Fiction
By PETER BURRA
All the Trees were Green. By -Michael Harrison. (Barker, 7s. 6d.) The Hesperides. By John -Palmer. (Becker and Warburg. 7s. 6d.)
Wild Harbour. By Ian Maepherson. ,(Methn ' en. 7s. 6d.) Frog in the Reeds. By Kit Marshall: = (Nelson: 78. 6d.)
So intensely personal a preoccupation with the things of the spirit as is suffered by M. DuhamerS Salavin is a rare theme today. To be sure many well-known writers have laid their hands upon it, but for the most part they herald the gesture with such' a nourish a metaphysical trumpets that the spirit takes flight in Very terror. Salavin pursues it quietly without a falter, and never calling for an orchestral accompaniment. The issues of the stOry are plain facts of physical and mental experiences, and they are not complicated by their sufferer or their author, With metaphysical specula- tions. For the critic there is only one problem about the book and that is the relation of Safitvin to his creator. His story is told in four short novels (now brought together in Miss Billings' excellent translation); the first part of which was :published in 1920, the last not till 1932. That so com- paratively short a history has taken, so long to write may in part be due to the extreme concentration and verbal point of the writing. Is it, every now and then, too much of a good thing ? Can it be, when such good things are so rare ? The question is only an extension of one that is more funda- mental—is the autobiographical Salavin of the first two books a possibility at all ? Can a man indulge in such an orgy of self-analysis and remain Salavin ? " If I were the kind of person who could do one thing well," he says, "no matter what, I wouldn't be the sort of fellow I am." Yet the fact is that he cap talk (in the first part) and pour himself into a diary (in the second part) with such a pitiless clarity of self-knowledge, with such searching irony, that by all -the laws he should destroy himself in the process. Salavin, in fact, we feel in these first two books, is a completely invented person, a marvellously true invention, but a convention. There is no absolute Wertheresque identification of the portrait and the painter.
But then in the last two books we see Salavin from the outside, and at once he becomes a complete identity ; the " I " and the "Me," so to speak, come straight together in an utterly whole and probable person, so probable that he ceases to look " invented " at all. And in a final valediction of the author to his creature, "companion of my youth and my ripe years," there is the mark of a Werther after all. "1 am leaving you, brother, at the hour when, pushing through and beyond my dreams, I accept with calm despair the fact of being only what I am." In that last sentence at least Salavin and his creator are completely identified.
Many before Salavin have ended in that "calm despair " ; his story is one more beautiful proof that the wisdom cannot be learnt at second-hand ; unless it is the climax of experience it is mere defeatism. In the first part he is a young clerk of thirty who has just lost his job as the result of a ludicrous incident, and is suffering from an attack of " Oblomovism." One moment, "How marvellous it is to be happy", he is declaring, "how easy and simple " ; and a few minutes , later protests that he knows "nothing of what true happiness is, having as I do barely six hours of happiness a year." In the second part he is confessing into a journal his absurd ' —as he thinks it—resolution to become a saint. The story is becoming the tragi-comedy of a man who looks in vain for opportunities to be positively good. The best he can ever discover of himself is just negative. "What there is of integrity in my character is reinforced,,by a fear of the police." In The Lyonnais Club, a secret meeting place of political workers, we see him from outside still searching in the company of some extremely Well-Con- trasted characters. The issue resolves itself -into a' quation of moral and physical courage. Finally under a diffekent name in a different cotmtry the opportunities are found; but none of them satisfies him until he discovers at last, in death, the calm despair of acceptance. What especially distinguishes the book is the marvellous originality, and ,aptness of the. episodes to" the cefitial theme ; - and nothing can convey the richiieSit of .its Inithour or the honesty of its pathos.
Mr. Harrison disdain's any connexion with the " I " of All the Trees Were Green, and certainly one would not care to be identified with so pompously Obtrusive and tediously verbose an individual, who must needs even inform us that a memorial card on a mantelpiece was "framed with black adhesive tape in that manner which is called, I believe, passe- partout." To tell the truth, the narrator's articles of belief include little that is more interesting ; which is unfortunate, because, as he truly admits, "this tale . . . in no wise con- cerns me, except that I am its chronicler," and the tale which he chronicles of an over-proud family of females who have lost their male relatives has in itself interesting possibilities. But we never manage to see it on its own merits, because there is always this chronicler in the foreground, finding life really very difficult on the miserable- £600 a year left him by his uncle, and with no better standard for judging his friends by than the degree of savoir faire they can display in the Café de Paris. It is just possible, but improbable, that he is laughing at himself. But like the totalitarian councillor in Mr. Palmer's The Hesperides, we may well ask ourselves if it
is decent to see that kind of joke. ' - The more depressingly Obvious the future of this world becomes, the more ready do authors seem to speculate in satire or fantasy on alternative or future worlds. Mr. Palmer is an excellent satirist His book, he says, "should not be read by anyone who has the smallest respect for things as they are." In the planet Hesperus (which he constructs round some extremely ingenious physical geography) he depicts a purely totalitarian world, in which every kind of emotion or activity which does not directly contribute to the profit of the community is regarded as indecent, and the individual is held to be no more than a "hyphen between two genera- tions." There are some extremely well-written scenes, and
ll-d vised episodes Towards the end the onmeeanovtherYer because use they have nothing else in common." satire deepens when comparisons are drawn between the Hesperides and ourselves. With us, it is explained for example, "quite intelligent people are often driven to make love to
Back on earth the author of Wild Harbour optimistically defers our final cataclysm until 1944, but beyond that date offers us nothing to hope for. Will it be possible, he wonders like many of us, to avoid joining in any "bloody stupid war" by retiring to some lonely spot beyond the range ? His hero and heroine do so, and for some months live in a remote Highland cave 'Where they are compelled to return to the first principles of living. Their make-shift existence occupies most of the book, and is on the whole not so imaginatively handled as it might have been. Finally, the savagery to which the world has returned invades even their remote fastness ; and having fled from the senselessness of modern mechanical war, they end up as victims of the most primitive hand-to-hand barbarity they could have wanted.
-Meanwhile 'Mr. Kit Marshall also 'return to first principles but in the depths of Zululand at the present Rine. *hat is one to say tovi plea for nationalism aiming Zulus at this hour of the world's history? Mr. Marshall certainly says much very forcefully. "My tale is neither sedition nor fantasy," he states, "but an expression of my love for a great people." It describes a movement among the people themselves, for a "revival of Zulu magnificence," which is led by a white girl who has been brought up as much among the natives as among her own people. There is just a suspicion of the Tarian-brash about her which' prevents the story leaving as completely convincing an impression as it might otherwise have done ; while her clean-limbed young English lover is kept too obviously hanging about the scene to allay any fears we might entertain about the purity of the girl's devo- tion to her native' friends. All the same, she is an original and lively figure, like several other persons in the book, and she introduces us to much that is fascinating and impressive in native life and ceremony. There is an inte- resting presentation of the case for witch-doctors ; and all the symptoms of the native revival are heartening.
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