Novels
The Unknown Sea. By Francois Mauriac. Translated by Gerard Hopkins. (Eyre and Spottiswoode. 9s.)
The White Witnesses. By Helen Spalding. (Methuen. 12s. 6d.)
M. MAUIUAC is one of the few living novelists to whom the adjective "powerful "—once so beloved of literary critics—can be applied. He writes with an intense, almost a tempestuous, force about the life of the emotions. The intellectual, political and social problems that possess so many modern writers scarcely exist for him. His characters, fixed in a small area south of Bordeaux, are set, like those of Miss Compton-Burnett, in the pre-1914 era of the morality
of manners. The advantages and disadvantages of these self-impostd limitations are immediately evident in the work of both these dis- tinguished writers. M. 'Mauriac, like Miss Compton-Burnett, is completely master in his. own world, but his novels are so similar that only the addict tends to read all of them. His world, also like that of Miss Compton-Burnett, is dominated by the family ; his famiEes, like hers, dominated by elderly women whose monstrous egoism disguises itself as unselfish ambition for children and home. Where, however, Miss Compton-Bumett's characters are given mainly intellectual expression, those of M. Mauriac fling themselves into " a world of spume and blown • sand . . . an infinity of passion." This is " the unknown sea " in which the two elderly mothers of the book have immolated all considerations but those of the purpose of their lives that gives them power. Rose, the young girl, one of those who "at the very beginning of their journey ... are amazed by the bitter violence of the wind and taste of salt upon their lips," when tempted to lose herself in that sea, chooses rather to retrace her steps.
The Unknown Sea (translated so excellently that one is never for a moment aware that one is reading a book which has been written in another language) tells, of a family left penniless—the family of Revolou, a great lawyer who has ruined himself and committed suicide. The eldest son, Julien, a young society man, says to his schoolboy brother : " You don't know what it meant socially to be a Revolou. . . . I couldn't have climbed higher. . . . I have sometimes refused to shake hands with a man ; no man has ever refused to shake hands 'with me. Those I once ignored will now be the first to pretend that they don't see me." Julien takes to his bed and says he will never get up again. Who could now close the book and fail tochscover what happens to Julien ? Once involved in the affairs of a Mauriac family, the reader cannot, and certainly would not want to, stru331e free. But Julien is only a minor interest in the emotional storms that follow the Revolou scandal. On the night of the suicide Madame Costadot, mother of two young men whose fortunes are involved, forces Madame Revolou to sign away her dowry in their favour. Rose Revolou is engaged to marry Robert Costadot. In spite of his mother's opposition, and temporarily sharing Pierrot's disgust at her greed on their behalf, Robert refuses to break off the engagement; but in the end he is too weak, too frivolous. Rose, overworked and grown plain and shabby, begins to disgust him. The scene in which he makes his final, brutal break with her is scarcely bearable, and the reader, enguffell by Rose's despair, emerges exhausted. All that follows—the social descent of the younger Revolou boy and Rose's realisation of the danger of her power over him—comes as anti-climax. The compelling force that has carried us .so far drops suddenly and, given time to think, we become critical.
M. Mauriac, one realises ,• has an odd lack of confidence in his ability. Perhaps some of his power comes from the fact that he feels it necessary to hi:Miner in his point and, at the end, give a final blow for good measure, with the result the reader gets the full impact straight from the page. Gide's subtlety may have a delayed action ; Mauriac takes no risks. Having, for instance, drawn in iron the contour of his Lk.onie Costadot, having made her motives and 'self-deception clear to anyone of average intelligence, he must still tell us :
" She lay awake till dawn turning the matter over and over in her mind. She did not see that what she was really doing was to build a fortress in which she could fake refuge from remorse, from something she had recently done in a house in the Place de la Bourse ; to conjure into oblivion those gloomy Revolou faces that moved about b' bed with fixed, inexorable eyes." The second half of the book, which, in the complexity of its implications would call, for a greater creative effort than the first, has a limping air. Denis Revolou's marriage to the land-agent's vulgar daughter is never made completely credible, nor does Rose's desolation hold us as did her passion and despair. The scene in which Pierrot Costadot, the young poet who loves Rose, meets Landin, the Revolou evil genius, is not sufficiently significant to the whole to prop up (as one feels it is meant to prop up) the comparative weakness-of the concluding chapters. Landin, in spite of the work put in on him, remains a flat character, and his murder, instead of seeming pertinent to his whole life, is come upon by the reader unawares.
None of this, of course, is to say that Mauriac as a writer is not overwhelmingly superior to ninety-five per cent. of other novelists at work today. In turning from . The Unknown Sea to the other books on this week's 4ist the critic necessarily moves to another plane of criticism. It would, anyway, be unfair to Mr. Lodwick, for instance, to discuss_ his work as though he intended it to be
more than ephemeral entertainment, but, as such, it is very enter- taining indeed. In his story of a man who breaks away from an unfaithful wife and becomes entangled in a fantasy of spivs, circus performers, black marketeers and petty crooks, the author writes with a witty, almost a wicked, pen. He should, however, guard against overdoing it if he has an eye to his sales, for his description of a man and his wife as " man and .superior domestic servant " will seem to the great female reading public today too true to be funny.
Both Mr. Morchard Bishop and Miss Spalding deserve more space than I have left this week. Mr. Morchard Bishop is an established writer with a gift for presenting life with a most depressing exactness, and in Valerie his gift is used to the full. Poor Valerie, a lovely, intelligent, sensitive girl, is trampled upon by one male after another until she becomes little more than a doormat. I believed every word of it, but was none the happier for that.
Miss Spalding's The White Witnesses is less convincing, but equally depressing. Like many poets who turn to prose, this writer does not see the difficulties of the new medium sufficiently clearly to be able to overcome them. Her ignorance (or should I say innocence ?) of the art of the novel results in crudity of construction, a muddle of too many and too similar female characters, and some uncertainty as to the direction of the book's main threads. These flaws apart, it is the book of a writer who is trying to look at life through her own eyes—an effort so rarely made in these days that one would wish her to learn the trade and try again.
OLIVIA MANNING.
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