New Novels
Trial of Strength. By Celia Dale. (Cape, 12s. 6d.)
NOVELS are as good a way of living vicariously as any. You can live backwards in time or even forwards, farther to north or south or east or west than you arc, higher or lower, simpler or subtler, better or worse than you were born. But some worlds, though they go through the motions of the worlds we can enter, are always closed. These seldom appear in novels, and when they do it takes a different effort on the novelist's part, another kind of imagination on the reader's from the usual effort or the everyday imagination. When the world is that of physical deformity the effort needed, I think, is somehow to short-circuit sympathy, somehow to extend the limits of a very specialised and enclosed form of suffering.
The Singular Hope tries; it understands and faces the difficulties; yet, with its many qualities, it leaves us where we were, outside. Its world is Bylands Cross, a mediocre school for deformed chil- dren where Joan, fifteen and a clergyman's daughter, is sent. She is unhappy, lonely, reserved; her mother is dead, her home un- sympathetic; a middle-aged cousin visits her, then asks her to his house, and, encouraged and drawn on by him, she falls in love. Then she tells someone at school what has happened, and the situation blows up.
takes delicate handling, and courage to handle in the first place; and Miss Sewell has made of it an informative and often moving book. Her setting is excellent: the desolation of school. the ironic loneliness in a perpetual crush, the world where you can cry or read a letter in peace only in the lavatory; the slight physical squalor; the grind of an everlasting and inexorable routine. Her minor characters are good, too; children, staff visiting parents, the maids, the matron, the cousin's housekeeper, all as solid as minor characters need to be. But Joan and her cousin, on whom the book centres, Joan's awakening, ner growth in love, her revulsion, and her final moment of glory—these fail. In a book as intelligent as this it is hard to find a specific fault, a single false episode or a pre- cise mistake of character or action. The fault, I think, is one of emphasis throughout, of saying just too much or just too little, of not knowing where to pause, and where to crash boldly on; of turning, too, the reserve and the ,rigidity of adolescence into woodenness, of never quite engaging our sympathy for people, only for a situation. a fact. Mis Sewell is hampered, of course, by so much in the subject itself. it.11Sot least what her readers will face, and what refuse. This is a novel that aims high, and if it does not entirely come up to its ambitions it remains a sincere and distin- guished attempt at an immensely difficult theme.
Trial of Strength deserves, and thunderingly, that equivocal adjective 'readable.' Forget quality and intention a moment : it is, of this week's batch, the one you read at a sitting. This is not a compliment but a comment. It is short and compact enough to swallow at a go; it is smooth (another small, enclosed world), and the pace is terrific. 'He went to the first night of The Cocktail Party but had never read The Waste Land, heard Peter Grimes but never 7'he Magic Flute, visited the Leicester Galleries and the special exhibitions at the Tate but could not tell a Sutherland from a Matthew Smith': so Bill Bridewell, editor of the Daily Post. His little world is Fleet Street, impinging on the larger world Of success in general, and London wealthy success in particular. How tightly and exactly they are pinned down, Bill and his wife Poopsie, that ginger kitten on the climb for whom the London world suddenly pales beside the prospect of diplomatic circles in Washington as someone else's wife; and Ba, Bill's daughter, so much more re- served than he is, so uneasy in the middle-aged world of 'darling' to everyone and backslapping; and good, simple-Simon Whitney, the American clawed by the red kitten. Very few novels have as hero a true contemporary, a child of the time, born of our circum- stances, easy only with our present flavour of things, a man who is unthinkable as he is at any other time. Bill Bridewell is all that.
Exact as a fly in amber, he will make valuable social history to any- one who cares to look him up in years ahead. Sharp and slick, acid but never angry, uncomfortable but salubrious, this novel hits one small, contemporary nail so squarely on the head that you are left. like Bill before the shock of his very contemporary troubles, rather gasping. A shudderingly efficient feat.
Mobile, Alabama, is in the deepest, very deepest corner of that novelists' fairyland the Deep South; and my, as they say in Mobile at the beginning of every second sentence, isn't it folksy- woven : everyone eating fried chicken, and magnolia growing like cowparsley, and things called katydids, as well as bullfrogs, tree- frogs, crickets and motor-boats on the Bayou, singing loud in the night to the smell of willow oak, and everyone, just everyone. called, with tenderness, crazy. They talk and they talk from start to finish of The Untidy Pilgrim. no one in Mobile having much else to do, it appears. They tell long tales, of the sort called 'zany,' about their great-uncles and their second cousins and their coloured cooks; or they simply talk ('You should see yourself sleeping. You look like somebody else.' I always sleep incognito' : that sort of thing). Your stomach may turn at a sentence like : 'When I woke, my teeth were all wearing little cashmere sweaters': but the lusciousness, the high spirits, the inexhaustible verve and just his plain gift of the gab make Mr. Walter (whose first novel this surprisingly is) rather sinisterly good company, like some en- ticing Southern drink you know very well will give you little cashmere sweaters next morning, but that you go on drinking, just the same.
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