Tittion
By GRAHAM GREENE- Captain Nicholas. By Hugh (Macmillan. 6d.) .
Mn. WALPOLE'S new novel would be of interest if for no other• reason than that it exhibits in high relief not only his great talent for dramatic storytelling but the familiar faults of form and: personality which prevent his talent from being used to the' best advantage. The theme of Captain Nicholas is an excellent one (Mr. Walpole is often happy in his choice of subject) a large affectionate family, three generations living together iri an old house in Smith Square; are joined by Captain Nicholas Coventry, brother of Mrs. Carlisle, the wife and mother who shares with him the centre of the stage. For the last ten Years Captain Nicholas has spent a racketeering life abroad with his small girl, Lizzie, living on his wits and his charm., The world is his oyster and he returns to the family circle only for a rest from pillage. Their Sentiment, their, to him,' old-fashioned ideas irritate him until quite deliberately, witli the sadism enjoyed by so many of Mr. Walpole's most memorable characters, he sets out to break their happy. relationship. " He hadn't asked to interfere, but how could he help it How could he sit down quietly and watch their silly sentimental lives and not interfere ? " He discovers their secrets, with his adventurer's charm he works his way into the trust of Mrs. Carlisle's husband and children ; the novel closes with an admirably dramatic set scene between Mrs. Carlisle and her brother.
The story is written in the sometimes charming, sometimes irritating, always " unbuttoned " Walpole manner, the manner of an art collector with a genuine passion for his pieces who can never find for them the exact describing word. Occasionally the accumulation of bric-ii-brat is too much for one's patience, and always the extreme naivety of Mr. -Walpole's young men and-'women is unconi-incing, but when he is content to tell a .story Walpole is very nearly first :rate (alas, when his characters discuss ideas, he is nearly 'third rate ; in Captain Nicholas there is a heavy slab of vague, sentimental religious idealism). The Captain's past
is well suggested :
" The high lights in it—the flight from Jamaica, the death of his wife in Paris, Bawtrey's suicide in Monte Carlo, the thieving in Rapallo, Saunders' death in. Venice, these might once have been called melodrama. Novelists threw bright colours on just siieh incidents as these, drab and unromantic as they always 'sere in reality, comprised of discarded tram-tickets, the week's washing, wine splashed on a marble topped table, a barber's impertinence, a fit of indigestion, a woman's cold. . . . He moved surrounded by a constant company of men out of a job, ready to do anything for money, by suicide' murder and robbery with 'violence. One figure led to another. Touch Abel and you found Marston, have a meal with Marston and he introduced you to Likiadopulos, drink with Likiadopulos and he asked you to meet Mme. Balzac. . . . Always a little lower."
And Abel, the small Jamaican blackmailer, is ably touched in :
Abel liked to be scrubby. He made a jungle of civilization. Anywhere that he lived acquired very quickly a musty foetid air; something indescribable, something like an animal shop where the birds' droppings, the scent of stale water, the closeness of the cage defy light and air and the changing of the hours."
But the great fault in Mr. Walpole's work is evident in Captain Nicholas : a misuse of the author's persOn-, ality, an incomplete parturition ; his characters never have independent life. On . them Mr. Walpole fathers his own generous, if rather indiscriminate, enthusiasms: Captain Nicholas's literary taste is breathlessly conteinl porary, so breathlessly that he seems to have read Mr. Auden's Orators in MS. ; and one is not convinced that this adventurer would read Mr. Pound's cantos in his bath: This failure to curb his artistic enthusiasms (even the named of minor characters are chosen . for their literary sound, Marston, Cervantes, Balzac, Cavafy) is responsible for Mr: Walpole's most serious fault in form, the chatty asides to the reader which destroy any illusion of reality. Henry James wrote a long while ago, " I am tender-hearted enougli to be capable of shedding tears of pity and sympathy over young Hugh on the.threshold of fictive art," and one-wonderd grimly what tears he would be inclined to shed now over the marring of a genuine talent, " the vice," in his own words addressed to Mr. Walpole, "of a not finer doing." , .• Mr. Walter Greenwood has followed up Love on the Due with an even better second novel ; there is no quesi ion here of a failure in form ; he seems to have been born with the faculty which Mr. Walpole still lacks after twenty years of novel writing. The scene is . set -again in Manchester and Salford, but Mr. Greenwood, without sacrificing any emotional depth, has enormously increased his range of characterizaticin. One notes again the Smatl,original tricks
of a born technician. In the first w
book there was the chorus of old women ; the second book ends on an echo of the main theme, so that we gain the effect of time going on, of the special case being endlessly repeated, of " the vast scope of concrete things."
Love on the Dole was tragedy ; His Worship the Mayor is a savagely humorous satire on- the men who make profit out of the tragedy. It follows with an intimate close eye the career of Edgar Hargraves, a small and unsuccessful shopkeeper, and his rapid rise when he inherits a fortune to the rank of Lord Mayor. A mean stupid man, who repeats other men's views, .pays out money when his party requires it, he is no more conscious of his corruption than Alderman Grumpole or Sir William Chetterby or Sir Rhys Price, the pawnbroker, as they bob in the limelight, while behind in the shadows of Traverse Street and Peggytub Lane, under the damp arches of the elevated 'railway, exist their dependents : the fodder for workhouse, for Means Tests, for the Public Assistance Committees. Together Mr. Greenwood's two novels form a complete picture of a district not equalled, I think, by any other living writer who finds inspiration in a particular locality. The style is sometimes clumsy, but it is never banal ; truth is never sacrificed for a fine phrase.
Mr. Clayton is a rhetorician ; words, words, words, violent, literary, false, tumble over nearly 600. pages. Dew in April is absurd and sentimental, but it has" "a queer driving force, perhaps because the author is so good a Pro- testant. There is conviction behind this novel of a thirteenth- century Provence living in the fear of an imminent Docimsday, a genuine conviction however bouncingly expressed : " Sinners, outcasts, wanderers to the wilderness—in -a word, the wicked—let no one despise their task in the universe. To them we owe the light in which we walk, because they hated the priestly darkness ; they broke the shackles from their feet, even if they broke their limbs as well—and we are free . . . and so first the fear of hell has departed from us, and now the sense of sin, those two great vultures that darkened our sky. We are free to live our momentary lives in the sun. Honour to all the wicked of yesteryear. . . ."
It may be rather naive, .rather a hiker's creed, one may wonder where Mr. Clayton finds his freodom and his sun (Mr. Greenwood's Two Cities have a more than priestly darkness), but it is a creed which lends a boisterous Boy's Own Paper life to Pedro, the handsome troubadour,. who " saves " the lovely Dolores from a convent life. But -I doubt his publisher's assertion that " he knows what life was like in a thirteenth- century nunnery " ; it is a very Protestant idea of a nunnery, where the novices twitter like the smallest of schoolgirls (although they are 17 and this is the thirteenth century) and where the older nuns are so sex-starved that the intrusion of a good-looking man is enough to "destroyall discipline.
There is no tushery in Mr. Hockaby'a novel of a fourteenth century English family, which is written in good plain con- temporary English. The picture of convent life under the relaxed rule of a dissolute abbess may be exaggerated and a little antedated (this novel too suffers in accuracy from being a Protestant view of a Catholic society), but at any rate Mr. Hockaby understands, as Mr. Clayton does not, that a nun may have as genuine and as happy a vocation as an engineer or a schoolmaster. This is a sound exciting novel, with the central character, the unscrupulous house-proud girl, Isabel, very well presented; but in one way Mr. Clayton's absurd novel has the best of it. His manner and his matter match. The Violence in Seven Stars and Orion, which ends with a terrifying description -of the plague, destroys some of the reality of the: very twentieth-century characters and makes one doubt whether a contemporary- manner can properly- present men and women conditioned by mediaeval .life.
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