Fiction
IMPLICATED in a forthcoming symposium to enquire: "Where arl our novelists ?," I shall put forward confidently the name of Mr. Robert Kee. The Impossible Shore shows him to be fully equipped, and, what is even rarer, to have a precise knowledge of his own intentions. Many a beginning novelist would be able to carry out his intentions if he could make up his mind exactly what he wantei to do. Uncertainty of intention is the greatest fault in the con- temporary novel ; and it comes usually from a dissonance between the novelist's conscious and his unconscious mind. Mr. Kee is in the happy case where the two chime together. I do not suggest that he was fully conscious of the implications of his story while he was writing it, perhaps not even afterwards, but that the two sides of him were working in harmony.
The story itself is slight. At the end of the war in Germany the Russians liberate the prisoners in a German prison camp. Two Englishmen, the narrator, Clay, and an older officer, named Rankin, decide to escape from the subsequent chaos and make the best of /heir way home. They do not get far, but stay for some time in the home of a German and his daughter. Friendly relations develop. Presently Clay begins to suspect that the girl and Rankin are in love. His feelings about this, his relations to a couple of Russians, and his failure to save the lives of a batch of wounded Germans, make up the rest of a short and deeply disturbing nova What Mr. Kee says in it is all but unanswerable. Here is the failure of the sensitive, liberal human being, rendered powerless by a situation in which the fate of individual men or women seems not only insignificant, but irrelevant. A lorry-load of drunken Russian soldiers abduct a man for sport, and it is a toss-up whether they drop him out alive or dead. Helpless, bewildered, and homeless, people are sent here or there on the whim of badgered and irrespon- sible officials, whose appointment was as fortuitous as their decisions. Life is at the mercy, not of blind chance, but of human forgetfulness and stupidity. Farmsteads peaceful or still with the hush of death, a lake that seemed full of healing silence and now turns devilish, a girl who snarls at-a kind word, since the speaker is in the image of what has so impossibly ill-used her—Mr. Kee's story is full of such ambushes, but the things he does not say, the incidents we do not stumble over, are more disturbing still. If you can face life as it is he& unemphatically shown, you have little to fear. To say that this is the best novel I have read for a long time is faint praise. Mr. Kee might become a great novelist ; he has all the signs. The worst of work of this quality is that it is unfair to its bedfellows. Mr. Rowland Winn stands up well in equipment, and he can vividly describe a scene, but in intention he goes to
pieces. His book is not so much a work of art as a spree. Instead of deciding on a target, and concentrating his very considerable
gifts on hitting it, he has a pot-shot at every sort of game he can raise, pheasants, rabbits, cats, mice, anything. Often he hits them ; but a genuine talent is dissipated in this fable of Lord Highport
and his misfortunes. The basic idea is amusing, and there are many laughs and surprises, but the whole is incoherent. Even the blurb- writer has been baffled. He goes for it boldly: " An absorbing and amusing mixture of fantasy and straight fiction, this book will appeal to all those readers who are glad of an occasional invitation not to take things too seriously." We all know what that means.
Miss Horner has a good idea, and works it out very intelligently. Her Evelina is pictured first as a schoolgirl, then as she would have
been had she married this, that or eother man, and finally as married to nobody. To succeed with such an idea the novelist mu-'t have a character who is interesting in herself, and who will remain recognisably herself in the different environments. There are women so plastic, so completely identified with their husband; interests, that each will speedily become a different person according
to whom she marries ; but such women are not interesting. Evelina remains herself, not unaffected by her supposed partner.'. yet an individual. The Greyhound in the Leash is written carefully and honestly, a woman's book which a man can read with profit and pleasure.
As a novelist, Mr. Sheean is unsophisticated. I have no sooner said this than I begin to wonder. He has chosen so fruitful a theme
-social reform conducted from the Ritz-a theme which makes the best of both worlds and is therefore likely to be very popular, that "unsophisticated" hardly seems the right word. Still, I will keep it ; for this fable of a wealthy man who after the war interests himself in his own property in Harlem, at intervals of love affairs against a luxurious background, combines the gawky charm and naivete of an adolescent with his occasional flashes of knowingness and intuition. The writing, too, is patchy.. Mr. Sheean confuses
affront" with "confront." And there are things like this
"She sank into some region where there was no language. Dark nigh:, soft enduring night, oh velvet shadow, there, there while the sunlight streamed into the room and a bell rang from the church on the corner ; what was sleeping and what was waking now ? "
There is honesty of purpose behind the book, but I will stick to my first adjective.
After reading several of the pieces in Odysseus and the Swine, I was about to report sadly that the author of Yew Siiss and The Ugly Duchess was not a short story writer, when I read a preliminary note in which Dr. Fcuchtwanger severely informs us that these are not "short stories in the Anglo-Saxon sense . . . according to Henry James, eminent American author of Continental short stories." It is not for me to contradict him. The pieces exhibit various felicities, and the title story is written with authority-it contains, in Elpenor's remonstrance, a curious echo from Oscar Wilde-but they do not conform to our insular idea of the short story, and I doubt if one or two of them, The Death of Nero, for, instance, fit into the short story category anywhere. L. A. G. STRONG.
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