Recent English Fiction
So, relieved of the burden of cowardly hypocrisy, I will say at once that no year of English literature is quite a real one to me if there has been no novel either by Virginia Woolf or E. M. Forster. Lawrence is dead, George Moore has, I believe, written his last novel, Kipling has, for one reader at least, dropped into a second-day childhood, Wells declares that he is no longer interested in art, Galsworthy has finished with the Forsytes, and Arnold Bennett—well, the greatest disappointment to me of any in 1930 was the Imperial Palace of Arnold Bennett. To few books recently have I looked forward with more excitement. Here was a theme that had (I knew) occupied Bennett's mind for years, a theme exactly suited to him--he had been a year and a half in the writing of it—why then is it so grievously disappointing to many of us ? One reason, I think, if Bennett will excuse me, is its inherent vulgarity. Why is it that when he writes about the Five Towns he is never vulgar, but that when he writes of anywhere else—Paris, London, the Riviera—we move uncomfortably in our chairs ? It is, -I think, because all his values are wrong. As a citizen of his own town we see him kindly, generous, and charmingly innocent. As a spectator of the larger world he is provincial. These are commonplaces, but another thing that Imperial Palace makes clear is not a commonplace—namely, that Arnold Bennett has never yet learnt how to write. Sometimes he writes good journalism, sometimes, as in many pages of Imperial Palace, his sentences are of an excruciating ugliness. The reiteration of the word " Panjandrum," for example, in this book is like the creaking of an ill-oiled door. This is the Gilbertian side of it, that, within recent months, Bennett has scolded Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Sir James Jeans all for writing badly. But I should like to emphasize here my veneration for Old IVives' Tales and Clayhanger— two of the greatest novels of our time.
It would be absurd, of course, to deny Imperial Palace the zest, good nature and kindliness that Bennett puts into all his work, but it is nevertheless a failure (for myself, be it understood !).
For myself, again, the finest novel in 1930 was not an English one ; it was the translation of The Castle, by Kafka, the young Austrian, who is, most unhappily, dead. What a lovely, moving, memorable book ! But as it is not English I must say no more of it here. The really happy feature of the last six months in English fiction is the return of the real novel. This same real novel has had a hard fight for it during the past few years, years famous for the constant masquerading of books under the banner of the novel, books that are not novels at all.
As my own contemporary favourites among novelists are men and women like Colette, Leonard Frank, Arnold Zweig, Virginia Woolf and Willa Catha, I do not claim to be old- fashioned (at present the proudest boast of many of us !). But the pseudo-analytical-auto-biographical-after-Joyce-and- Huxley novel has ceased to be an influence. The successes of the last year have been Richard Mahoney, by Henry Handel Richardson, the Angel Pavement of J. B. Priestley, The Water
of Vicki Baum.
Now every one of these books creates characters outside the author's personal experience and tells a story. Of course, in one sense, no author creates outside his own experience, but the difference really lies between the rather self-con- gratulatory notion that to tell one's own life story in public is enough for creation, and the impulse to fling oneself outside one's personal history into another world. It is this creation of other worlds that Henry Handel Richardson, Priestley, and A. P. Herbert have offered us ! What a rel: f after the dreary self-disgust of Aldous Huxley, the weak, boneless introspection of Stephen Hudson, the sexual preoccupations of some of the followers of D. H. Lawrence ! It is, I think, the finest possible thing for the English novel that J. B. Priestley and Alan Herbert should be the two men most vividly in the public eye at the moment.
I do not see how you can deny that Angel Pavement and The Water Gipsies are fine, full, living novels, engaged on the proper business of novel-writing, that is, the providing for us of real, active, breathing human beings ! Mr. Priestley's vast success has come because he writes about the ordinary man without despising or patronizing him. His prose is often beautiful and moving. (Take any page of Angel Pave- ment and compare it with any page of Imperial Palace! He has an astonishing eye for detail and a grand humour. These are some of the reasons of his success. But I think that Richard Mahoney was the novel of 1930. It is, of course, not a new book, but a trilogy of novels bound for the first time together. The cumulative effect of this is remarkable and the last division of the book is the best (and how unusual in a novel that is !). What of younger writers ? Where are the reputations of the men and women under forty ? I confess that I don't see them. I have liked greatly novels by Joanna Cannon, Barbara Goolden, Thomas Bell, Francis Oliver, Marguerite Stein, D. F. Gardiner (her Another Night, Another Day is a fine work) and the author of that promising novel, Other Man's Saucer. But who of these novelists will be able to keep it up, be able to keep it up as, for instance, Somerset Maugham and "Elizabeth " do ? Which of them after thirty years will be able to produce novels as fresh and living as Cakes and Ale or Papa? Here I think is one of our present diffi- culties. It is very easy now to be clever over the first or the second novel. The tricks are very readily learnt ; anyone can learn them. But competition to-day in the field of the English novel is terrific. There are so many clever novels and again and again one has noticed men like Mr. Gerhardi, for example, arrive with one brilliant book and then fail altogether to sustain their reputation. I was delighted, incidentally, last year at Miss Rosamund Lelunann's courage in following a first brilliant success with a work far more difficult, a work that was exceedingly well worth while, but that had no chance of popularity. That is the courage that deserves fame and that is the fashion in which a solid reputation, one worth having and keeping, is founded.
In general, I would say that 1930 was a most encouraging year for the English novel, because of its return to sanity, cheerfulness and generous full-handed creation.
Hums WALPOLE..
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