BOOKS AND WRITERS

DA LEVERSON• and Ronald Firbankt were both writing

during the 1914-18 war. They both belonged to the upper- class Edwardian world at a time when only the imaginative could foresee that this particular kind of privilege and cultivation was already doomed. Neither of them was happy in that world, so far as one can judge from Sir Osbert Sitwell's moving descriptions: but it was where they belonged, it was the England they knew. The rest of England did not know much about this small sector of society ; if you talk of Edwardian England, you must not forget the England of Bennett, or Wells, or Firbank's exact contemporary, D. H. Lawrence, to whom the Firbank environment seemed as remote as it does to us, and more forbidding. In 1951, that tiny, glittering Edwardian society has taken on a shimmer of its own ; and part of the interest of such writers as these, particularly of Mrs. Leverson, is one of period.

Neverthe!=, limy have considerable interest in their own right, though it is asking for trouble to put their claims too high. Ada Leverson was an agreeable and entertaining novelist with a great deal of wisdom about the emotions of love. She lacked altogether the force, the appetite, which make the characters in a novel stand out as though they are embossed: unlike Anthony Hope, whom she in certain respects resembles, one does not feel that she had great powers, and through diffidence or perversity or both, half- deliberately threw them away. There is nothing i-a her novels which approaches the best pieces of The King's Mirror (a sad book because of its overwhelming impression of a line novelist wasted). Yet she is readable: she is witty, often conscientiously and elaborately so ; she is very honest about love, and treats her characters with the disillusioned tenderness of one who has suffered much. Both Lore's Shadow (1908) and The Limit (1911), her second and third books, now republished in an attractive edition by Chapman & Hall, reveal her in what I imagine (I have not read her other four) to be characteristic form. They are much more worth reading than any but a handful published in 1950.

For most people, they are also much more worth reading than any of Firbank's—though he was an original writer in a sense which Ada Leverson was not, though he is one of the pioneers of the moment-by-moment novel. The moment-by-moment fashion has now outlived its usefulness, but it dominated a certain kind of sensibility for thirty years ; and so it is worth while to go a little further into Firbank's brand of originality. In Inclinations (1916) and Love's Shadow there happens to be a closely similar situation. A young woman is going to bed, thinking of a man. This is how Ada Leverson deals with it.

" Hyacinth felt somewhat soothed, and resolved to think no more of Cecil Reeve. She then turned up the light again, took her writing materials, and wrote him three long letters, each of which she tore up. She then wrote once more, saying— .

" ' Dear Mr. Reeve, ' I shall be at home today at four. Do come round and see me.'

"She put it under her pillow, resolving to send it by a messenger the first thing in the morning, and went to sleep.

" But this letter, like the others, was never sent. By the morning light she marvelled at having written it, and threw it into the fire."

Here is Firbank's treatment.

" ' I shall never sleep. I don't sec how I can. The die is cast I There's no telling, child, how it will end ! . . .' 6 6 6 6 6 6 Via Tiber . . . Countess P-a-s-t-o-r-e-l-l-i. Via Tiber . . . " 0 Tiber, Father Tiber, to whom the Romans :pray." Impossible ! ... If they did, it was a perfect scandal. " ' And suppose he made me too ? Oh, good gracious I ' " By the bedside, mellowing among a number of vellum volumes, were the Nine Prayers of the Countess of Cochrane and Cray. .

• Lore's Shadow and The Limit. By Ada Leverson. (Chapman and . 7s. 6d. each.)

Three Novels : Caprice. Vainglory. Inclinations. By Ronald Firbank. (D ckworth.. 18s.)

- Who would do the burnivg ? " That eighth one ! What a clamour for a crown ! " On the subject of jewels there wasn't much she didn't teach.

"Two loose diamonds made a charming tic-roc sound.

"'At a dinner-party, now, who would work in first ? She or Lady Cray ? One would push past her probably, in any case- ' the Italian woman ! ' . . . ' The Pasto Countess thing ! '

" She played her eyes and flung out a hand towards a sugar- crystal-rose.

" No ; one couldn't exactly tell how it would end.

" My dear, I shouldn't care to say ! . .

" There were those Beer-Hall voices . , . Fal de rol di do do, di do do ! Fal de rol- "Miss Collins turned her pillow.

" I suppose I've to lie and listen ! . . . Oh, Good gracious ! '" Anyone who has read novels between 1920 and 1950 can recognise this moment-by-moment technique. In reality, it is not so much a technique as an attitude of mind, which suggests that a writer can only learn anything of life through the immediate present, i.e., he should confine his art to what he can see and hear or (as with Miss Collins above) to the solitary moments of free association.

No attitude could be more sterile. It is not in the least how one learns about life in actual fact. In knowing a human being, one does not restrict oneself to the seconds in which one hears him speak and watches his face: one thinks about him, corrects one's

thoughts, investigates his past and guesses his future, listens to others' opinions, and gradually forms a kind of composite of feeling and

observation which, though it includes moment-by-moment pictures, is utterly different in kind. That is the way in which the great human novelists have always worked: it is, incidentally, the way in which anyone who studies people for a living has to work.

If you analyse the two passages textually, you will find many interesting contrasts. Firbank's is far more variegated: it is throb- bing with sensation: but it contains nothing but sensation. Emo-

tionally, it is ice-cold. The words of Ada Leverson are flatter, less individual: you may find them dull at a first reading, but at a

second they will make you aware of a sharp, sarcastic mind and a

warm heart. In terms of sensation, they convey nothing, nor, indeed, does any of Ada Leverson's writing. Between these two

writers, neither of them first-rate in their own school, you can see two different approaches to human beings with caricature-like exag- geration—Firbank apprehending them with brilliant senses, but with

weak or inhibited emotion and little mind: Ada Leverson, not photographing them with a tenth of his vividness, but responding to them with strong feeling and an acute intelligence. If I have to choose, I do not hesitate a moment about which approach gives the truer picture.

The moment-by-moment vision looked to its pioneers as though it might reveal startling truths, but it has turned out arid. Its

characteristic works have sacrificed both mind and emotion—which, in any literary form, is altogether too big a sacrifice. That is why a number of contemporary novelists are making a fresh start.

With all that said, Firbank has several claims on our admiration —a genuine originality (when he began writing there was fro one in

the least like him), a remarkable eye, a kind of eldritch gaiety. He also possessed another quality which, while it is not strictly a literary virtue, increases his impact, especially on the young. He

was totally devoid of moral vanity ; he was the least stuffed of men ; he exposed the nerve of his perverse sexual temperament, with an abandon that few writers had done before him. Often this quality—irrespective of artistic merit—turns out to have an appeal for the sensitive young, puzzled and sometimes dismayed by facets of their own temperament with which they have not yet come to terms. Several writers, no quite of the first rank, have derived a large slice of their reputation because they have, through their self-exposure, calmed the fears of others. They have, as it were, presented some of their readers with the latch-key. Among these latch-key novelists, Firbank has, and may for some time continue to