Two Experiments
Fables. By Jacquetta Hawkes. (Cresset Press. 15s.) The Doctor and the Devils. By Dylan Thomas. (Dent. 10s. 6d.) MRS. HAWKES is a perfect exemplar of the writer in the situation described by Kipling in his poem "The Fabulists." Taking the unpopular side, she jests at that which, if not none, hardly any will name aloud. What especially rouses her is that aspect of our present condition where it may be said that "diligent Sloth demandeth Freedom's death." She detests uniformity, she dreads equality, seeing in them the doom of all sense of beauty, of expansion of the spirit and of love, indeed of flowering of any kind. She naturally exaggerates, taking what you might call the operative ideas of our time and driving them to their logical conclusion, which would be sound if men were logical creatures—which mercifully they are not, seeing how insecure their premises are. What perhaps a little weakens the force of her moralising—fables, after all, are a form of moralising is her not giving enough credit to the generous impulses which are a driving force in our present trends just as much as envy and laziness. The irony lies in the fact that the best intentions of humanity lead to the direst results. Not that all her fables are political; some are,
rather, economic, if the two can be distinguished; and there is much in her work to make one think of Mandeville's The Grumbling Hive which afterwards became The Fable of the Bees. Two or three are purely human, or psychological.
The old form of the fable is extremely difficult to handle. How much of the dream element is there to be? How much allegory or apologue? And the fabulist has to keep always in mind that unless he pleases he is not heard at all. Mrs. Hawkes certainly pleases. Her fables are all in themselves good stories; they are lively, and, when she wishes them to be so, they are amusing, and the analogies are always easy to make. There is one point that she seems to be unaware of, and that is that the fable, to be truly a fable, should be, as Bagehot said of the lyric, "soon over." • Her last fable, "The Unites," occupies nearly half the book, and is much more a kind of Utopia in reverse, after the manner of Brave New World, and so lacks the sharp tap to our laziness or prejudice that the form at its best administers. It induces a different mood. But this, maybe, is to be a little too captious. Where is the line to be drawn? Is Jekyll and Hyde a fable? Stevenson was inclined to rank it as such, yet his own actual "Fables" are admirably succinct and pithy. One of the great joys, however, of Mrs. Hawkes's book is the quality of her prose, beautifully balanced in phrase, precise, musical, with just that suavity which gives an extra point to the irony.
Prose equally admirable, but of a quite different quality, is to be met with in Mr. Dylan Thomas's The Doctor and the Devils, a hard- hitting, vivid prose; for, as we know, Mr. Thomas has a rare sense of the weight and value of every word. As befits his subject, and his adventure in a new form, that of the published film-script before handling, it is extremely economical, and absolutely fitted to his grim theme; every word and phrase bears an exact relation to the thing, and at the same time makes demands upon the imagination. The story is that of Dr. Knox, and the "resurrectionist" murderers Burke and Hare, who, through the oddities of film-censorship, here have their names changed to Rock, Fallon and Broom, while the theme is that of the end not justifying the means. We go through all the almost unimaginable sordidness of a worse than animal humanity, lighted by flashes of the intellectual humanitarian idealism which in the end is worse than the hellish horror of the silent scenes, as when, in Rag-and-Bone Alley, we are shown:
"Hay wisps and knotted straw, dust clouds and cloth shreds, small crumpled nameless shapes, light as paper and string, scudding through the narrowness: All the inanimate furies of the Close alive suddenly, crying like the wind through telegraph wires, grotesque dancers from the dirt . . ."
and, through all this, characters, people with something that is their own only, emerge with more or less distinctness, driven by their own being. And at the end as we watch Rock climb a hill near the City, we fitfully hear his voice communing with himself: "Did I set myself up as a little god over death? . . . Did I set myself above pity? . . . Oh, my God, I knew what I was doing!"
It is extraordinarily powerful, actual as only a poet can make it; and this new form makes us wonder whether this may not be a pointer towards the way novels will be written in the future. If so, the method is wonderfully economical; there is not a word nor an emotion wasted. It is written, of course, in film language; we "dissolve to"; the camera "tracks back "; we see someone "in close-up"; but we soon get used to all this, and adapt our imagina-
tions to the whole movement, or the series of disjointed moven eats which make up the whole. The question arises: Do we need to se!' it on the film? Perhaps the answer is: We shall not need to see it only when the script is written so well as this one. That will be 8 rare occurrence, but a master in the art of the novel might well become a master in this new form.
Mr. Donald Taylor, who gave Mr. Thomas the "story-line' to write on, tells us in an interesting epilogue that: "The screenplay of The Doctor and the Devils is the first to be
published as a book before the film has been produced. This is no doubt due to the literary quality, unusual in this medium. It will be instructive to compare the finished film, when it is produced with this screenplay."
It will indeed, when Mr. Thomas's work has been submitted to ' varied contribution made by many hands and the constant polis and alteration that is the integral part of the work." More's
'the lino
tilt B.
Previous page
