Fiction

BY 1 A. G. STRONG.

The Provincial Lady Goes Further. By E. M. De/afield. (Macmillan. 7s. 6d.) 7s. 6d.) My Bones Will Keep. By Maurice Richardson. (Collins. 7s. 6d.)

Miss DELAFIELD has not only done it again, but done it better than ever. I really do not know how to review The Provincial Lady Goes Further. Reading it in the wrong way, i.e., straight through, as it is a diary, should have provided m'e with faults to censure; but it has not, for the level is sustained, apparently without effort, and one feels aggrieved that the book stops at all: A Way out would perhaps be to give quotations, but, as I find I have listed exactly thirty- seven, this is not practicable either. The best I can do is to say that the provincial lady, after scoring a success with a novel, takes a flat in town, visits Belgium, takes the family to Brittany, anciattends a number of literary gatherings. Three quotations cannot be resisted. They all come from near the beginning of the book. The first is self-explanatory : "Interview with 'Mademoiselle -takes place 'after lunch, and is

fully as unpleasant as I anticipated. (Mem : Generalization, so frequently heard, to the effect that things are never as bad' as one expects them to be, once more proved untrue up tsy the hilt.)

Main conclusions to emerge from this highly distressing con- ference are : (a) That Mademoiselle is pas ETU PAS susceptible, tout an contraire ; (1) that she is profoundly Wafted, and froissee, and agacte and (c) that she could endure every humiliation and privation heaped upon her, if at least her supper might be brought up punctually. This sudden introduction of entirely new element in the whole situation overcomes me completely, and we both weep."

Two pages further on the provincial lady is being shown over a possible school for Vicky :

. .• .- We aie sliciwn Chapel—chilly and Unpleasant building Sick-rooncwhefe hielorn-robking child with inadequate little red cardigan on over school uniform is sitting in s depressed way over deadly-looking jigsaw puzzle of extreme antiquity.

The Principal says Hallo, darling, unconvincingly, and darling replies with a petrified stare, and we go out again.

I say Poor little thing ! and Principal replies, more brightly than ever, that Our- children love the sick-room, they have such a good time there. (This obviously untrue—and if not, reflects extremely poorly on degree of enjoyment prevalent out of the sick-room. )'

The third is also self-explanatory :

"At last we separate, and I tell Rose that this has been the most wonderful evening I have known for years, and she says that champagne often does that, and we go to our respective r001128."

The provincial lady has indeed gone further, and she may go to any length, as far as I am concerned. The book is brilliantly illustrated by Mr. Arthur Watts, whose "Literary Club Members "• is heavenly, and who in Starting the Car" has given an extraordinarily beautiful instance of his control over his medium.

When Compton, axed from the Navy, lonely, just back from five years in the East, first attended one of Mr. Horridge's Oxford Street Election Parties, he heard a Labour Govern- ment returned to power, and met his daughter Madge with Simon. The next time he went he heard Simon's Con- servative gain broadcast, one of many in the new National Government. What happened between these two events, to himself, to Madge, to Simon, and to England at a time of crisis, is set forth with all Sir Philip Gibbs' lucidity and sense of perspective. Now and then the dialogue reads a little oddly, And Sir Philip's descriptions of public affairs are usually happier than those of personal relationships ; for example, his account of the Wall Street crash, a vivid and graphic piece of writing, is a good deal better than the passage in which Madge expects her baby. Taken all round, The Anxious Days is an acute summary of our present dis- contents, full of human interest, and most s/cifully done.

Mr. James Aston's second novel, while it has definite points of resemblance to his first, breaks new ground both in character and background. Mr. Belfry, a Cambridge professor of insignificant stature, goes to Naples to . see life, about -whieh he has learnt a good deal. in his researches into eighteenth-century literature. From there he drifts to Capri, to love a chambermaid but be loved by a cook. By de-is,s methods he persuades the chambermaid to elope with him He rows her to• Anfitrano, where they settle among as eccentric and cosmopolitan crowd. The pair read Dante, and Mr. Belfry, making some progress in hiseonquest, ls&Taries jealous. At last an eccentric Russian named Platonov, who is an inveterate borrower, borrows Beatrice. Then follows a magnificent scene in which Mr. Belfry nearly strangles hi rival, and, surfeited with love, returns to Cambridge. It is all very wittily and engagingly told, and Mr. Aston hay avoided the mistake of making his hero a lay figure of fan. If A Pattern in Yellow is not so .sueeessful as Miss Hewitt's first novel, it is partly because the author has attempted to extend her range, and included imaginative territory with which she is not yet familiar. The one character who is really alive is Rima, who leaves her husband to go to Africa with Richard, whom she loves. Her part in the book—her regret for the old security, her courage in the face of Richard's slackness and the poverty which results from it, and, to a less degree, her Jove for Richard—is convincing enough. It is in delineating the people with whom she comes in contact that Miss Hewitt falls short. Richard is only a woman's idea of what an attractive, optimistic and lazy man would be like to live with. Mary, Rime's two-year-old daughter, is merely a stage property ; and the failure of Miss Hewitt's imagination to absorb these two characters is nowhere more clearly shown than in the soliloquies assigned to them. Because of Mary, Rima is sometimes tempted to return to her husband. While Richard is away looking for a job she is nearly killed by a mad lodger, and loved by a young Englishman. Then, having made no sign for four months, Richard returns, and she goes gladly back with him to the same hand-to-mouth existence. By the excellence of the good parts of her story Miss Hewitt has provided all the criticism necessary of the less good. A Pattern in Yellow is not as good as Mardi, but it does nothing to shake my faith in the future of its author.

I have read Storm in Oxford with an interest which is perhaps due more to Oxford than to the storm. I always get homesick for Oxford at this time of year, and Mr. Tangye Lean's many pictures of town and college have made me more homesick than ever ; for he describes her with affection and skin. His story, with its pair of unusually devoted brothers, senior tutor, college eat, and undesirable characters pinned to walls or trees with fencing foils, is melodramatic and a little mad ; but he has a real sense of atmosphere and of character, and, unlike an earlier generation of Oxford writers, he is never afraid to let himself go. His dialogue is sometimes stilted—" 'The fencing was fine,' said Vici. The sunlight on your tunic and the flashing blade. I loved it.' "- but one wants to know what is going to happen, and one reads on. Storm in Oxford, which, frankly, I enjoyed, con- firms the impression given by Of Unsound Mind that Mr. Tangye Lean has in him the makings of a novelist.

Oxford is also a feature in another novel On our list. My Bones Will Keep traces the career of one Thomas Swayne through nursery, prep school, public school, and Oxford, to the point where he cashes a cheque of his father's and is packed off abroad. The prep school is staffed by idiots, the headmaster of the public school is a ninny, and the prefects exceedingly unsure of their authority, Oxford is (for Thomas) a prolonged pub-crawl, and his subsequent life an increasingly dismal extension of it. Mr. Richardson Is continually interrupting his narrative to lecture us, and explain why he " stresses " this point or, that. He appears to be very cross with parts of our educational system,

and,

as Thomas is a more or less ordinary little boy to begin with, we are perhaps expected to draw the moral : yet the story IS no more an arraignment of school and university than Thomas is an arraignment of the genus young man. The didactic interludes are the more to be regretted, since in individual scenes the author shows a vivid narrative gift; and—when he forgets his theme—a sense of humour- However, he wl!I have worked off a great deal of moral indignatidn, and !US next novel will, we hope, be all the better for it.