Judgments and Illusions
Letter for Tomorrow. By Rosemary Ross Skinner. (Hodder and Stoughton, 10s. 6d.) The Terezin Requiem. By Josef Bor. Translated
chinson, 18s.)
FROM this week's international collection Hjalmar Sederberg's Doctor Glas stands out. Doctor Glas is a thirty-year-old doctor living in pre-First World War Stockholm and the book consists of his journal. His reflections, often profound, always profoundly pessimistic, on his womanless life and life in general form the substance of this journal. To him 'morality is a merry-go- round, a spinning top,' philosophy a playing with words, and the stars 'a constant, painful, insulting reminder of our own insignificance.' The story, when it comes, seems almost an aside, and the only laboured passage is the one in which he argues directly with himself whether or not he shall murder a clergyman.
It was the apparent suggestion .that murder could be justified under certain circumstances which shocked Swedish readers in 1905 when the book was first published. But this is to miss the point and to give an importance to such value- judgments which Doctor Glas would not have given. It is the author's skill that he draws us into Doctor Glas's warped and, by normal standards, insane world, so that we too believe these standards are of little importance.
Also in journal form and also with a Swede for a principal character is Rosemary Ross Skinner's eighty-seven-page love story Letter for Tomorrow (though there any resemblance ends). In a precise, controlled style she has caught the essence of illusioned romantic love and 1 cannot remember it done more successfully. For this 1 forgive the rather arbitrary way she drowns her heroine's husband. Less satisfactory is her con- clusion, without disillusionment. 'I am a little afraid,' she writes, '—perhaps I am afraid of not noticing any more, of taking everything for granted and I am afraid of never feeling like this again.' Here there is a suggestion that neither Miss Skinner nor her girl has achieved suffi- cient distance from the case; and though I believe that she has provided sufficient evidence that her response to whatever may follow will be honest and intelligent, others may find such an ending too associated with magazine fiction. I think Miss Skinner is better than this.
Neither worthy intentions nor grand abstract
conceptions make good novels, as The Terezin Requiem, by Josef Bor, shows all too clearly. Written in memory of the young Czech conductor Rafael Schachter, it is a fictionalised account of a Verdi Requiem he organised and conducted in the ghetto-concentration camp of Terezin in 1944. This, the author tells us, was `to show up the mendacity of perverted ideas of pure and impure blood, of superior and inferior races, to expose them precisely in a Jewish camp, and precisely through the medium of art, in the field where a man's true worth can best be recognised.' In his short book he tells us other things about the signifi- cance of this great performance, and the plight of the imprisoned Jews, but we feel nothing for them; singers ,and musicians, even when named, remain distant sentimentalised stereotypes. As for the writing, I cannot say whether original or trans- lator is responsible but when in the space of a page and a half one meets 'quivering nerves,' 'constricted breath,' boiling with rage,' and `horror eloquent in her dilated eyes,' something has gone badly wrong. To cliché is added, perhaps by intention, a tendency to write poetic double sentences: `Maruska contrived it all, the thing began with her.'
The Enchanted Land of Joanna Catlow's novel is Sarawak and here she sets an accomplished story which turns out a good deal better than the blurb's summary suggests. People and country form an effective, if sometimes a little fully described, background to the family entangle- ments of Europeans of the trading community. These are well worked out and the final twists of the plot have just the right degree of complica- tion to interest but not seem so involved that the characters themselves would never have followed them.
Of the three half-sisters who are the central
figures, Emily the child of eight is most success- fully realised and Miss Catlow shows convincing hindsight of a child's view of an adult world. Pauline, too, is an effective dumb blonde. Veronica, half Chinese, I was less happy about, because of wordy dialogue which created a more superficial person than she suggested in action and reflection. This apart, Miss Catlow's novel has a brooding apprehensive quality which makes it a unity and leads us convincingly to its final tragedy.
THOMAS HINDE
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