Fiction
To Love and be Wise. By Josephine Tey. (Peter Davies. 9s. 6d.) UNDOUBTEDLY The Wall is a masterpiece of imaginative reconstruction. The device Hersey has used for his story is the invented discovery of records kept by one Noah Levinson from November, 1939, till May, 1943, of the lives of the Warsaw Jews. Hersey presents himself solely as the editor, the man who from an immense hoard of buried papers chose enough to fill 629 pages of consecutive narrative covering the lives of a stable though inevitably fluid group that could effectively symbolise the lives of all. Undeniably the book is great, is moving, impressive, permeated with deep Jewish feeling, seemingly authentic. And yet one knows, and remembers throughout, that it is not, in fact, authentic, and so finally comes to ask whether Hersey's method is the proper one for dealing with the tragedy of the Warsaw ghetto.
That tragedy was on the heroic scale. All the emotions it contained, the misery, cruelty; courage, despair, kindliness, religion, were as near absolutes as is conceivable. It happened thus, and to the facts of its happening (as recorded, for in- stance, by Bernard Goldstein in The Stars Bear Witness) there is nothing that imaginative reconstruction can add. Certainly such a tragedy must inspire imaginative writers, poets, essayists to expression that may well be as heroic as the tragedy itself. But such expression must surely be born of subjective reaction to the experience, must be transmuted through the individual personality of the artist. To subord- inate the personality, to give, as Hersey has given, an imag- inary fictional mock-authentic alternative to reality is not to create but to substitute. The emotion that this recital of seeming fact cannot help but evoke from the reader is, in fact, spurious compared with the emotion roused in us by the truth. The truth exists. Is it not better either to record it or by inspiration to transcend and enhance it rather than to create a purely imaginative pseudo-truth ?
I put forward this point of view hesitantly, and must emphasise that as a judgement it may have no more than subjective validity. The last thing I should wish to do is to dissuade anyone from encountering this devoted book, a book steeped in Jewish thought and tradition, a book of total sincerity. Though I believe it to be experience at third-hand and a second-best to truth, it is, none the less, experience horrifying and tremendous.
The importance of The Wall must not lead me to do less than justice to the admirable books that follow. Scamp, for instance, is surprisingly good. Here is a story that most of us have grown long since to loathe—the young intellectual writer equally unsuccessful in work and love, the background of Charlotte Street, Soho and the Fitzroy Tavern, the crowd of spivs, perverts, artists and writers manques who hang around the cafés and pubs. And yet with all this (and I forgot to mention the dirty bath with the rats scrabbling beneath it) the book has freshness, vitality, wit and pity. Its author is twenty-nine, and has written a book unmistakably emanating from a younger generation with a different outlook from his frowsty predecessors. Here, certainly, is all the horror of submerged urban life, the mindless, landless, whatever-else- it-is-less intelligentsia and proletariat. But here, too, is the possibility of escape to sanity, a possibility that to other writers in this genre never so much as reared its pretty head.
Josephine Tey has always been absolutely reliable in pro- viding original and mysterious plots with interesting and likeable characters, unguessable endings and scrupulous fairness throughout ; To Love and Be Wise will not diminish her reputation. For something to read in bed, it could hardly be bettered. MARGHANITA LASKI.
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