Best Stories of William Saroyan. (Faber. 8s. 6d.)

Fiction

Wits End. By John Moore. (Dent. 7s. 6d.)

The Edge of Darkness. By William Woods. (Hutchinson. 8s. 6d.) The Unpractised Heart. By L. A. G. Strong. (Gollancz. 8s. 6d.)

IN February, 1934, the American magazine Story quietly printed The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, by a new writer, William Saroyan, a young man of twenty-six, born in California, of Armenian parentage. This story made a considerable stir on both sides of the Atlantic, and now his English publishers offer it again, together with forty others, in a volume entitled Best Short Stories of William Saroyan, at a very modest price under war- time conditions. Eight collections of Saroyan's stories have been published in England (the first appeared in the spring of '35), and it is from these that the present volume has been compiled. The unnamed editor admits to dishonesty in the choice of a title, but claims he has at least done his best to provide a representative selection. Perhaps one might argue a little, or at least ask: " Why not Inhale and Exhale? Why not Little Moral Tales? Why not Dear Baby, and why, oh why, not Common Prayer and Among the Lost?" But each Saroyan fan will find, almost certainly, stories he would have chosen to include: Seventy Thousand Assyrians, Snake and Man, Laughing Sam, War, London, Ah London, The Sunday Zeppelin, A Number of the Poor, and The First Day at School, are all here for my own personal satisfaction.

Saroyan has built on to the method first used by Virginia Word in her brilliant volume Monday or Tuesday, by which she extended the technique of the short story. Progression, no longer controlled by narrative sequence, is made through exploring thoughts ass°. ciated with objects or people. The author, with seeming inconse- quence, darts from point to point, collecting, selecting, snipping and twisting, neatly tying the threads until a whole is contrived. Saroyan's antecedents, his background and experience, have made s deep well from which he draws material. He is a poet who makes the inarticulate speak, his sympathies are with the minorities, the outcast and the persecuted, and he has a depth of feeling and tender- ness for all manifestations of life which is impressive. Saroyan is still a young man ; he may yet fulfil the deep promise of his earl! work, but, while it is too soon for any sound assessment of his gifts, one can point to the quality of prophecy, manifest so frequently in his stories ; this, at least, is a significant demonstration of an original talent.

In his short novel Wits End Mr. John Moore gives an account of the historic summer of 1940, as seen through the eyes of a pilot, attached to the Fleet Air Arm, and the young woman with whom he falls in love. The doubts and struggles of that tragic year are recovered with a sincerity which is moving. The author can evoke a scene of action with an objective skill which is con- vincing and excellent. Of war in the air, of raids, of Dunkirk and its beaches, of the Battle of Britain, Mr. Moore writes with point 22-1

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and economy. These qualities alone should obtain a wide audience for the book.

In spite of his undeniable talent, in the creation of character Mr. Moore falls down. His romantic couple are types ; we listen to them, watch them, but they never make us forget either ourselves or their creator. The girl is a rather woolly intellectual, over- whelmed by the catastrophe of war which she had foreseen. The young man, having fought in Spain, finds the new conflict a logical development of the struggle between Democracy and Totalitarianism. Novelists, it seems, must make a choice between character and history. Mr. Moore has vainly tried to maintain a balance ; in consequence, history, being insubordinate, has flattened his char- acters with the devastating thoroughness of a steamroller.

A similar conflict occurs in The Edge of Darkness, a first novel by an American writer. The book is planned in three parts, cover- ing the months of September, November and December, in Norway, under German occupation in that same tragic year. In the remote northern hamlet of Trollness a revolt is carefully planned against the small German garrison. The people have been visited by a British agent, disguised as a Special Commissioner from Berlin. The guns are brought by submarine and landed successfully, and only patience is required. Unfortunately, the Mayor's daughter has fallen in love with a German soldier. The lovers plan to meet in Sweden, where the girl, who is pregnant, is being sent. The Mayor, having found out the soldier's identity, shoots him. After his death three of the local inhabitants are arrested as hostages. In consequence, the revolt is given a premature start. The garrison, which had been secretly reinforced, defeats the men of Trollness after a graphically described battle. Mr. Woods' characters, even the refractory ones, are forced into line by the compulsion of events, which proves too much for them as individuals ; but the book can be read for its objective narrative of a nation's struggle against oppression.

If the difficulties of obtaining barley sugar and a particular brand of shaving soap had not been stressed, one would scarcely realise that Mr. Strong's novel, too, has war for background. His hero, a thirty-six-year-old civil servant, who has led a sheltered existence, seems incapable of facing life as a whole. He solaces himself in a dream world with a beautiful young woman, whom he has inter- viewed previously for a few minutes, before she meets her death in a street accident. A passion for shaving leads Christopher to demand a mirror in the dream existence, and the face he sees in it is not his own. This brings him back to earth with a bump. Is

he going mad? He finds the original owner of the face, a man younger than himself, who is an R.A.F. pilot. Other people, by this time, have come to the conclusion all is not well with him. Christopher goes on a rest cure, is vamped by a young woman he has saved from drowning, who falls in love with him at first sight. One day they'll marry. But as Mr. Strong's everyday world is more romantic than real, his experiment fails to convince us.

Joinr HAMPSON.