Fiction

By V. S. PRITCHETT Who Once Eats Out of the. Tin - Bowl. By Hans Fallada. (Putnam. 7s. 6d.) -

7s. 6d.) , •

Who Once Eats Out of the Tin_ Howl is a very long German novel describing the life of a young convict from the last days of a five years' -" stretch,"' through a short, period of

freedom in which he fights a losing battle for rehabilitation, down to the first days of anothei king sentence. - It is

refreshing to find. that this has not been made the theme of a tract and that the author is saturated in knowledge of his subject: One forms the libellous and flattering opinion that Herr Fallada may have at one time been a convict : he treats his material with the lightness and simplicity of long application to it 1 It is a book of documentation; intelligent and acute, rather than imaginative.

We hear a great deal about criminal psychology and next to nothing about prisOner psychology. Herr Fallada sticks to the latter. Remembering. our Rene Clair, we may pause to find in the poker-faced naturalism of this book the wink of satire or the shadow of symbolism. The factory, the big shop, the ServiceS---Lall those institutions in which it is more than -a man's life is worth to act upon ' his own re- sponsibility, Where the stress iiiiponhierarehy a id diiscipline= . also create that prisoner-mentality where discipline breeds the wangler, and a. stale and corrupt peace. One might be reading an allegorical description of the Fascist or Communist states. And perhaps neither the book nor the faintly perVerse conclusion is strange coming from modern Germany. Will Kufalt, the convict, comes to the view that prison is the best place : " It was better. Here a man could live in peace. Tho voices of the world were stilled. No making up one's mind, no need for effort.

Life proceeded duly and in order. lie was -utterly at home and Willi Kufalt fell quietly asleep with a peaceful smile on his lips."

As a central character who is made to reveal himself, Kufalt would have become clearer and more aPpreliensible if we had seen him first under normal conditions and emerging into abnormality. His size and shape—this is typical of naturalistic character—do not alter. From the beginning one knows that he has none of the competence, the will and the nervous resistance to go straight. How far prison has made him so is hard to say and one wants to know this. It is almost impossible todisentangle his human being's cry for justice from his lawyer's love of hair-splitting for its own sake. Here in an indignant outburst to the Governor, or to the head of the Prisoners' Home after his release, or in some simple honest words, when he is wandering the -streets with an ex-convict friend, one sees aspirations to decency rise and become almost invariably diverted and annulled by his convict's vanity, his cunning, his perverse prison sense of humour and his eye for the value of scoring small casuistical points. Kufalt, with his yellow face, his anxious eyes, his dyspeptic pot-belly—the effect of " slops "—'with his petty blackmailing activities, his slyness in making fretful or passionate scenes, may be a product of thesystem whose guardians have become cynical and disilltisioned, but Herr Fallada is not writing propaganda. He draws Kufalt primarily as a man and shows that among warders, chaplains, charity organizers and ex-convicts' societies there are all kinds from the amiable or comic to the swinish. He knows exactly what the interests of these people are. He knows exactly what the effect of the prison is upon the warders and the authorities—how, for example, a storeman's pride can be shattered and'how the storeman can, .therefOre, be profitably tricked, if &lie moth holes can be introduced into the convicts' clothes. Herr Fallada has worked such an episode in very neatly. He aims to present conditions, humours and calculations rather than emotions. Only , people outside prison can have emotions about prison; inside the struggle is a listless one against nervous disintegration. Even the appalling sexual question is reduced to the terms of its prison limits and not inflated to the tertns of starved- • prison aspirations. The book is grim in matter and language and is very disturbing. It has no high spots and Herr Fallada has little style. His prose reminds one of the words of a disembodied radio voice. This laconic method has its . monotony, but it is effective.

We . now move from crime to innocence. No one could be more different in temper than Mr. Adrian Bell. 'I he

Balcony is an evocation of childhood and recalls the kind of thing Mr. H. E. Bates has so often done well in his short stories. These writers have " drunk the milk. of Paradise " ; their childhoods are an enchanted country of fear and wonder. Mr. Bell is the more intellectual writer. Re strives to define the essence of those remote sensations : " For accompanying the 'child -is born the shadow of his fear . . and all the while he knows it, keeping his eyes averted while he builds his sanctuaries."

The prismatic sense of things, the liberation and widening of wonder rather than the intensifying of it, the sense that the self is a " screen between two atmospheres through Which a-filtering process -took Place," makes him pause with

fascination as he attempts to get back. And he does get back with devastating simplicity :

" Munarnie,' I said, going one evening into my mother's room. !There's a Man in the dining room.'

What_',-. Who ? ' she cried, startled and went to see.

It was my father in evening dress."

Such a book cannot depend for its effects upon origi- nality of episode ; all middle-class people have had the same kind of, childhood. The booming uncle, the echoing aunt, the relations smoking too much and laughing too

loudly, the odd people met in parks, the habits of nurses, the whole -.zoological appearance of the adult world--Lthis kind of reminiscence depends entirely upon sensibility. Mr. Adrian Bell's originality and excellence as a writer lie in a sensibility which can forget later knowledge and come to

the sting of sensations buried under the immense machine process of thought.

Prophet Without Honour is the first of a series of novels, dealing with •the same characters, which Mr. Russell Green proposes to write agaiust. the background of the growth of industrialism ,:iini...provineial „England in the nineteenth century. He.. is full, of -ideas-7-rather.--too

and has an awe-inspiring sense .of the. period. He sets forth with considerable ironic pomp and circumstance to ,display

it. His hero in the present 'VOlurhe 'etherges and Is shown as a child in a cotton mill„then in a lead mine and later on working with - a: travelling zdraPer. At' the sake time he has the exceptional fortune of living in the toO-Ofteti- abused bookish culture of MOdeit Noneenforinist:. society:

Mr. Russell Green has clearly something new to say about

the Victorians': 'Itit 'a pity 'therefore that a PoinpOus' alid incurably discursive manner flatten his story into something like . an ,.expository:c.essaY-." IBS' 'sophistication is - heavy' handed.. T 1,4 his 1 give pretty fair_ idea of. his manner and his matter : _ . . . .

Iletty arid' Bella were indeed-not formed- tiy-raiture to be intellectual giants; _so that _perhaps:the offices of the Misses Tomlin were adequate to. their ptirpOses: Their -father, With his engriiired teapots' Of Briteninii4netal -and his :ten his hopes of •more, with his careful and saving wife whci even paid. Angela, cursed with a sweet tooth, two pence' a.week to go Without-sugar, was well able td -keep- the -four of them- home, not: in idleness indeed, but without earning any definite wage ; though it was, of- course, well understood that, at 'the firs-rairadable•-npfOrgunity they were to relieve him of :theirsupport- by _prudent matrimony,. And if' their inelital-atilture,-Of -which naiih-lir .paient Nicr.6ver had need, was thus defective,' no fault could be found with the'iigoiotie

domestic training Whin li Jane. gave to thern." • " •

However, Mr. Green is a *titer oT considerable intelligence and his. load in_ the succeeding., , „ . _ How Like • atz Angel is another :excUrsion, into !Attire_ oh the 'English Character and English institutions by the _Attire_ and ribald Mr. Macdonell..: Iis presetki:ile:dee is to take a -young man who has been :brought up ,until .his. _twentieth

birthday upon a desert island by three- missionaries-an

Englishman, a Frenchman and a German—and to send him unprepared into the modern' world. The desert -island passage's have some excellent AUK'