- Fiction

_ By WILLIAM PLOMER , - The Friendly Tree: -Bre. Day Lewie- -(Cape. 7s. 6d.) . Jew 'a By Heney;1C Marks:' (Peter-DaVieZ 7s. 6d) Envy. By Yuri Olypsha. Translated by Anthony Wolfe. (Hogarth Press; . 7s: Ad.)

There Heart: By Peter.:$eagoe. (Dent. 7e 641) - - Attic Meteor. By Dennis p-arry.- (Robert Hale. 7s. 6d.) - UI;UDULTERATEI) Inc stories are uncommon . at present. Nearly. all novels liaVe• a love interest or at least what I prefer to distinguish as a lust intereat-,..bat. as Often as not this is just jam - to make us swallow in account of what the Poles were doing in then. Corridors:year or two .,ago, a ponderous assertion that the yeomen:. of southwestern Somerset have lost none of their eaSentiallyrEiNgliali'stolidieiror some cure-all bolus according, to the preaeription. of the Doctor Marc The Frgndly-Trie, though. it intlY not be :iiinobent of dis- quieting reflections upon the preaerit.-stite" of Society, can be read as a straight love story, and ;read with greatPleasure. It is a blessing when novels are written' by pbets, writers

_ . . ,

who have 'theft senses about them and treat their creatures as beings Of fleali and bload, not like a lot of featureless billiard balls, knocking about - on .perfectlyflat. and mono- chromatic' surface. The stitieture of Mr: Day•Le*ia's novel is simple ; the 'style is-fleitible; full of gaiety and seriousness and telling- initigerY. A selioOlinast-er,..a Mr Charteris; who is a widower,- and an itAmiatakabie paehYderm... as school- masters often are, lives in the country !with his Only child, Anna, to whom. he is attached with a predatory love. .. A brother and sister named Richard and Evelyn conic to live in the aeighhoUrhood. They are pleasant ;young rentiers: Richard writes detective navels and Evelyn is agreeable and well dreaSed. . They . have a .friend 'called Steve, who comes to stay .vrith thern_and,is. made of aterner and somewhat intolerant stuff. All this -Makes' Arnia's life very much more interesting, and helps her to :free _he6elf-. from her father. She and . Steve. fall. in love_ with each other, but the process is much easier' for Sieve than for tfiesensitive, virginal Anna. A great part: of the ..bOOir is taken up With an extraordinarily sure and sympathetic.study „of her awakening. Before she learns to confide wholly in the man who Ines her she confides in Nature, and the way in is :Mr.- Day Lewis,- with his happy powers of observation, makes her belong to the landscape she' • inhabits - suggeSts aF corriParison • :With- the freshness and Englishness the: eaitier D. :14. Lawreire. He is not satisfied to unite his lovers ; more light, has to be thrown on Steve, and incidentally on Richard and Evelyn, who rather get it, so to speak, in the neck ; according to their friend Steve, after he had taken from them what they had to give; they were only "reflections of a longing for irresponsibility and. death," only " ghosts " .of an extinct civilisation. Is there perhaps a _doctrinaire, Mr. Day Lewis at the elbow of Mr. Day Lewis the nOVelist and poet ? Shall we be led to .compare him later to the. later. Lawrence .,..../eze's 'Harp . is ;another -hive story, but What is even more itriportantsis -that it is a hateT.ifory: To judge by a;i1fr. Henry ''Marla, who has been veri,. highly praised in France, . , . . , where his writings are usu.-ally first published, deserves to be better ,known in this country. , This is the story of Louis Bardak, a Polish 'Jew who became a rich art-dealer in New York and bullied an irresolute Portuguese Jewess into marrying him. The result was not happy. Irene found Louis repulsive. (beside • him Mr. Oltitrteris of The Friendly Tree would certainly seem just a bundle of exquisite semi- bilities),' she found that he was dominated by his matriarchal mother, and she did not like her -offspring because ttry reminded her of him. One of them fell doctor called to attend him was a young and handsome Gentile, and from that moment Irene felt a Tifew and all-absorbing interest in life. Her husband remaineii iporant of her-unfaithfulness, and somebody pointed out to him that he had chiefly himself to blame for his unhappy marriage; so heinade up his Mind to reform; with unexpected .ccrnaequences. It cannot be said that Mr. Marks takes a rosy view of human nature, and quite apart from the principals some of the minor characters are perfect horrors—especially -BardalCs sisters and an English gover_pess aptly called .Miss col—but; he writes' with power and understanding, and conveys. WelLthe over intense family life of the .Bardaks, their_ uneasiness about their racial and social and, .-the atiain Of a pro- longed and hidden emotional crisis in the husband and :wife. Altogether a competent, very readable, and-rather dreadhil

story. _

Envy is a curious book, and after reading it carefully J am only here and there sure what ilia about.- It is an-exampleof Russian popular huntoiir with satirical Motive, a piece of almost eottuter=revolutionary,' sentiment disguised as shiPstiek. In 1927, it appears; e_very-one in Russia ," was chuckling ,over it from Stalin in the Kremlin to soldiers on the Mongolian frontier " ; nevertheless it May leave an English reader with the feeling that ,this •mass laughter was produced. by. a half inscrutable private joke. It is-possible to' detect a number of broad hints that the new, socialist man may not be so unlike the old, unregenerate bourgeois after all ;. he too may be

liable to feel pity, tenderness, pride, jealousy, love, and especially envy.

" My. dear fellow, you are utterly paten up with envy—that's what is the matter with you. . . . Without knowing it; you are tho bearer of an historic mission. You belong to the centre of things. In you there has been concentrated the envy of a race which is slowly perishing. A race which always envies whatever will take its place.

That is addressed to one Kavalerov. Someone else has invented a wonderful machine called Ophelia which" suddenly reveals herself in the guise of a born liar, an ordinary senti- mental good-for-nothing," and shocks the new age "which spends its time gorging on our souls, crushing the nineteenth century with the venom of a boa-constrictor crushing a poor little rabbit." Then there is a scene in which a pillow becomes a symbol of individualism of private life and private feelings :

"Tell him that we want to sleep on our own pillows ! . . . Tell him that.we shall die with our heads on our- pillows ;. tell him that we shall kill anyone who tries to take our pillows away from us, and that they too shall die with their heads upon our pillows ! . . . What can you offer us instead of our capa'eity to hate, to love, to cry, to hope, to pity, to forgive ? Here is a pillow. Our coat of arms. Our banner. Against our pillows shall we receive the bullets you send amongst us. Oh, we shall stifle you under the weight of our

pillows ! " -

More surprising still is a hint that "indifference is the only faculty of the human soul which is worth anything at all."

And now two novels about the Balkans. There Is My Heart is a story of Roumanian peasant life by a Roumanian author who writes in English. It is a simple and charming story about simple and charming people, and seems to have value as an interpretation of the life it describes, but Attic Meteor cannot really be recommended as an interpretation if Gieece. It is perhaps hardly meant to be that. Mr. Dennis Parry tells us,of Demetri. Stratonides, an orphan brought up as a servant in a Boeotian monastery, from which he is ' kind to escape.

Demetri has character and intelligence, and drifts to Athens, where he becomes in turn 1..beggar, a waiter, -aid'a suCceasful journalist : ".0,-a visit to his native Pares he falls in love. with the daughter of a. loeal magnate, but; bring refused, turns demagogue- and' desperado," a Man NiTIM'atolis at nothing." The first part of the book is promising, but with Demetri involved first in the fortunes of a returned Greek-American gangster and of an American cabaret star, and then in a welter of racketeering and imaginary politics, ending up with revolu- tion and a battle in the Syntagma, the intere,st somewhat flags. It is true enough that "the racial sport, drug, relaxation, substitute for work, of the Hellenes is Government. Every other man is a dictator in his own imagination. The cafés are their parliament houses where civic pride, volatilised, goes up in clouds of words like the spirals from their cigarettes, and like them ends in nothing."

But Mr. Parry does better when he is more -devoted to the particular than the general. . Early in the book we come across sentences like these :

"Everything smelt of the ripe summer and of hot earth and of pleasant idleness. The belled goats tinkled homewards to Lystraka. In that clear air the rocks and trees became hyaline, transparent, as though lit by an inner fire. Two wood-pigeons sailed down on to the dome of the church, Where they sat cooing harmoniously."

Those two wood-pigeons are worth pages and pages of the diffuse intrigue and adventure of the later part of the book. _ _ .