Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER Moitke the Thief. By Sholem Asch. Translated by Edwin and Willa Muir. (Gollanez. is. 6d.) I M. A. and E. V. Barker. (Putnam. as. 6d.)

Tii6 English middlebrow is liable at times to profess an enthusiasm for some foreign writer or musician which is out of proportion to the merit of the individual, and seems to spring from an insular superstition that certain glamorcius aspects of the exotic have power and must be propitiated. Thus Sh?lem Asch, a writer of merit, has clearly been overpraised in this country, and hailed by muddled and. probably over- . worked reviewers as a giant of conternporary or of European literature, " immortal," " major," " belonging to the. same family as Tolstoy," &c. Perhaps this is because his. books traftsport us into an utterly foreign, a dark and violent Slav world. Actually he is essentially Jewish, and one seems to recognise in his work feelings akin to those Of the painter Chagall (who is more delicate and fantastic); an effort of the JeWish spirit to put out bright flowers in a world burdened wi

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history and darkened by poverty and brutality. In M like the Thief poverty and brutality are conspicuous enough, and yet they never quite become intolerable, for one never quite believes in the story : it holds one's attention by soMehow maintaining throughout the slightly sinister air of a faity tale or menacing dream. The child of abject parents, Mottke grows up in the hopeless squalor of a Polish ghetto and has to put up with an alternation of cruelty and neglect. Flogged, unwilling to go to school, flogged again, he is unsuccessfully apprenticed to a cobbler, then flogged again, works in a slaughter house, fraternises with dogs, takes to thd road, works as a glass-blower, joins a troupe of wandering tuMblers, commits a murder, becomes the owner of a brothel, finally reforms when reform is too late, and is betrayed to the police. " He felt the full injustice that' the whole world, everything, the sun, the sky, the earth, mankind had com- mitted against him. in -forcing -him- to-become 'what he' Witt:– . . . He blamed everything, everything but himself." What-. ever one's degree of sympathy with Mottke or his'victims, one can detect a note of compassion in this somewhat lurid but well-told story.

The hero of No More Reality, in so far as this book may be said to have a hero, is a less picturesque figure, a gawky, freckled, repressed young man on a farm, and an Australian farm at that. His existence is of some consequence in the small-town community which Mr..Godfrey Blunden has taken pains to depict. The rending of the veils of remoteness and unfamiliarity from Hobbleton does not disclose any very surprising manifestations, of human nature and behaviour. In fact Hobbleton might, with slight revisions of local colour, equally well be in some other dominion or in the United States, and this iadisarrningly indicated towards the end :

" ' A narrow little dump,' said Robert, looking down at the hot dusty township with its crooked main street and shanty buildings. ' The sort of little town which might well centralise a novel. . . . There's something stodgily English about it . . . and at the same time something harsh and new with the smug savagery of Gopher Prairie or Winesburg. . . . The characters are more or less stereo- typed. The publican, the parson, the postmaster. There is also sure to be somebody who owns half the countryside ; somebody who has been quietly dealing in land for years. . . . There's bound to•be an accommodating woman ; and I suppose there's amen of some kind quite capable of murder in certain circumstances. . . . For the lives of those people are dependent so much one upon another, are so involved in concupiscent scandals and promiscuous relations that the thing would form a unity.' " The thing undoubtedly forms a unity, and Mr. Blunden has brought an obviously thorough knowledge to bear upon it. With what might be called efficient camera-work, with an accu- mulation of detail, with a patient delineation of the most various types—satyrs, tomboys, drunks, peeping Toms, cunning old business women and hard-headed young ones ; old Joseph McKissock who often wanted to strangle his wife but could not because lie had no thumbs ; Loring the Communist who was capable of proposing to abolish women " when the revolu- tion comes "—he has managed to reduce " promiscuous rela- tions " to a pattern. Realist and impressionist' byttirng; hi$ ;" interests -ranging from _adolescent Itatasies--to--nieeties.

snobbery, verging often on caricature, sometimes slightly forcing the ironies of circumstance,, and indulging rather too often an interest in lingerie, he has produced as complete and entertaining a picture of an Australian Main Street as anybody could wish for, a story of " smug savagery " and a wretched lack of civilisation in an outpost of Empire.

From Warsaw to Hobbleton, from Hobbleton to Wessex, where Mr. Henry Williamson takes us beneath the surface, not of village life but of river and ocean, and convinces us. that there is a good deal to be said for being a scaleless biped. Behind this book, we are told, " lies half a !Hanle of close and patient study, pursued with an, almost mystical zeal : imagination lighting common things . . . Mr. Williamson lives beside a river ; at the bottom of his garden is a home-made hatchery in which he has been hatching salmon for many years, and he has spent over five thousand hours observing the habits of fish . ."

The question at once arises whether for our part we should , not learn the habits of fish either from a textbook or by similarly peering into a hatchery instead of front a novel, but whether or no Mr. Williamson exhibits a " mystical zeal " he succeeds in making the private life of a salmon seem very eventful and rather dreadful. I am afraid that where his readers are concerned the smoothest mayonnaise, the tenderest lettuce leaves, the most succulent cucumber will never be able to restore to a helping of sahnon its lost innocence. Consider, for instance,. Salar's depressing encounter with Petromyzon the lamprey, who lacked jaws, ribs, or bones, had a single nostril at the top of his head, and " resembled the artificial rubber thing escaped from the fisherman's

hook, magnified, discoloured, sunk in living slovenliness;, animated waste-product of the spirit of life." When

Petromyzon caught sight ,of Saler, the thick soft lips of his sucker mouth began to work over his thorn-like teeth, and

he clamped himself to the salmon's side and " began to rasp away and swallow skin and curd' and flesh." -Butt–

enough : let it be said that without becoming unduly anthroPornerPhic, Mr. Williamson reveals some of the horrid things that happen in a' pleasant-looking stream, that he is !" well able to enter into the feelings of a fish on or off a hook, .- and that this book is likely to quicken the imaginations of fishermen and amateur naturalists.

Having learnt .that it is knot at all nice to be a salmon,. or a' frustrated young man in an Australian township, or an ill-treated boy in a Polish ghetto, let us see what Herr Reinhold Conrad Muschler can do for us. Alas, he is a biographer and botanist who has forsaken memoirs and monocotyledons and embarked on at-light of fancy. Naturally one's worst suspicions are aroused by the information that One Unknown has been a best seller in Germany, for the present regime in that country has scarcely shown itself the nurse of a free culture. Does Herr Mumbler give us a taste of the new paganism or tell of blood-drinking from skulls ?

Not at all : he only offers us a wretched, anaemic, Aryan. little anecdote dragged out through 80 pages of twittering insipidity. This anecdote has been " inspired " by the,

death mask known as L'Ineonnue de la Seine, the beautiful and enigmatic face of a young girl. Herr Muschler springs

on us a provincial middle-class French girl with no ties, some means, and " artistic leanings." He manufactures a clumsyi

situation in Marseilles which brings her . in touch with an English diplomat, the most shadowy of milords, who is seeing

off his fiancee and then motors Madeleine vaguely off into the country. " Shall we drive to Arles tomorrow ? " he ask.s her. " From there .we can visit the strange dead cities wrapped in the queer magic of the Camargue, looking as though they lay beneath a spell." Madeleine, also lying beneath a spell, admires the scenery : " Look . . . there, on the

left---sheep," she cried, " such lots of sheep 1" Finally they arrive in Paris, where nothing whatever happens, until Lord Hendon goes away and. the -still pure half-wit hops into the river, or rather " steps out bravely through the starry enchant- ment." It is a positive relief when the " dark. water " closes, over her head. All this is no doubt meant to be an idyll, an exquisite suggestion of first love renounced and a young life,iacrificed to a. dream. Then smile ofsaliteonnue remains enigmatic.