Fiction

PLOMEE Keep the Aspidistra Flying. By George Orwell. (Gollariez. 7s. 6d.)

The Sixth Beatitude. By Radelyffe Hall. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) The Beauties and the Furies. By Christina Stead. (Davies. 7s. exl.) . ONE need not go back to Baktac to look for precedents in r the treatment of money matters in fiction, for in a sense nearly all novels are concerned, directly or indirectly, with the influence of money, or a want of money, on character.

' And this is natural, since the need for money is as universal ; as the need for love. Men cannot live by bread alone, but

they certainly cannot live without it, and they are apt to .1 want jam on it as well. Tiring of bread and jam, they want

, cake. The celebrated question "Then why don't they eat cake ? " means little today, for millions will have their cake

and eat it, even when they cannot pay for it. This, roughly, is the theme of If I flare Four Apples, which tells of an " ordinary " American family caught in the tangles of the hire-purchase system. Miss Lawrence seems to be popular,

• in her own country, and it is easy to see why : she does not :. for a moment take Mr. and Mrs. Everyman any further out of their depth than they are already. She has worked !• for many years in charge of the question-and-answer depart- ment of a newspaper, and one can think of many worse trainings for a novelist than the duty of helping to solve the problems of the feckless, the muddled, and the ignorant, who make up so large a part of the human race. In her new book she presents us at once to a Mrs. Bradley, to whom a Mrs. Hoe has applied for suggestions in regard to the balancing of her family budget. Replete with common sense, Mrs. Bradley decides on a personal investigation, and the rest of the book is a close-up of the Hoes at home. The interest of this close-up is chiefly sociological, and to the domestic economist, sensitive to extremes of bad house- keeping, there should be a strong appeal in the spectacle of the Little Man trying to enjoy plenty in the midst of poverty, or, rather, extravagance on a competence. As for his wife, "any salesman who could reach her when she had the money for a payment down easily persuaded her ;to sign on the dotted line. Her elaborate gas-cooker, the huge shining white ice-box, even the 'divan on which she sat, could not be paid for within two years, if then. Yet she had confessed to a desire for Venetian window- blinds, and they really needed an electric or gas mangle, she said."

One of the daughters, who rejoices in the name of Darthula, engages herself, on the strength of a belief that "an all-white dining room is the smartest background for a blonde hostess," to lay out half her small salary for forty weeks to purchase an unneeded suite of furniture. The family are too proud to eat fish, cold meat, or stews, and Mrs. Hoe, in fact, is "death on economics." She is in the grip of the passion

for mechanical refrigeration. "No matter the income or obligations, American women apparently believed electric and gas ice-boxes to be as necessary as cooking-stoves," and

the reforming Mrs. _Bradley meets with nothing but an obstinate stupidity.

"They may be just as good as the Henry Fords, they may be as much entitled to palaces and yachts as the steel kings, but that doesn't supply them with money. . . . Now, as I see it, the Hoes can have the necessities. Let their right to the luxuries be argued later. They certainly can't hope to reform our economic system by their lack of sales resistance, and if they could they'd meantime have to exist. . . . Is there any sense in human beings wrecking ; their lives for a house, a car, a mammoth refrigerator, and an over- stuffed living-room suite 7" :No, of course there is no sense in it. Mrs. Bradley looks into the causes of this folly, and finds a horror of retrench- meat, a distrust of economy, a crazed attachment to possessions associated with certain definite standards of -living, and a complete absence of taste, which, after all, means

dear-headedness.

"Nothing was worth sacrifice to obtain, there were no essentials, because the ability to choose wisely is a cultivated quality, and the mass make no choice, only demands."

If that is not an indictment of what is broadly meant by democracy, it comes remarkably near it. At the very end of the book we leave Darthula reflecting that "a piano gives tone to a living room, and perhaps after I get it paid fort

• can take music lessons . ."

Mr. George Orwell's new book, bitter almost throughout and often crude, is also all about money. He opens it with a long quotation from the Epistle-to the Corinthians in which

he has seen fit to substitute the word " money" for" charity." His version ends "And nOw abideth faith, hope, money, these three ; but the greatest of these- is money." The scene is London, the -time is the present, and the hero is Gordon Comstock, a seedy young man of thirty who work;

in a seedy bookseller's shop. Gordon would like to be

famous and to be loved. He has vague aspirations in regard to the writing of poetry, and tender feelings towards a certain Rosemary. His heredity and upbringing have bees

against him. His exceedingly depressing and depressed lower-middle-class family have set, he considers, undue store by money, of which they have seen little. Reacting against their standards, he refuses the chance of becoming "a Big Pot one of these days" in a red lead firm, deliberately • throws away his good prospects in a publicity company, and embrices squalor. The embrace is protracted for some three hundred pages, and Mr. Orwell, who is the author of a book

called Dawn and Out in London and Paris, spares us none of the horrors of sordid loneliness and a hypertrophied inferiority complex expressing itself in physical grubbiness and stupid debauchery. In the end, after various contretemps, described

with what may be called painful realism, Rosemary comes to the rescue and persuades him to return to publicity and bread-and- butter, which is just as well, for there is an unknown child to be

considered. Turning over the pages of a magazine he takes a straight look at the world to which he is returning : " Adorable—until she smiles. The food that is shot out of a gun. Do you let foot-fag effect your personality ? . . . Only a penetrating face-cream will roach that under-surface dirt. Pink toothbrush is her trouble. . . . Only a drummer and yet he quoted Dante. . . . How a woman of thirty-two stole her young man from a girl of twenty. . . . Now I'm schoolgirl complexion, all over. Hike all day on a slab of Vitninalt "

-His rebellion against money has brought him" not only misery', but also a frightful emptiness, an' inescapable sense of futility." 'Yet in the conclusion his bitterness is softened by the reflection that although " our civilisation is founded on greed and fear, in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler." He therefore marries and settles down with Rosemary—and an aspidistra, which has to be "kept ,flying," for perhaps it is "the tree of life."

Both the sensible Miss Lawrence and the vigorous Mr. Orwell have their limitations, but they have succeeded in taking a firm grasp of certain problems and in throwing light where light is needed. The same cannot very well be

said for the other authors on my list. On one who has nate* read The Well of Loneliness or even any of .Miss Radelyffe Hall's less known books The Sixth Beatitude produces an impression of radiant good nature which scarcely makes up.

for its shortcomings as a novel. It tells of slum life in a town on the edge of Romney Marsh, and especially of Hannah Bullen, who though generous rather than discriminating

with her favours was pure in heart. The story is patclity.: Fragments of genuine observation are embedded in hunki:ot sentimentality, blunt home-truths alternate With purple, or rather mauve, passage% and human nature 'is simplified Out of all recognition. Unfortunately the general effect is of kut undisciplined imagination, and what happens when Miss Ault forsakes terra firma may be shown by quoting some words addressed to Hannah by a Cockney boy in a hopfield

"But you're different, you seem to belong to the soil. . . . If had you beside me I might go far—all the splendid sounds in my head might come out. . . . You would give me your vigour, I'd give you my music ; great beautiful soul-filling themes, magnificent chords, God-like chords, God-like themes . . . they're all here in my head, but they won't come out—something stops them, perhaps it's the pain in my chest . . ."

Miss Christina Stead has also abandoned herself to indisci- pline, but on a much more elaborate scale. It is a pity, because in her earlier books she gave evidence of unusual powers of imagination : but all too often -women novelists spoil their talents by a straining after effect,