New Novels
The New Men. By C. P. Snow. (Macmillan. 12s. 6d.) Heyday. By W. P. Spackman. (Frederick Muller. 10s. 6d.)
MR. SNOW'S novel-sequence begins to shape impressively. The outline we know already; and while The New Men doesn't tell us a at deal more about Lewis Eliot as a man it does fill in 4 new area Of experience: the revolution of nuclear physics and the problem of the scientist's position in a world made wobbly by his industry.
With Strangers and Brothers (which is to be the title of the com- pleted sequence) and Time of Hope we took a good look at the narrator; in last year's The Masters and, now, The New Men, we only see him obliquely, see him through his reaction to and experience of other men and external events. Mr. Snow's method is particularly well suited to this more delicate, flatter approach. Always fully in command of his story, his clean and undecorated style is one of the more admirable things in current writing: the Stendhal clarity is there, distant but distinct; the unmannered leanness of narrative now and again recalls Stevenson; and there is of course, about the wholeness and solidity of the conception, in the willingness to dig right down to the roots of his central character, more than a little of Ford Madox Ford.
The New Men is more the story of Martin, the younger brother, rather than of L,ewis Eliot himself. It relates with quiet sombreness the events leading up to Hiroshima; and, more importantly, it car fully weighs the men who created those events: Walter Luke, the_ brilliant, pig-headed, burly young physicist whose theories finaltY, work; Drawbell, the pompous, pathetic controller of the research centre ("Those Drawbells! Between them they'd do anything to get a K, wouldn't they?"); Hector Rose, the correct, dangerous, rising civil servant; Thomas Bevill, the sly, spry old Cabinet Minister under whose department the research responsibility comes; Martin himself. The characters, like the story, are whole and plausible. The, atmosphere, both in Whitehall (with its celebration dinners at Pratt's, the informed gossip of the Athenaeum lavatories, the dream' like tempo of work) and in Barford (the makeshift laboratories of the early days, the friction between physicist, chemist and engineer, the inbred social life) is convincing and authentic. A touch too much of Nigel Balchin here and there, particularly in Whitehall; but that must have been hard to avoid. The two things that fail to convince are Martin's wife, a contrived and literary creature; and his final decision not to accept the UV job he's worked, honestly and dishonestly, throughout the war to get. The rejection, for integrity's sake, doesn't ring true when sounded against the facts we are given about Martin. This is Mr. Snow's problem, to resolve later 'in the sequence perhaps.
Mr. Farrell has already written a successful novel-sequence. Now, in The Face of Time, his first book for a. number of years, he presents us with a full-length portrait of a Chicago family at the turn of the century. Old Tom O'Flaherty's dying of cancer; his wife Mary is e making tea and cursing her daughters; Louise O'Flaherty's dying 01, consumption; Margaret's the mistress of a married man; At O'Flaherty's a travelling salesman doing well, who sends home money and bullies everyone; living with them is Danny O'Neill, the first grandson, child of the third (crippled) daughter and Jim O'Neil, an amiable waster. Oh well, everyone's wildly Irish; and Danny is an ancestral branch of the Studs Lonigan family tree. But that's that; in the earlier books Mr. Farrell was writing in a bright light about things as they were, real things, events he'd experienced, emotions he'd felt; at their most sprawling the novels of the tetralogY were controlled and tautened by a high discipline. The Face of Time is a second-hand, second-rate ambling back into an America which is only hazily seen, and lazily written about. To cut the sentimentalitY he feels in himself Mr. Farrell makes his characters as miserable as possible. The result is Cold Comfort Farm out of Sinclair Lewis.
Rachel Ferguson's slice of life is less ambitious and much mortt palatable: a lady-like slice of thin bread and butter as opposed to a stale loaf. Sea Front is the portrait of a middle-class seaside town q to, through and since the war. The tone hovers between overt (and often able) satire and Mrs. Miniver kindliness, as though Before Bombardment had been written by the companion of one of Sir Osbert's aunts. But the whole is a remarkably satisfying picture; and, as a piece of social history, it is helped rather than hindered by Miss Ferguson's firmly genteel point of view. Its documentarY nature makes it an ideal book for a weekend, to be put down and picked up again whenever you feel like it. Finally, a strange discovery. Hidden beneath a dust-jacket of quite exceptional cheapness and vulgarity, a remarkable little boa by an American unknown to me, a Mr. Spackman—to whom thanks. Over-written, repetitive and emotional as it is, Heyt.laY, nevertheless remains an exciting experience. The story (wive!' doesn't matter very much) is told in the first person by Webb Fletcher; it-chronicles his own life and loves and those of his cousin, Malachi, who is from the same background but whose development is differ- ent. Inside this rather too obviously contrapuntal framework comes what does matter: the. history of the young upper-class Americans who came to manhood during the Depression. The Fletchers are both Princeton men (class of '27) and their world with its casual but romanticised promiscuity, its drunken parties, ItS literate cynicism and, above all, its hopefully trusting sentimentalitY is brilliantly drawn. Mr. Spackman has an excellent ear for dialogue and the clipped, clever, young voices come clear and true across the years. This is, for many of us, the Scott Fitzgerald period. Heyday helps to make This Side of Paradise, for example, understandable far more easily than a dozen scholarly biographies—or Budd Schulberk There is enough vitality in the writing to ensure that we shall be hearing plenty more from Mr. Spackman; I look forward to that I hope in the meanwhile his publishers will .decide to give his next novel a dust-jacket which doesn't look as though it belonged to Ethel M. Dell.
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