Some Books of the Week
Miss REBECCA WEses is so brilliant and provocative a per- sonality that her new book, The Strange Necessity (Jonathan Cape, 10s. 6d.) will be eagerly welcomed. It is not yet the satisfying novel she will one day write when she sits down to recollection in tranquillity, but a volume of literary criticism of which the first paper has not been published before. In this she considers the " strange necessity " of Art which makes an appreciation of a portrait by Ingres and a passage from Ulysses an integral part of a golden day of happiness in Paris. If her conclusions are not more startling than those of most meditators on the nature of Art, her side-issues and illustrative criticisms are alluring, confident, and gay. If you already loathe Ulysses you will continue to groan every time its repellent bulk rises again across that radiant Parisian day, and while you admire the ingenuity that sees in Leopold Bloom a reincarnation of the Court Fool, and in the whole work a creative parable of Father, Mother, and Son, you may somewhat doubt her sincerity. Also, if you are not a properly scientific intellectual, you may regret that Miss West was much enlightened by Professor Pavlov's " Conditional Reflexes," because visions of decorticated dogs blundering foolishly about will distract the argument. What you really want to enjoy is golden white-built Paris, and the exquisite experiences with which the writer tantalizes you. This is an unequal volume, with dull and heavy pages when she is half-heartedly writing of " excitating complexes " and so on, and sudden passages of amazing felicity when she strikes a theme proper to her delight, her malice, or her dancing wit. Her comments on " Adolphe," Jane Austen, Dostoevsky, George Moore, W. B. Yeats, and Kipling enliven the mind ; and to read Rebecca West on Proust is almost as fascinating as reading Proust. Unequal, divining, sometimes wilful, allusive and pictorial, she has the stimulating quality of one to whom literature is secondary to life.
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