FICTION
- By FORREST REID Doctor Dido. By F. L. Lucas. (Cassell. 7s. 6d.) Green For a Season. By Derrick Leon. (Duckworth. 8s. 6d.) The Monument. By Pamela Hansford Johnson. (Chapman and Hall. 8i. 6d.) Anne Alone. By Owen Rutter. (Michael Joseph. 7s. Od.)
I WISH that "the great Mr. Parson, the new Professor of Greek," had been more than a name in Mr. Lucas's Doctor Dido, for I am very curious about him. My sole information has been gathered from a little -gossip by Hazlitt and others in which it is said that he knew Greek better than anybody since the Greeks themselves, that he Was indifferent to appear- ances, that he sometimes got drunk, and that he was not averse from pothouse company. I canned' even tell why this unusual mixture of tastes should appeal to my imagination ; nevertheless it does, and I feel pretty sure that.- the private life of Richard Porson was interesting. So is that of Dr. Samuel Plampin, a colleague of Porson's at Cambridge, and the hero of Mr. Lucas's novel. Dr. Plampin is a learned,' unworldly, and agreeable man ; in fact, now and then he reminded me a little of M. Bergeret, which is to say a great deal, for M. Beigeret and the Abbe Jerome Coignard are the two characters in fiction with whom, if I had the choice, I should most care o spend an evening. But I think I could also enjoy myself with Dr. Plampin, who was University Reader in Hebrew and Vicar of Babraham towards the close of the eighteenth century. He had at that time reached middle-age, and was happy, or at any rate contented, until in September, 1792, romance entered his life, in the person of Mlle. sophie Letourneur.
Sophie has come from Paris on a mission, she is the bearer of a private message to Pitt, the Prime Minister. While she is in England, however, events abroad happen so rapidly that, her mission accomplished, she finds it useless and indeed impossible to return. Therefore she accepts the position of housekeeper to Dr. Plampin, and being young, gay, and attractive, the Doctor promptly falls in love with her. He wants to marry her, but, though fond of him, it takes Sophie ten years to consent. Then they set out on a preliminary visit to her family in Paris, and the catastrophe happens, she falls in love with a young French officer, leaving the Doctor to realise "the dreadful fatality of passion, its inhuman in- difference, once its tide has turned, to all that the most devoted adoration can ever do to turn it back again." He suffers intensely, for his is not a light nature, and, as usual, the thing was sprung upon him unexpectedly. He resigns the living of Babraham, and now takes up his quarters permanently at Cambridge, where he slowly recovers from the first shock. He takes to botanising ; he goes for long solitary rides on his black horse Jeremy ; a new pupil, Nick Boyd, helps to console him ; but this affection also is doomed. Two years later Nick introduces him to a Miss Katie Rockingham, with "neither head nor heart," but with, presumably, her share of sex attraction. And the Doctor watches "this young cat playing maliciously with the victim she 'Would shortly carry off to devour, while sparing an occasional scratch for the victim's old friend, in whom at once she sensed an enemy."
It will be divined that Mr. Lucas's novel is not rose-coloured, yet it would be wrong to regard it as a gloomy book. It has indeed an ending more tragic even than I have suggested, but it has far too much vitality to be depressing, and for the reader at least, if not for Dr. Plampin, there is the consolation of humour, wit, and irony. Only a scholar could have written it, and only a scholar who possessed a creative imagination. That is the secret of its charm and originality. I admit that the Paris interlude interested me less than the-first and last parts— the Cambridge parts. In the last part is sadness enough, but there is beauty too, and Mr. Lucas's reeding of life appeals to me. It is neither unduly pessimistic nor unduly optimistic— the presiding dictator is chance. Chance ordained that Dr. Plampin, who was warni-hearted and eager for affection, should find nobody in whose affections he was not presently to be relegated to a second place. Being no stoic, he is unhappy. The second place sounds so much better than it ever actually is. But Mr. Lucas sees to it that at least he comes first in the affection of the reader. The novel is a memorable and distin- guished one. _ . have it.
Passing from it to the picture of our own times in Green for J Season, one becomes conscious of a decline in the scale ot- -rspiritnal values. Intellectually and morally we are on a lower plane. Even emotionally; for; though- emotion is rife, it
seldom Under control, as is witneSsed by the prevalence of tears. not only feminine but masculine. Mr. Leon presents a group of middle-class young people, all closely 'connected by ties of relationship Or physical attraction, and shows us what they made of their lives. Nothing very inspiring, I am afraid, for though they are dissatisfied with- the world in which they live, they fail to see that this world is unsatisfactory largely because of an irrationality, and a looseness of principles and- morals, which prevail in their own lives„. They are highly-strung, unreliable, and the void created by a lack of religion has not been filled by any system of ethics;. so that, following the line of least resist- ance, they are at the mercy of impulse. One does not dislike thern, one simply feels that in all their relationships there is an element of impermanency. This reachei its highest point in Delia, who, before she has reached middle-age, has tried out three husbands and a _lover. She even remains fond of them, though fonder still of her young brother. She is an affectionate, jealous, irresponsible creature, living in a perpetual atmosphere of "scenes," yet incapable of meanness : Delia's, indeed, is the best portrait in the tale. It is aninteresting book. The characters may irritate, but the story has the quality of "grip," because Mr. Leon has talent. His method is not for the careless or lazy reader : it is impressionistic, and takes attention for-granted. - People -are introduced abruptly and by their cluistian names, the surname may be supplied a hundred pages later. The drama, tao, is developed in a series of flash- lights. What precisely is gained by this staccato, cinema tech- nique I do not quite see, but the book is alive. .
• It is inevitable, when a sympathetic portrait of a novelist is
attempted 'fiction, that we -'should imagine- that novelist's works to be very-similar in quality to the work we are actually reading. The books of Charles Demailly, for -instance,- have always pictured as closely resembling those of the brothers de Goncourt ; and the tales of Ray Limbert or Hugh. Vereker as very like those of Henry James. So, toO, after reading' Miss Johnson's The Monument, I feel familiar with the novels Of Mary Captor, the heroine ; except the first, perhaps, Which was written in her teens, and -about Donne,- and _therefore, considering the author's age, cannot really have had-the surds d'estime Miss Johnson claims for it. Mary, we are told, is "decreasing the direct propaganda in her work," and this is wise, because The Monument would have been a much better book had Miss Johnson not interrupted the narrative from time to time in Order to moralise and soliloquise. in a quisi-poetical style that instantly dispels credulity. The novel is peculiar, in that it consists of two stories rtlnning Parallel in time, yet never actually meeting. There is_ the sophisticated; high-brow story of Mary and her friends, and there is the fir more interest- ing story of the Whyes, a family belonging to the- Cockney working class. I think Miss Johnson's instinct was sound when she decided to keep these themes entirely separate, and I even think I know what she was after, and that she achieves her effect when, at the end of it all, the Captor lot read in the newspaper, with only a vague momentary curicisity, of the Whye murder. The Monument is a clever book, and has in it the makings of a good one._ The Cockney- story is good, but Mary's is more commonplace, and ixievitably, bY dividing the interest, Miss Johnson sacrifices intensity..
- — • - Mr. Rutter; s Anne Alone seems to me a stupid book. George du hianrier was a black-and-white artist, not an actor, and Mr. Arthur Symons does not spell his name with a “..st." These. however, are superficial blunders; it is Daddy, with: his doctrines of Karma arid the spiritual life; that is so frying. ' Anne, who is a milliner _and dressmaker, embraces Daddy's views, Which does not prevent her from yielding to more earthly embraces, for there are pathetiC signs that Mr. Rutter, too, wishes to be " the movement." The rest of the book deals with hats and dresses, described in detail, as if they were works of the deepest significance. Hats, Karma, embraces—there you
Previous page
