BOOKS
THIS WEEK'S BOOKS
FOUR short stories by the late Joseph Conrad are pubasned this week as Tales of Hearsay (Fisher Unwin). One was the first he wrote, one the last : none have been printed before. Mr. R. B. Cunninghame Graham writes an excellent preface to the volume. Of the first of Conrad's stories he remarks : " His English is as perfect, perhaps more perfect, than in his latest work. This is not so curious as it appears, for as the years roll on, a language that we have acquired in youth, when all our faculties are keen, and with the first impact that a strange tongue makes on the brain, gradually fades ; then the speech that we learned at our mother's knee sub- consciously reasserts itself." He draws a cruel picture of British complacency : " Conrad's humour was so subtle that dullards generally failed to perceive that it existed and went away feeling that they had helped an interesting foreigner to face the fell coruscations of real British wit, without discrediting himself." The week, indeed, is notable in fiction. Mr. Aldous Huxley, whom we had regarded as frivolling away his talents in a perfect fright lest he should be thought serious or good-hearted, brings out the most important and sober book he has yet written, Those Barren Leaves (Chatto and Windus). Mr. Llewellyn Powys gives us another novel of Africa, Black Laughter (Grant Richards), which contains, we gather, personal experiences manipulated to make them credible and to round them off. And Mrs. Dawson-Scott deals darkly with Cornwall in They Green Stones (Heinemann).
Previous page
