FICTION
Old Home Week. By Minnie Hite Moody. (Putnam. 7s. 6d.)
THE author of The Asiatics carries his own Asia with him, and his publishers do wrong to suggest that in his new novel "he has forsaken Asia for America and has written a far more realistic story." His Asia is not the kind you can easily dis- pense with—sliding another scene behind the characters: it is a heavy rich romantic mood which has nothing to do with geography, the mood of Mr. de la Mare's Arabia, and it absorbs quite blatantly anything which may be of use to it- Hindoo Holiday supplied the material for one of the best chapters in The Asiatics, just as the commentator of The River has helped to write some pages in Night of the Poor. One cannot call this plagiarism: some writers use and adapt other men's lives ; Mr. Prokosch seems to use and adapt the books he has read. He has immense gusto for literature—there is something very young, very innocent and very greedy about his novels ; he doesn't discriminate well between flavours so long as they are spiced enough, and he thrusts in the ruthless gunman out of the films and the motherly prostitute out of
how many young men's novels just as they stand, leaving them to be digested by the overpowering juices of the romantic mood. They glimmer oddly and thinly up at us out of his maw, the skeletons of other people's people.
Night of the Poor is the story of a boy, Tom, who was meant to catch a train at Prairie du Sac in Wisconsin for his family home in Texas ; his uncle with whom he had lived was dead, and he was leaving one secure way of life for another. But it didn't turn out that way. The old car kept breaking down on the road to the station until it was hopeless to expect to catch the train, so off he went suddenly, like the character in a fairy story, with Pete, a hired man, leaving the other two of his uncle's men fiddling with the car. "To the other two clung the scents of the farmyard ; farmyard motions, farm- yard calm. But all over Pete hung the sunny, yawning, prowl- ing fragrance of the land itself." So the Odyssey begins, the dangerous tramp through Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana. Pete kills a man over a black girl and they are hunted by the police: Tom loses Pete and picks up other companions—a girl he loves who goes off with a New Mexican and whom he finds again at his journey's end, stray people who are supposed to represent the unemployed migrants of America, but who are curiously undifferentiated. They all have ideas about life, death, "all that immortality crap," philo- sophy, "that old geezer Aristotle ": the background is orient- ally rich with birds and wild flowers and coca-cola signs ; he sees a lynching.. . . The writing is often admirable—the kill- ing of a snake: "It wriggled a moment, then lay still, and began to exude its acid scent of death" ; sometimes tiring— because all the people Tom meets (they can be distinguished no other way) are physically monstrous with goitres or sores or just fat. We get a little weary of reading: "She was the fattest woman he'd ever seen. She bulged, she billowed, she cascaded. Each moment seemed as if it must be her last before bursting . . ." and so on for a paragraph. Neverthe- less, this book does not belong to the great fictional morass. It is a genuine imaginative achievement to have made a kind of opium dream out of the burst sandwich-bag, the empty cider bottle, the Cameo cinema and the co-ed. girl.
Mr. Gunn's book too has a pleasing and individual flavour: it would be easy to make fun of the romantic plot—the Glasgow journalist who takes a lodging in a farmhouse out- side the city and falls in love with his landlady's daughter (a tiresome virginal creature with a passion for rock-gardens). He doesn't tell his love, but believing that she has gone away for a week-end with a friend of his, he gets drunk, is beaten up in the slums, and is going to die for-want-of-the-will-to- live, when the girl enters the ward carrying flowers . . . The plot is rather like one of those old-fashioned backgrounds that photographers still use at fairs (here again is the tender prostitute—two in one week): the figure of the journalist stands incongruously out. All the same, Wild Geese Over- head is well worth reading because of the sensitive unpre- tentious brooding style and for the sake of a journey through the Glasgow slums which border on that nightmare territory Mr. Joyce made his own. The dark deliberate policemen with their Highland accents and their "cheekbones like blunt timber ends" sail malevolently like dog fish round the corners of Mr. Gunn's Glasgow.
The other books needn't detain us. Mr. Hackett's novel is very long, mannered and assiduous—good of its kind, but historical novels, with their air of let's pretend, seem to me intended for children rather than for adults. There is some bad ornate writing, all sombre velvet and gold tassels, and some well-phrased plain judgements to keep the balance even, like this on King Henry : "He understood stability. It was his greatest preoccupation." On the whole, I would put Mr. Hackett's novel on a level with Hewlett's The Queen's Quair and well below Hueffer's Fifth Queen trilogy—he hasn't that author's powerful sense of character driving up through the research.
Old Home Week is doomed, I imagine, to excessive popu- larity: a slick, easily read, rather sentimental story aching to be filmed about the, to us, odd celebrations in a small American town—a kind of citizen's Gaudy. Middle-aged couples meet their old sweethearts and nearly . . . but, of course, not quite ; the young people, too, end by finding old friends best, and Grandma, aged a hundred, comes o...t best of all.
GRAHAM GREENE.
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