Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER

IT is a good test of a novelist's merit to find out exactly what power he has to transfigure the commonplace ; to isolate it, as a picture is isolated in its frame ; to intensify it by thought and feeling ; to light it up with poetry or idealism or irony or humour or fantasy. If in the process he manages to avoid being dull or affected or precious or pretentious, he manages pretty well. It would be too much to say that each of the authors of the four novels.on this list has managed very well, but they differ sufficiently from one 'another in their attack:on the -coninioriplaee to provide both entertainment and some interesting comparisons. Mr. Michael Goring, otherwise Mr. Nikolai Gubsky; haS Made a valiant and fairly successful effort, thOugh it is with some anxiety that one reads the first Sentence of the blurb—" This is the story of a married man who

falls in love- with The Other Woman." The 'anxiety is not - .

lessened by learning that the hero is-a novelist, and indeed the -

opening pageS, flat in tone, are full of forced and banal small- talk, but matters improve as soon as Me. Goring gets into his stride, which he does by suddenly introducing a Polish count, taken, he tells us, straight from' life: The 'placing of Count 'Stanislas Hocinski (" an innocent—Parsifal and Don Quixote

rolled into one ") in a middle-class English setting may be taken as an example of Mr. Goring's ability to show how oddity and ordinariness are mixed up and-how they react upon one another. To some extent -this is the -subject as well as the method of his book, toe the hero, Matthew Lerrnoni, is all

temperament, and the Other Woman, Miriam Travers, , is nothing of the sort. She not only caused Matthew's forty- year-old pulse to beat irregularly—it even touched 135—but made -him sink- on the ground and sob and beat- the ground with his fists, neglect his work and harrow-the feelings of-his wife : this un-English behaviour way be explained by the fact that Matthew was forty and Scotch, and had been educated on the Continent.. Miriam, alas, was selfish. Comfortably, off, with a husband, a home, a car and a club, she was quitewilling to lead Matthew on continually, though never so far as he would have liked. " I love you awfully, Matt," she said once. " But not desperately." At heart she was quite indifferent to him, and

" the love to which he had given all his soul, and for the sake of which he had maimed his home life, was but a pastime for her . . . "

That does not sound very new, but the point is that Matthew, unlike most distressed lovers in contemporary fiction, really had a soul to give; that his passion really was a passion, that (like his. author) he had brains as well as feelings, and that the effects of his frustration are well worth reading about, for it enabled him to learn to know himself (a self worth knowing) and to understand more about love and life. He learned, for example, that love is not necessarily happiness, but " simply the heightening of life's tension " ; that " in love, experience counts for nothing, that man cannot profit by it, since what befalls-him is new every time " ; and that ,` most of the suffer- ing which people cause each other comes not from wickedness but from indifference." Whether he grows introspective or discursive, we are not allowed to forget that he had to pay his bills and consider other people's feelings : like his wife Sheila or Miriam or the Count, he bears the stamp of Mr. Goring's admirable search for what is genuine.

Mr. J. C. Powys's new work also centres upon an affair of passion, but how are we to relate it to the commonplace ? There is nobody quite like Mr. Powys—he has made that particularly clear in his Autobiography—and as a writer he

seems to be regarded either as a thundering major _prophet or as something very different. On the whole, I think it

may be said with justice'that_he does not stand very firmly on the same ground as most of us. He. has declared, if I remember - rightly, a distaste for French ways of thinking, which is revealing, but not surprising in one who so easily goes Ossianic, a kind of Welsh wizard, bardic and enthusiastic artni swirling vapours, a druid struggling in a torrent of ink,' a a one-man eisteddfod, a maker of symphonic poems full' of cloudy mysticism, harsh rusticities, and portentous shado.ws, erotic, Macabre, and nonsensical 'by turns.' In Jobber Skald we obtain the mixture as before, and once again find Mr. Powys by no Means without the power to create a bizarro world of his ovrn,-peopled with humours rather than character.; —in the present- work they. include a Mystic, a philosopher, a drooling idiot 'with blood-red hair, a gipsy with Taint cards, and several female idealities, performers. in the phantasmagaric .life of a seaside town on the shores .of 'night- mare. Mr. Powys's freakish fancies and his taste for quaint

personal names and place names make him read again and again like Firbank; but a Firbank serious in his sprightliness.

For instance :

" Gone. Quite gone. Sea-sands free of him and his brute-tricks for ever and a day ! And Miss Gower at the Weeping Woman pouring out drinks just the same . . . "

Or again : ' Pilgrinis of Love ' and Brides of Quietness ' used to come to Shell-Back and Shingle Beach from all over England in old days. Old wives in Shingleton in my memory used to make a concoction out of this that' brides *Mild put into their tea. You're mine now altogether, Perdie, since' we've swallowed Sea-Holly under the Clipping-Stone ' ! " .

Mr. Powys's exuberance . cannot be denied, and that his writing has toucheenf poetry- and flashes of insight even his detractors should admit, but the mist -keeps swirling back and hiding everything: "Was it by some abysmal Pythagorean magic of sound that-these blind nonsense-syllables lapped up and soaked up the sharp-smelling fishy life-sweit of the sea-serpent of truth ? Sylvarniis received a final revelation 'then of what Ile. had often suspected, namelS, that the Absolute was to be found in the concrete and not in the abstract.

If Mr. Powys goes in, as they say, off the deep end, Mrs. Gladys Hasty Carroll sticks to the shallows. In A Few Foolish Ones she is said to do for the woods of Southern Maine what she did for its farms in an earlier work. But what does she do for its people ? 'Something pretty definite, one would suppose, since the book has been a best-seller in America. It may roughly. be described as a family chronicle extending over fifty years; lin& ittsstrongly.eharacteriStic in two ways, American arid 'feminine-. Materialistic, very much concerned with such 'things . as Money, 'Foos-sessions, 'furniture and food (of which last there are frequent descriptions), it is absolutely innocent of even-thelightest metaphysics, and. it is not- without significance that even the -chapel in the settlement described has closed down. Mrs. Carroll gives a brisk, woman's-eye View of the life Of a hard-wOiking New England community not without RS: picturesque aspects. Local colour , (whippoorwills, - -huckleberries,- and -working one's fingers to- the bone) is piled on like the food on the plates—

even on his deathbed the hero, rather too much a woman's idea of a man, eats beans and bannockand barberry sauce." The book is packed with dorrieitic detail (" Them peas has

come on good ".oc " Ed has got a boil on his leg "), and perhaps its appeal in - America is nostalgic : it probably carries one back to dear old Maine. But to an English mind Mrs. Carroll's inability to rise above the commonplace is

suggestive of spiritual thinness. -

Mr. Adrian Alington's new book is fortunately so light- hearted that there is- no -need to make any very solemn enquiry into his tendencies, tough it would not be difficult to point a moral or two in his funny story.-. Donaldson, a quiet bank clerk no longer in the first flush of youth,-married Grizelda gushing.youngwornan who " Wanted Beauty " and " just had to write " " It's not me really—it's something inside me. Oh, well, perhaps it is me, a sort of inner me, if you know what I mean."

With her first, book, 'Heart's Dust, she became a -best-seller, and rapidly followed -it up with Bertram Barraclough- Gentleman and .Daredevil, Sinners in Amber and Harris o' the Desert. Always gushingly soulful, she became intolerable. but though- Donaldson contrived' to get rid of her without actually murderiagitailthat gushing- soul returned from tilt! grave and nearly replaced his .own. That is the briefest all.t1*_cg a chearflri_piegiof 1f