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Fiction
By WILLIAM PLOMER The Thibaults : Parts -4 and. 4I: . By Roger Martin du Gard. (John Lane, The BOdley Head. 7s. 6d.) The New Bridge. By Meyer Levin. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.)
The Delicate fire. Shoal Stories and poems, By Naomi
The Haunted Mirror. - Tales..- 13:y .1Elizabeth7 Madox Roberts. (Cape. 7s. 6cr, )
Chinese Dust. By J. van Dyke. (Jarrolds. 7s. 6d.)
IT would be -possible -to form, a- library consisting of nothing but novels about middle-class family life in Western Europe. BUddenbrooks would be one of its chief ornaments, it would, of course, contain the Forsyte Saga, and it could be increased every year by several notable volumes: it would not often be possible to add such an excellent work as Monsieur Roger Martin du Gard's Les Thibault. Such a collection, besides affording the common reader a great deal of pleasure and the sociologist a great deal of material, would hardly be likely to cheer the amateur of human nature, except intermittently. In these family novels the sorrowful aspects of human life and the meaner tendencies of human nature are continually being presented, and we are continually being reminded of familiar but ever-disturbing -home-truths—that we want power, but when We get It we do not as a rule know how to use- it ; that our respectability is often mixed with stupidity or hypocrisy, rir -both ; and that there is apparently no " right " way, to bring up children. Nothing, however, is more thrust upon. our notice than the fact that bourgeois solidity, in all its wooden or stony impressiveness, instead of being rooted foursquare in firm foundations, is often poised uneasily over the springs of tpOet-ry,- and madness. Take the Thibault family, for instance. :Nobody, one might have said, -couldhave been a stouter citizen than Monsieur Thibault him- self. Of Norman origin and irrePioachable Catholic orthodoxy, with assured position and useful connexions, he seemed a pillar of society—he was even the Founder and Director of the Institute of Moral Hygiene. And yet he produced a son like the red-haired Jacques, as temperamental as a Karamazov with a streak of Rimbaud in him. At school : "'among these. children, whose personalities were dormant .beneath the wdight of 'habit and discipline, sarong these perpetually busy masters, whose natural gifts seemed to be atrophying, this dunce, with his unprepossessing face, but also with his outbursts of candour and wilfulness, who seemed to hivec in_ a .uni'Vense of phantasy, created by and for himself alone—who never hesitated to throw himself into the most preposterous adventures without any fear of the consequences—this little monster provoked terror but extorted unconscious esteem."
Among the first to feel the attraction of this nature was Daniel de Fontanin ; it was "less developed thank his own, but:sO •-rieh, and perpetually capable of astonishing -.and in- sti,ileting him." The consequence of the attraction was a wildly eniotional friendship between:the two adolescent boys. The friendship having . been - diScovered, they elope to Marseilles in a frantic quest for an impossible freedom and happiness. They are brought back, and Jacques, "the prisoner of the mechanism of the family and of-society, hemmed in on . every. side, with no means of escape or of resistance," has to face his father.
"M. Thibault was shouting : The worthless creature ! We must break his will ! ' He had held out before him his thick, hairy hand, opened right out,- then reelosed it slowly, making the joints crack."
This adventure is the main theme of the first part of the novel. The Second describes superbly the incarceration of Jacques , in the reformatory founded by his father, and its consequences. Monsieur du Gard has a rare mastery of his medium. Imaginatively Conceived and finely wrought, his '.novel gives . life to a variety of memorable characters, and he leaves Lis , with an idea of how they would look while drinking a cup of tea as well as of how their minds would be likely to work in any given situation. Besides the portraits of Jacques and • his father, those of his elder brother Antoine, of Madame de Fontanin and her spiritual adviser, and of Lisbeth, an Alsatian maidservant, are especially good. Six parts of Les Thibault have already appeared in French, and it was high tinie for the-work to- be introduced-to English . readers.; -ft.is.good news that the Bodley Head mean to continue its publication in . English: Mr. Meyer Levin has -worked -as an actor,, theatrical producer and stage manager, and . his new novel is said to be his fifth. The New Bridge is a specimen of what maw be called the dramatic novel. That is to say, it depends mainly for. its effect upon those powers which- the novelist has in common ,with the playwright and- very little upon those extra liberties which he may allow himself if he knows how to use them. It would be no denigration to say that it reads almost like a play, and would fall easily into three acts. A "stage sense" has evidently been at:work through. out, and something_ of a dramatist's care and skill have
gone to the fashioning of the characters -and dialogue, of ,
the gradual approach to climax, the drifting . away of smoke after the central explosion, and the somewhat wistfulending. The scene is New York and the personnel are the inhabitants of a tenement house—they are mostly of Jewish or Central European origin. "The radios ,from twelve fiats sang into the six-foot courts, but it was just- like the Garden of Eden with stucco walls and automatic refrigeration for the working classes." A family is threatened with eviction for non. payment of rent ; active resistance is organized by the powerful Ida Fentgold ; the police arrive, and someone is accidentally killed ; -meanwhile the builder• and owner of the tenements has lost his fortune. The story, of which that is a bare hint, has unusual merits. Often humorous, it is up to date and easy to read ; it is only .bitter.when questioning injustice ; and it makes a really valuable attempt to explore the effects of a man's prolonged unemployment upon his married life. It is rather a pity that, towards the end of the book, ghostly _fingers should begin to fumble for the reader's heart-strings, for they prove to be all, or nearly all, thumbs. The use of coincidence is overdone, and the behaviour of the characters grows stagey and sentimental.
Mrs. Mitchison. and. Miss Roberts have this much in common, that each takes an elevated view of human nature. I do not mean that they think people are necessarily nice, but. that they are aware of beauty and dignity, conscious or unconscious, potential or actual, in human lives ; they are concerned-about love and justice and passion and hope. Mrs. Mitchison's new book consists of stories interspersed with poems. Its range is immense—it extends from Phaedra in the palace' of Theseus to hunger-marchers in "Hyde Park, and on the way we encounter Sappho in Lesbos, Carl Milks in Stockholm, and Vikings. in Hammersmith. It is a vast and creditable ambition to try• and see life whole, but leis difficult to -fix the vision steadily. Mrs. Mitchison's turbulent imagination and vigorous sympathies have again achieved many good things, but taken as a whole the book perhaps lacks unity of conception. A half-hearted note on the dust. cover hints as- much : "Between whiles there are verses, which seem ttb the: authorto have some bearing on the ideas behind the stories, but which no one need read unless they want to." - Miss Roberts's tales of the hill folk of Kentucky, who are quaint in speech and. primitive in outlook,_ have a grave and distinguished beauty. of their. own. Her musical Prose flows quietly round its themes. At times it wavers into abstraction : " He lived upon-the laughter that flowed under the-hymn and lived siviftly as. hatthied by an uorealiZed.disister that,tbreatenil to arise from some hidden part and bring the whole earth to a swift
consummation." - - . _ But it is better that Clarity of outline should occasionally be lost like this in a-twilight of words than that elusive and eVaneSeent shades of feeling should be ignored.
Even if a. novelist takes a_very low view of human nature and can find nothing good to say about the life he- describes there is no reason why-sordidness need be drearily presented —it can sometimes be made to appear terrible or pathetic. European communities in the Far East are not as a nde exclusively composed of such crapulOtts morons as the characters in Chinese Dust, but ,even if we admit the existence of such a community as the One at Lao-King, and of 111." sionaries who philander with Russian adventuresses and throttle rickshaw men, we cannot feel that Mr. van Dyke has made the _most of his unsavoury exiles. ,
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