Fiction

By GRAHAM GREENE

Deep Streets. By Benedict Thielen. (Methuen. 7s. 6d.) IT is unfair to judge a novelist by standards he does not recognize, but any novelist, even so romantic a novelist as Miss Miles, does try to give an illusion of life, and an extra- ordinary sense of real people and of real pain is the first

quality one notices in Mr. March's new novel. He seems to write with all his senses when most novelists write with one. His imagination is as aural as it is visual. The dead negro hanging in the prison yard (" His hands were hie the splayed claws of a dead hawk. - They were rigid and curved with pain ") is not more strictly seen than the early morning damp is heard : " There was, also, in the gutters of the gaol a hushed, precise sound of dampness congealing and flowing, and dripping, finally, a long way on to tin."

Come In at the Door is a novel of exceptional interest ; the first hundred pages, had they been published separately as a long short story, could have ranked with the best stories of childhood in English. Placed alongside The Turn of the Screw the opening section retains its significance, it is not overshadowed. The comparison is not arbitrary, for Mr. March's novel is a study in terror, a terror conveyed with an appalling precision of phrase. The child, Chester Hurry, is motherless ; he lives with his father and his black nurse, Mitty, on a farm in the Mississippi delta ; his nurse is his father's mistress, a handsome ruthless woman with a pas- sionate love for the boy. To the farm comes Baptiste, a French half-caste almost white, a frivolous quick-witted conceited man who draws the child's affections away from Mitty. But Baptiste will not stay, and the child in a rage of jealousy allows Mitty to use him secretly to cast a " death spell " on the half-caste. Baptiste for awhile laughs at the spell, but the fears of the other negroes work on his mind, he is frightened, he tries to get the spell removed, he goes out of his mind and kills a negro dwarf whom he believes has cast it, and Mitty takes the child to see him hanged. This section of the novel is deeply imagined ; each character, however brief his appearance, has been dredged up, one feels, from the lowest levels of sub-conscious experience.

Even the dwarf, who appears only to be murdered, with his wrinkled aged brows and purple skin and his beautiful booming voice, lends an almost Shakespearean desolation to the act of murder. " He cried again in terror, his chest rising and falling, his organ-like voice rolling magnificently across the fields."

The novel, from Baptiste's death .onwards, is a little less satisfying. There is a slightly text-book air in the psychologi- cal case he presents, a touch of eccentricity the charac- terization. Chester, in the sickness which follows the hanging, forgets Baptiste, forgets the final dreadful scenes ; only in dreams he sometimes sees " a sort of clock and a pendulum that swings back and forth and turns in a dizzy way. There is a big hawk with yellow claws flying over my head." His mother's relatives take him from his father and Mitty ; he grows up under the cramping load of something he cannot remember. He finds most companionship with his uncle Bushrod who has married unhappily and who explains the significance of the pictures he has tattooed on his body : " When a man writes a book or makes a statue or does any- thing like that, he is only taking something ugly out of himself and making it beautiful ; then the thing which has been troubling him can't hurt" him any more." So the story is broken, not only by sedate extracts from the diary of Chester's great-aunt who supplies the necessary point of sanity, but also by short stories and fantasies (sentimental, ironic, tragic), which I imagine are meant to be the fruits of Chester's creative mind which plays round the forgotten

experience but misses a final integration (the " soinething ugly " remains). The novel ends with his father's death, his return to the farm, his meeting with Mitty, his recollection of Baptiste : " His face was twisted with pain and-his hands pressed together in agony. l'ni. vdry -amusing7 lie shouted

over and over, ' I'm essentially a comic character ! ' but his words were lost in the larger sound of-the world's fury." The last word of all is allowed to the normal, to the great aunt's irrelevances :

" Mrs. Herman Outerbridge has got the books of the Pearl County Ladies' Auxiliary in a fearful tangle and it is up to me to straighten them out again. It does seem that a mature woman, a high-school graduate, could•write a few short paragraphs without misspelling most of the words or do simple sums in addition and multiplication, but alas, such is not the case ! I do not know how this county would get along, if it were not for me."

Mr. March's economy and freshness of phrase are the results of clear sight and clear hearing. Banality of phrase, the poeticizing of experience comes from a failure to use the senses ; it is an acceptance of sight and sound and smell at second hand. When Mr. March describes " a bedlam of crowing cocks, some far away, with voices like faded threads against the horizon," the freshness of his style is as much a physical as an intellectual quality, and one might say that the failure of Miss Miles in Blind Men Crossing a Bridge is partly a physical failure of the senses to recall their reactions. Her novel is appallingly long ; it runs to 850 pages ; and nowhere (I speak open to correction, for I found it quite impossible to read the whole novel) could I find a sign of accuracy. Her first paragraph is typical of the whole book :

" Profound and without stain, unmarred by any sullying touch of man or of beast or of light-footed bird, unstirred by ruffling breezes, the snow, still as a pall, lay spread in calm beauty above the graves."

This tendency to repeat everything explains the 850 pages. If the snow was without stain, of course it was " unmarred by any touch, &c." ; if it was still, of course it was unstirred and " spread in calm beauty, &c.” Adjectives and meta- phors of appalling banality drip from Miss Miles's pen. Miss Miles is nothing if she is not poetic ; her first hero (her novel covers three generations) is a young poet ; his sensibility is extreme :

" He found it hard to discipline himself when the oaf's hobnailed boot crushed heedlessly the stem of a straying blossom . . George stooped and stretched his hand, and caught up the injured snowdrop. Though the stalk was crushed the flower was barely sullied. George walked on with hand cupped about the fragile thing. He bathed it in the mere and then dried it in the sunshine."

A few pages later :

" There stood upon the shelf a delf basin, full of cowslips. George filled both his hands with chilly young buds, unopened. He stood mute with hands stretched as with a proffered gift. His impulsive act upset his sister."

And once more George :

" I'm going far away,' he said hoarsely, ` until Whitsun.' (Were they shining tears that made her dark eyes so star-like ?) ' To Cornwall 'y must go.' Meg's voice was husky too. He felt a sudden need. A gift for her something fragrant . . .

something fresh and soft : a nosegay of budding cowslips, or prim- roses half blown, with dew upon them still."

But perhaps the most extreme example of Miss Miles's fragrant transformations is that of the Hadaway's mare :

" Shy half-formed phrases and curtailed words fluttered like birds within George's heart. But his lips were awed and hushed by beauty still, though his heart was vocal. Meg's eyes were on the Hadaway's mare, which, against damson boughs, gleamed pale as a flitting cobweb."

Blind Men Crossing a Bridge is a silly and badly written book, which attracts attention only because it has been so pompously produced. It is one more example of a book sold by weight. Mr. March's novel costs 7s. 6d. ; Miss Miles's, because it contains about a quarter of a million words, 10s.

Deep Streets is not " an amazing achievement " (her pub- lisher's description of Miss Miles's novel), but at least it is not pretentious. It is written in a conventionally modern manner, quick snatches at a number of lives in New York, showing rather too melodramatically the fallacy in the optimistic -ideas of life indulged in by three " rosy-cheeked, white-haired old gentlemen with comfortably rounded little bellies and philosophies." The style is a great deal better in its undistinguished way than Miss Miles's. • It may be dead,-but at any rate it is dead without flowers.