Fiction

i3y WILLIAM PLOMER Land of Women : The Tale of a Lost Nation. By Katharine von Dombrowski. Translated from the German by the

Now that almost everybody writes novels, we ought not to complain of a want of variety, but in fact there is a great sameness about them, which perhaps explains why many people prefer biographies. This sameness is due largely to conventional habits of thought, though the higher standard of mediocrity which has been attained in recent years some- times half blinds us to the fact that many writers have poor faculties of observation and invention, and that they are content to record types rather than attempt to create indi- viduals, while their diffuseness and longwindedness often hides the fact that they have little to say. Most of them seem intent on reducing us all to our crudest common factors and tend to present human beings as wonderful bipeds who have endless love affairs and commit crimes, although a number of us have only one leg and few of us commit crimes, and many of us are not very wonderful and are largely taken up with other matters than love.

With Land of Women I have received a biographical and perhaps autobiographical note on its author, who is revealed as somebody rather out of the ordinary. Prospective readers of the book will perhaps find some encouragement in learning

that Katharina Ludovica von Dombrowski zu Papros and Kruswic is the Viennese wife of an Austro-Polish baron, has a " nonchalant, sophisticated and forthright personality," speaks eight languages, once adopted a mandril, fought the enemy during the War " with caricatures," dislikes Fascism, has been in touch with nearly all the nations of our globe "

and thinks, them "all a lot of hypocrites and cut-throats," has always had " the nicest and best horses," has " raised the most delieate exotic animals," cannot write unless " driven by some

dark impulse," and feels herself to be " a female Don Quixote." Incidentally, living plants, if kept in the same room with her, " invariably die." Equipped with this information, one is not surprised to find that Madame Dombrowski's dark impulse has led her to choose an exotic theme and treat it in a spirited way. Her " land of women " is none other than Paraguay under the dictator Lopez, El Supremo, of whom Mr. Cunninghame- Graham gave us a good account a year or two ago, and she begins, suitably enough, with Lopez' return from Europe with

Eliza Lynch (sometimes referred to as La Lynch, a Parisian Irishwoman and adventuress with a " magnificent bust " and

eyes that " shot out blue darts ") to a glowing landscape with an odour of orange-blossoms, brown-skinned women, and carrion," the two latter ingredients prevailing. A note on the cover tells us that " in that climate man can have no urgent business save to love "—and, one might add, after reading the book itself, to murder. So in spite of all the local detail, the Guarani wards, the golden combs of the courtesans, the mate

tea and vampire bats, here we are again back on pretty con- ventional lines. A great number of characters appear, but it is not in characterization that the Baroness excels, for she tends to present human beings as little but amatory engines that kill or are killed. Yet even under dictatorships there must sometimes be other fish to fry besides Desire and Ambition. But the story may certainly be called " colourful," and the colour is no doubt genuine enough, for Mme. Dombrowski has lived in

Paraguay in close touch with the Guarani people of whom she writes.

The Wish Child, another historical novel by a woman, is longer and less highly strung, or shall we say less " nonchalant, sophisticated and forthright." People sometimes say they can tell what a book is like from its first page, and Frau Seiders opening sentence exactly indicates the solid, thorough and rather old-fashioned way in which she tells her story : " On the night of the 25th of July, 1792, in an old family residence on Carmelite Square in Mainz, Hans Adam Echter von Mespelsbrun,

_lieutenant in a Prussian infantry regiment, was sitting with his wife and mother keeping watch by the bedside of his child, lying dangerously ill."

The story of Cornelia, the wife, and of her children, is that of a sound, sweet woman doing her best to lead a good life in a time of wars and social and political upheaval. It is developed in a calm and leisurely way, and coloured with the hOpe that

the day will come—and it must come—when the tears of women will •be strong enough—Strong as a flood to quencli. the 'fires of war for ever." Producing an effect of graveness and coolness, The Wish Child will not do for readers who are looking for the doubtful stimulus of desperate and self- conscious modernity.

Mr. Derrick Leon's second novel also differs from the general run. of present-day fiction by the soberness of his 'method and by his detachment from rant and cant, axe-grinding, group- consciousness and general fussiness. He has been content to take a situation of no great uncommonness in ordinary existence and to set it out thoughtfully and compassionately, in such a way that he can quote lines by Matthew Arnold and a page or two of Plato without producing any sense of strain. He knows that infinite unhappiness an come from the fact that a woman in love, especially a young Englishwoman of the middle class, may expect too much and long for the impossible :

" Only you're so idealistic. You always want things to be set and regulated. You never realize that life is fluid ; that things are changing the whole time : that no two people can remain indefinitely in the same position, and that if one doesn't want to lose everything the only alternative is to adapt one's self."

Thus Kenneth Orme, a married man, a writer, to Enid Law- rence, who is first his secretary and then his mistress. " Don't love me too much, Enid," he says on another occasion. " I'm

not really worth it." It is a real difficulty, and Wilderness might teach some warm-natured but inadvertent and inexpe-

rienced person to beware of it, or might show some injured person that she is not alone in feeling misunderstood. There have not been many novels lately of which one can say that they bear so closely upon the conduct and the predicaments of everyday life.

The last two books on this list are both of the regional, or at least the provincial variety. Messrs. Thompson and Hodson have little in common in their approach to their subject, which is Lancashire. The disadvantages of this kind of fiction are to some extent the disadvantages of the life they often reflect with a

painstaking, hearty and over-expansive realism, disadvantages which there' is no need to enumerate. Song o' Sixpence, how- ever, the neater of the two, is by no means without charm.

The local dialect of the conversations calls for a little effort on the part of an outsider, but the effort does not go unre- warded, for Mr. Thompson has a special gift for discovering humour and pathos in the talk of unpretentious people. He is nearer to life than some of the " big noises " of the writing profession as with a light and kindly touch he sketches the pre-War progress of Zachary Kay, who founds his fortune on cough-drops, expands it with biscuits, marries his delightful housekeeper Sally Plant, goes into the theatre business, becomes a civic dignitary, survives the War and his wife, and ends up presiding over a market stall. Nothing is -laboured in these pages, nothing overwrought, and their quality is clearly derived from an affection for Lancashire people that must come from lifelong familiarity.

Mr. James Lansdale Hodson's Chesterford in the slump, with mills closed down and queues waiting for the dole, brings us close again to the distress and anxiety of recent years and the stoicism with which they • have been borne :

" I don't believe Chesterford's finished yet. We're not givin' in—not ever. We're goin' to keep on fightin'—fightin' for a decent heritage for our childer ; fightin' that they may have work agen, an' peace, an' a bit o' comfort such as every man and woman 19 entitled to, an' same as Clod intended."

That is the moral which God's in His Heaven conveys with