Fiction
Ah Well. By Jack B. Yeats. (Routledge. 6s.)
The Lads of the Village. By Hugh P. McGraw. (Michael Joseph. 8s. 6d.) THE poor dear 'thirties are treated with harsh impatience by the young editor in his foreword to the third volume of English Story. His naive assertion that " the Left Wing group " adequately digested " Marx, Joyce, Proust and Co." disarms one by its very innocence. However, labels are far too easy and meaningless; the wise reader will leave the editor out in the cold while,he explores the gallery for him- self. Twenty authors are represented, some for the first time, and the only generalisation for the whole volume is the word catholic. In Land of Promise Dorothy Baker makes an exciting experiment, presenting her material from three different planes of feeling. A youthful soldier, visiting a Cornish seaside village for the first time, creates a scandal by overstaying his period of leave ; the problem is handled with poetic insight and tenderness. Happy as the Day is Long, by J. Maclaren Ross, tells of a young man in need of a jof,, a loan, a meal: he gets some drinks, a snack, and plenty of meaning- less advice instead. This story has atmosphere, irony and economy. Henry Treece writes of an elderly schoolmistress, whose early life is evoked as her class reads aloud from The Primary School Reader. The sketch is well done, but spoilt by an unconvincing anti-climax.
A fable in the shape of a battle between a tank and a fire engine, staged in an arena for the edification of a crowd, by William Sanson, owes method to Kafka, but its fluid optimism is the author's own. L. J. Daventry's study of another young soldier on leave does not quite come off, but the author has a feeling for atmosphere and his imagination has depth. His name and that of Raymond Williams should be noted, for this is their first appearance as short story writers. Williams handles his material with considerable assurance, depicting working-men and their idiom with convincing details.
Material which is copious, or unusual, is not enough: it must be sufficiently digested and amplified if fogginess is to be avoided.
The problem of the soldier's feeling of isolation from civilian life crops up again in the story by Ronald Willetts, which lacks the clarity essential to such a theme. Elizabeth Berridge, Reginald Moore, Diarmuid Kelly and Nicholas Moore have work- able ideas, but all are marred by a too hasty exploration of possibilities.
One knows, more or less, what to expect from established writers ; for while their skill may re-excite us, their new work extend our experience, our impressions are built on to the foundations of previous knowledge. In the present collection there are contribu- tions from five authors, whose work is (or 'should be) known to those interested in the contemporary short story. Elizabeth Bowen offers us a shattering study in guilt. Osbert Sitwell more of his Grand Old Women. L. A. Pavey gives, with gentle irony, the vague uneasy flutterings of a man who has grown accustomed to his prison without bars. Sylvia Townsend-Warner an exploration of an abnormal situa- tion and Elizabeth Kyle a problem piece. A good collection.
Ah Well : A Romance in Perpetuity, by Jack B. Yeats, is an ex- travagant tale about a small town done with genuine affection. Many Irish writers, even the great and gifted, do, now and then, resort to something which can only be described as blarney. They have a delicious, but at times dangerous, gift of persuasion, added to a poetic fondness for words and phrases. The results are often more dubious than stimulating ; here is an example: " It was a sinless place, a kind of fool's paradise. A sort of Tom Tiddler's ground. But every now and then it became something else and some sugar plum filled young bull man would walk down beyond the dark trees where there was a small cliff above a deep pool in the salt tide. He'd choose the full ebb, and shoot himself so that he'd fall in the waters and have his body rolled away. It was a kind of gentility with them to do that." Ah, well!
Little is left unclarified in Hugh McGraw's Lads of the Village, which is a well-observed chronicle of the activities of a group of youths emerging from adolescence into manhood, against the back- ground of a small Midland town in the early 'thirties.
JOHN HAMPSON.
Previous page
