FICTION

By FORREST REID

Such Harmony. By Susan Goodyear. (Chatto and Windus. Ss. 6d.) Three Novels. By Sholem Asch. (Routledge. 8s. 6d.)

DECEMBER is a quiet month so far as publishing is concerned.

Activities will begin again with the new year, but the present season is over, and of the seven novels on my table waiting to be reviewed only one is British ; the rest are translations from French, German and Jewish writers. Translations have been rather numerous of late—I think too numerous. Of these six foreign works, for instance, on literary grounds, only Le Sang Noir of M. Guilloux was really worth translating. The Sholem Asch tales come next in merit, and of course we are all very much interested in the Jews just now ; but the remainder might well have been left in their original tongues.

Le Sang Noir, called here Bitter Victory, is an original and distinguished novel. That the translation should be American I regret, for though Mr. Putnam has accomplished his task with great ability, the American idiom produces at times an incongruous effect. Yet only upon the British ear, of course, and very likely only upon the elderly British ear.

If you get me, as Mr. Putnam would say, Bitter Victory is a story of the Great War, staged at home. The scene is a French provincial town, and the important characters are those who for one reason or another have not joined the army. Most of them are hypocritical, stupid and complacent— making heroic speeches, writing patriotic poems, encouraging in every way the war insanity while clinging to their own soft jobs at home. Most of them, too, are intellectuals, connected with the lycee. It is a huge book, composed of several interwoven dramas, and the dominating figure in it is Cripure, professor of philosophy, an extraordinary creation— disillusioned, tormented, unhappy, morally feeble and intel- lectually bold—a kind of inverted idealist, hating the sham and shoddy patriots around him, yet yielding to their influence.

Cripure might have escaped from a novel by Sologub.

The story opens with him, and in this introductory scene we get him at his ugliest—verminous, deformed, lubricious. That is no doubt part of the author's plan—a deliberate challenge—for it seems impossible that Cripure can become a sympathetic character. Yet he does. What is more, he is almost the only character in the book to suggest the existence of higher moral and spiritual values. He is an angel, fallen very low indeed, but he has seen the light and opened the eyes of others.

The novel is perhaps too individual to be realistic. The atmosphere created is not really that of an ordinary pro- vincial town even in the third year of the War. Yet M. Guilloux must believe it is, for he can do the other side when he likes ; his young students and his dogs are healthy, natural, and pleasant, while Maia, Cripure's servant and mistress, though purely animal, is essentially simple-hearted, and looks after him with a protective, grumbling affection. But the sleek Nabucet, with his unpleasant interest in little girls ; Madame de Villaplane, with her spy-hole through which she gloats on her young lodger in his bedroom ; the odious Simone, who robs her father ; Glatre manufacturing his albums of obscene pictures ; even Moka, with his more innocent mania for pasting stamps on plates—all these are definitely on the edge of the abyss ; one tiny push and they will be over.

In comparison with Bitter Victory my solitary English novel seems very English indeed. Such Harmony A a story of a small West Country town and of well-to-do professional people.

Rachel, the heroine, is a woman of forty- ; the two heroes, are Andrew Field, the Rector, married to Rachel's sister Catherine, and Elsham, a successful London architect who comes down to superintend the church restorations. Miss Goodyear has taken great pains over her portraits of the sisters, bringing out the contrast that exists beneath a superficial likeness, for Rachel is generous and charming, Catherine selfish and shallow. Of the men, Elsham—honest, downright, energetic and intelligent— is typically a self-made man, while Andrew- approximates to a mediaeval saint.

There are two stories in the novel—the love story of Rachel and Elsham, and the story of the secret estrangement between Andrew and Catherine, which underlies the deeorous - life at the Rectory, and casts its shadow over the younger generation growing up there. It is to Rachel that all, young and old, turn for sympathy—even Catherine, who nevertheless, to save her own reputation, tries to sacrifice her. She fails, for this is not the kind of novel where virtue goes Unrewarded. Perhaps there is even something to be said for Catherine. Life with a saint cannot be easy—particularly should you happen to be in love with him. I am not sure that Miss Goodyear's treatment of the Rectory pair is quite convincing. I find it hard to believe that after twenty years of marriage a wife could become physically infatuated with a husband to whose early advances she had remained cold—so cold that she has instilled into him a loathing of his own natural instincts and a horror of all carnal love. But, granting the situation, the scenes resulting from it are under- standable. The novel is well written, with a pleasant leaven of humour.

Here is a capital remedy for those troubled by dreams of poverty—dreams in which the savings of a lifetime have miraculously melted away, in which you have lost your job and cannot find another, in which at a single stroke you are reduced from wealth to indigence. I found it in Chaim Lederer's Return, by Sholem Asch, and all that remains to be proved is whether the gentile imagination is sufficiently impressionable to profit by it.

" When Lederer went to bed_ that night he was startled by the glitter of diamonds and other gems which met his eyes—he was quite dazzled, in fact. All his wife's jewelry was piled up on his little bedside table.

' What's the idea ? What is your jewelry. doinghere ? Are you trying to make it easy for a burglar ? ' ' No, that's the cure. - That's the way to have pleasant dreams. If the last thing you see before you go to sleep is, jewelry, you'll dream about being rich. Mrs. Abramson tried it out on her husband'."

Chaim Lederer's Return is one of three short novels now printed together in a single fat volume and entitled simply Three Novels : the other two are Uncle -Moses and Judge Not. All are realistic, all deal with Jewish life in America, but each describes a different stratum of society. Uncle Moses is a story of a tailor's sweat-shop, and of a rather horrid old man who, aided by his hold over her parents, forces a very young girl into marrying him. It is a-dull, ugly, and depressing tale. In Chaim Lederer, the Lederer family, though springing from the same class, have grown prosperous. In Judge Not, Max Stone, the vice-president of the Commercial Bank, is at the very top of the tree, enormously wealthy and influential. What is it that in all these characters, whether they -are successful or still struggling, produces an unsyMpathetic effect ? I think it is simply the commercial instinct, the love of money. More deeply rooted in them than anything else, stronger than any moral scruples, is their desire to accumulate wealth. Every- thing is subordinated to that ; without wealth happiness is inconceivable.

" Chaim Lederer sat among his pious old Jewish workers at night and prayed an evening prayer .with them. He did this because he thought he could get an extra hour's work out of them after the prayer. It wasn't very long since Chaim Lederer had been a working man himself."

And when he retires from business in favour of his son, of course he is utterly bored. He begins to drop in again at the office, but he is not welcomed there. He has nothing to do, and the days " grown desolate, whisper and sigh to each other." He was happier when he was a working man, he thinks, and presently he suggests to his wife that they should return to the old life. Naturally she regards him as cracked. He says no more, but—he disappears. A brief search is made by detectives in all the likely factories and shops, but it is unsuccessful, and his family soon become reconciled to his absence.

Max Stone, in Judge Not, starts his financial career by a deliberate fraud that brings ruin to hundreds. This novel is the most dramatic of the three, and culminates in a trial for murder. Max is not really a murderer ; his killing of the old man was accidental; but he is condemned. In prison he ponders on what his life has been, and for the first time a moral consciousness awakens in him. His lawyers assure him that it will be easy to get a reprieve if he will act as they instruct him. But he will not, he willrlo nothing,-and the death- seittetiee is vanied out.