Fiction
The Fat of the Land. By Peter de Polnay. (Hutchinson. 9s. 6d.)
IN the present literary doldrums a first novel by Mr. Trilling is an important event. Admirers .of his distinguished critical work on E. M. Forster and Henry James will welcome its appearance with a suggestion of the excitement they might feel on hearing of a new novel by Mr. Forster himself. Perhaps, that amount of anticipation sets any first novel at a disadvantage, but for at least one admirer of Mr. Trilling's work The Middle of the Journey has been a dis- appointment. It must be said at once that in many respects Mr. Trilling provides all that we require from him: a. firm restrained style, an adult approach to his theme (the recovery of a man from physical illness only to face a crisis of the contemporary spiritual illness), and a perceptive intelligent mind unwilling to let a detail— the clumsy handling of a child by its nurse, the drinking mannerisms of bourgeois intellectuals—pass without significance and comment. But we also require him to make a novel, that is to say to interest us in his characters for their own sakes as well as for the sake of the opinions -they hold and the standpoint they represent. We want to feel, that John Laskell, Arthur and Nancy Croom, and Kermit Simpson are not only a bunch of earnest Left-wingers of the late 193os trying to prevent their little radical boats from capsizing under the impact of Gifford Maxim's defection from the Communist Party, but also relations, at least, of warm-blooded animals whose emotions are not always clothed with intellectual jargon, whose tears are wet and who, above all, sometimes laugh out loud.
We want to feel that somewhere in the New England landscape someone is being moved by the sun on the trees or the passage of cloud-shadows over the grass as well as by John Laskell's Theories of Housing. And of this there is not much sign. It is not that Mr. Trilling's characters are unreal. Everyone has met boring Political prigs like the Crooms, old friends with whom Laskell is stay- ing in the country after his illness, or boring renegade Communists turning religious like Maxim, who visits them there. It is just that we get the uncomfortable impression that there is no world beyond these people. Even Duck Caldwell, the drunken, earthy handy-man whom the Grooms admire because he is so " real," seems detached in space. John Laskell himself, the hero, is the most important failure. It is impossible to sustain sympathy for someone who has taken such a long time to become " disenchanted" with the Grooms. Emily Caldwell alone, Duck's culturally pretentious wife with whom Laskell has a dreary little affair, seems for one moment as if she is going to set all this carefully collected brush- wood alight. But her flame flickers and goes out.
The result is that although Mr. Trilling's situations are often theoretically capable of making a fine novel, they never develop momentum and his novel remains dull. When Duck Caldwell slaps
his daughter Susan for reciting badly in public and she falls down dead from heart failure, one is left strangely unmoved. Where there is no life there ean be no death. Laskell and Maxim discuss questions of guilt and responsibility over her corpse like two unhungry vultures. The Middle of the Journey is itself a sick book—sick with the disease which deprives so much of the most serious work of today of all colour and warmth and human feeling.
It is refreshing and encouraging to turn to Jean Giono's Blue Boy, a rambling account of French village boyhood at the end of the last century which contains all the blood, sunlight, squalor and poetry that make life worth writing about. The book is one delight- ful chain of incidents and impressions described with a fine blend of virile sensuousness and understanding. A stranger enters a room:
" The man looked as if he had just come through a long rain. His hat hung about his head as if it were soaked, and when he removed it, his thin limp hair dropped over his forehead. He was afraid of bothering people."
At harvest time the boy, who tells his story in the first person, sits amidst the ripened wheat reading the Iliad :
" They were mowing throughout the countryside. The heavy fields rustled like cuirasses."
And the baker's wife who ran away with the shepherd of Les Conches "had hair so black that it made a hole in the sky behind her head."
This is the sort of writing which gives life to the novel, however flimsy its structure, and one is grateful to Katherine Clarke for an admirable translation. Even though Blue Boy was first published sixteen years ago it strikes to the heart of the contemporary problem more simply and effectively than Mr. Trilling. " Remember," says the Italian, Franchesc Odripano, at the end of the book, " Remember that all of man's happiness is in the little valleys. Tiny little ones. Small enough to call from one side to the other."
The last three books on this list make less serious claims as literature but are all, in their way, entertaining. Mr. Oliver's Not Long to Wait, the story of_ an innocent young Welshman who takes a job in a Soho restaurant and gets more than he contracted for, has not the competence of Mr. de Polnay nor the cock-sureness of Mr. Croft-Cooke, but is, perhaps for that reason, fresher than'both.
Wilkie is the touching story of a progressive Anglo-Indian colonel who returns after thirty years to be disillusioned by the " horrors " of Socialist England. These include the discovery that his ex-public school ex-Commando son has turned spiv. It would have been a more effective story if the picture of post-war England had been less crudely painted and if the Labour Government had been apportioned• a little less of .the blame. .
" Slick " is the word for Mr. de Polnay. His story of an eccentric English millionaire who first does nothing but eat and play bridge, then runs off with the narrator's wife, then leaves her, becomes a French resistance- hero, and finally, after the war, tries .to convert the narrator to a neo-Oxford Group movement, is readable if not plausible. Mr. de Polnay slides smoothly and easily over anything troublesome or profound : " Why, I asked myself angrily, couldn't I run after her, take her in my arms and ask her to stay with me for the rest of my life? Why? But while I- asked that question I had already let in the clutch."
ROBERT KEE.
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