Relationships
r 12s. 6d.) Child With a Flower. By Elda Bossi. (Gollancz. 13s. 6d.)
Miss BORTON was a journalist sent by her Boston newspaper on a week's assignment to Monterrey in Mexico. Within a year she had married Luis de Trevino, the young Mexican provided as her official escort by the Monterrey Chamber of Commerce. Her book describes the transformation of a modern independent working woman into one whose every action was circumscribed by rules—of religion, of con- vention and, above all, of relationship, as wife, daughter-in-law, mather or niece. Senora de Trevino must have had great stamina, humility and discipline. Few of us would take kindly to a life in which it was impossible to speak to a man except in the presence of one's husband, to engage in any cultural activity in public or to eat except when one's husband chose to return home, and where one had to beg for each individual shilling above the daily allowance for food. But Senora de Trevino found that, once accepted, the rigid and intricate ordering of life had overwhelming compensations in excite- ment—she gives a hair-raising account of an orthodox Mexican court- ship—and in real security. Everyone, even the spinster, the senile or the mad, has his place in the family, and his share of obligation, love and respect. One may perhaps doubt &Mora de Trevino's statement that 95 per cent. of the population is still devoutly Catholic, but the basic attitude is Catholic—stoical, accepting, joyful when that is possible and at all times convinced that 'sacrifice is beautiful and service a form of love.' We cannot wholly recapture that habit Of mind, even if we want to, because we cannot arbitrarily re-create the conditions in which it flourishes, but SL.'lora de Trevino's book, light-hearted and amusing as it is, will and should arouse some envy.
Mrs. Seton also married into a strange environment. Her husband is the adopted son of Helen Gould Shepard, once 'the richest girl in America,' majority shareholder in five great railway systems, whose larger subscriptions to charity for one year totalled 1,146,000 dollars, who attempted to rule her life and the lives of her children by biblical texts, who made the girls wear black cotton stockings when bathing alone in their private swimming bath and who felt guilt towards her delphiniums because she had not tended them well enough to enable them to win a prize in the local flower show. Mrs. Seton certainly has a subject, but has written an unsatisfactory and unpleasingly facetious book, partly because, in spite of repeated protestations to the contrary, she made no real imaginative effort to understand her fantastic subject—she only wanted to conform enough not to be found out and, like a frightened child, she never mastered the principles which would enable her to do so; partly because the pattern to which she was asked to conform was so unsatisfactory. Riches and the Kingdom of Heaven may just be compatible; the unsurmountable obstacle, however high the indi- vidual's moral aim, is the power to' dispose of money arbitrarily, outside any system of social obligation and relationship. If the Mexicans go too far in reinforcing their respect for natural laws with passitivity in a rigid man-made hierarchy, the Americans ignore the one and dispense with the other. One feels that it was no accident on the part of nature that all Mrs. Shepard's children were adopted.
In contrast to &flora de Trevino and Mrs. Seton, Signora Bossi lives in a minute enclosed world. She describes, as if looking through a magnifying glass, and with hardly a reference to another human being, the first four years of her daughter's life. No one, and certainly no mother of young children, should be put off reading her book by its rather rarefied tone and the horrible historic present in which it is written. it is a good and profoundly sensible book because, like Sefiora de Trevino, Signora Bossi respects life and has the imagination to recognise and the patience to accept its mani- festations, whether it is her child's logic or the endless dawdle in the bath for the pleasure of playing with water.
CAROL STEWART
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