FICTION
By KATE
O'BRIEN
MR. WILLIAM FAULKNER is a writer handicapped and distin- guished by a particular exaction which he makes of readers and which we cannot always place at his disposition. His narrow and dark emotional force requires to find a channel already prepared in our responsiveness, if we are not to be flooded by a rush of misunderstanding and boredom. His prose expects of us something of that formal fatigue and heavy-liddedness which, say, a death in the family establishes for a day or two— and it is a question if voluntarily we embrace that mood. It has its rewards. Sometimes—for page after page, as we assent to his sultry formalism and to the processional movement of his events, as we feel the power which justifies his evocative rather than definitive use of words, and acknowledge the eloquent passion which often betrays him into turgidity yet also in a measure excuses its own offences—we believe our- selves persuaded. And well we might be too. For here at least is no commonplace churner-up of the customary slab of pseudo-nourishment. Here is a writer of passion and indi- vidualistic vision who, if we respond to him as to a ritualistic ceremony of the Church, for instance—rationalisation tempor- arily barred—can cut off the vulgar, and refresh us with a vista of flowering moods and sensations, and of actions beautifully formalised and possessing the undisputed rightness of dream-behaviour.
So it is in The Unvanquished. The book's qualities are relentlessly marked, and it has the defects of emotional obscurity and slow-stepping, pretentious exaggeration. But it is full of well-selected felicities and, within its mood, seems oppres- sively true and noble. It is a book of episodes of the American Civil War. These are told by a boy who is the son of a Southern general and who, with his negro fosterbrother, his grand- mother, his Cousin Drusilla and his father who is killed, plays his revealing part in them, and through them grows to a brooding prematurity which is almost manhood. It is a book of great passages, and some longueurs, but undoubtedly it stands with deliberate pride out of the nick. And if for some tastes it demands too much of the nerves and not enough of the brain, resentment of that may be anaemic exasperation against an artist who has the emotional power to drain us tired. " Oh, damn you Sartorises ! " said Aunt Jenny in the second last page. Damn them indeed—but if some of us feel that we need an easier day and more responsive nerves with which to read of them—surely that sensation is at least a grudging tribute.
Miss Yvonne Cloud does not aim at our nerves. Nor indeed does she seem to have much hope that we will use our brains on her pages. She is unflatteringly precise—and flat—in The . Houses in Between. Her fans—and I am one of them—will be very happy to welcome another book of hers at last, and one as agreeably dust-covered, though we may not care over- much for photography grafted on to drawing. Readers of Nobody Asked You, Short Lease and Mediterranean Blues will know that this talented and errati: author is a lucky dip, and that there is never any telling what you will get from her. This time she comes to mock and stays to moralise. In both functions she can be brilliant, as we know, but here the mockery begins on an unfortunate tone, which I am happy to say is not sustained. The prologue of The Houses in Between is, I humbly submit, one of those pieces of writing which its author should have scrapped, (a) because it is out of tune with all that it introduces, and (b) because it is itself dowdy, with the unlucky dowdiness of the extremely expensive and smart hat which is out of date before the milliner sends it home. However, the story which follows is too sound and too full of moral value to be injured by the trifle of a false start. Its subject is property—a house in Islington, a row of houses. The " answers " to this subject, if one may use fugal terms, arise from landlord, landlord's wife, land-agent, aesthete, bricklayer and bricklayer's girl.. It might be thought from this that an intricate comedy of character and emotion was in train— but Miss Cloud has preferred to use her ingenuity on the situation and let the people involved serve it as so much necessary but transient scaffolding. She may be right. She has some important lessons to hammer home about what is happening to privately owned estates in our time. She has assembled all the problems of greed, sentimentality and egotism which, under existing conditions, make impossible the right and sane adapta- tion to true necessity of any piece of goods. She presents the situation with accuracy and without bias. In doing so she manages to find room for occasional character-drawing ; the land-agent's wife is a good novelist's interlude, and Hilda, the original owner of the troublesome terrace in Islington, who is compelled to hand it over to her blustering, harassed and impetuous husband, is a well-drawn, true character. There is also a sketch of proletarian sentiment—between George the bricklayer and his Kate—which suffers, for all its essential right- ness, from its author's queer nervousness before surface charac- teristics. If only Miss Cloud would grasp the nettle of human feeling with one half the conviction she puts into pulling her Pauline's aesthetic leg. However, in this book she has chosen to be mainly dry, tractarian, and expository of those cul-de-sac situations in which feeling confuses, and cannot resolve anything. The result' is that we close her book instructed, subdued and, some of us, if we have been surrep- titiously entertained, feeling a little guilty, as no doubt in her new role of lecturer she would be glad to have us feel. But her work is here, as always, stamped by knowledge, cold sense and the authority of the born writer.
Mr. Mark Benney also has knowledge of what he elects to write about and this mitigates his occasional lapses from cold sense, and on the whole excuses that exuberance of the born writer which is his major defect. He is someone with plenty that is interesting and fresh to say about what is called the under-world, but he must beware of his tendency to write emotional nonsense. Writing, as such a purist as Miss Cloud could tell Mr. Benney, is not a mere matter of discovering with happy gusto that one can in some measure write. Nor is it well-judged of any author to begin to write until he has mastered infatuation for the central figure of his book. The Scapegoat Dances has a good theme which may be summed up as " once a gaolbird always a gaolbird," or that crime and punishment, as handled by human legislation, predestine us to crime and punishment. But the idea is all but lost in the wordiness and emotionalism of Solman, the ex-convict whose adventures in Soho after he has been restored from gaol to freedom are the narrative. The facts seem authentic ; they are fresh, savage and often amusing ; the account of a grim and wild party in a prostitute's flat is very good, and so is the exposition of the life of street-girls and their " bullies " in the Lisle Street region ; the traditions, snobberies and exactions of this way of life are most credibly presented. Indeed, all that is wrong with this entertaining and in many ways very terrible story is the self-pity and literary bombast of its hero.
Pomfret Towers presupposes a world in which there is no under-world, and to those millions who are only too willing to accept such sunny and naïve limitation it cannot fail to bring chuckles and delight. It is a vast, gay, unreal lark about one of those charming English country-towns and countrysides where all the architecture is perfect save only Pomfret Towers, which was built by the sixth earl of Pomfret under the inspira- tion of St. Pancras Station. It is a comedy of that moonshiny English state of things in which to be a little afraid of barking dogs is to be a source of anxiety to one's affectionate parents. It has a lively drawing-room plot and it is mainly worked out at a house-party in the St. Pancras-like Towers. It can be recommended without blush or tremor to any who feel that they have the time to read it. Many of its jokes are good, and it is altogether as jolly as the jolliest kind of tennis-party.
Pathetic Symphony is a curious, untidy stringing together into pseudo-imaginative form of most of the known facts of Tchaikowsky's life and death. It 'is difficult to know why it should have been written, as all that it does for its hero is to make him seem a soft, absurd, flirtatious and confused kind of creature in ordinary life, while remarkably concealing all traces of the impassioned and disciplined composer. There is no attempt to explain where his music came from, or his processes of v. cr.t.
Previous page
