Fiction
This Was the Old Chief's Country. By Doris Lessing. (Michael Joseph. 9s. 6d.)
No Arms, No Armour. By Robert Henriques. (Collins. nos. 6d.)
EVERY human experience depends for its value on the human being to whom it comes. Platitude though this is, we do well to remind our- selves of it every now and then. Given the choice between reading about a film star, a dentist, a poor white, a miner or a schoolgirl, most people would choose in obedience to a prejudice ; regarding the experience of, say, the film star as more or less interesting and real " than that of, say, the miner or the dentist. These prejudices are much exploited by magazine editors, who prefer stories to emphasise unusual happenings rather than unusual qualities in the characters to whom the things happen. Such considerations, never remote from the reviewer, arc roused anew by the week's stories and novels. As a writer Mr. Coward is easily underrated. He has connived at this mistake by helping his public to dissociate themselves from the problems with which he deals. The basic human problems confront his characters, but their attempts to solve them strike Mr. Coward's public as irresponsible and bizarre —Design for Living. Private Lives—and therefore to be regarded merely as an entertainment. Private Lives says, with force and understanding, two or three basic things about the human heart ; but situation and behaviour are so heightened, repartee so pointed, that the truths are blown away in a warm wind of laughter.
There is less danger of this in Star Quality, the second volume of Mr. Coward's stories, which reveal unavoidably the murderous sharpness of his observation and the generous sympathies which prevent it from being merely lethal. One would expect of him readability and excellent dialogue. What one might not expect is excellent narrative. Nothing is harder than to sustain and animate a long stretch of narrative unbroken by dialogue. Mr. Coward proves his integrity and his craftsmanship by giving us two stories out of six with hardly any dialogue at all, but with narrative for which•brilliant is the only word ; narrative kept lively and amusing—often more than amusing—by an observation which darts everywhere with the quickness of a lizard, yet never loses sight of its main purpose.
Not all the stories are of equal value. I think the title story, for all its inside knowledge, tells us least ; there is a charade-like quality about Thii Time Tomorrow, despite the accuracy with which it recreates a flight across the Atlantic, and in places the writing is careless. But Stop Me If You've Heard It touches a jumping nerve, Ashes of Roses has shape and warmth of heart, Mr. and Mrs. Edgehill ambushes the reader continually with delights of observation and phrasing, and A Richer Dust is masterly, all the way to a surprise ending which is more than a surprise, adding depth and character with an economy which Mr. Maugham could not better. I have greatly enjoyed Mr. Coward's sextet, and am left with an increased respect for his qualities of heart and head.
Miss Lessing runs_ the contrary risk of being overrated. The themes she handles with such sincerity and power are so close to 'the public conscience, so real and immediate, that we are apt to forget our prejudices and judge her for her themes rather than for what she does with them. This would be most unjust ; Miss Lessing's work arisgrAirectly from her quality as a human being. She would write well about anything that inspired her. So, bearing in mind that her themes and characters are intrinsically. no more " real: " than Mr. Coward's, I. can the more freely say. that these short stories fulfil the promise of The Grass is Singing and estab- lish her as a writer of real importance. The stories flow naturally frotti their deep sourcea„. but ,their rising cannot have been easy. MisS Lessing knows where to start and when to stop, knowledge which. most short-story writers take a lifetime to acquire. - Each story gives the impress of an experience that is true on more than one level, and the best of them are magnificent. I arri not afraid of overrating Miss Lessing. Like the boy in A Sunrise on the Veldt, who'saw the buck eaten 'alive by ants, I have been given something to think about • a set of experiences to' reconcile with my own.
The theme of Homewaid Borne is an-other which could easily blue 'one's 'view of the novel itself. In her husband's absence a woman whose attitude towards the problem is already prejudiced adopts a Jewish boy from a concentration camp. The task of weaning him from that hideous early diet is made more difficult when her husband returns. Writing on a lower level of skill and perception than Mr. Coward or Miss Lessing, Miss Chatterton faces her theme with -honesty of purpose, and her novel, which is reall a study, not of the boy, but of the woman who adopts him, is kept on this side of sweetness by her realisation that her heroine has faults which contribute to the difficulty as well as her husband's intolerance and the suspicions of the damaged child.
Miss Ngaio Marsh offers yet another admirable novel which incidentally contains murder and the pursuit of the murderer. I put it this way, because so many readers who say they cannot abide detective stories have no idea what they are missing by avoiding Miss Marsh. If anyone can read the first hundred pages and more. in which a girl who has fluked a job as dresser to a famous actress is caught up in the excitements of a first night owing to her like- ness to a famous actor, without wanting to go on, he deserves nothing but parish magazines. The important things about Miss Marsh arc that she writes extremely well, and that her characters are not types subservient to a plot, but real people.
Finally, there is a handsome reprint of Mr. Henriques's No Arms. No Armour, which for obvious reasons had less than its due attention in 1939. Twelve years have not lessened its power to transmit experience to the reader, so that, while thanking heaven that he was not a regular soldier in the Sudan, he is left with bruised, incredulous feeling that, somehow, he must have been.
L. A. G. STRONG.
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