Fiction

By V. S. PRITCHETT

THERE are novels which arouse the covetousness of other novelists. These are, in the main, books which have not completely emerged from the documentary state. I Love, like so much of contemporary Russian fiction, belongs to this class. It is full of rich material, macabre, racy, vivid and dramatic experience which could hardly be dug out of present-day western society. Some selection has been made, but on the whole the author has had merely to remember and

write down the facts. And therefore another novelist covets them. He has been shown a heap of raw material which belongs to someone else ; and that someone else has not transformed the stuff from material to art. Like a child he has merely displayed it.

I Love describes the appalling lot of the workers and their inevitable degeneration under pre-Soviet conditions in a Russian mining slum. The revolution comes and the narrator

(a gutter child whose parents and brothers and sisters have died of starvation or drink) becomes one of the homeless waifs who, as thieves, infest the country until the government rounds them up and turns them into decent citizens. The story describes the process from the lower depths to regeneration, from the sewer rat stage of " I hate " to the state of respected and respecting harmony with the community. Obviously

such a book cannot be pure document ; some attempt has clearly been made to give shape, direction and temperament to the material. In the opening chapters we see the strong

miner broken by starvation wages and reduced at last to desperation and madness by the vodka to which he has been driven. His son follows the same course. The wives go to pieces as their husbands fail. The children run wild and

starve. There is an awful description of the death of a child in an old oven into which two of them have crept for warmth. The surviving child is carted away alive on the corpse waggon. Innumerable scenes, unemphatic but vivid in the rapid naturalistic manner, stamp the misery of Rotten Gully on one's mind, and the subsequent adventures of the child thief are equally' alive with that brute casualness Russian writers excel in conveying. No pretence is made- that the path of reformation is attractive or easy to the hardened waif.

He is a savage. But he is gradually and quite 'plausibly " brought round."

Why then is one not content to leave it at that and say that I Love is exciting and alive from cover to cover ? Simply

and briefly because of the inadequacy of the essentially sociological or political approach to human nature. A

glance at the original picaresque novels will show at once how much more than a sense of the struggle for bread is required to give significance to people. A glance back at the

people of the earlier pages of this book and comparison with the perfect citizens of the later pages is equally revealing.

The book, with all its merits, remains one of naturalism's sermon-documents. One sighs to see it pass that way.

As a work of art Mr. Walmsley's Foreigners is superior and therefore more deeply impressive, despite its relative

provinciality and its very narrow scope. ' Its excellence

took me by surprise for I have thought his earlier books overpraised and dull. In Foreigners he has become an artist

and I cannot ever remember reading so good and fascinating a rendering of what goes on in a boy's mind, as he knocks about between his home and his school. He is, thank God, no upper-middle-class poeticized boy, nor sentimentalized boy, nor boy morbid, but the raw young animal, selfish, scheming, bullying and bullied, quickly frightened, quickly recovering, and far more in awe of his parents than he has yet

understood. Mr. Walmsley's triumph is that he has got himself back into the limited boy world; has readjusted himself once more to the crude boy values, and has recovered too the boy vernatular in .:which, the book is written.; It-is a tour de force and it succeeds. The child is the son of narrow, poverty-stricken Wesleyan parents living in a fishing village on the Yorkshire coast. The father is a photographer and would-be painter ; and the fact of being " foreigners " to the village is rubbed in upon their child by the village youths, good and hard. Mr. Walmsley's manner must be quoted at length. " Chicken," the boy's guttersnipe friend, has returned to the, village : " I had hardly believed what he had told me about his mother and Bob Walsh. Yet I knew it must b3 true, and that Chicken had come back to Bramblewiek to live, and although I had felt just the same as I had always done about him talking too much and chewing sweets, I was so pleased I could have hugged him. But I thought straight away that I must never show him that I liked him as much as that, or he might start getting cheeky and I began to think of all the things I had done since I had seen him last, particularly of how Charlie had shown me how to fight, and of how I'd beaten- Ginger. So I pretended I wasn't a bit surprised he'd come back, and I told him quite coolly that I was going on to Browe Beck and that if he liked he could come with me. We started to walk up towards the cliff, and I let him go on talking about Leeds and the chapel where his mother had worked and what he had seen in the train coming home, and how glad he'd been when the train came through High Batts' tunnel, and he'd got his first sight of Bramblewick Bay again. He hadn't had any- real adventures, of course. But I didn't mind listening to him. I was happy. And I thought once I started telling him about mine I'd never stop."

The jerky alternations of sensitiveness and insensitiveness in the aggressive boy's mind do not injure but rather enhance

the sharpness of his pictures of other people. Whatever may be lost is copiously repaid in the vivid haul Mr. Walmsley has brought out of the past. Nowhere did I suspect an adult guiding the pen or putting in the fruits of later know- ledge, and characters like Slogger, the schoolmaster, the boy's religious mother, the drunken sea captains and Grab, the bully, are perfectly done. The English childhood, as rendered in literature, has, by imbibing the public school spirit, lost its raciness. Mr. Walmsley's books show what

a wealth of pungent and vital stuff lies buried in the non=7 comformist childhoods of non-respectable, ugly-minded,

struggling England.

Susan and Joanna is another of Mrs. Elizabeth Cambridge's excursions into what may be called the poetry of dullness. Her habit is to show the wisdom- of being born ordinary and simple, the vague halo—peculiarly English and at its

brightest in the landscape owned by English gentlemen farmers—which illumines the heads of those who piously muddle through. Joanna, not really of the country and coming from the vicarage, unwisely chose to have brains. Unhappy Joanna, how can her life be other than a long struggle with servants who lie at the sight of her, a husband who clouts her head and a farm for ever losing money ?

Yes ! Joanna will get what she wants, but will she like it when she gets it ? Let us rather turn to Susan. Not very beautiful yet, at once, we have the word for her (some memory out of Galsworthy or the stud book) : breeding I She fails to get the man she loves, her father is indifferent to her and leaves her penniless, she marries a young scientist who talks continuously about his researches—and she has no idea what it is all about—and marries knowing she does not love him. They are miserably poor. Something always goes wrong when the big moments come. And yet—yes,

you have guessed right—Susan is happy, Susan is wise, she may be a trifle dazed but she has muddled through. She will get all the prizes. Miss Cambridge conducts her pastoral

gently and skilfully about these matters. Her characters are well observed. She has the gift of invention. But she

is at her best, in my opinion, with her servants and villagers.

Usually in this kind of novel they are lay figures. Miss Cambridge has given the lower orders a good dose of life in lieu of poetry.

Circumscribed as Miss Cambridge's novel is, it is not vulgar. She may idealize the dull but she does not, like

Miss Lorna Rea, trot out the tepid- and the banal. Six and Seven is a book of short stories, .mainly about the financial

difficulties of suburban couples. Presumably the snobbish Material of this kind of magazine story is ordered in advance by the advertisers, for while Miss Rea will tell you all about the interior decoration of her heroines' flats, she tells you nothing about their characters. The depths of the magazine genre are touched in the story called " The Doctor and Mrs. Cook."