Fiction
By WILLIAM PLOMER
The Harsh Voice. Four short novels by Rebecca West. (Cape: The Road Leads On. By Knut Hamsun. (Rich and Cowan. 103.) " THE role of the artist, like that of the scientist,"- said Henri Matisse many years ago, " is based on his seizing certain current truths which have often been pointed out to him but which, through him, take on novelty and which he will make his own from the day on which he realizes their profound significance." It is not a bad test of the validity of a work of imagination to inquire how far its creator has been sue= cessful in that way. Certainly the-four " short novels " which Miss Rebecca West has collected under the title of The Harsh Voice are a. significant expression of current truths, though she may not be the first to make their significance real. Some of the current truths upon which she has. most firmly seized are these : that in love and marriage today the intermingling of love and hate has taken on a new complexity, partly on account of changes in manners and the variable economic conditionS, particularly in America ; that America in par-- ticular has evolved a new kind of woman, extremely capable, hard-boiled," influential, but _certainly not devoid of feminine feelings ; and that " the Right Wing of the English temperament stretches towards Europe and touches France with its tip " while " the Left Wing stretches all the way to America." All four stories are about rich people ; • three are about Americans ; three are principally about problems of the married ; and in all may be heard that " harsh voice we hear when money talks, or hate.":It-.is noticeable that with one exception Miss West accords her women justice, mercy and . admiration, and that she seems to find them definitely more important and worthy of respect and affection than the men, who leave an impression that they are little more than foils to the women, than commercial and .domestic func- tionaries—with one exception, who is dominated by vanity. This exception appears in the most brilliant and characteristic of the four stories, the one called " There is no Conversation." It shows to the best advantage Miss West's sophistication, her respect for wealth and power, and her ingenuity and re- sourcefulness as a story-teller. " There is no such thing as conversation," she tells us : " It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all. . . . I am talking now of times when life is being lived, not when it is being talked about, not when the intellect is holding the field. Then, of course, ideas can be formulated, can be passed from ono mind to another. It is not easy, but it can be done with care. . . . No such caution is passible when one is really living. Then there is no conversation."
Two individuals belonging to entirely different worlds are
brought by chance into a close association. its often happens nowadays : as a theme. for the novelist its interest is almost inexhaustible, but the right and left wings of his tem- perament are not often as tensile as those of Miss West's, nor are his experience and curiosity as a rule sufficient to enable him to enter two other worlds, both alien. The Marquis de Sevenac, at luncheon with some Americans in Paris, was " thrown back on " a Mrs. Sarle, who did not seem to him what in fact she was, an extremely shrewd woman of big business. Being at the time in a state of loneliness and frustrated tenderness, he conceived a sentimental affection for her, to which, in her own more cautious and much more se. rious way, she responded. He failed her, and she was left in a position where she felt bound to avenge herself. So much for the situation. How does Miss West manage it ? She contrives that the narrator shall be so placed as to get from each of the leading actors their Own version of the affair, and the result is a highly sardonic revelation of the obtuseness of the mondain male, and of the Napoleonic nature of the female whom he had actually pre- sumed to pity. Another of the stories is an exposure of the dreadfulness of being good : " Alice," a man tells his ,wife, "you're the salt of the earth. . . The point is that nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds. . " • Another provides a pleasing portrait of a. chorus-girl turned faithful mistress. These stories are likely to be _read. by those who care for excellent writing, acuteness and wit, applied to the
" seizure of certain- current truths." r cannot help feeling that Henry James would have been interested to find an English writer so extraordinarily knowledgeable about certain of his compatriots, and so sympathetic towards them.
• Miss Noralt, James's latest attempt to capture an aspect of contemporary life is less stylish but no less genuine 'than Miss West's. She certainly has a way of her own with Mr. and Mrs. Everyman, who are in this case the manager of a garage and his wife. Her way is to reduce everything to what she considers bare essentials. Borrowing a word from the architects, one might call The Return a " functional " novel. Here are these ordinary people, an 'ordinary decent man earning his living, with an ordinary but not quite so decent wife ; ordinary happenings, Christmas dinners, family gatherings, journeys by tube,- .visits to the pictures, scrubbing the sink, work, love, jealousy, disappointment, death; little violent dratria- and no •rionSense. " There is a curious fascina- tion in this careful and detailed record of commonplace existence, and its very ordinariness sometimes makes one laugh and sometimes Makes one frightened; for it almost seems that it may all be true, that.Jsek and Effie Blake, whom one often sees in the tube, may really be as standardized, as com- pletely unsurprising as they appear to be. They have no religion—" After all, it was holy wasn't it," Effie had- to • remind herself when she was being married in church. They have no curiosity—a girl with a sallow skin " looked like an Italian or some such dago." If they think of death, it is only in this way—" You went on somewhere, he supposed, but he hadn't thought about it much." If of life—" Life was growth, wasn't it ? What a-funny thing to think." Only once in the whole book does one of them become anything like thoughtful, and that is when Jack, under the influence of sorrow, specu- lates about the nature of 'love. They have no imagination, no taste or originality, no eccentricities, and scarcely any little personal tricks, even of speech, and yet they have a life of their own, these characters, jointly and separately, and after closing the book one remembers them, though it may be as stylized types rather than individuals : but better a genuine type than an unreal individual. Miss James has whittled away quaintness and softness and exuberance and super- fluous ornament ; she is as fir from the Dickensian tradition as steel chairs are far from plush sofas ; she has closed her eyes to the bizarre behaviour we read of in newspapers, hear of from our friends, notice in them and in ourselves' and in our neighbours ; she has reduced plain living to its lowest common factors, with the result that the world she presents has a life of its own, true within its own limits, and managing to catch some reflections of universal truth.
On its dust cover the publishers praise Sailor Town for its " strange incredible beauty," but such beauty as it- possesses. is not in the least strange, and calls for no suspension of belief, though it is certainly strange that a book which depends largely for its effect on,gredibility should be recommended for lacking that quality:' When his ship docked at Porto Plata, Luke -Sweeney' was Inn of good resolutions. He meant to go ashore and have a look round, but not to waste his substance in riotous living, for he knew from experience that " when your got drunk, you got crazy, and money streamed away like the wake of a ship." But by -the time he had called at the Hotel; de los Dos Mundos and the Cantina Universal, the prey of pimps, prostitutes and his own restlessness, drink had flowed and craziness had set-in: -.His craziness resulted in a sort of practical idealism, an attempt to lend permanent, external fulfilment to repressed-sentiment. A shoitish and well-written story, which some will find touching and others sordid, it might easily loosen the purse-strings of those who promote missions to seamen, and is likely to act as a heady stimulant to the prejudices of teetotallers.
It is to that class of readers whe look for length rather than `intensity in the novels they read that The Road Leads On is most lilcely to appeal. A long drawn-out and doubtless 'authentic chronicle of Norwegian country life, it is conducted with a kind of forced sprightliness, and lacks the necessary
element of surprise.
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