Fiction
Norma Ashe. By Susan Glaspell. (Gollancz. 9s. 6d.) Work Suspended. By Evelyn Waugh. (Chapman and Hall. fis. 6d.) Who's There Within ? By Louis Golding. (Hutchinson. ros. 6d.)
SUSAN- GLASPELL has always been interested in metaphysical problems, and once again she presents us with a study of a woman's spiritual adventures. Mrs. Max Utterbach is a defeated lodging- house keeper, harassed by failure' penury and decay, during the "era of stupendous wealth" in America of the tragic 'twenties. She had known better days, first as a young student, favoured and favourite pupil of a brilliant professor, a participator in his plan for a brave new world. But the professor died early, and Norma was wooed away from the mission by lov itself. Her young man was imperious, eager and hungry. She felt his need, and though she resisted him for a little while, soon she was caught up in the adventure of matrimony. Max was an ambitious materialist, lack- ing in scruples, so that he made a number of grave mistakes in his efforts to get rich quick. After a few years, in which Norma learned 1 to enjoy prosperity, she found herself an almost penniless widow, with two small children. to bring up. This she did bravely enough. But one day a figure from the past walked in to her home - they had nothing to say to each other. Shocked by her own flilure, Norma (her children then grown up) set out again as an explorer, determined to find out where she went wrong, and to see what she could recover from the past. It is a brave pilgrimage, and one the author carries to a triumphant conclusion.
In September, 1939, Evelyn Waugh had written two chapters of a new novel. We learn through the dedicatory letter which presents Work Suspended: "It is now dear to me that even if I were again to have the leisure and will to finish it, the work would be in vain for the world in which and for which it was designed has ceased to exist." For the devotees, of course, this is very sad ; but just why, the rest If us may wonder, in these day' of a paper famine, has the author chosen to edit and present his fragment of a nameless novel? The refined first-personal hero, Mr. John Plant, who wrote murder mysteries for a living, knew that coronets were more, much more, in sales value than kind hearts. He was staying in Fez, engaged on Murder at Mountrichard Castle,
when the news of his father's death reached him. The circum- stances of his father's house, profession, death, &c., are all in our hand by the time he has returned to London with his book un- finished. We have also been introduced to Mr. Arthur Atwater, who slew his father by the time the second chapter is reached. Here we learn of the hero's intention to buy a country house, and watch him fall in love with Lucy Simmonds, wife of a friend, another literary gentleman. So far as it went (we are told) this was the author's best writing, and then, of course, the fragment is only a little one (a hundred and fifty pages), and the edition, too (five hundred copies) is limited . . . . so perhaps. . . . Then there is Basil Seal . . . no he won't do . . . but, indeed, it would have been a shame to waste the egregious Arthur.
Who's There Within? also belongs to the Waugh, or fin de siècle, part of the twenties, for if little else is here, Louis Golding has certainly retained the slick gold-rush atmosphere of the period, with its extravagant orgies of getting and spending. Sophie Briggs, the Doomington orphan, whose mother hanged herself, apparently because of poverty, plans and achieves an existence in which rich- ness is all. After two years in London, and before she is twenty, she owns a fashionable dressmaking establishment. She then marries an American millionaire Tony ; and they go to live in the States, where they drink, gamble and throw wild parties until the fortune in oil has been gambled away. But just before this is realised, an admirer of Sophie murders Tony for her sake. She doesn't approve of this, and telephones for the police. However, the way is now clear for her, and she goes to the Wild West, where she picks up another rich young man, English this time. Who's there within? The answer, it seems, is the great-granddaughter of a ninth earl searching for dragons in a pale green Rolls-Royce. A novel in- credible enough to satisfy the most blasé of film-goers, one would
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