Fiction

By GRAHAM GREENE .

I, Claudius. By Robert Graves. (Barker. 8s.)

THE Vicar of Bray would have made an admirable member of the Book Society Committee. It must be a little startling for the ordinary member with an appreciation leis catholic

than that of his literary tasters to turn from the lush romance of Mr. Louis Golding in April to Mr. Robert Graves's stern puritanism in May. If Mr. Golding is All Right, can Mr. Graves be All Right, too ? Surely the eminent tasters have played him a rather shabby trick by choosing in successive months these two extremists ; the blow would have been more gently delivered if instead of Mr. Golding Miss Mackenzie had been chosen, a more controlled example of the romantic novelist, and instead of Mr. Graves Miss Montgomery, who is more " literary " than Mr. Graves but is less harshly sabbatarian.

For Mr. Graves's novel is an extreme example of the reaction from a " literary " style ; his object is roughly the same as

Mr. Hemingway's, his manner different. The period he has chosen, the last years of Augustus, the reigns of Tiberius and Caligula, has a violence and brutality which might easily have attracted the novelist of the bull ring; Mr. Hemingway, too, would probably have told this story in the first person (it is much easier to avoid being literary if the tone is kept conver- sational), but Mr. Hemingway would probably have chosen

as his mouthpiece a far simpler character than the despised neurotic Claudius. The dead level of Mr. Graves's conver-

sational prose proves quite inadequate to convey the com- plexity of Claudius. Mr. Graves indeed has gone much further in his revolt than Mr. Hemingway. Mr. Hemingway's revolt is against inexactitude, emotional insincerity, against false eloquence, which Mr. Herbert Read has described as fine writing not supported by an inner structure of fine thinking. His puritanism is alive, he is capable of fine writing in the best sense. Mr. Graves's is dead. This pallid rigid style is a revolt against every form of vividness, it is a kind of artistic suicide.

The general style of this very long novel is set in the opening paragraph :

"I Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Gernaanicus This-that-and-the- other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as Claudius the Idiot,' or That Claudius,' or 'Claudius the Stammerer,' or ` Clau-Clau-Claudius ' or at best as 'Poor Uncle Claudius,' am now about to write this strange history of my life."

One must admire the skill with which Mr. Graves has caught the coyness of a rather whimsical old man and maintained this tone unwearyingly to the last page ; it is even possible that Claudius would have written in this style, but Claudius's object would have been a historian's, not a novelist's, and one of the main tasks of :a novelist 'still remains the creation of• character. Mr. Graves has simply given an ingenious and painstaking imitation of a historical work translated from the

Latin. If this book had indeed been by Claudius, the reader would not have criticized the superficiality of the characters (the Bad Woman, Livia, the Bad Man, Tiberius, the Noble Youth, Germanicus), his interest would have been in the facts presented at first hand. But Mr. Graves's facts are only third hand ; it would be better for those interested in Roman history to go straight to the sources or to a modern historian (as far as I can make out Mr. Graves has accepted unreservedly the highly coloured version of Tiberius given by Tacitus and Suetonius). The merits of his book are all negative ; it is never sentimental, never melodramatic, never obscure. But in spite of these virtues, it is an example of literary puritanism in extreme decadence. If it were by a writer less distinguished and less conscious of his aims, the flatness of the prose might be ascribed to incompetence ; but Mr. Graves has obviously weighed every lifeless phrase :

"The one person who comes well out of this ugly story is Julia's mother, Scribonia, whom it will be recalled Augustus had divorced in order to be able to marry Livia. Now a very old woman, who had lived in retirement for a number of years she boldly went to Augustus and asked permission to share her daughter's banishment. She told him in Livia's presence that her daughter had been stolen Vona her as soon as born but that she had always Worshipped her from a distance and, now that the whole world was set against her darling, she wished to show what true mother's love was. And in her opinion the poor child was not to blame : things had been mado very difficult for her. Livia laughed contemptuously but must have felt pretty uncomfortable. Augustus, mastering his emotion, signed that the request was granted.

From this passage it will be seen with what a Claudian tyranny Mr. Graves lops the head of every epithet which by its vividness might stand above the low level of his subject prose.

After a year's reviewing, I can remember no more interesting first novel than Swallows ; it would be an unhappy irony to use the word "promise," for Miss Montgomery died before her novel was published. The style is as " unliterary " as Mr. Graves's, but it is infinitely more expressive. Written with an air of high-spirited depression, maliciously witty, her novel tells the story of a Victorian clergyman called Swallow, his wife and children. They live on three pounds a week on the edge of a great estate, the women delude them- selves for a generation with the idea that one day the aristo- cracy will take them up fafter more than twenty years comes an invitation to dinner), Swallow, who has lost all his wife's money in speculation, alienates by his hypocrisy a wealthy sister-in-law, lives a long while, ruins his sons, dies and leaves his family penniless. "A boisterous breeze frolicked among the mourners when they went outside to commit Swallow to the earth. It blew two hats into the grave, and one was buried with the coffin." The story is merciless to the end, to the retirement to the seaside villa, life continuing on the inevitable three pounds a week paid now by the once wealthy relative who has taken to drink and shares the Swallows' home. The War comes, bringing a few Zeppelins to drop bombs in the fields and kill some chickens, a few trenches on the East Coast cliffs, some barbed wire in Poppyland, the War stops : "'What was the worst in the war, do you think, Livvy ? Not having butter or bacon, or those awful evening services in church— just a few candles to see by.'

I think the worst part was that nothing changed for us,' said Livvy." '

It is all horribly, true, Miss Montgomery has made no compromise, yet one remembers less the rather familiar story, than the manner, the wit, the malice, the delicate cruel choice of revealing episode. There are curious similarities between Miss Montgomery's style, especially in dialogue, and Miss Beatrix Potter's ; her human characters are strung up with the same impartiality as Mr. Tod and Tommy Brock, and there are moments when the fate of poor Wilhelmina Swallow recalls the baffled flutterinis of Jemima Puddleduck in search of "a convenient dry nesting place."

Miss Mackenzie's novel is quite a favourable example of the literary romance. The prose is ornate, the time early Victorian, the theme love and loyalty, but the very familiarity of the situations, the violent death of the waster husband, the wife's renunciation of the man who loves her, the tender happy surprise on the last page, has the-charm of a period piece. One remembers Stanley Weyman and other adept ticklers of the tear ducts who are now dead. Is it an illusion to believe that those writers were not quite so exclusively feminine in their appeal ? So much of Single Combat is to a man hopelessly obscure.

"It was a very satisfying corbeille, with a sealskin jacket, a whole parure of embroidered amethysts, and yards of lace : Madame had sniffed a little because the lace was only Bruxelles appliqué and Chantilly, but Amandine, who was most romantically in love with Monsieur Octave, was as delighted as if it were point de Venise, and fluttered among it like a substantial butterfly.'

Miss Mackenzie's style is less overpoweringly well-dressed when once she has established her romantic situation. The Scottish scene obviously wakens a direct and not a literary response. Reading of" the sleek shift of a sea freckled with rain" ; how "the weed was bare with half-tide, between the

stones and the green clearness beneath, that rose and sank smoothly, making the gunnel dunt on the sea-worn stone, and the long shaft of the boat-hook change its slant," I found myself regretting the very able writer who has been lost to a literary form without contemporary meaning.