Fiction
By LOUIS MACNEIOE
Farewell Romance. By Gilbert Frankau. (Hutchinson. Ss. 6d.) Standing Room Only. By Walter Greenwood. (Jonathan Cap©. 7s. 6d.)
Fifty Roads to Town. By Frederick Nebel. (Jonathan Cape. 7s. 6d.)
Spring Storm. ,By Alvin lohnsOn. (Constable. s7s. 6d.) Rising Tide. By Elisaveta Fen. (Macmillan. 7s. 6d.) IF a novel is to have large sales, it must taste familiar and digest easily. Do not let us be snobbish about this. A
nice taste and digestibility do not necessarily damn a writer. Aneient Greek tragedies, which seem to us hard nuts to crack, went down well with the ancient Greek audience, who knew all the plots and the morals in advance. Com- placent expectation is the mood in which we all go to the movies (the Hollywood movies), and it is also the governing mood of most -of the clients of lending.lihraries.
Frankau and Mr. Walter Greenwood both enjoy very good sales. Farewell Romance and Standing Room Only will both sell well, and the reason is patent to anyone who will open either of these books at random. Each book presents a self-consistent little world. These worlds may not be true to the world but they are true to type. The library-subscriber will get what he expects.
' Mr. Greenwood's characters say " Aw " and " Bob's your uncle " and " If it serves me purpose it's mekkin' money for me and I'll pay for it." Mr. Frankau's say " Great news, old chap. The very greatest. We're going to have a baby." Mr. Frankau's " tog themselves up " and talk about the pater. Mr. Greenwood's walk round with their braces dangling and say " Gentlemen, eh Why, my owld father what never had a day's schoolin' in his life was a better man than any hundred of 'em put together." Mr. Frankau's heroine would hate breakfaSting with a naafi who did not shave first ; Mr. Greenwood's slovenly socialist producer has grey-green eyes as eccentric producers should {think of them having blue eyes !) and lives in a mice-ridden garret on hard-boiled eggs. But both authors are kind to their pets. Mr. Frankau procures for his heroine an early , Shaver and Mr. Greenwood fixes up his producer with an intelligent but warm-hearted woman—" You're the most Provocative person I've ever met," she says ; and once she has said that, we know they are meant for each other.
Farewell Romance is far too long. If Mr. Frankau will not tut out the many unnecessary scenes, he might do a little pruning of cliches. His characters never have a simple thought as you or I might. " Better not," said her intuition. "Yes," said his intellect. "No," said her soul. "Yes," said the old antagonism in him. "No," said the Jewess in her. And so on.
These women are nearly all good-looking and the men eharacterful, with strong jaws and consciences. Yet, in spite of that they occasionally come to life : witness the game Of chess between the hero's crippled wife and her doctor.
' Standing Room Only, though also very conventionalised, is a much better book ; it moves quickly, is very readable, the" characters amuse, and untruths to the wider world can more readily be forgiven as Mr. Greenwood is here unabashedly on the road to fairy-story or to Hollywood. A little shop- assistant in a northern city writes a play which is successfully produced in the West End. A little northern girl is similarly chosen to play lead in his play, becomes a star and marries a lord who lives in a beautiful castle. The hero's parents are hilarious caricature : the father a seedy old conjurer, out of a job on the halls, signing himself The Perfect Gent, quoting Hamlet, and heroically crooked over money ; the mother, a Lancashire heart of oak, warped, knotty and reliable. But the hero himself is a flop. It is quite all right that he should be imbecile but he ought to be attractively imbecile like Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton in their silent days. Perhaps he fails because with him Mr. Greenwood drops his thorough-going escapism. No castle and green lawns for this one. He is married off to a commonplace girl in his home-town—" A one-play-man with a now barren mind ; a man with too much money and time on his hands ; a man
whose wife could persuade him to join the golf club for social reasons and to buy a small ear because the garage was empty
and because possession of a car was essential to the dignity of their status." I wonder if Mr. Greenwood takes it out of his writer-hero in order to spite himself—a not uncommon habit with. authors. He leases him expecting apaby.
Fifty Roads to Town is a well-told 'story, whkh, like many recent American stories, depends on the Unity of Place. A number of travellers are snowed up together in a little New England town. Rear this town a man, who is running away from the dangerously idealistic husband of his-mistress, has taken refuge in a lonely logitut. A: traveller in fire- extinguishers has a breakdown with his ear, is taken in by the runaway lover and stranded in his log-hut when the snow comes. The traveller's wife misses her daily 'phone call and comes in pursuit of him, followed by policemen, reporters, news-reel, men, dog-team champions, and reeord-brealchig airmen. Mr. Nebel is a deft describer of landscapes and persons ; it is a pity that when he moralises he should write like this—" Nothing, Nostrand felt, without being profound or dogmatic about it, was worth the fierce intent candle. which human nature sometimes burned to ill-conceived ideals." Mr. Nebel has a simple but effective way with his' characters ; he takes sharply contrasted types and pairs them. The virile runaway lover he pairs off in the log-luit with the timid commercial traveller ; the traveller's wife, a militant puritan, he forces to share a bedroom with a torch7; singer ; while the almost comatose innkeeper has to be assisted in his work by a nephew who always moves headlong., and who ends and balances this book of tragedy, irony and; 1 battle with natural forces, by falling in a fit of enthusiasm'' into the coal-bin.
For most people their first novel ought to be their beak,. novel because,, it is unlikely that the average would-ht. riovelist's_experience ,,or intellect can rise to more than three hundred pages of self-eXpression. A first novel is, however,,... rarely very good—especially if it is autobiographical. Spring Storm is an autobiographical first novel and it is very goocl.' This is because, -though the author's reminiscences are UT, his boyhood, he has waited a proper time before writing about them ; he is now sixty-one. A man in the earlSr; twenties has not yet digested his 'teens, and the ordinary autobiographical novel, the work of youth, is prejudiced, . sentimental, violent, hot and sticky. Mr. Johnson's is not in the least like that. As documentation of farm life in, North-East Nebraska it is excellent. As an account of 4' strenuous and serious adolescence (few adolescences we heair of are either) it is convincing and moving. The struggle to make a living, especially when it is also a struggle to establish: oneself in an alien country, is one of the classic themes for the novelist ; this theme enabled Mr. Liam O'Flaherty to write his best book in Sicerrett. Mr. Johnson puts acrosp. the drudgery of agriculture without over-sentimentalising. (like some communist writers) but also without de-sentimental ising it ; the land, while not a Lady Chatterley, is something more- than statistics. Mr. Johnson is one of the editors of The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, so it is illuminating' that he should be able to present characters in the round. The extremely amiable poor whites who live rent-free on ground which the river may any day undermine, seem a, little too good to be true, but most American writers like a dash of idyll and, where Mr. Johnson remembers so much of Nebraska brute and' unvarnished, it is only fair to allow hit n" one or two more gilded memories. A notable characteri- drawing is that of the drunken, mean, malicious, repellent but not ungenerous old farmer whose wife has a love affair' with the hero. This love affair concludes the book and its development and decline are unusually credible.
Rising Tide is about a Russian town on the Black Sea. during the fighting between Reds and Whites in 1919-20. There is much interesting reportage---the barter of chemises for flour—but the book is disappointing. The authoress does not prove her quite tenable thesis that the lives of her individualist hero and heroine are as important as anything else, because she fails to make their private lives" interesting.
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