Of Love and Sudden Death
How Far to Bethlehem? By Norah Lofts. (Hut- chinson, 25s.)
JAMES AGEE'S film scripts for Hollywood were the best of their kind, and the cinema criticism that he contributed to the American press was the finest of its day. But nobody can read his letters without detecting in them a note of remorse at the energy which he expended on such work. How much better it would have been, he seems to say, had he given his undivided attention to the all-demanding disciplines of the novel. For in its own right, his one full-length novel, A Death in the Family, remains a con- siderable achievement. Its weaknesses are few, and when they occur they come significantly enough at those points where Agee the journalist- reporter becomes Agee the self-conscious artist straining after effects. At one point, he resorts to various typographical devices and curious
phonetic arrangements to convey the sound of a car starting up. Yet when he is writing straight —and much of the background of this post- humous novel is autobiographical—there are many unforgettable pages.
When Jay Follet, aged thirty-six and one month, finds that his brother's call to his father's death-bed has been no more than a false alarm, he speeds back home: on the way, he meets with a fatal crash on the Knoxville side of Bell's Bridge in Tennessee. The effect of this accident is traced on three generations: Jay's parents, children and widow Mary. Every reaction of their grief is exposed—though it is in its record of Mary's inner soul-searching that the book really reaches its high point. Here is a woman for whom the cold professionalism of the under- takers has suddenly assumed a reality—the earth, the headstone, and the coffin. It is as if she had grown up overnight. Even the birth of her two children now seems only an apprenticeship for this bereavement (dead husbands at such moments appear little more than older children). And in charting her soul-searching, Agee has provided an emotional graph of the fluctuating doubts and hopes that accompany such a loss: the numbing of the senses; the crying out to the departed in the silent empty house; the fear that the grave- side could be the end; and (for Mary, at least) the final recognition of the might, grimness and tenderness of God.
After reading 288 pages of Memoirs of a Peon, and despite a puzzling quotation from a writer called A. L. Coleman-Thompson which prefaces it, I am still not certain what a peon is. The Oxford Dictionary offers three possibilities: an Indian foot-soldier, a Mexican debtor who is held in servitude by his creditor, and a South American man or boy leading a mule or horse. Miss Erskine, another novelist of the week, also uses the word, but provides no clue. My feeling, after finishing Mr. Sargeson's book, was that his particular New Zealand peon had something of an Oblomov in him. There was the same desire to be a recluse and to idle the time away.
But Michael Newhouse is more active than his Russian predecessor, since he does occasion- ally pursue both women and jobs—even if his success at either is very temporary. Indeed, always short of cash and always ready to make a moon- light flit, the one thing that he is never short of is funny stories. I especially liked this one, set off by his thoughts about his father—an impoverished farmer who is now a council labourer: He would wear a top hat with a frock coat and trousers to match whenever he was engaged for a wedding or a funeral (I remember, by the way, that my stepmother once remarked that it was not right for him to be dressed in exactly the same way for each of these ceremonies: and from my second eldest brother, who had a quicker and more open sense of humour than any of us, there immediately came the remark, 'Why not? It's the same thing'). . . .
Both Another Man's Wife, by Senor de Tena, and Mr. Coleman's first novel, A Girl for the Afternoons, deal with adultery. Ann Maria is not only jealous of her husband's `sixth sense for business,' but infuriated by his lack of artistic sensibility. When Andres, a lover from her student days, has an exhibition in Madrid, she once more becomes his mistress. But a surprise ending to this affair awaits them both. Scattered, too, throughout their story are a number of moral aphorisms, many of which are pretty feeble: `Sin is merely the consequence of consent.' In contrast, in Mr. Coleman's book, it is the wife who is deserted. At a loose end, she picks up with a lawyer, has a rather half-hearted relation- ship with him, and is eventually reconciled with her husband when the girl with whom she shares a flat is killed in a car crash after a barbecue. The writing is distinctly breezy—though, at times, embarrassing: . . be nuzzles into the back of her neck which is, he knows, the proper thing to do.'
The coarse and ham-handed stage adaptation of The Passion-Flower Hotel (rightly trounced by the Spectator drama critic) should not be allowed to put readers off Passion Flowers in Business. For in this third instalment, as it were, Sarah Callender, late of the Passion-Flower Hotel, becomes involved, in the nicest and simplest way, with a publisher who i really a blackmailer. The fun that follows is fast and furious, and Mits Erskine's descriptions of contemporary London are beautifully bang on: 4. . . we made a date for lunch at the blond-wood salad emporium.'
Lastly, a yarn, a saga, and a re-telling of the Christmas story. In The Long White Night Mr. Lambert examines with conviction and ingenuity a supposed case of cowardice at Alamein, and proves it was otherwise; in What Time Collects James T. Farrell covers with gusto and dash fifty years of American Midwest history from the 1870s onwards, and sets against it a tale of a passionate tempestuous marriage; and in How Far to Bethlehem? Miss Lofts re-creates with care and devotion the events surrounding the Nativity, and has some interesting ideas to put forward about the Wise Men—especially Melchior.
NEVILLE BRAYBROOKE
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