FICTION
By E. B. C. JONES
MR. SWINNERTON'S title is misleading ; his new long novel is not concerned with agriculture, Harvest being the name of its chief character. As is so common with English novelists, Mr. Swinnerton has identified himself with his hero in a way ivhich makes his dealings with him a little too tender : Not until you speak to him, or he speaks to you, is it apparent that perhaps, after all, he may be a little remarkable. Any such suggestion would make him laugh. Good heavens, no!" he would deprecatingly murmur. "I'm the most ordinary man in the world." What an old-fashioned thing to say in such self-important times as ours.
The self-consciousness of this passage, which occurs in the introductory chapter of Harvest Comedy, gives a hint of the tone of the whole book, which is cosy, leisurely, deliberately Victorian. The elaborate plot has the air of having been carefully, perhaps even diagramatically, constructed ; the numerous characters and their background are filled in with loving care and considerable though intermittent skill. There is no sense of unifying passion, of imaginative intensity carrying the story along. Certain of the characters—notably Dick Firth— do not come off at all; Dick has the tag of potential villainy attached to him at the start, and he remains throughout a two-dimensional figure of shifty charm and insincerity, in a story which is by way of being rounded and full of humanity. It is also curious in a novel largely dependent for its effect on accumulated detail, to come on inaccuracies such as a meeting of constitutional Women Suffragists, addressed by Mrs. Fawcett and decorated with the once notorious colours of the Militants. But such flaws, both major and minor, do not prevent Harvest Comedy being agreeable reading for those (mostly elderly) novel-readers who do not consider anything leisurely long-winded.
The story traces the lives of three men, natives of the same small town, acquainted from childhood, and inextricably connected by destiny, but without any real liking or sympathy between them. Bobby Whistler is the son of a grocer and becomes one himself, under the yoke of a terror of a mother with a mania for power which even leads her to murder. Dick Firth, son of the organist, becomes the associate of shady financiers and a politician (his avocations are more vaguely sketched than the others') ; and Harvest, son of a very poor widow, fits itrto -a sung journalistic niche in his native town, from which an unhappy love uproots him. One of the important -threads connecting Harvest and Firth is the girl Minna ; and a Frenchwoman, Julie, is a thread connecting Harvest with Whistler. Both women are fully and well done. It is inspiration which is wanting.; the whole book is slightly factitious, as though it had been written for a competition, on the understanding that high marks would be given for the complicated interweaving of diverse natures over a long period of time.
Leisureliness is also Mr. Household's note, and The Third How; has this in common with Harvest Comedy, that it shows fate linking together men in quite different walks of life. Its opening is extremely good. Manuel Vargas, son of a Spanish fruit exporter, who has worked as his father's agent in Europe; finds himself through a complex series of events fighting with the communist troops in a Mexican revolution. He is a highly intelligent and enterprising man in the early thirties. One of the revolutionary activities consists in blowing up trains and the opening pages describe such an incident, just about the time when Manuel realises that his lack of political convictions makes his position insincere and so insupportable : " He would work with men ; he would lead and obey and starve, but he would never accept a second-hand opinion or a second-hand thought. He would go his own way and leave his destiny to- chance." He is, in fact, a born adventurer, but one having nobility.
Fate comes to his help ; he discovers from the papers of one of the dead officers on the dynamited train that the train carries 3,000,000 pesos in gold ; he gains possession of it and
hides it in the desert. In the next few years he makes two unsuccessful attempts to regain the district—he is wanted for the theft—and there temporarily, we leave him. The next three parts of the book introduce us to two more of the men whose paths are, unknown to them, converging. Whitehead is a clerk in a toy-making firm which employs Toby Manning as world traveller. Orrery, an accountant, and Bendrihem, a Jewish business man, are friends of Toby's. Toby's picaresque life and loves are related in detail. By chance he meets Manuel, now a waiter in Valparaiso ; they are immediately sympathetic. There are conversations about politics and the destiny of man, in which the need for a new class of " nobles " is adumbrated. By nobles is understood a class "out of politics and out of commerce "—men of goodwill with a code of manners and ethics, with international, not national, feelings, free of the dominion of wealth. In Toby's view, a headquarters would be necessary, a sort of monastery but without asceticism; and when Manuel confides in him the story of the still-hidden gold, he undertakes to obtain it, with the idea of endowing the monastery. He enlists the help of Irma, an early love refound, now a hysterical Hitlerite, and of Ottery and Bendrihem—all potential nobles. Manuel converts a Spanish working-man to the scheme. The book ends with the reunion of all these (and some I have not mentioned) in England, and the drafting of a constitution and rules for the Order of the Third Hour.
Now as a direct narrator of events, and as a portrayer of persons in action, I found Mr. Household excellent. He can render scenes of war, business interviews, escapes and adven- tures admirably ; moreover Manuel's personality, his aristo- cratic quality, sense of proportion and independence are finely conveyed through speech and action in a way which marks the author out as a born and practised (perhaps under another name ?) novelist. But the theory of the nobles and their monastery I could not take seriously ; it seemed a glorious, half-baked, schoolgirl's dream, and cast a devaluing light upon Toby, its begetter. It is impossible to believe in Manuel, whose feet were so firmly set on earth, or the mature Bendrihem, lending themselves even to the initial stages of such a scheme, far less their flinging themselves whole-heartedly into it. Thus the book goes soft on us half-way through. Mr. Household writes of Toby, when involved in a brawl : "He . . . concen- trated his thoughts so that his imagination . . . might play over the human situation rather than enjoy itself in fantasy." Here is briefly but brilliantly stated one of the major problems confronting the artist. The first half of The Third Hour is the result of imagination playing on human situations ; the second illustrates a decline into the self-indulgence of fantasy.
Mr. James Curtis is not a leisurely writer ; he belongs to the tough, brief school of fiction.. His hero is a burglar ; and the burglary on which the story hinges is so well-described as to be very exciting. The fault of You're In the Racket Too is that it simplifies too much. All relationships even bordering on friendship are suppressed ; you would think that sheer liking was unknown in the underworld—that Snowey only experienced fear, lust and the desire to make use of people. The craze for brevity also causes Mr. Curtis to eschew all description of persons, so that one has no notion what anyone looks like. Instead of overdoing the thieves' slang, which soon palls, he might enrich his themes with a few hints that even criminals have cronies as well as colleagues, and a few more to enable us to visualise his chief characters. He should also avoid as far as possible the portrayal of the well-to-do and those not avowedly in any racket. The Krebs family here, father, mother, daughter, are conventional comic-strip figures, and their conversations grotesquely unreal. But the story is carried along by Snowey and his " buyer " or fence, Len, and is nearly as good as the American examples of its kind.
Cleopatra's Nose is based on an amusing idea. George, a young Englishman of so ordinary and harmless a face that he can never get off with a girl, is changed by a car-smash into a Don Juan with a fascinatingly twisted lip. Unfortunately, his subsequent amorous successes do not make such lively reading as did his dull days. One can't- help thinking what Paul Morand would have _made of them. The Hungarian back- ground is agreeably sketched.,
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