Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER

None Turn Back. By Storm Jameson. (Caszoll. 7s. 6d.) The Rampaets of Viktue. By Johd Brophy. - 7s. 6d.) .Agaid., One Day. - By Matila C; Ghyka. Tramlated by Maud Bigge. (Methuen. 7s. 6d.) A Song for Harps. By William March. (Rich and Cowan. 8s. 6d.) NONE of these books is to be recommended to readers who like to forget the present -political troubles of the world, .for in each those troubles play a more or less important part. Miss Storm Jameson is concerned with-the private and public behaviour of various peOple &ming the General Strike of 1926 ; Mr. John Brophy's tale, which may be dated by allusions to

the burning of the Reichstag, invites us to notice, among otbei 1 things, an intrusion of Nazi 'racial prejudice into English family

life ;- M. Matila Ghkka, ".a Roumanian diplomat of the widest experience," and also a specialist in nostaglia for the past, ,.offers a contrast between empty bellies in the Vienna of 197 and beds of roses in. pre-War London ; and even Mr. William

March, piling up domestic agonies in the backwoods of Alabama, includes among his characters a young woman with a Red bee in her bonnet. All four books reach at least that • level of competence which we have generally come to expect, and all four may be taken as pretty faithful reflections

• -of various phases of lives that have been lived in the last few

years.

In Miss Jameson we find something besides competence : her pages seem to exhale a settled melancholy, not the melan- choly of defeatism but of honesty and even earnestness of • purpose, and of a concern for general decency and happi-

ness in the face of fearful odds. None Turn Back, the third plume of a trilogy, deals with events in the life of Hervey "Roxby, a married woman about to undergo a major operation but " Working,: scheming, loving, feeling and thinking " during that critical week of the General Strike. More than a close-up of one person, it is a slice of social history and touches ' on many--:peepte:- •vrell-Wiittenliote on The dust-cover

compares them to spiders, and there does seem to be something insect-like in this shifting pattern of their activities. There was George Ling, whose chin trembled at visions he conjured E up of rapine, outrage, and the mad lusts of Labour leaders."

There was Re nn, who said, " I don't want anyone to touch his hat to me or feel worse educated or less- free in soul." There was lEarlham, who thought it surprising that there were only four thousand Communists instead of a million ; i and HeYwood; a researcher into poison gas, who said he preferred rats to men ; and Father Hart, who put his trust

in the Holy Spirit and abhorred violence. And in this welter . of conflicting sympathies, the serious nature of Hervey Roxby

was obliged, like many. others today, to rely largely on a

faith in its own sense of fitness.

Mr. Brophy gives, us a detailed account of an attachment

formed 'by a respectable liberal journalist for a chorus girl named Mike Mandeville, "a living representative of thou- ! sands of modern pretty girls." The spectacle of Oliver Antrobus,

" aged forty-three, 'widower, leader-Writer on the Emblem, author of Tariff Reform- Dissected (1913), A Machine-Gunner's Memories (1929), . and .Mid-European Madness (1931), standing in a dingy alley at the back of a theatre.. . waiting with a palpitating heart for the appearance of a slip of a chorus girl whose mind was probably full of jazz"

might not have been very interesting or essentially very novel,

but it happened that Antrobus had. a grownLup son named Franz who, for cogent reasons, had turned into a German instead of an Englishman, and. .into a rabid _Nazi at that. " Much though I may grieve," wrote Franz, in a'-letter to his

father„-, _ _ _ _ - •

" as an individual aria 'as a son for -.mys_dear_Moter, as a pure- blooded German citizen I realise that in flying to give me birth she was fulfilling the highest. faRetion,of German womanhood . . . Just as truly as any of the millions who sacrificed their lives between 1914 and 1918, she died _for her Fatherland . . ."

Mr. Brophy brings this dislocation of the link between father and son to a painful climax in_n scene .wbere Antrohtials not

only 'spat upon byhis son but tries to make arri. tri'a Jew who has. Suffered, alike indignity. '-•1Ie has-taken eMisiderable

pains, and successful ones, to depict the commonness of Mike Mandeville and the nature of the attachment between her and Antrobus, which was to be a Like many novels,

this one would have been more effective if it had been shorter ; it contains, for instance, a - would-be .satirical portrait of a young poet which completely-,mjsses ftre..- Again, One DO is a curious book.' -4. derives its title from an Edwardian song, On the- sunny side of Bond Street We'll meet again, one' day.. . . . The people are as unreal and stylish as- the figures in fashion plates, and the world they inhabit. is i.nspite of itern'realities and Central European • confusion, largely .a. world of fantasy, yei-they have a way of almost comingto life and behaving at least with correctness.

• Their minds are as weThordered and as litnited, as the Almanaila de Gotha, they attach great importance to forms and ceremonies and traditions, they are widely but not deeply cultured, sometimes superficial, . often sensible, and -altogether rather lost in a world in which bombs fall, boundaries change, crowned heads become uncrowned, and upstarts have the power that used to belong to emperors, The story opens in Vienna with the down-and-out baron Napoleon-Edalric de Maleen-Louis looking not very hopefully at a ham in a shOp •Wiridow-7-- Maleen-Louis who in 1913 was an anglomaniac attache in London, admitted to " the inner circles of the most exclusive clubs," With- a flat in Jermyn Street and a taste fOr antiques. Fortunately an encounter with an old -friend, the Count de Rietberg-Clairvaux, restores his fortunes, and in two twos he has met the Princess de Konigswald, who was " of course," as they say, a Balosch-Feldvar. Provided once more with . position, Maleen-Louis is able to indulge_ not only his taste for briC-a-bras but what may be called his blue. bloodthirstiness, and before we leave him he is back once more on the sunny side of Bond Street. - - From the sunny side of -Bond Street we switch over to the shady side of Alabama, which provides a field-for the notable talents of Mr. William March. A Song for Harps arrives with a warning that it is " strong meat for the squeamish," but we are used to that kind of dish, dressed in various ways, and we doubt whether " the squeamish " are not with the dodo by now. This dish, at all events, is rich and juicy if rather strongly flavoured. The framework of the story is a triangle. An unflaggingly unpleasant young woman named Myrtle Bickerstaff comes in for the attention of two brothers. She easily falls a prey to Jim, a village beau of the lightly come and lightly go variety, -but will have nothing to do with Andrew, a Hercules with a hare- lip, who falls in love with her on a tremendous scale, idealis- ing her and writing her awesome poems full of . imagery partly Biblical and partly in the vein of D. H. Laivrence. That a storm is brewing becomes evident quite soon, but one

re

,is hardly prepared for its intensity or -its' duration : it is a long time since we have had fuller or Meatier descriptions' of the opposite of domestic bliss. A conversion, a murder, dehauchery, cruelty, violence, jealousy, help to:make thenight- mare gather horror as it proceeds, but it would. be unfair- to suggest that Mr. March's song for harps is just a dirge-tor big drums, for the book is not merely affectedly " powerful " and relentlessly gloomy. Right from the beginning one notices felicities -63"deSeription and signs of wit and humour, 'rind one welcomes that visual sense which is such a, godsend‘f ',In the first few pages one sees the log-pond " with purple logs, like defeated giants, lying inert in the stagnant, oil-streaked water " ; the woman's mouth from which." wavering wrinkles radiated like the spidery heat-marks around a child'O'drawing of the sun " ; the woman who " lifted her eyes 'ft■ the ceiling and touched her circular earrings, as if to verify that they had not been stolen " ; an old horse registering pleasure at its owner's approach ; the girl' whose face was " as ungraceful and asyMmetrical as the timid first egg that a pullet layi." In short, however one is prepared to take the story as a com- ment on American rural life, one sees that Mr. March - is gifted enough to have the right to hand out the rough stuff, and that he can do it without being absurd. At the same time one is not above sympathising with the father of Jim and -Andrew Who said; ". Lord God Almighty, whit a sorry passel of --chilltm raised ! " or with Myrtle's mother who said, lernamILeringquieter times and places, " -YOU can say whatyou please, but people in Georgia do not act this way ! "