

Finally, his view of our muddle about sex is worth the attention of schoolmasters and others.

Turning from writers who look more or less questioningly into the heart of things, we find Mr. Compton Mackenzie fully occupied as ever in recording events of a kind that

have always interested him. Figure of Eight, which I imagine to be in some sense a sequel to Carnival, a novel Mr. Mackenzie

must have published nearly a quarter of a century ago, traces the destinies of a number of chorus girls who were employed at the same music-hall before the War. There was Irene' Dile whO was fated • to become " an old woman

in a basement in a red petticoat With a._ halfpenny dip! and a quartern of gin 7 ; Madge Wilson, one of nature's kept women ; Maudie Chapman, whose married life was unhappy ; Margery Seymour, a 'social climber ; Rita Vitali, fortunate in her children ; Queenie Danvers, a thief ; Gladys West, who had Managed -to engage the interest of a baron ; and Lucy Arriold, the chief figure, who made a successful marriage " above '! her. Mr. Mackenzie seems to have been always interested in the more or lesS Sickertian parts of Liidon, in the:4e back bedrooms in Camden Town where life oscillates between, crapulence. and respectability, and in their denizens. In Figure of Eight he wants to let us know where third-rate coryphieS go in the winter time He must have written nearly thiitjr novels, 'arid this one is no less smooth than its predecessors. • - • Career is, One of those small-town American novels which make the United _States seem furthee Off than any part'Of Europe.:' PitifiViile, Iowa, we are told, "'given gasoline and a supply of motion-picture films, could conveniently have seceded from the universe." But a case could be made to suggest that it has seceded from the universe,-so seleContained

and so foreign does it Seem. This may be partly because Mr. Stong " and • his Characters have a prickly and obliqiie

• - way of :expreSsing themSelVeS,' so . that it is not always easy to gather. what they are driVing at The story is of a decent, storekeeping farnily behaving Well in a time of crisis. That firm upper lip; of which the late Marie Dressler was a practised exponent, seldom relaxes, except to emit a flow of not very wise wisecracks ; there are heroic renunciations, moments of passion and sentiment, and a good'deal of -rather inseiuta'Ac comedy based on alcoholism: Mere and there one welcomes a joke. I. particularly liked Madame Saitimander,-whO used to chi-a high dive in flames into five feet of water and was described as " the fair foe of gravitation."