FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN
HALFWAY through Over the Frontier I closed the book and said " Hurrah three times " for Pompey Casmilus. But when it came to the final closing, the very last line, I had not quite .three hurrahs to give. Perhaps I had only one small one, Pompey—" just a tiny little trifle that hardly has its eyes open." I was tired and worried when it came to the last page. For I find Stevie Smith a refreshing and exciting writer —I am an outright fan of the Novel on Yellow Paper—but I cannot altogether hold with these extended goings-on of Pompey—over the frontier. What a worry the girl is ! -We all remember Pompey, and sweet Freddy and darling -Harriet and there Josephine and darling, darling Auntie Lion. Well, here again, sitting within Pompey's skull, on the flickering screen of her dark eyelids you are invited to observe them, and with them—for this is a dark, night-lighted fantasy of Pilssen beyond Pillau, beyond Germany, on the Baltic Coast—with them, the sweet boy Tom, and Colonel -Peck and Mrs. Pouncer and the Generalissimo. Work it out for yourselves, Pompey says-7-and all that worries us here is not her fine, shadowy story, shuttling like a dream, but the anxious question of a manner. For there is nothing whatever wrong with Pompey except the menace of her brilliant trick, which once was marvellous, now is intermittently delicious, but hereafter — ?
. Let me be clear. Pompey's mind is well-furnished, flexible and sensitive ; she is full of ideas and is a great one to " cry Stuff and Nonsense in the sacred places." She is without unction and is not in the least afraid of pain or tears. But she has fixed on a method of expression which, great fun for a while, now threatens to intoxicate her. I use the word exactly. For her style—of the very intelligent, very fluent, very young foreigner running on, running on in brilliant, trip-up English— is infecting, has already infected, whole areas of her thought with a quite alarming fausse naïveté. But Pompey claims, and in page after page establishes her claim to, sophistication— I mean the real kind. And she is admittedly in the thirties and knows as well as any of us that that is a region which, alas, has almost nothing to say to the dry-as-dust twenties. Why, then, does she attempt in one paragraph to be herself and in the next the heroine of Daddy Longlegs? Why ask us to play " baby " with her and indulgently read ten words in place of one ? Why, like an ignorant undergraduate, drag up Mona Lisa's weary eyelids once again against the author of Marius the Epicurean? Why, like Colette and other " I " novelists, reveal to us too embarrassingly the superficial indulg- ences of narcissism ? Ah, Pompey, witty nightbird, lonely rider across frontiers of sorrow, mockery and malaise, how tragic if by an accident, the accident perhaps of our too easy and too grateful pleasure, you were to become something as everyday as a bore ? It could hardly happen—but the threat is there. For sophistica- tion is the most severe of all undertakings. But I believe that Pompey will ride her horse and, grateful to her for much, and for more to come, " I tip the glass to sanity, security, escape and return."
The Stroke of Eight is badly named but, within its neat range, has no other disqualification. It is, one supposes, a thriller—but with a difference. It would be a thousand pities to outline here its crisp, strong story—of a Norfolk farmer who, returning home in a cheerful state of intoxication from a British Legion dinner, is involved in a motor-car accident which hands him over to the power of a blackmailer and to a succession of quite credible but very troublesome and uneasy happenings. Gerry, the farmer, is a beautifully done character—good, manly, natural and honest, but by virtue of his very qualities open to temptation, glamour and disturbance. Cedric Owen, the blackmailer, is also excellently real, quite comic and authentic, and still after his change of heart towards the end of the book very credible, even if that change exacts from us an act of faith not elsewhere demanded by an author whose good, simple English and traditional narrative method are most praiseworthy and restful. There is a girl called Una who is the clou of the plot, and for a time the catspaw, and her personality and physical appeal are presented as truly as are Gerry's integrity and his helplesi,
guilty love for her. Her end is tragic, and so, though- in
accordance with law, is the blackmailer's. The game, with its lessons and its grief, goes to Gerry. Decency is saved from the consequence of folly, saved by itself. A satisfactory moral tale with a good plot and plenty of character and feeling. Northwest Passage has " swept " America, but that fatiguing advance news need not daunt those who like a good, big, carefully-written historical novel. Not having this taste myself, I am chary of recording my reactions to a book which, while frequently impelling my admiration, mainly bored me. There is no doubt that the immense job has been done conscientiously and with shrewdness. The story, told by a young American painter called Langdon Towne—an entirely fictional character is of a certain Major Robert Rogers, of Rogers' Ranger:, who figured in the campaigns and skirmishes against the French in colonial America before the War of Independence; and who afterwards, in London and New England, manoeuvred vigorously to get " the King's ear " and financial backing for an expedition to find the Northwest Passage. The book is a tale of decline and fall. In its first three hundred pages Rogers is a magnificent soldier, a genius of energy and generalship, and the narrative of the St. Francis campaign and above all of the retreat therefrom of the Rangers is very fine, and compels attention from the most unwilling reader. But thereafter, as Rogers sinks from greatness—in strict accordance, apparently, with historical truth—the whole thing drags and becomes a commonplace of " What ho ! " and " More rum, I say," and all the rest of it. There are women— lay figures—and there are hosts of men from the records of the time. We meet Hogarth and Reynolds and Burke. And, with the greatest attention to detail, we are taken on a very complete sightseeing tour of the Fleet prison. The author' has spared himself no trouble, and his manner of writing is temperate and at times agreeably humorous.
In A Giant In Chains Miss Marjorie Bowen has reduced to her well-known formula no less a figUre than Mirabeau, the statesman-aristocrat who might have saved France for the monarchy and the people after 1789, and who indeed made a great attempt to do so, but, thwarted by death, remains one of History's " ifs." Had Honore Gabriel Riqueti, Marquis de Mirabeau, lived to be fifty, say, instead of forty-two, could he have forced his political wisdom on Louis XVI and his obstinate but panic-stricken wife, and steered France through a bloodless revolution ? Naturally Miss Bowen's novel does not seek to answer this vain question. She deals picturesquely with the known facts of Mirabeau's stormy and frustrated life, his love-affairs, imprisonments, exiles and quarrels with his father ; she gives us a credible, enter- taining picture of Sophie de Monnier, who ruined herself by eloping with Mirabeau to Holland ; she draws an equally careful and pleasant portrait of Henriette de Nehra, gentle, faithful girl who suffered all things so gallantly from her wild, ugly, brilliant lover ; she shows us Mirabeau taking charge at last in the States-General, interviewing and persuading the confidence of the Queen, his greatest enemy—and dying when France most needed him. What is not done might be impossible to do—to make us feel that here in this romantic tale we have the authentic Mirabeau. But Miss Bowen's formula is sound—she adheres to her authorities and does her honest best to wed the true to the picturesque. In the result she is readable and lively and does not mislead.
Two For goy is a first novel and has an autobiographical ring. It is about the marriage of a modest enough young man, a builder's clerk, to a high-brow young lady, an artist of sorts, who is cold-blooded, clever and rather unkind, and who divorces him after they have made a longish uneven struggle for happiness. He is very decent to her in retrospect, and to attempt to present her complicated nature was ambitious and praiseworthy in a first novel. One reader found Lucy, and therefore many passages of the book, insufferable. The story is in any case too long, but there are many pleasant pages, and despite the author's inclination here and there to emulate the " illiterate " school, he gives proof of novelistic talent .
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