Fiction
Chosen Country. By John Dos Passos. (Lehmann. 15s.) The Inspector of Ruins. By Elsa Triolet. Translated by Norman Cameron. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 1 Is. 6d.) The Witch's Thorn. By Ruth Park. (Michael Joseph. .10s. 6d.) I AM 'subject to neural twinges of rather solemn speculation in reading a book like Chosen Country or any other of its profuse and confident American kind. The world's tide of nationalism constantly recedes and as constantly rolls forward again, and -large nations and small, simultaneously or in turn, are invaded by a sense of destiny. The , affliction possesses the United States today in the liberal and ration- alist optimism of the American way of life. In literature this pro- duces work of abounding energy and purpose, veracious, idealistic and experimental. There are still cross-currents from Europe, of course, and there are dark American backwaters, but the broad stream of the literature of the American Century, of which Mr. DC16 Passos is so admirably representative, bears along with it all the faith, the self-assertion, the eighteenth-century political cosmo- graphy of the ordinary citizen of the United States today. What, precisely, one asks, speaking not out of a sense of destiny but a sense J' the length and breadth of Europe's artistic tradition, are the values of art in this contemporary American literature ? Is there, after all, anything more than a grain of metaphorical truth in the assertion that art knows no frontiers ?
The point at issue may be briefly illustrated by reference to Dreiser. (Thomas Wolfe is another interesting case for comparison.) For tha serious American reader Dreiser is a genius—an American genius—that only just stops short of being Homeric ; the cool, dry protest against this verdict made by Mr. Trilling, for instance, has won little support. For the reader here, however, nothing will make Dreiser seem other than ponderously flat-footed and philistine. And, as between American and English critical opinions, Mr. Dos Passos—a novelist of commanding strength and sincerity—may be in somewhat similar case. His style, though it lacks distinction, has clarity and flexibility where Dreiser had only an uncouth and madden- ing wordiness ; his invention is brisk and vigorous ; he has as genuine a feeling for the originating culture of Europe as for the American problems of his day. And yet he gives an English reader, in this long, carefully composed and intelligent new novel, Chosen Country, so much less than he seems to promise and so very much less than American readers have apparently discovered in it. I hesitate to invoke the catchwords of European aestheticism, but literary Americanism of this kind and degree surely excludes whole- ness of vision and leaves little trace of the formal property of beauty in art.
The trouble is partly that Mr. Dos Passos is here repeating himself; and repeating himself to rather more facile purpose than before. The wide expanse of American social history which he surveys in the ,margin of the idyll of Jay Pignatelli and Lulie Harrington is more !sharply, more vividly focused in his trilogy, U.S.A. What he has gained in sheer professional competence—there is scarcely a page in the book from which one could not quote in evidence of his astonish- ing ease and dexterity—has been at the cost of imaginative depth and illumination. It is all just a little too bright and mechanical, this floodlit review of the different racial and intellectual strains in American society, this intimate statement of the verities of pro- gressive doctrine, this ringing declaration of faith that " we've just scratched the surface of our country." Added to which are a curious and possibly new taste in Mr. Dos Passos for the slightly scabrous and a vein of gay, whimsical tenderness that is, embarrassingly, almost Barrie-ish. Mr. Dos Passos's energy and confidence are qualities to admire and even to envy, but, like the corresponding energy and confidence that are obligatory for the Soviet writer today, they appear to go with a view of life and literature which to the debilitated European seems blinkered.
Vigour or passion or vitality is what is lacking in The Way to Glory, and yet this is essentially what is called a civilised novel and a civilised pleasure to read. It is the first of Mr. Scott's books I have come across, and seems to me a remarkably good piece of work in its cultivated middle-class kind. The story it tells is of a man with a childless wife, uneasily aware of a growing tension in their marriage or in their feeling for one another, wha goes off to Paris for a month to demonstrate an excavator of sorts, only half-accidentally picks up a mistress, discovers that she is coloured and her brother a deserter from the R.A.F., is visited during a week-end by his wife, and in the end returns to London with his personal problems solved or at any rate onthe way to being solved. Not a very fair summary, of course ; it is the re-discovery of Paris, "the charm, the guilt, and the sadness of sex," and the general predicament of the intel- lectual today that make up Mr. Scott's theme. Is it the choice for his hero of the name Ansell, also the name of the rude philosopher of The Longest Journey, that suggests he has aimed a little deliber- ately in Mr. Forster 's direction ? He is, at all events, engagingly informal, his dialogue is apt, economical and amusing, and he has a pleasant trick of surprise. At what depth, so to speak, the people in the story are alive is another matter ; Mr. Scott is too much inclined to account for what they do. And his all too honest parting gesture of belief in "political action" is, I am sure, a mistake. But this is a good novel. There is little space for the other two books in this 1st. Ruins are an interesting subject, but Mme Triolet's fantastical confection about the adventures of a human ruin, an ex-prisoner of war-who is preternaturally encafarde, has too little coherence. Some of the preposterous bits and pieces are funny in their way, though the total effect bears some resemblance to automatic writing. Miss Ruth Park's novel I found a disappointment. She is clearly a writer of talent, but the comedy, the brutality, the pathos and piety of her sketches of life and character in a New Zealand rural community seemed to me flagrantly overdone. R. D. CHARQUES.
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