Fiction

Br HERBERT ;BEAD

7s. 6d.) Foutt of these books are products of post-War despair—the fifth is grim enough, but it would not admit any temporal variation in the lot of man. Three of them are the type of

fiction that Mr. Pritchett, in last week's Spectator, declared so hard to find, which deals with the social problem of today . and draws men and women as they are conditioned by our industrialized life. Among these three I include Mr. Heming-

way's new collection of short stories ; for although they do not deal very directly with social problems, they are a very exact and very realistic reflection of them. And although his men and women arc not actually engaged in industrial life, they are what economists, with a vividness unusual to them, describe as parasitic on it. But it is not so much in his characters and his themes that Mr. Hemingway is sympto-

matic of our social. conditions, as in a certain hard brutality. his complete amorality, his ruthless dissection of horrors, his

cynical humour, are not only sickening (some people deserve to be sickened),- but also pitiless. Mr: Hemingway might reply that his method is merely objective, and objectivity, we must admit, is one of the first essentials in a good writer.

But objectivity of method does not exclude a measure of humanity. Humanity is a soft word, and so is pity, which

might be substituted for it ; and in any case sentimentality

is not implied (it would not be so necessary to exempt Mr. Hemingway from that quality—" A Day's Wait," which describes a boy Waiting to die under' the misapprehension that

his Fahrenheit temperature was centigrade, might have been -written by Katherine Mansfield). What I mean was per-

fectly expressed by Wilfred Owen in the phrase he used of his own poems : the poetry is in the pity. It is rather odd, there- fore, that the two Stories in this collection which seem to inc to surpass the others should have Wilfred Osven's subject-

matter—the War—and though, like Owen's poems, thes- e two stories are " in no sense consolatory," yet they do convey this

sense of pity. "A Way You'll Never Be" is a vivid and, because pitiful, a poetic account of a mental casa on the Italian Front. But the finest excess of this quality is

present in the other War story, "A Natural History of the Dead," reprinted from "a rather technical book," Death in the Afternoon. Mr. Hemingway did well to resuscitate this little masterpiece ; its sardonic wit is worthy of Swift, and if it has Swift's horror, has also his charity.

Perhaps by now the technical accomplishment of Mr. Hemingway's stories goes without saying : he has . stripped the short story of its last excrescences; he has made it as economical and as compact as a good sonnet. At the same time,'he is not afraid of experimental variations, both of form and verbal expression. It is Miss Holtby's misfortune that her book comes for review at the same time, for by the side of Mr. Hemingway's steel furniture (chromium finish) her stories are all plush and antimacassars. It is partly a coy affectation (ten of her stories.begin " Once upon a time ... "), but perhaps she has inherited an old-fashioned business with a large stock-in-trade. Her types are human enough,- and she has some of the pity lacking in Mr. Hemingway ; but there is no poetry powerful enough to get beyond the surface of modern life.

We Poor Miserable Devils is a translation from the Swedish. It is almost an exact parallel to Hans Fallada's Little Man What Now, which Was one of the successes of last year, espe- daily in America. It deals with the plight of the unemployed in Sweden, the central characters being a well-educated member of the clerical grade and his wife. When the story - opens the man has -already been out of work for seven '-ears, and from his seven-roomed flat he has-been gradually reduced to a single bare room in a tenement. He is sensitive, honest and somewhat feckless. It is winter, and his wife is , with

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tan& The shin- télls qUite- Am-0$; of his daily search foN work, his growing despair, the temptations to crime that beset him in his need. Finally he falls, commits a theft and is caught. TIM law of Sweden allows a- conditional sentence : that. is to' say, a first: offender may be given:a sentence... which is., not enforced unless he is again convicted, when it is added on- to the second sentence.

tly virtue of his -well-attested good character, the hero is granted this conditional sentence, and is even offered - employment by the magnate from whom he had stolen. This happy ending, though it will make for the popularity of the book, is dramatically unsatisfying ; it provides an individual and accidental Solution for a problem which the -book has raised in general terms. It is not the business of fiction to solve our social problems ; but to avoid the solution (or the insolubility) in this way is merely to produce an effect of un- reality at the end of a book which, in its simple way, is a work of .art as well as a human document.

There is no such faltering in Herr Grafs novel. I can remember being impressed by his first novel, Prisoners All, which was translated a few years ago. Though it is on a • smaller scale, The .Wolf is also very impressive. Virtually, there is only one character (why not have adopted the exPressive German title, "One Against All" ?—but English publishers spoil the chances of many a good book by giving it a bad title), and th:s character .is, like the hero of We Poor Miserable Devils, a down-and-out. But with this difference : he has lost all moral sanctions, hates "the peace" more than "the war," and is determined to pay civilization back in its own coin. From legalized aggression am! mass murder it is for him but a logical step to individual action of the same nature. The book is a graphic 'account of his adventures as a .tramp, a robber and a murderer. He is caught in the end and commits suicide in his cell When the cell was searched it was found that he had scratched some strange words on the wall. The -words were :

"WAR'S OVER. SICK OF PEACE."

To people of comfortable minds that might semi --the but will and testament. of a madman. But Oscar Maria Graf has the power to make it seem credible. Incidentally, he helps us to understand some of the forces that eventually produced a cataclysm in post-War Germany.

The subject-matter of the last novel on the list is of a very different nature, though the form corresponds almost exactly with that of The Wolf. Again we have only one central character—a parish priest in Buenos Aires. It is the story of a single day in his life—a Holy Wednesday during which an almost incessant stream Of situfers • piss through his confessional. Their sins are mostly of a sexual nature, and their recital exasperates the priest's own suppressed sexual instincts. His gathering agony as the hot day wears through. the physical discomfort of the narrow confessional box, his final breakdown, are all described with penetrating sympathy and psychological precision. But the power of such a narrative must depend to a great extent on the reader's acceptance of the priest's spiritual and moral standpoint. To a non-Catholic reader his ease will seem to be one of morbid psychology, his fate merely the inevitable fate of a man who has suppressed his natural instincts. It is true lhat the priest's purity shines out in dramatic splendour against the appalling corruption of " the sons of lust" to whom he gives absolution. But his code of purity is not the only code of purity, nor are his penitents a fair representation of-the mass of humanity. The conditions of this tragedy, that is to say. are not so universal as they are suppoSed tb be, and a con- sciousness of that false emphasis will rob the story of its fall tragic effect. We are, Of course,- touching. on another aspect of that problem which has...b.een, discussed a good deal in recent years in relation 'to poetry : the question whether it is necessary to share a poet's-beliefs .in order to appreciate the greatness of his poetry. It -is' really a general psycho- lOgical question, and. what we have to determine is the func- tion of sympathy in aesthetic appreciation. Both The Wolf and. Holy Wednesday would, be relevant documents in such an enquiry.--------------- - - .