Fiction

By V. S. PRITCHETT Windus. 7s. 64.1.)

NVernour going to the arid lengths to which our art-hating political puritans would like us to go, we must admit that great _novelists commonly-have something explicit or implicit to say about the times in 'which they live. But to hold that this something must today: be political is dangerous doctrine, and many serious writers whose consciences have been hurt to indignation by' social injustice are digesting it badly. . The chief danger is that a -view of life as partial as the political' view- is rat.* -gets the novelist beyond the cradities of melodrama. I We had Lyceum noblemen and now we may run into a patch of Lyceum workmen of incredible viitbe: Another- danger springs from proselytism ; and here, before the novelist puts down his views, he might reflect upon the deadriess-of the-doctrines of Tolstoy and the sermons of Dickens, and.. note that views are not people. Very. few novelists :have views which are not far better expressed by sp'ecialists.

To the critic who shares the indignation at social injustice which runs through the 'work of writers like Mr. Boden and Mr. Rollins, it is embarrassing to find how far less satisfying they are than Mr. O'Hara or Mr. Camborne who are not directly concerned with the problem at all. Mr. Boden's A Derbyshire Tragedy contains some excellent descriptive writing—the opening chapter which describes two young miners bicycling through the snow to the mine and working the night there, is one of the best first chapters I have read —but he has not distinguished sufficiently between views and people. In consequence there is no tragedy in the true sense. His reforming zeal has led him to place the two serious, bookish young miners in the foreground where they tell us in a vague way that there is too much talk of the " soul " and too much " self-importance " (presumably individualism) in the world, while the accident and the people concerned in it take a back seat. Frankie, his mother and the victims of the engine which profit-hungry employers have refused to repair, are candidates for a tragedy which, in the artistic sense, does not materialize. Mr. Boden's failure is mitigated by his simplicity and by the fact that he can write. But it is an embarrassing irony to find that the traditional bosses' man, the foreman, and Sam Ticey, the rent- collecting skinflint, are the only figures continuously alive.

In The Shadow Before the Lyceum and propaganda problems are solved more successfully, but by a technique which diffuses the interest while sharpening the picture. Mr. Rollins's aim is to sketch the portraits of all the people involved in a big

American strike, and he has borrowed the method of John dos Fassos, who, quite incomprehensibly, compares the author to Dickens. This method is the news-reel method, and it gets over the " views " difficulty by treating them as news. So one is giyen a shot of a tea-party, shots of offices, workers at the looms, strike headquarters, the police, the workers' homes. There are the love affairs of an Irish girl, Micky, to lighten the story, and we take brief dives into the Joycean minds of all.

Mr. Hollins is efficient in continuity, ready in humour. He

is the. earliera man with a sharp eye, a good ear and a liking

. .

for trick shots :

"He had seen him in Madison Square, trousers ripped, cold blackscabbed legs, cold- wind bellowing under his coat on to his 'berg belly-while he slouched on a bench, nodding. CAN'T NOD IN AMERICA! 'GOT TO' SNAP 'AWAKE ! (t I'll just take this old news- paper and pretend I'm reading ; pretend I'm awake, and then I'll fool them, they wont notice that.') Crath on the shoulder ; GREAT- BELLIED BLCEDELLIED LAW ABOliE HIM. ` COME ON ! GET A MOVE ox ! " Cant I sit and -read. . . " HEAR WHAT I SAID? GET A MOVE ON ! ' You cant even play awake ; pull your eyes open, hard. He pulls himself up, takes the newspaper with Jim; (' perhaps if I sit in some far corner ; the next park is such a long ways off, . . . ') He hobbles to ;a far corner, flops en a bench, chill wood against- his Coldcrusted buttocks, icy iron against his elbows ; he lifts the paper, really reads now. Rut he's gone-under once ; _ America _aint easy like swimming.. HARD= DEWED luxe STANDING OVER HIM. ` SAT ? DID YOU HEAR ME? OR DO YOU NEED A CRACK Olt THE SIDE OE THE HEAD? AlOvi Olj WREN I TELL YOU TO ! GET UP AND MOVE ON ! " We are becoming, as Mr. Aldous Huxley has pointed out, a world of lookers, voyeurs, and not surprisingly the essentially surface view of Mr. Rollins's strike is inore "interelting-in its

mannered passages than in its conventional narrative, which is commonplace.

Far more revelatory of the state of American small-town life in an industrial area is Appointment in Samarra, which has no apparent political axe to grind. Here is the wicked bourgeois deep in his amiable sin, rootless, spiritually and materially insecure, and driven to drown his bewilderment in phenomenal drinking parties. That strange class 'of reader which seeks social relationships with the characters in novels and dem-ands the likeable will be disappointed. I should dislike being far involved with the boring, drunken, snobbish and pathetic inhabitants of Gibbsville, who live On the fruits Of the anthracite mines, but I am glad I have met the ex-prize-fighter, gangster's yesman Al Greeco, the boot- legger Ed Charney, the suicidal Cadillac salesman, Julian English, the whole brisk, comic crowd of small-town go-getters, male and female. Mr. O'Hara has created a world and its inhabitants are human beings. The story occupies only the space of a Christmas holiday, and in this time the respected Julian sedulously and unconsciously sets about wrecking his life. Mr. O'Hara is an expert in describing the phases, fantasies, grandeurs and miseries of intoxication, and just- as the delightful Al Grecco endears himself to the reader by his child-like admiration of Ed Charivey's silk underwear, so Julian English becomes almost lovable because

of the streak of innocence in his recklessness. In an odd way the narrative is very moving, even on the occasion of Julian's painstaking suicide, where Mr. O'Hara is obviously making a case.

The method of writing owes much to Mr. Hemingway, but it is merrier, richer in effects, less perfunctory, and more humane. Mr. O'Hara's characters are of a More articulate class, and it is his success that he has made the most boring people in America continuously interesting and alive by this device of pretending to accept their values and telling their tale in their own jargon. Here is Julian English on his last night, sitting on the floor surrounded by gramophone records and -bottles of drink. He takes the flowers out of a vase, pours away the water andmakes himself" the biggest highball he had ever seen," and thinks of the humiliating future :

"He didn't want to go back to anything, and he went from that to wondering what he wanted to go to. Thirty years old. She's only twenty, and he's thirty. She's only eighteen, and he's thirty and been married once, you know. You wouldn't call him young. He's at least thirty. No, let's not have him. He's one of the older guys. Wish Julian English would act his age. He's-always cutting in. His own crowd won't have him. I should think he'd resign from the club. Listen, if you don't tell him you want him to stop dancing with you, then I will. No thanks, Julian, I'd rather walk. No thanks, Mr. English, I haven't much farther to go. Listen, English, I want you to get this straight . . . ' " This is a serious comic book.

From the seductions of naturalism we proceed to The Wind of the Morning, to pure romance, but tempered by that con- cern for the soul or for conduct which Mr. Boden's miners, clamped down by the struggle for mere existence, have every reason (except that of experience) to believe is a monstrous irrelevance. It is not often that charm, dignity and intelligence are found together, but they are there in Mr. Carnborne's book. He is concerned with a youth of strict, conventional upbringing who spends a holiday in a rich, easy-going household on an island near Jersey, and who falls in love there with a very young daughter of the family. The conflict between " advanced " and conventional ways of life is admirably shown. Although the boy's parents are caricatured and the interval between disaster and the final happy (and plausible) solution is hurriedly bridged, these faults do not seriously mar a very agreeable impression. Mr. Camborrie is a sensitive and sensible writer. He is above all economieal. He puts down the essentials of his romance .without all that verbiage which is the bane of the modern novel. One succumbs all the more readily when the hypnotist cuts out the tedious theatrical gestures.