Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER

PXR LAGERKVIST is a distinguished Swedish writer in his

early forties, and The Eternal Smile is the first of his books to appear in English : it may be said at once that the English in which it appears is excellent. Ignorant as we are of con- temporary Scandinavian literature, we can easily perceive that this author must be considered apart from the con- ventional realists and producers of latter-day sagas. With regard to this particular book, it is very remarkable that it should first have been published in 1920, for it seems to over- leap the post-War depression and to communicate a freshness and hopefulness that is with us only just beginning to be discernible : this may be partly explainable by the fact that its author belongs to a neutral country where the strain of the War was less felt. It is an allegory of rare quality, individual if not absolutely original in method, and a little reminiscent of the Dreams of Olive Schreiner, a book widely read some thirty years ago. It is inspired by a similar love of life and by what can only be called natural piety. Lager- kvist shows himself a humane writer in the fullest sense of the word : his prose has the simplicity of perfect confidence and good taste, and the poetic truth inherent in that sim- plicity. The characters differ from those of ordinary fiction in one or two important particulars—first of all, they are, with one or two exceptions, nameless ; secondly, they are dead. They are the dead, recalling their earlier existence. Souls now homeless, they look back on the goodness and badness, happiness or unhappiness, pride or humility, love or hate, frustrations or fulfilments of their earthly lives. They tell each other tales. Some cherish an old grudge or sorrow, a memory or an illusion. Of two children we learn that " the darkness around them shone with things they had brought with them." A man says, " I am thankful for a morning long ago." All combine to ask God to explain the meaning of existence. " What have you meant by us ? " they ask. " I have done the best I could," He replies.

To such a book as this, which exhales a wisdom that would allow the merits and yet transcends the limits of this or that political or religious dogma, anyone may turn in the expecta- tion of finding some comfort in being reminded that " only within narrow limits can man experience what is greatest," that " there is no nothing," and that " it is mankind's duty to be happy " ; comfort also in accepting the thought that

" Life has no love for you tree, life has no love for you man, for you flower, for you waving grass, except when it means just you. When it no longer means you, it loves you no more but blots you out."

In the phrase " I acknowledge you, dear life, as the one thing conceivable among all that is inconceivable " (a phrase that epitomizes the whole book) one may detect the voice of a new paganism. It is not that there is any .startling novelty in the suggestion that we should cultivate our gardens while fortifying ourselves with a slightly mystical submission to our fate. The newness of Lagerkvist's paganism—if such a crude label can be given to the point of view, the " message " of such a subtle intelligence—lies in its individual source.

Wise, temperate, cheerful, civilized, European, it is soothing and heartening in a time of nerves, scepticism, change and fear, like the cool note of a bell heard above a street full of traffic. May this book be so well received as to encourage the publishers and translators to make more of Par Lager- kvist's writings available in English.

Seven Poor Men of Sydney also goes further and deeper than ordinary fiction, for Miss Christina Stead has more talent, more passion, and more imagination than nine novelists out of ten. An uneven and highly rhetorical work, it suggests at times that Miss Stead is inclined to overstrain her resources, as well as those of her characters, whom she endows too freely with her own restless eye and roving curiosity, her own Mental and verbal exuberance, so that one feels at times that they must have been brought up on Sir Thomas Browne and Nietzsche and Herman Melville. And yet when they are most her mouthpiece they are most com- pelling. Of Michael Baguenault, foremost of the seven poor men, we are told that

" when he saw a person going downstairs and compared the last appearance of that one's head with the empty space when he was no longer there, the change seemed to him infinitely great, even impossible, a freak that could not take place in the natural world in which he breathed."

This visionary power, this inability to take the obvious for granted, helps to lend emphasis and vividness to Miss Stead's own view of life. It is a view by no means lacking in variety, as readers of The Salzburg Tales will remember. The new

book seems to catch the very. atmosphere of a populous anti- podean city, with descriptions of scenery, evocations of family life, excursions into crooked commercial byways, and in particular cruises in the local intellectual backwaters, with their confused currents of communism and Catholicism. So

long as we are directly- concerned with the destinies of

Michael and his sister Catherine all is well, but there are long and frequent passages less tense with poetic certainty, and one is reminded of a saying of Melville's that " truth uncom- promisingly told will always have its ragged edges." Michael himself might be called a congenital suicide, and the War did nothing to ease him : he found " no meaning in ordinary life," had " a hunger and lust for death at root," and declared, " I am lost because part of me is sundered from me for ever."

He is presented definitely as an Australian, with roots in old Europe :

" And after all this notable pioneer tale of starvation, sorrow, escapades, mutiny, death, labour in common, broad wheatlands, fat sheep, broad cattle-barons, raw male youth and his wedding to the land, in the over-populated metropolis the sad-eyed youth sits glumly in a harebrained band., and speculates upon the suicide of the youth, the despair of the heirs of the yellow, heavy-headed acres. What a history is that ; what an enigma is that ! '

In part at least it is the history of a conflict between order and disorder, of the frustration of an insatiable appetite for an impossible happiness, of tumultuous energy finding no true outlet and driving the spirit into a Rimbaudesque world where

" hermit-crabs and octopuses issue out of bony wrecks, ribands of flame out of the shrunken mouths of sunburnt castaways rolling on beaches in a spasm of thirst, and barnacles close the seams of coffers holding fortunes."

Not an easy world, but not a negligible one ; and Miss Stead is not an easy writer, but a powerful one.

There were episodes in the career of Michael Baguenault that would not have been out of place in that of George Brush, the hero of Heaven's My Destination, as, for instance, when Michael goes about looking for a stranger to whom he can give away some money. It is not, however, by plunging us into storm and stress, but with the methods of quiet comedy that Mr. Thornton Wilder pursues truth. He has invented a serious young man with a healthy body and a fine singing voice, a successful travelling salesman of school books, who is a bundle of good intentions and unworldliness, and who might be regarded as a saint, a fool, an absurd prig, a pattern of logic, or a mixture of all four, and has led him into a series of situations that make him appear ridiculous by all ordinary standards of behaviour, but worthy of respect for his sincerity, which finds expression in such an outburst as this :

" You can- get away and stay away. If I ever become like you fellows I'd expect to be dead a long time. I may be cuckoo, perhaps I am ; but I'd rather be crazy all alone than be sensible like you follows are sensible. I'm glad Fm nuts. . . . Everybody's crazy except me ; that's what's the matter. The whole world's nuts."

As we are so fond nowadays of pointing out to each other the nuttiness and cuckooism of the world in general, it should be difficult not to sympathize with such a hero. At the same

time, he serves as a warning of the danger of trying to be right by oneself, of thanking God that one is not as other men are, a tendency that led him not only into spiritual pride, but now and again into gaoL Heaven's My Destination is an un- commonly skilful and good-humoured entertainment, and

thought and experience have gone to the making of it.