A Little Travel
IN his new book, Coming Down the Seine, Mr. Gibbings does not do justice to his own great charm and talent. He dissipates his powers in too much dalliance with passing thoughts of not sufficient interest, while the magic Seine hangs in abeyance or is skimped. It is so delightful to be gliding along the river in his cheerful company, noticing, through his perspicacity, the ripples and wrinkles on the surface of the water, scrambling ashore with him for a drink or a night under the stars, listening to the legends and histories of the places going by—and he tells his anecdotes particularly well, with a careless throwaway air, very attractive. But alas!—in the middle of any of these agreeable occupations Mr. Gibbings is fatally liable to be reminded of something else, an Irish story, an excerpt from the Oxford Companion to Music, one thing leading a little too much to another.
His gift, however, for rendering into English ordinary French conversation is exceptional. The feat is a difficult one and usually muffed, but here the translation is so adroit that practically a whiff of garlic comes across as well. Nor is it possible to congratulate him too much on the simple subtlety of the device he uses for con- veying the feeling of a river growing from next to nothing down to the sea. He does so by enlarging, stage by stage, his own method of transport: starting his journey from the springhead on foot, then, as the stream widens, taking to a little matchbox of a boat, from here transferring to a barge, and finally reaching the estuary in a Channel- crossing steamer. The book is illustrated by his own wood-engrav- ings.
Mrs. Mackay, from a lifetime of travel, has picked out certain episodes—sometimes, indeed, mere glances—with such preciseness as to do away with any sense of confusion. I Live in a Suitcase is very trimly packed. One heading may be Hong-Kong and the next perhaps Paris or Johannesburg, but the distinctions are clear and the result is not a hotch-potch but a neatly-strung necklace of variegated stones. Each incident is treated to the technique of a short story, having beginning, middle and pithy end. Mrs. Mackay's descriptive writing is very good indeed. She uses the minimum of words, and those words are nearly always dead on the mark, fresh, crisp, faintly , surprising, never outrageous, so that the pictures start instantly up before one's eyes. In a chapter on Lisbon she says that the houses "are hung on the hills like bird-cages." And later: "She was en- tranced with her room, which opened on to a grilled balcony fluttering with bougainvillea. She could look down on the river Tagus and watch the fishing boats dallying with sails like moths."
Unhappily the general impact of this book is a chilling one. The writing is impeccable, but it has in it no heart. One gets the impres- sion that Mrs. Mackay's lines have fallen in exclusively expensive places, and that this accident has limited her sympathies; in a writer as well-equipped as she, it is a sad and a considerable loss.
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