FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN People Are Curious. By James Hanley. (The Bodley Head. 7s. 6d.) Last Stories. By Mary Butts. (Brendin Publishing Co. 5s.) French for Funny. By Robert Westerby. (Arthur Barker. 7s. 6d.) Something Wrong. By James Stem. (Secker and Warburg. 7s. 6d.)
DURING these weeks of December, if one may presume to argue from knowledge of oneself, we read reviews of literature not so much in search of what may be good among the new books but more in order to seek support for our wild guesses at what dear Margaret might like, or -Uncle Joe, or Cousin Anabelle. Fiction, contemporary fiction, is the rashest of all presents to give—has anyone ever given you a modern novel that you wanted or can now remember ?—yet two convictions do prevail, I think, among the flustered at this season : one, that a book is always a safe present, and two,• that fiction is the only form of letterpress read by the non-. literary, who make u, the bulk of the v.7orld, and must there- fore, by the law of avere:prs, dominate our shopping lists these days. And a corollary from these two notions is that when in doubt, short stories are the best bid. I think I agree with this. Your present, if it is read at all, will be snoozed over on Boxing Day between cold luncheon and heavy tea, and there is no denying that the episodic manner will find more favour then than will the Victorian saga or the dear old "stream of consciousness."
This preamble may read as if I were proposing to be helpful at a busy time. But that is not so. To every man his own mistakes this Christmas, as last and next. There is this, however, which I can say. Do not give any of the works of Miss Norah Houlc to a teetotaller, to a disliker of the Irish race, or to any orthodox citizen of Holy Ireland. And do do not give Nine rears is a Long Time to confirmed admirers of its very,, gifted author. For in this collection she is so uneven as to be shocking—and it is a bitter thing to be the underminer of a just and well-founded appreciation. These storie3 are gathered, I should think, from the random work of many years, and the best of them have a kind of weary thinness, as of ideas which once genuinely moved their begetter, but to which she could not devote the patience necessary for the tragic maturity they postulate and cannot prove. Did we not know Miss Hoult's usual work, we would say that the eponymous story, and Miss Manning's Fight, The Farewell and The Tinker's Corpse, showed enormous promise, but that word is no longer, applicable to one of Ireland's most distinguished and original novelists. And some of the others—A Wonderful Woman, for instance— have a professional slickness which is positively surprising in this poetic realist. Whereas The Story of Father Peter is a clear case of a very good theme quite cynically flung into any old shape. In short, this collection is representative of Miss Hoult at her second, third and fourth best, and is one very good way of showing how difficult it is to write by her usual standard, the standard of Coming From the Fair.
Mr. Hanley's current collection of short stories is also somewhat disappointing and second-bestish. (But let me say with all possible emphasis that such writers as he and Miss Houk are, at their worst, a million times more valuable and respect-worthy than a hundred renowned contemporaries on the top of their form. So, if one judges them solely by standards they have fixed themselves, it is in the hope that this relativity of criticism will be allowed for and that the knowing will pursue their own investigations into what I believe to be the off moments of two singularly good writers.) I found three stories in this volume that seemed to me to flow from end to end on a sustained and unforced understanding in the author. These were Beyond the Horizon, a little story called The Dead, and, perfectly told, Winners and Losers. Here in this last, so sure was the author of everything, character, occasion and emotion, that he did not grudge us, as in view of the nature of Cockshot a less confident writer might have done, the conclu- sion we craved, which is indeed nothing else than a happy ending. But in general the book does not wear this mastery. The first story, touched again and again by that passion of c.-Anpassion which givt s majesty to misery, is nevertheless spoilt by a weak clatter of reiteration, and in particular by the curiously noisy and immature irony of its conclusive part. Seven Men is again a good, generous, brave story—of fatalism and courage in the foc'sle—spoilt by false emphasis, as certain other smaller stories, good in conception—The Butterfly is an example—are damaged by startling flashes of sentimentality.
Mary Butts was always a writer whose talent had to be held in question. There were certain evocative things that she could do with words, but not all of them were justifiable, even when she was living and might be allowed the benefit of a future in which to outgrow her " poetic " mannerisms and her false and over-rich eclecticism. Now, however, it is sad to see how fast we have travelled from a day when it might have been possible and even, with reservations, pleasurable to read her tales of Cornwall, candlelight and rose-campion, of men "with the sea in their eyes " and women :
" . . . very tall and quaint And gold like a quattrocento saint."
Indeed for my own part I can only say that I cannot read the very literary and decorative stories of this last collection. That is to say, I have read right through five of them, and have begun to read all the others. But if " escapist " literature is of value to us now—and I believe it to be more than ever so— there is, nevertheless, small shelter, in 'this particular ivory tower, the trouble being that we can neither believe in its elegant inhabitants, nor desire for one instant to believe in them. They are sentimental evocations, without bones. It is symptomatic perhaps of their malady that they are all called Julian, Charmian, Pippa, Cynthia—though one of them is indeed called Julius Caesar, and monologues very improbably in his tent to a centurion called Florus. But they are shadows conceived as a decorator's indulgence, and without the passion which drives understanding into dreams. Stories may be as remote and untrue to our pedestrian experience as a writer can make them—but they must have that life in them which creates . desire and nostalgia in us for their unattainableness. The fact that no young lover has ever said : "Make me a willow cabin at your gate, And call upon my soul within the house," does not make those lines unreal, but expands us towards a far reality. On the other hand, when a weeping lover speaks of "three days in the -boat called millions-of-years" we are made uncomfortable' by falseness. Beauty; after all, is truth handled any way you like—but truth. And there is no escape from it, as all *the great escapists know.
French for Funny is a very competent and readable collection of stories, which should -giye entertainment to many readers. Mr. Westerby has a clean, crisp manner, and no one need be daunted by his surprising trick of beginning some stories in such a manner as : "There were just the two of us in the railway carriage ; myself and, opposite me, a little man with sandy hair." That is admittedly the sort of start that freezes one into unresponsiveness, and actually the story from which I quote it, Talking Horse, is boring. But it is unrepresentative. There are neat, tragic sketches of motor racers, condemned criminals and boxing-boys. The boxing stories are the best— exciting and economical. The first story in the book, which is about a ubiquitous bore on a liner, is mercilessly realistic, but I confess—art being at a safe remove from life—that I felt a sneaking affection for Elmer J. Thomas, and tended to find him, as he would have liked me to, tray drole, French for funny.
In Something Wrong Mr. James Stern presents us with a collection of stories widely varied in setting, but linked by their theme of child-and-parent, or more particularly child-. in-approach-to-life-and-feeling. He is self-conscious on delicate ground, and demonstrates his carefulness by a manner of writing which is unpretentious and traditional in its cadences—some- times awkwardly so, but which gives an old-fashioned air, sufficiently attractive, to stories most of which would not have been written twenty-five years ago. There is old-fashionedness too—most welcome—in Mr. Stern's willingness to -shape a story as a dynamic whole, not as a mere evocation of emotional status. I am not enamoured, however, of his reliance on rows of dots to do his work. And where did he get his extra- ordinary Anglo-Irish idiom ? But there is imagination in these stories, and the writer uses his talents in the main with 'a commendable sobriety.
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