The Psychological Novel
The Dreamer. By Julian Green. (Heinemann. 78. 6d.) THERE is a sense in which any novel is psychological, but one uses the term here in the loose modern sense to indicate the influence of the psycho-analytical theories of Freud. Their importance to the novelist can be exaggerated ; psycho- analysis is only a therapeutic method and dream symbolism is of doubtful value in establishing a fictional character. The
symbols are usually common ones ; it is only in his personal associations to those symbols that the individual character is revealed.
This is why one feels that Mr. Fitzgerald has used psycho. analysis more legitimately than M. Green. Richard Diver, a psycho-therapist, has married a rich young American, the balance of whose mind he has helped precariously to restore.
The curious double relationship of doctor and husband, the double responsibility, ruins him. His love is normal ; her love is a transference of her sense of affection and trust from her father after the shock which had shaken her sanity. When he is momentarily unfaithful to her the transference
takes place again. She is cured of her dependence ; the un- balanced mind has a freedom denied to the normal mind with its prejudices and moralities. It is the normal mind which can- not adjust itself, the sane man who is broken. Psycho-analytical theory is here part of the material of the- story, not of the method of narration. This is legitimate, but because a novel's force lies, as a rule,- in its width of reference, there is a weak-
ness in the abnormality of Mr. Fitzgerald's subject matter.
This reservation made, the imagination capitulates before the subtlety of Mr. Fitzgerald's style, the accurate irony of the climax :
" While he did not answer she began to feel the old hypnotism of his intelligence, sometimes exercised without power but always; with substrata of truth under truth which she could not break or even crack. Again she struggled with it, fighting him with her small, fine eyes, with the plush arrogance of a top dog, with her nascent transference to another man, with the accumulated resentment of years • she fought him with her money and her faith that her sister disliked him and was behind her now ; with the thought of the new enemies he was making with his bitterness, with her quick guile against his wine-ing and dine-ing slowness. her health and beauty against his physical deterioration, her unscrupulousness against his moralities—for, this inner battle she used even her weaknesses—fighting bravely and courageously- with the old cans and crockery and bottles, empty receptacles of her expiated sins, outrages, mistakes. And suddenly, in the space of two minutes she achieved her victory and justified herself to herself without lie or subterfuge, cut the cord for ever. . . . The case was finished. Doctor Diver was at liberty."
The mournful echoing cadences of the style remind one of a great badly lit railway station, where many people are saying goodbye. In its voluptuous sentiment, its rich obscurity, its sense of chic it is definitely post-War. But Mr. Fitzgerald now begins where the author of Tales of the Jazz Age used to leave off ; his style has lost none of its glittering contemporaneity, but one is suddenly presented with an unsuspected brutality, a background of corruption which lends to the sad wit and the wistful haphazard poetry of departure the lost gas-lamp urban note which our generation has rediscovered in the poetry of Baudelaire and Laforgue.
M. Green uses psycho-analytic theory less legitimately. It is a brave, but unsatisfying experiment to present the dream life of Manuel with the object of deepening our realization of his character. Too little is known of the sub-conscious for the reader to be convinced that M. Green has invented the correct fantasy for a character already vividly and objectively presented ; the day dream of the Castle, where Manuel's harsh passionate aunt is transformed into the Viscomtesse, his own
tuberculous hopeless life into the drawn-out painful dying of her father, is little more than an ingenious embroidery.
Without analysis, the fantasy adds nothing to our knowledge, and with analysis it would reflect the author's character more than that of Manuel. But, as always, in M. Green's novels, one admires the melancholy intensity of the style and the lovely tightness of the form. The dream offers the only leakage of interest ; otherwise the three characters, the ugly sickly youth, his young pious cousin, and the aunt who loves and insults him beyond bearing, are strict warders with power to keep the imagination confined to one house, almost to one room, in the small dead town in the provinces.
Previous page
