FICTION

By KATE, O'BRIEN dventures of a Young Man. By John Dos Passos. (Constable.

Sr. 6d.)

hilct of Misfortune. By C. Day Lewis. (Cape. 7s. 6d.)

easonett Timber. By Dorothy Canfield. (Cape. Ss. 6d.)

I* JOHN Dos Passos is the author of, among other things, a trilogy of novels called U.S.A., which gave him a position of leadership among contemporary American novelists, so that now this novel, Adventures of a Young Man, initiating a series of fictional works in a new technique, is, the wrapper tells us, " manifestly an occasion."

For those of us who, welcoming the youthfulness and vigour of the earlier novels and earlier technique, were not wholly persuaded by them of the advent of a first-rate novelist, this " occasion." might have been at least notable, for better or worse. For, overdone as we are now with averagely decent writing talent, it is as well, for that talent's sake, to take note of the failures of promise—and on the other hand most of us like to be around, and shouting, when a world-beater steps out from his trial stage.

However, here we have no world-beater, but only a sound, observant reporter, one of many; a camera-man who happens to shoot from a sympathetic angle. The " new technique," as old as the history of the novel, is preferable, I think, to Mr. Dos Passos' former jerky and journalistic method. Here we are

to receive not so much the impression of a continent,, of

crowds, events and mass psychology, as the Iffe and character of one American man, flung naturally against the moving screen of his time. So the author begins with the sad, muddled and gentle childhood of his hero—which he invests with a moving persuasiveness not elsewhere to be found in he book—and works forward industriously through boyhood nto working days, into social and sexual consciousness, to olitical idealism and disillusionment, and so to the young merican'S tragic death with the International Brigade in pain.

It is all set down with care and sympathy ; it builds up to a arge picture, and it displays the author's wide knowledge of ndustrial conditions in contemporary America, but as a hronicle of events, often exciting and even tragic in concep- ion, it lacks pace and passion, whereas as a character-study t could positively be described as lackadaisical. Glenn Spots- ood toils along into manhood conscientiously, and even_ hen he is exceedingly sentimental, we do not fall out of empathy with him, so- decent is he, so hard does he work to ght wrongs, so simple and practical is his concern for the nderdog. But he lacks personality—he is not created, he is nly the agreeable, inoffensive shell of someone whom it might

e worth while to know better. And as for what the wrapper ys about his sex life, that he " is at once tantalised and

orried by problems of sex," I can only say that I have seldom ad of anyone who seemed less so. We were mercifully ared what he may have been going through under that head adolescence, but once arrived at man's estate, it seemed as sy as winking for hina to hop into bed with his neighbour's e—who was always the most accommodating of young omen. Indeed, the neighbour usually took the matter easily . And he was always reported to be a very good lover. He the usual yearning for marriage and kids, and no doubt had lived these would have been added unto him, but for the rt span of his days he certainly took his sexual pleasure here he could find it, and it seemed to one reader to be easily c least of his worries. However, it must be said that the book is uch more concerned with its hero's social conscience than with s personal pleasures, and in this it is sober and sympathetic. it is not sufficiently moving. The traditional form betrays e author's non-creativeness ; his talent flashes but does not He remains what we knew him to be—an excellent

Mr. Day Lewis is a poet of originality and passion, and refore when he writes at all will frequently throw out sages of meditation or description which command our and mark him off from other writers. But I am vinced that he Cannot write novels worthy of himself. on is not his medium. Child of Misfortune is the second el of his which I have read and, although I prefer it to

11 II

I • Starting Point, I can find. nothing in its conception, shape, dialogue or atmosphere to distinguish it from a hundred other

pleasant, unimportant narratives. It is simply another of those hit-or-miss books about English upper-middle-class life, child- hood and young manhood, which, according to your mood, you may or may not finish. It has a few ideas scattered about in it, a few observations which are not commonplace—but they, and they are infrequent, are ttre sole indications, from cover to cover, that its author bears a name most justly distinguished in contemporary letters.

It is the story of two brothers, Oliver and Arthur Green, brought up in the usual pre-War, and post-War, comfort, and undergoing all the usual minor difficulties of adjustment to each other and to the claims and pleasures of life. One becomes a painter, the other a clergyman ; both fall for the same boring girl, and the clergyman gets her. We sit in at a good deal of self-analysis from each brother, and we are not deeply engaged by the personality or the problems of either. Some of the more obvious queries about present-day life, which ordinarily arise to the minds of the ordinarily thoughtful, are posed and, naturally enough, are not answered. We close the book disappointed. There is no character here to remember ; there is no conflict and no illumination. We can only wonder why a poet troubled to write it.

Seasoned Timber, on the other hand, leaves us in no doubt of that kind. Miss Canfield wrote it because being a novelist is her métier, good or bad. So much is clear from this one book, the only work of this author that has come my way. Here we have the practised, the rather too practised and not sufficiently se:ective hand. This is a long, detailed story of the ups and downs of life for a Principal of an Academy, or High School, in the State of Vermont, New England. Timothy Coulson Hulme was a middle-aged bachelor living with an eccentric, music-loving old aunt, and directing Clifford Academy under many difficulties but with faithful, if often wearying, idealism. At an age when he thought he had sub- dued all personal desires he fell in love with a very young, very simple local girl, and he became extremely distressed and out of control inwardly, because of this passion, at a time when all his self-command was needed by the Academy for a great campaign he had to lead and win, for the preservation of its ancient principles against the tempting onslaught of an immense legacy.

The story runs on conventional lines, and Miss Canfield's eloquence often runs away with her. She overwrites her simple theme. " The time was not come for the steady relish- ing of frustration, nor did he often have even an instant's pause to drink of things Lethean." That is a bit too much, about a tired schoolmaster's fusses and loves, but it is highly charac- teristic, and, it will be admitted, it is a fatiguing style. But the professional in Miss Canfield is compelling ; she is able to put over her New England characters and their characteristic talk ; she is able to make us see their landscape, smell their food, and take a mild interest in their politics and problems. She is sentimental and conventional ; her leading character is preposterously " Mr. Chips "-y ; occasionally she writes us almost into stupefaction about nothing at all—but, bear with her or not, she is professional. Her characters develop features and shape ; her little town has architecture ; her dialogue has the modulations of true speech.

And Now England might be called an adventure story, I suppose, were it not that the heroes of adventure stories are not usually allowed to have the gift of the gab, which Captain Leggatt certainly has. Unfortunately his talk, which is all about England in relation to the world situation, 1937-38, is no better than the talk of the rest of us on the same theme for the last two years, and this re-reading, in hastily written novels, of all recent foreign-affairs platitudes, collected from bar and smoke-room, is becoming dreadfully boring. Not less boring, in this book, is the narration of the mercantile-marine captain's domestic middles with his daughters and his second wife—but there is a certain forthright excitement in his vendetta with a sinister German sea captain, begun in Hamburg, continued in New York, and resolved in dramatic gallantry in an Atlantic storm. The rather uninteresting plot is helped along by such coincidences as the author deems necessary.