Fiction

WILLIAM PLOMER By

Going Abroad. By Rose Macaulay. (Collins. 7s. 8d.) The Darkening Green. By Compton Mackenzie. (Cassell.

7s. 6d.)

Queenie Molson. By Wynyard Browne. (Cobden-Sanderson.

78. &I.) Hell Said the Duchess. By Michael Arlen. (Heinemann. 6s.) 4 THE contemporary critic," said Gogol nearly a century ago, " does not recognize that great spiritual depth is needed to light up a picture of ignoble life and transform it into a gem of creative art." A little oppressed by fashionable heroics, he was speaking a word for the writer who attempts " to bring to the surface what is ever before men's sight and is unseen by their indifferent eyes . . . all that is hidden in the often cold, petty everyday characters with which our bitter and dreary path through life swarms, and with the strong hand of a relentless sculptor dares to present [it] bold and distinct to the gaze of all." Plenty of interesting novels are published, more or less skilful, marked by good feeling and special knowledge, but the writers simply have not the power to transform raw material into " gems of creative art," and too often they resemble the aspiring dramatist in Harvest in the North :

" A deep sympathy, a wide-flung charity, keen humour, these, he knew, well enough, were essential to success."

But for the truest success something more is needed than realistic chronicles overflowing with the milk of human kindness. Detachment, selectiveness, the resources of irony, and, in short, stylization—which does not mean " fine writing," but the exercise of freedom within certain limits —these things, and especially what Gogol calls " the laughter of lofty delight," are what we miss too often in the novel.

Mr. James Lansdale Hodson has at least an energetic hand and an expansive heart, and they have enabled him to produce a long and, for the not over-exacting reader, an entertaining novel which will probably have, and which certainly deserves, a popular success. He tells us that the Lancashire cotton boom of 1919-1920 and the subsequent slump " affected lives in Lancashire and turned them topsy- turvy much as the Great War did those in wider England," and he has made it his business to trace the effect of this economic rise and fall on the lives of a variety of individuals. It is obvious that Lancashire offers a rich field for the novelist ; it is equally obvious that Mr. Hodson is thoroughly familiar with " Chesterford." I imagine that he owes something to Arnold Bennett, and that he belongs to the same school as such interpreters of industrial England as Miss Phyllis Bentley and Mr. Louis Golding.

No doubt Miss Rose Macaulay, Mr. Compton Mackenzie and Mr. Michael Arlen have each a particular public to which they purvey what is expected of them, and no doubt what is mainly expected in each ease is a particular mood and a particular point of view. It is probably in the works by which they are best known that these writers are most characteristic, and it may be said that their latest works are consistent with their earlier ones. Miss Macaulay offers us " a novel of unredeemed levity," kind and appropriately cheerful; Mr. Mackenzie a picture of village life in the 'nineties, with a mainly " static quality " ; and Mr. Arlen what he calls a " bed-time story," which is in fact a short, fantastic " shocker."

Going Abroad is certainly good of its kind, but Miss Macaulay has chosen a somewhat Firbankian theme. It is useless to lament that one writer is not another, but " unredeemed levity," if carried on too long, does not always remain effective : it is apt to need either a little tartness, serious relief, or concentration. The scene is set in the Basque country, and it was a happy thought to deposit there some youthful Buchmanites full of proselytizing righteousness and peculiar jargon, besides an English mis- sionary bishop and his wife, who wrestles with the Basque language, and Monsieur and Madame Josef, cosmopolitan beauty specialists. Out of their activities Miss Macaulay gets some excellent jokes. What could be better than this ?

" The bishop's wife opened her Basque grammar and murmured,

Gizonek, man, gizonak, the man . . . gizonetaz, with the men . . . Madame Josef, tripping by with her husband from the bathe to the massage, wished them good-morning. Tiens,' she remarked, low-voiced, when they had passed. `Cette femme de l'Avt-Nque, comme elle pease toujours aux hommes ! Ecoutes-donc : gizonek, gizonak, gizonetaz—oh la la ! A coop stir, elle pease comme vieille fille, cette dame-la. Et pige done, comme elle s'est assise, les jambes allongdes . . . Oh, mon Dieu, ces Anglaises a bas bleus ! " In order to reassure any Buclunanites, Basques, bishops or beauty specialists who may feel that Miss Macaulay is giving them umbrage, it will be best to quote another of her characters, the nice Mrs. Buckley :

" It's all a question of angle . . . I mean, is any one of the ways in which humanity behaves inherently more ridiculous than the others ? After all, aren't we all targets for the disapproval and derision of those who may chance to disapprove and deride ? And isn't there good in everything, and should we not try to find it, and be more ready to approve than to condemn ? " The Darkening Green gives us a picture of boyhood visits to the village of High Beeching in the middle 'nineties, with a frustrated love-affair against a background of dear old ladies, amiable clergymen, and the mildest rustic humours. Mr. Mackenzie seems to be essentially a pre-War writer— that is to say, his liveliest sympathies are quickened by memories of pre-War England. He writes of course with a practised hand, an exceptional smoothness, and just as the writing never gets worse or better and never jars the reader with infelicities and never lapses from conventional good taste and never rises above it, so there are scarcely any fluctuations of mood. No doubt this is what Mr. Mackenzie intended—never to be intense or alarming, but to darken the green with a great many touches of quiet pathos and wistfulness. This seems to be essentially a book for middle- aged readers who sigh for the past and hate the present. It is unlikely to please the young, not because Mr. Mackenzie describes a life they have never known, but because he describes it in a way likely to be little to their taste. They cannot stroll and shed a companionable tear in his fragrant, old-world garden, for they live in a world more like the

field known as Culvers :

" a tract of sour stony ground . . . sparsely covered with couch and cleavers and beggar's grass, with chickweed and dodder, except where a patch of viper's bugloss or sorrel might give colour to the poverty . . . "

In High Beeching nobody's dreams were troubled by Karl Marx, but in the Malham and the London of Mr. Wynyard Browne's Queenie Molson that hirsute spectre is distinctly active. This first novel gives a life-like account of the contemporary use of communism as a prop for those who do not fit easily into society, and its effect upon a young man down from Cambridge and an unbalanced elementary school- mistress in particular. It is told, to quote the publisher, with " detailed realism," and, one might add, with a very pleasant astringency.

Mr. Arlen's new book is as facetious as its title. It is not without ideas, but either, like his epigrams, they do not seem very good ones, or else they remain undeveloped. The main idea is that in 1938 a young, chaste, widowed duchess incurs the suspicion of having committed a series of outrageous murders which are plainly the work of a maniac, popular known as " Jane the Ripper." If the national crisis that results from this suspicion puts a strain on the imagination, the revelation of the Ripper sinks the fable to the level of absurdity. The criminal in question proves to be a Dr. Xanthis Axaloe, a supernatural being but also a vampire, hermaphrodite and erotomaniac, with a cosy pied-a-terre at Leatherhead, where he represents " sin incarnate and sin triumphant " and talks like this : "You fool. I am eternal. But you shall die."

He eventually ends as a bad smell and " something greyish that slopped over on to the floor." Mr. Arlen is perhaps less at home with the mysteries of iniquity than when he is waggishly familiarizing us with the private lives of his rich and titled characters. Is there perhaps something symbolical in his rioter who comes out of the looted house in Groivenor Square " wearing in broad daylight" a duchess's under- clothes " as fancy headgear " ?