Fiction
By GRAHAM GREENE.
CONRAD'S Heart of Darkness impressed Africa as an imaginative symbol on the European mind. The shadow of Kurtz, "a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful reali- ties ; a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence " falls across the work of Gide, of Kurt Heuser and Wassermann. Even Mr. Evelyn Waugh and Miss Winifred Holtby live at the edge of the shadow.
Mandoa, Mandoa I is magnificent entertainment. For the style one can have nothing but admiration ; it is superbly adequate, and as satisfactory to the eye as to the ear : one can see the architecture of Miss Holtby's pages ; the words stand with a kind of square maturity. Her subject is the de- velopment by a tourist agency of an ancient African kingdoM, a miniature Abyssinia with perverted relics of Christianity. The head of the agency is romantic, idealistic, honourable, but the agent he sends to Mandoa finds it impossible to do other than work with the material to his hand—slavery and superstition. There are scandals, questions in Parliament, lies in the papers, and a delegation from the International Humani- tarian Association is sent to Mandoa. The book is so good, the subject so thoroughly treated, that one quarrels with faults which in another writer would pass unnoticed. Miss Holtby never made up her mind whether she was writing comedy or farce. In the first half of the book her Africa is the Africa of Mr. Evelyn Waugh ; in the second half of Conrad (I use the names loosely to express difference of tone ; Miss Holtby is never imitative). The Lord High Chamber- lain, Safi Talal, who wrote this letter to the agent on the back of a penny exercise book, sealed with a lump of beeswax stamped with a Maria Theresa dollar : Dear Sir,—How is it with your life I I also am well. Make right now copies of air port, hotel, publicity schemes, moneys, men required for levelling ground and all desirables. Thirty-five for High Council, Holy Church, Royal Court and Humble Servant. Rains come. Decision immediate. Step on the gas. Mandoa is Blandon. Yours affectionately, T."
does not belong to the same imaginative world as Dr. Benoit, of the Humanitarian delegation, who, imprisoned in a native hut, thought of his dead wife :
" He saw before him floating on the rancid darkness, his wife's face. He had tried to snatch her back from death, to keep her'for himself.. . . He had watched her, caressed her, held her with such eager, agonizing, tender love that each curve, each movement of her body had been known to him. But his passion had never been without fear of loss. . . Death had claimed her before Pierre even saw her. Death came between his mind and her's. She dwelt apart in a shadowed country where those who are young and doonied
can know only each other." •
Safi Talal and Byron Wilberforce Gish, the Lord High Culture Promoter, are easier characters to draw, because they depend on amusing exaggeration, than Arthur Rollett, the intolerable, fanatical lover of justice. He is the finest achieve- ment of the book ; he has, in James's phrase, a "rage of personality." One question puzzles me : how did a film company on location in Africa come to have four completed films with them ?
Mr. Williams has also taken Africa as his symbol, but his novel shows how too symbolic a symbol can be. It is a slack, unconvincing book. Mr. Williams introduces his situation in a few casual sentences : Africa overrun by its native population, an ultimatum to the European Powers from someone calling himself the Higher Executive in London (he turns out to be a man two hundred years old, who has discovered the secret of immortality), black troops landed from airships on Hampstead Heath. A Zulu king called Inkamasi living in lodgings near Belsize Park, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and, of course, the Jews come in somehow. Both Mr. Wells and Mr. M. P. Shiel could teach Mr. Williams how to make an impossible story convincing, one by the reality of his characters, the, other by the imaginative force of his prose. Mr. Williams' characters all talk alike ; they
are all infuriatingly facetious ; and this is a fair example of Mr. Williams' style :
" He shall delight in feeling, and his feeling shall be blood within his blood and body in his body ; it shall burn through him till all that old business of yes-and-no has fallen away from him, and then his diseases will have vanished, for they are nothing but the shadow of his wanting this and the other, and when he is those things that he desires, where are the shadows of them 1 " It remains for Mr. Williams to give us his interpretation of the Great Pyramid.
Mr. Julian Green's beautiful control is refreshing after this. He has written nothing better than The Strange River, nothing more dramatic than its opening': the big, self-satisfied, hand- some man leaning over the embankment above the dark Seine, listening to the two quarrelling voices in the shadows below. The tone of the book is immediately and unerringly struck. Mr. Green's novels have sometimes been stifling ; every chink has been so stopped lest cheerfulness should creep in ; but that objection cannot be taken to his new novel. Philip, the self-discovered coward, betrayed by his wife and the prey of his sister-in-law's passion, is enabled to build up a new relationship with his child behind the cover of their common fear ; he is not left, !lice so many of Mr. Green's characters, nakedly exposed to life- Nor is he a clinical case. His cowardice is as universal as his patient licking of the wound. But it is not to the characters that my thoughts return again and again in admiration, but to that sense of control. Miss Holtby proclaims her book "A Comedy of Irrelevance " ; I suppose it is the English tradition to be irrelevant, to be picaresque, to be panoramic ; but I cannot help preferring that firm line which Mr. Julian Green draws round his subject, a line which is never crossed even by the thoughts of his characters. Mr. Vyvyan Holland's translation is admirable.
When Russian novels first appeared in this country, the world they described must have seemed odd in the extreme. We have absorbed them now, and the samovar, the ascetic, the philosophical sensualists and the endless discussions about God are more familiar than the world of His Exeellency Sefior Raman Perez de Ayala. No Karamazov talked more than these provincial Spaniards, whose minds still move in circles round the sixteenth-century conception of " the point of honour," Tiger Juan, " scrivener, copyist, blood-letter," Colas, his adopted son, the widow Gengora, the commercial traveller, the shepherd. They have a strange, acrid vitality, they smell of wine and dung, they cannot sit down to cards without falling into the attitudes of tragic farce : Don Sincerato Gamborena, the priest, with his ever open mouth " which looked like the mask of' tragedy when he coughed, and the mask of comedy when he laughed," and Dona Marks, who " kept her head close shaved without a hair on it but every morning she rubbed her skull with burnt cork to give the illusion of hair divided into two bands and she scraped the central parting with a darning needle. She had no lips and her mouth was small and contracted, like a button-hole, and she had eyes like a rat, but she was all airs and graces." The cuckold falls first into his traditional attitudes ; but he develops between conversations, and though this exciting, difficult book begins and ends in talk on the same " point of honour " which Calderon wrote about four hundred years ago, the modern world has crept into the corners of the market at Pilares.
Mr. Roley's novel describes the progress of a young Communist through the Trade Union movement in Liverpool to the post of City Councillor and to the leadership of the Hunger Marchers on their walk to London. Mr. Roley has small literary ability, but his integrity and the authenticity and freshness of his subject give the book some of the excite- ment of the early Russian films.
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