Fiction
Stamp Me Mortal. By John Lodwick. (Heinemann. 9s. 6d.)
A Voice in the Hills. By K. D. Savell. (Chatto and Windus. 9s. 6d.)
READERS who were bored or disgusted by The Age of Reason and The Reprieve, Sartre's first two volumes about a mixed group of human beings plodding relentlessly on with their lives through the catastrophe of the nineteen-thirties, will be similarly affected by Iron in the Soul. It is pointless to try and win them over to it with advertiser's threats (" You can't afford to dismiss Sartre ") or reviewer's flattery (" M. Sartre is so intelligent"). Sartre is a serious writer, and serious writers are often boring, and almost 'always say things that are not very nice. If you don't want serious writing, then why on earth should you be forced to spend hour after miserable hour wrestling with the often paragraphless pages of M. Sartre ? For you the Royal Academy School of Writing ; for you that skilled and readable practitioner, Philip Gibbs, who can make rape and pillage, prostitution and tuberculosis in war- time and post-war Germany sound horrible in a really nice way, as inoffensive and as stimulating as the rattle of tea-cups at a Vicarage garden party. Whether or not Iron in the Soul is a success as a piece of serious writing is another question. The book opens on, and, like a thirsty bee on a rich flower, stays for virtually its entire length, the scene of the French collapse in June, 1940. Sartre is showing a passage in human history as just part of the continuity of individual ,buman existence. To do this he uses several groups of characters, unrelated to each other in the present except by their all living together through the same present. Thus we have Gomez, a Spanish ,Republican veteran of the Civil War, trying to settle down to a new job in New York on the day hs.hears Paris has fallen ; Mathieu, a second-line soldier in the French Army, waiting somewhere between the Vosges and the Rhine with the rest of Divisional H.Q. for the arrival of the Germans ; Daniel wandering about a magni- ficently deserted Paris, making a casual pick-up ; Brunet, a prisoner, and the rest of them. It's no good complaining that one doesn't get a full enough picture of this or that character, or that another, Gomez, for instance, is left in mid-air. This is all true, but the characters are not primarily there for their own sakes. They are there to give intensity to this passage of time as a clearly perceived moment in the unending stream of human experience. It is the conveying of this wholeness, and Sartre's personal view of it, that is the point of the book. Iron in the Soul is partly successful undoubtedly. An almost uncanny feeling of the immensity of human life comes off it at times. But not always. The method has severe limitations. Why, for instance, should one ever stop going on and on and on like this ? And yet if one doesn't stop, how wearisome it all becomes, how it begins to defeat its own end, as in the last section of the book where monotony reduces Brunet's experiences almost to insignificance. One finds oneself longing after a time for a little more significant selection, a little tender use of form.
The translation by Gerard Hopkins, though of course expert. is
not altogether satisfactory. A large part of the book is taken up by the dialogue of rough French soldiers and peasants, and this has invariably been translated into a conscientious, rather stagey, cockney or Dorsetshire. However ingenious this may be as an exercise, the overall effect of reading about• Frenchmen who say to each other " Marnin' t'ye," " I don't half stink and no mistake,' There baint no peace anywheres for we country-folk," and who talk about their " bags" (trousers) and taking a " dekko " is, on the whole, to interfere with their verisimilitude as Frenchmen. The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a book which admirers of Philip Gibbs ought to like. It is, in fact, more naive than Thine Enemy, and for that reason much more full-blooded, though perhaps too tritely full-blooded for admirers of M. Sartre. It has the sort of story which one seems to have read a thousand times since childhood, or at least seen a thousand times on the screen. Bo Mason is a tough sentimental semi-ne'er-do-well of the early nineteen-hundreds who is always on the make but never really quite makes it. Early in the book he takes as his wife an honest decent girl, who loves him, from Indiana Falls. The rest is a story of the vicissitudes which this loyal woman and her two boys have to put up with in face of the moods and whims of this at bottom presumably lovable man. As the years go by, Mr. Stegner focuses his story more and more through the eyes of the surviving younger son. Though the construction of the book seems at times unwieldy, Mr. Stegner can write with real power. There are descriptive scenes which hang on in the mind after much of the heartache of the central characters has dissolved into oblivion.
Mr. Lodwick has already blustered a sort of name for himself as a writer of forceful if erratic promise. Stamp Me Mortal seemed to me cocksure and shoddy. Its hero, a mildly unattractive character, who is busy in France drinking himself into a state of greater unattractiveness following on the death of his wife and child in a railway accident, has an affair with a very young French girl who had a conventionally terrible time at the hands of the Germans. Their affair is the body of the book. The characters seem not unreal so much as phoney—dreary little people dressed up by Mr. Lodwick into tragic and passionate men and women of the world, about which, so runs the insinuation in his style, there is nothing he doesn't know, particularly on the seamy side. Mr. Lodwick is so obviously a born writer, and has so much imaginative vigour, that I cannot help looking forward to some other book than this, some book which will not give the impression of having been written in such a hurry, as doing better justice to his talent. A Voice in the Hills is an earnest and mature first novel which sets itself an almost impossibly ambitious objective. For its climax is the discovery by a young man, returning to the Lebanon after the war, of a hermit-like Frenchman who declares to him, " Let it suffice to say that I believe I have discovered some of the pro- foundest problems of human existence." And he proceeds to impart his discoveries. How can such talk, in the conclusion of a novel, help seeming either a little pretentious or second-rate ? But there are also some very good descriptions of the heat and colour of the Lebanese scene in A Voice in the Hills, and a refreshing determination to get well below the surface in human relations.
ROBERT KEE.
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