FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN Acquittal. By Gracme and Sarah Lorimer. (Cape. 7s. 6d.) You Know You Can Trust Me. By Charles Curran. (Cape: 8s. 6d.) Young Man With A Horn. By Dorothy Baker. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) The Orange Lagoon. By Kenneth Champion Thomas. (Peter Davies. 7s. 6d.)
LITERARY collaboration is always tricky, but one wonders par- ticularly how two people dispose themselves . far joint work on a novel. Prose narrative usually depends for success on a foundation of intricate, somewhat dull and outwardly unneces- sary-seeming knowledge in the writer of his characters. Know- ledge which he never could and never need convey to readers, but which must underlie all the necessary statements if the presented creatures are to persuade us that they live. We must know that an author can see for himself—not for us— every hypothetical gesture, attitude or reaction of his characters in situations probably never to be adumbrated. And I think that the reasonably good novelist does roughly feel that he has such information in his hand by the time he is ready ,to present any elected piece of imagined experience. In short,_ the good novelist simply must be head man—or rather, head cook and bottle-washer. For if he admits, an assistant, how are the two ever to persuade themselves that -they are riot _working away in rash harmony on two entirely differentiated sets of people ? Since in life our dearest friend is obviously one very clearly known being to us and quite another, just as clear and real, to his mother, his son or his other dearest friend, surely imagined characters present the same complication. We can speak only that which we know of anyone, and though you and I may agree absolutely that our hero has blue eyes, drinks Madeira and is a sleepwalker, how can we possibly collate what we severally establish in our own breasts from these outward signs ? And until we . can, how are we -to write a novel about Blue-Eyes ? For novels are not written by flashes of lightning, and even if they were, things so illumined are incommunicably differently remembered by spectators.
So we may ponder, reading Acquittal, which is an uneven and interesting book written by two Americans, whom I take to be husband and wife, and whose fourth work in tandem this appears to be. The unevenness of quality is what sets one puzzling, for it suggests either that one of these people could write a very good book solo, or that perhaps both could, for that matter. Together they somewhat mar each other.
They have had a good idea. When a member of the upper classes—as it happens—is acquitted " without a stain on his character " of the charge of having murdered a prostitute in her bed, and returns to his wife, his two children and his orderly, beautiful house, what happens ? No other murderer of the girl has been found—simply the prosecution is unable to prove that John Rolfe, apparently the last person to have seen her alive, is guilty of the crime. They have his oath that he did not do it, they have the skill of his lawyer, the wealth and subtle wire-pulling of his father-in-law, and the absence of that last link in evidence which would convict him. So he goes home, free. His wife loves him, but we are made to feel that not even she, to say nothing of many others of his friends and relatives, is quite convinced of his innocence. However, rather against his will, she insists on the restoration before the world of the status quo ante. She is very good to him and is presented attractively, as a generous, unpatronising, self-questioning and affectionate woman who is really concerned to help him, but is aware of traps in the situation and unsure of how to circumvent them. This is the best thing in the book, the unexaggerated, conventional but sensitive character of Mona. The man himself is less certainly presented—sometimes, as when he has to confront society at a great party given to re-establish him, his misery and humiliation are extremely well conveyed. But in scenes with his seventeen-year-old son he seems to lose identity, to become a sentimental puppet. This failure may indeed derive from the authors' entire aban- donment of skill in creation of the boy Jock, who Is an uninterest- ing and half-baked conception from beginning to end. But the little girl, Pauline, is pleasing and real, and the working-out, in gentleness, bewilderment and longing, of the husband's and wife's situation is admirable. The concluding scene, in which the two come at last to clarity of feeling, -is written with unusual intelligence, and is really moving. It is a relief to get a new novel from America that is not a mere tough-sentimental running-on, but actually attempts the bony structure and the spiritual graces of civilisation.
You Know You Can Trust Me is a good, firm, well-planted piece of contemptuous biography. It tells of the life from 188o to 1948 of an English go-getter called Hector Clamamus, who, born of poor parents in Wolverhampton and compelled to look out for himself and use his wits all through his life; ends up a fat, bald, successful, uneasy magnate, M.P., P.C., and Minister of Public Welfare. Things always turned out well for Hector, in the sense that by keeping his head and exploiting his own ever-ready emotionalism—he was very luckily a man of feeling—he usually got where he wanted to be. In his youth he took to socialism and, being a born mob-orator, he followed it right on to where Ramsay Mac- Donald led it, and trotted behind his leader, after a struggle- " The blood beat in his ears. He heard himself telling his imaginary audience in Pangleton Town Hall, ' Labour has not betrayed you. The leaders of Labour have betrayed you, yes . . . "—but Ramsay won, and Hector trotted into the National Government. It makes a good bitter story—a whole character is energetically established with all its potentialities for coarseness and dishonesty and occasionally for brief good. Always our hero is betrayed by what is false within, and the moral of the prologue is well rubbed in, and justified with some gusto.
" But they hadn't taught her to do what she was doing with the song, they hadn't taught her to sing the room is cold, the streets are wet, I'm here alone, babe, did you forget ? And make it stand for all the trust and all the betrayals of all time." " He knew that there was good in the world, and tenderness and sadness ; and when it can be said of you that you know anything at all, you will know what these things are." • "It was a good flowing little tune that didn't have a jot of meanness in it, and he could shade it off and lift it up and do right by the simplicity of it." If you can let Miss Dorothy Baker get away with pages and pages of such " flowing little tunes " as the above, if you can face just one more of America's " Aw Hell ! " efforts, if you can take a dose of that peculiarly voguish liquid sentiment and see how it works on you when arising from the story of a " pathetic " this time instead of a tough guy—you will find Young Man With A Horn worth reading, I think. It is asking a lot. The maple -syrup has certainly got mixed with the gin, and as music is our theme—" Blues " music played by negroes, all geniuses apparently, and played in particular by one white boy, Rick Martin, who gets in with them, becomes the greatest of them all and the idol of New York jazz fans—you can imagine the opportunities lying in wait for Miss Baker's prose idiom. And I'll say this for her, that she doesn't miss a single one of them. Never; theless she has produced a book which is fresh in its setting and in its interest, and she does seem to know an awful kit about jazz music and the lives, ambitions and follies of those who make it. The best pages are the early ones describing Rick's childhood in Los Angeles and his discovery of that talent which was to be the sole true passion of his short 11,.. The negro characters, allowing always for over-sweetness in presentation, are well done, and the description of a negro funeral is simple, touching and humorous. Rick's successful days in New York are harder to stand, for though we are interested in the facts of the story and even, when not smothered by it, in the atmosphere, the flow of sentiment is too steady, and the love-affair and marriage with Amy are plumb unreal. Still Rick does somehow establish himself agreeably befoie us for the time of reading, and in spite of Miss Baker's miter:- ation we believe in his talent, are sorry about all the drinking and deplore young death in the last line.
The Orange Lagoon is also American. It is about a young woman who, having parted for some years from her lazy husband and having worked hard in a department store to support herself and her little daughter, is persuaded by him to return to live in an old, marooned steamer in a lagoon off the shore of Long Island and to run a sort of tea-shop there. She has emotional, adventures, and she is very pleased with herself and gets a good deal of fun out of self-pity and self-
justification. I found it dull. _ , -
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