FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN A Family and a Fortune. By I. Compton-Burnett. (Gam= 7s. 6d.)
7s. 6d.) Miss COMPTON-BURNETT writes, as it were, with a diamond
on glass, so that we are conscious both of the scratch of her labour and of the finality of each small or large result. It is impossible to imagine that this author ever crosses out, or has a second thought, and one is a little unsure of the ultimate attractiveness of these literary attributes. The display of cold power is magnificent, but it may be more powerful to make less display. Jane Austen, absolute mistress of Miss Compton- Burnett's particular field, deployed her forces with a wilier grace. She knew better than to make us feel, as we closed any one of her novels, that it was magnificent and formidable, but that we would prefer to be spared reading another for a little while. Indeed, the catch about Jane Austen is that, when we are so weak as to return to her, she keeps us dally- ing overlong among her seven volumes. 'She is, in fact, a rest, a relaxation ; whereas this formidable modem, so like her in many ways, but so much more passionate and cold and formal, so almost malignant in fact, is nothing of that kind.
Everyone interested in contemporary writing is familiar by now with this author's distinguished manner. She writes exclusively of the English landed gentry of about thirty- five years ago. She displays them almost entirely through their own intellectualised and highly intensified conversa- tions. She has reduced, or raised, certain English upper- class characteristics to a profoundly personal formula, and within it, since she is a very remarkable artist, she enforces a fantasy which is much truer and shrewder than life. She wastes only the minimum of time on descriptions, but these are potent when permitted. For instance, of an elderly woman, the mother of the family in this book, she says, among other things, that she had a " stiff, narrow, handsome face, and a permanent air of being held from her normal interest by some passing strain or distraction." I think that the longer one considers that the better it grows. Of another elderly woman, a minor character, she says : " She looked about as she talked, as if she feared to miss enlightenment on any matter, a thing which tried her beyond her strength and which happily seldom occurred." These accidents of characterisation may seem like bulls'-eyes, but they are nothing of the kind. The pages of this book are strewn with better things, for Miss Compton-Burnett seems to know of no other way of writing than this of hitting the nail, with a curious, cold passion, straight on the head. Jane Austen might well gasp sometimes, and with an intake of exasperation, at the faultlessness of this new aim.
But nevertheless the comedy produced, though exquisite, is not enough. It may seem mean to cavil, in an age of pedestrian dullness, against an entertainment so rarefied and glittering as this of A Family and a Fortune, but when talent is so high that we can compare it with the highest, our complaints may also be taken to wear an unusual significance, and to be a part of compliment. And comedy, to be whole and everlasting, must spring in some sense from the heart as well as the brain. Miss Compton-Burnett knows much that Jane Austen never seemed to of all the mean and savage forces that can ramp in the civilised breast, and she is very bitter, therefore, and suspicious of the tender touch on sensi- bility. She knows about the latter, too, and hints as much, but she will not have sweetness breaking through, and all analysis must be done from above, through the malicious brain. We may know, she is delighted to let us see, that we are potential savages, that we are egoists and poseurs and cheats, but her point, and her cunning pleasure, is that we are chained beasts. For all her comedy lies in the cold dominion of what we call civilisation over our other selves. She delights in the skill and absurdity with which we betray and conceal our condition of imprisonment. She handles us as if our outer skin were glass—an inconvenient case for all the awkward fleshliness within. The story she tells in this novel is slight, but adequate to her inquisitorial purpose ; it need not be outlined here. All admirers of the English novel at its best will read it and rejoice in a startling talent.
The Unbroken Heart begins badly with a rather bogus- seeming prologue, and, indeed, for about a third of its 283 pages it is dull going, but once we leave Ireland and the mental home in Shropshire and get all our characters down into Provence, things change most curiously for the better, and the book takes on qualities of scholarship and sensibility that are very rare indeed and most refreshing. The theme is elusive and would not be easy to epitomise here. It is a close study of an Irish boy who has been cheated by a strong-minded, devoted aunt, his sole relative, of the true story of his romantic parentage. He has inherited a streak of madness through his mother, and the pressure of his upbringing has induced delu- sions and fits of mania. The workings upon his delicate and violent spirit, for good and ill, of his aunt, of his psychiatrist, of Rhoda Charles, the girl he falls in love with, and of the Italian pianist she marries, make up the plot, and are handled unevenly but with an interest that deepens as the book advances.
I do not think that Mr. Speaight has resolved his psycho- logical problem at all ; he has merely stated it, and asked us at the close to accept as satisfactory what appeared to one reader to be no more than an improbable and sentimental miracle. But in making his attempt he has done a number of interesting and occasionally very moving things. He has created a most entertaining and alarming character in Miss MacNamara—Heaven preserve us from ever having to attend a performance of Racine with her in the ' Romin• Theatre at Orange ! In Rhoda he has written a singularly attractive and touching girl. Seldom, indeed, is a young woman in fiction allowed to be really intelligent and yet so true and tender. I found the brief passage describing her married happiness extremely touching, and her tragedy unbearable. The more so as throughout the book I felt only the most perfunctory interest in the young hero, the cause of all the trouble. But the novel, its early longueurs overcome, is distinguished and civilised, and lays a courageous stress on goodness and on the values of the spirit.
It is no use my pretending that I have any use at all for the much-praised works of James T. Farrell. Long ago Studs Lcmigan defeated me, and I tackled No Star is Lost with my heart in my boots, and finished, or tried to finish it, without any perceptible alleviation of my premonitory boredom. He has been compared to Theodore Dreiser, whom, indeed, he may somewhat resemble—the latter novelist is a pet aversion of mine. But he has also been compared to James Hanle., and that is a comparison which really surprises me, as the Chicago writer seems to me to lack, with a kind of exactitude. the lively flame of passion which lifts all the Englishman's work safely out of reportage and into literature. In any case, Mr. Farrell eschews selectiveness, and is so repetitive and monotonous that in the end—round about page three hundred and ninety-seven—one is uncertain whether one is reading backwards or forwards. " Kiss your sister, Liz." " Peg is a good girl, mother." " So long, Al." "Kiss your mother, Bobbie." The O'Flahertys and the O'Neills, slum-dwellers 1.1 Chicago, are closely and laboriously reported in pages and pages of dialogue and description which are reputed to be vel moving in their laconic accuracy, but which fall consistent: on this reader's ears as whimsical, sentimental and just off the note of truth. The book contains one well-written character, Margaret O'Flaherty, whose griefs and cravings are authentic, and who moves as if in life. No one else, child, man or old woman, either convinces or interests, and there seems to rr(• to be something radically wrong with Mr. Farrell's dialogu- The City Lies Foursquare is a ghost story. It is more pr. tentiously written than most of its kind, but that is no particc lar enhancement. However, it contains all the come-- properties—an enchanting old house in a little town on ti Welsh Border, two young people about to marry who fall love with it, an interesting and dramatic caretaker, old poetr\ books that open at certain pages, no one knows why, voice• in the night—and a good old creaky plot arising with com- fortable non-originality from all these matters.
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