Fiction
By GRAHAM GREENE
HERR WASSERMANN'S. novels have been appearing in English in a curiously haphazard way (The Goose-Man was published in Germany in 1915) ; and not until the translations are com- plete will the English reader be able to get a proper view of this rather monstrous romantic genius. The Goose-Man presents impossible difficulties to the reviewer ; it is a book which must be either absorbed slowly into the imagination or completely rejected ; it cannot be laid hurriedly like a length of ribbon along the life of one's time ; it is not meant to match ; it has little relation to any life but Waisermann's own; The characters are the stock figures of the old Gothic melodram'a transformed by their intensity into personal symbols. A more realistic writer would have qualified the virtue of this girl, tenOre, as he would have qualified the viciousness of that girl, Philippine, but these figures in Wassermann's novel are not characters, they are the opposing qualities in a composite character, and the composite character exists only in the imagination of the central figure, the musical genius, Daniel Nothafft. It is the subjective world of " one in the grip of a fearful loneliness of which he is not wholly conscious ; . . . an uncouth peasant with the nerves of a degenerate."
An artistic genius has seldom been a satisfactory figure in fiction ; his subjective life is so much more important than his objective. The objective life of a man doomed to be mainly an observer and interpreter is generally lacking in incident, while the completely subjective novel is rare. Was- sermann's is of this kind, but because he does. not make it clear that these figures of incredibly noble and incredibly vicious people have no existence outside the brain of the musician, one believes oneself at first to be reading no more than a wild Gothic romance, little different, except in its intensity, from, or more valuable than, the melodramatic element in Dickens's novels.
A typical figure is Herr Carovius, " the Nero of our times," who "had an amiable weakness for consorting with men on the brink of ruin. In their company he drank many liqueurs, his favourite tipple being the sort known as Knickebein. After several glasses he unbent, and began to express audacious opinions, and not only in respect of erotic subjects ; he would even rail against the police and Divine Providence. But when he tripped homewards late at night his face wore a cowardly smirk, the sign of his return to virtue, for his days belied his nights." There is not a single quality in Carovius which modifies his meanness, envy, hypocrisy and snobbery. " One morning, as he left his flat, he saw two milk-cans stand- ing in the hall, one for the first floor, the other for the second. The milk-girl had left them there for a minute while she went into 'the next house. Herr Carovius fetched a bottle of vinegar out of the lumber-room that served him also as a kitchen, looked carefully round, and emptied the contents of the bottle, in equal parts, into the two milk-cans." It is a Cruikshank character ; one is prepared for a• conversion at the sound of Christmas bells. But Wassermann does not, except superficially in his style, make Dickeris'g mistake of confusing two worlds, the real world and his own private world ; Carovius cannot be converted ; he does not exist in this monstrous way outside the brain of Daniel. It is Daniel who must be converted, who has to emerge from his subjective Inferno. During the brain fever that follows the burning of his music by the mad Philippine, the goose-min to whose statue in the market place his enemies have com- pared him, appears to argue with him. " If the work," he asks, " absorb the whole of a man's affections, what is left of the man ? How can a man create if he stint and defraud the humanity within him ? " For one day the musician believes that he takes the goose-man's place behind the railings in the. middle -of the market. " Nothing out of the ordinary hap- pened—only commonplace, everyday events, to which every- one was obviously accustomed." The goose-man had said, " I lend a little dignity to the market place, where the towns- folk haggle over apples and potatoes—that's all." It is the artist's surrender of the ivory tower to the inferior artist, to Diiderlein, the bad conductor, the pedant, the director of the School of Music Only give me time," he said with an upward gesture, and the very eagles will be proud to acknowledge me ").
The moral is excellent, but The Goose-Man creaks, creaks majestically, if that b3 possible, but creaks. One is uncom- fortably aware that only the final synthesis, only the last twenty pages out of more than 540, saves it from being a more intense, but at times hardly less absurd, performance than The Mysteries of I.'dolyho. The war of good and evil, the wild catastrophies in this subjective Nuremburg are too logical, the fantasies, like skeletons in armour, too tangible. One is aware (it is so often the case with the great romantics) of an amazing lack of humour. The anonymous translator can only be held partly responsible.
" Ho pressed Lenore to his body with such vehemence that he crushed the breath out of her, muttering between his teeth : ' We have only a choice between being insensitive to each other or hurting each other.'
The mask, the mask,' whispered Lenore in terror, pointing to the corner where the mask of Zingarella gleamed in the semi- darkness like the face of a beautiful but sinister phantom.
Outside the door stood Philippine listening. She had caught a rat and killed it, and had laid it in the doorway."
Unfinished Cathedra! is the last volume of a trilogy, but no one need be deterred from reading it by ignorance of the previous volumes ; this final instalment of the life of the old Confederate soldier, Southern gentleman and crook, Colonel Milt Vaiden, is quite self-containing. Colonel Vaiden by the period of Unfinished Cathedral is the bank president and leading citizen of Florence, Alabama, and one of the chief contributors to the non-denominational cathedral which is being built in Florence by the Methodist minister, Dr. Blankenship, to meet the needs of a great building boom. The plan includes : " Restaurants, kitchens, cold storage, game rooms, library, children's library, moving-picture room, basket-ball court, gym- nasium, running track, laundry, billiard room, lecture rooms and, of course, on the first floor, the main auditorium and chapels. . . . ' It is designed to minister to the Body, Brain and Soul,' quoted the Doctor automatically."
Mr. Stribling is an excellent story teller with an acute sense of satire which he directs against Southern conventions and cruelties and high motives. The trial of sonic negroes charged with raping a white woman (one of them is only fourteen years old) is "cooked" virtuously by the Colonel ("A swift trial followed by immediate execution will consoli- date public opinion here in the South against illegal violence"), while the chivalrous feelings of a conventional young man towards the Colonel's daughter, his instinct, after an unsuc- cessful attempt to lynch the negroes, to protect her Southern womanhood at any costs, leads him to seduce her. One need not take very seriously Mr. Stribling's attempt to make coincidence play the part of Fate through these three volumes ; it provides a useful framework for his detached, completely unemotional comedy.
Dew on the Grass will be enjoyed by all admirers of The Golden Age. It should and other readers as well, for it is a far better book, less literary, less sentimental, less poetic (one cannot say the same of Mr. Charles Morgan's prefatory letter). Myself I feel a little uneasy before even so moderate an account of childhood as Miss Lewis's : was one's happiness quite so exalted as Miss Lewis describes ? I suspect that the years before one went to school had a more humdrum earth- bound quality than the years enjoyed by Delia, Lucy, Maurice and Miriam, except when they were more terrifying. These nature-loving children never suffer from boredom, malice or nightmare, and their ideas do not always, to my ear, ring true. Lucy (aged nine) describes her doll Joseph's thoughts in rather Rupert Brookian terms : He likes the muddy lanes that go twisting in and out and the little trees blown crooked in the wind, and water where it lies on top of a Weir and curves over the edge, gently, gently, before it goes crashing down below." Dew on the Grass is tactfully and skilfully written, but many will continue to believe that they find a more real reflection of childhood in the terrors of The Turn of the Screw or the practical fantasies of Miss Nesbit.
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