Fiction
BY HERBERT READ.
Miss FARRELL and Mr. Linklater are both _ humorists, and are out to amuse us in one way or another. But humour is apt to be merely polite and effete or merely bucolic and boring unless it is laced with some more bitter essence of the mind ; and of such essences there is a wide choice, ranging from verbal wit to social satire, from irony and sarcasm to cynicism and the sardonic. A comparison of these two books suggests that a better effect will be produced if the means are not too muddled, if the motive remains dear, and if in the end we are left with a definite direction for our sympathies. It is true that the comparison might be pursued on a less technical ground, for Miss Farrell is Irish and Mr. Linklater is Scottish, and every nation has its peculiar type of humour. But racial distinctions, in literature no less than in politics, are of doubtful validity, and though I have no reason to question the representative nature of Miss Farrell's humour, I find nothing particularly Caledonian about Mr. Link- later's. Scottish humour, as Charles Lamb discovered (read Elia on "Imperfect Sympathies ") is a very elusive quality. But then Mr. Linklater himself is not particularly Caledonian ; he is a native of the Orkney Islands and in Scotland the Orcadians are as a race apart. Whether Orcadian humour is also, like Irish humour, a thing apart, I have never stopped to enquire. Mr. Linklater is the solitary representative of it, and one cannot generalize on the evidence of such a unique phenomenon. It is simpler to regard. Mr. Linldater himself as unique.
His book relates the life and adventures of a modern cynic —the word is not adequate or exact, as we shall presently see —and we are " admonished " in a prefatory note not to identify the hero of the book with the author. Nevertheless, Magnus Merriman is born in Orkney, and the major incidents of his life seem to bear a parallel if distant relationship to what we know of the author's. Let it be admitted, however, that Merriman is one person, and Mr. Linklater (thank heaven, as he says) quite a different person. But it is necessary to insist on some degree of identity, because I believe the faults of Magnus Merriman, such as they are, are due to the author's imperfect objectivity. He shifts, that is to say, between a sympathetic if comic account of the life of a playboy of the northern world and a satire of contemporary life. Mr. Linklater has further complicated matters by making his hero a cynic. Merriman, farcically defeated as a politician, retreats to the high lonely places of his native island, and there muses in this strain :
"Here is my home and here i where I shalt live. We're virtually independent here and a man can live on the products of his own labour. When that is possible there's no need to think of politics, and it will be a relief not to think of them, for the more I consider political theories the less I can believe in-them and the less I can wholly dismiss them. If I had lived: in l89() I'would have been an Imperialist, and if I were living in London today, and were unemployed, I would call myself a Communist. But between those blissfully positive poles there's a world of twilit muddle and quarter-truths, and I'm damned if I can find a label to suit me, or any other reasonable man. . . . I would like to believe whole- heartedly in something, but such belief is impossible in this disgust- ing ant-hill of a medern world, where nothing is clean-cut, nothing simple and whole. I would believe in God—sometimes I nearly do—if it were not for the abominable suggestion that He made man
in His own image . . " ,
This, of course, is a very common attitude in the modern world, and- the basis of the predominating mood of cynicism in contemporary art and literature. In spite of its hollowness and nihilism, it has been responsible for some very impressive art and literature ; and cynicism, as an antidote to the pom- posity and pretentiousness of the self-satisfied and the com- placent, plays a necessary role in our moral economy. But Mr. Linklater is not a .conipiete c:ynic ; he is a satirist, and as such is one of the self-satisfied.'-'. Scratch a satirist and you will always find a sentimentalist-es shall we say an idealist 2—of some kind ; but the cynic cannot cohabit with any kind of idealist. It might.be possible to regard the main portion of this book, which deals with the Nationalist move- ment in Scotland, and with literary and political society in, Ecrinburgh, as entirely cynical; but then-we know that- the
'author himself contested a by-election as a Nationalist can- didate in 1931, and the cynic, to give him his due, is not an active humbug. The satirist, on the other hand, can turn Upon himself, and upon the objects of his secret sympathy.
This confusion of genres is matched by a certain uneven- ness of technique. The first forty pages summarize the early life and adventures of the hero with an almost eighteenth- Century naivety. From that point, to the declaration of the election results on page 220, the book moves with that gusto, heartily humorous rather than intellectually witty, which made the fortune of Juan in America. At that point a pure satire might have found its just climax ; but the story of Magnus Merriman pursues its way for more than another hundred pages, in the course of which the hero returns to Orkney, to nature and to the arms of a milkmaid. In this mock-idyllic setting he begins to write a satirical poem. He takes his satirical spirit to London, but is summoned back to Orkney to marry in haste. He buys a farm, and settles down to the simple life, a sadder and a wiser man but not yet a complete cynic ; for we leave him fixing his hopes and aspi- rations on his infant son.
Miss Farrell's book is on a smaller scale, but within its limits it is perfect. Miss Farrell has two rare qualities—rare, at any rate, in combination—comic wit and poetic sensibility. Her power of observation is acute to the point of cruelty ; but it is not directed towards a cynical despair, nor merely for comic effect; at the end we are made aware of a sense of values, a sympathy for all that is most vital and intelligent in life. Her types are rather tenuous—a weary novelist, a bright but brainless American girl, in the power of a cynical and neurotic lesbian vamp. These three are introduced into a country-house setting in Ireland, and brainless American girl falls in love with brainless Irish sportsman, much to the alarm of her vampire friend. The vamp means to stop the nonsense, but a simple Irish girl (a triumph of Miss Farrell's creative cruelty) intervenes, and in tragic self-sacrifice saves the situation for love and happiness. It sounds the usual sort of thing, but Miss Farrell's method makes all the differ- ence. She is informed by the pure spirit of comedy ; her human beings are somewhat more exotic than anything in the world of nature she so sensitively places in contrast to them. But that is as it should be to the "calm curious eye of Comedy." I do not say she completely represents the Mere- dithian definition ; reason, it will be remembered, presided rather grimly and unexpectedly in that famous Essay. Re- placing reason by poetic sensibility, Miss Farrell achieves a more contemporary sense of comedy—or is it a more feminine sense ? In any case, the result is delightful.
Bre don and Sons leaves me rather defeated. Even in externals I recognize a type of novel which is far from sym- pathetic. Eight and sixpence is the price, and there are 624 thick pages, done up in a chocollite-box jacket. Mr. Priestley
has familiarized us with the type, and I am sure there is a great and hungry public waiting for such a feast. Any
niggling remarks of mine will not affect the fortune of the
book, and I do not wish that they should, for Mr. Bell is -a sincere writer, and is possessed of a devastating fluency and competence. But in reading through his long saga of a family of East Anglian shipbuilders, how one longs for some fire to give it -concentillation, some means of economizing the long, loose, interminable pages of unnecessary conver- sation! There is, I know, a class of- fiction readers whose preliminary judgement of a book is determined by flipping over the pages .in a circulation library, and the lighter the resulting grey blur, the better the book promises to please them. So publishers urge their novelists to put in' " plenty of conversation," and it would be almost impossible to get a
novel published that eschewed Conversation altogether (ouch do exist). I do not accuse Mr. Bell of writing deliberately
for thi4'iionventien ; but it seeins -to me he could have pro- duced a better 'result with a quarter of the words he uses. The effect of his prolixity is not improved by a prevailing tone of facetiousness, which is adopted by all the characters In the book and which must presumably have been an here, ditary trait of the Bredons.
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