Fiction

By BONAMY DOBREE THE danger of writing a social satire, such as Mr. Horgan has attempted in The Fault of Angels, is that outside your own social milieu you may be misunderstood ; because it is necessary—at least, if you are writing a novel—to oppose your own values to those that you satirize. Thus, if people do not share yoUr values, it is almost impossible for them to knomF where they are meant to stop feeling superior, and what values they are to accept.- No doubt for Americans there is no difficulty in seeing which is satire and which is truth, but it would be interesting to see where exactly—or, rather, in how

many places—people on this side of the Atlantic would draw the line. All the time one asks one's self, " Ant I being stupid, or am I being too subtle ? " There are moments when One thinks the whole book is satire, that every figure is being held up to social ridicule :

" Mr. Denson and Blanche Badger, each in characteristic ways, represented the best that America has to offer in individuals. There was remarkably little nonsense about either of them. They both had vigorous minds and .striking means of expression ; Mr. Ganson in his masculine creation of that tremendous fortune, with its corollary benefits ; Blanche in her charmingly ordered life, with its feminine creations of her lovely house, her fine books, her pic- tures, her gowns, her secure establishment against charlatanry which was still the earnest of the national adolescence. They wore both competent to a great degree. . . ."

Or again:

" The poised bows bit. their strings. The cymbals, the brasses, the kettle-drums, stated the music. It was a concert of great style and beauty."

We smile ; we prepare ourselves to be amused. But soon it appears that this is what Mr. Horgan takes seriously, as he

does his impossibly irritating Russian heroine (" one of the most entrancingly lovely women that fiction has produced," according to the Philadelphia Record), who tries to bring heart

to the coldness of an American provincial town. It is, in fact, a 'disguised " uplift " novel : its interest for us lies in the fact that all unconsciously it reveals a portion of American values.

And that is something, as perhaps the fact that it is partly

'fantasy is something, though fantasy. without some implied value is useless, as one can see from Miss Bigland's Gingerbread House, which deals with a family; " half-Irish, half-Russian," and reads like a 'kind of Co2thlant Nymph at third remove. It

is true that there are " good " people in this book, and " bad " people, and that different ways of life are indicated, but we are not made to feel that there is any philosophic background to the Story Miss Bigland has to tell us. Perhaps this is because the people throughout seem so obviously fabricated ; they are novelistic as some stage characters are purely stagey. One cannot really ascribe any meaning to puppets, however

charming they may be, unlesS the author creates a whole world, as Balzac did, one which has a curious relation to the real world ; or unless they arc-made consummately-delightful, a task which requires great artistry.

But then, on the other hand, " reality " itself is no good unless some issue seems to be involved, and this effect can be produced either by the Subject-matter being some important issue, or life being made to assume some pattern. In Strap- Hangers Miss James takes the lives of several people, whose

sole reason for existing together in a book is that they travel by the same tube train. The book is a 'good piece of realism,

it is competently written, we believe- that what we are told is true, sometimes we are moved : but the final effect is small,

because the book has no pattern, except the pattern that could not be helped. Nothing, therefore, is arranged within ourselves ; and is it not the point of form in a book that our emotions are arranged in a certain way by the structure, and that this in turn sets up a train of thought, or brooding ?

Without form this process is not set up, and the book does not give us the 'feeling of mattering. • For one reason or the other it can be said of the books so far mentioned that they do not matter, although the last is interesting.

It is different with Herr Zweig's De Viten& Goes Home, as one would expect from the author of Sergeant Grischa ; and when one sees that it is translated by Mr. Erie Sutton, one picks it up with a certain confidence. Not that this is altogether a good novel, but, at least, it is about something of great importance to a number of people, and its form causes a train of thought to be set up in ourselves. The theme is the Jews in Palestine at the present day, though the story is of " the troubles " a couple of years ago. Herr Zweig obviously knows what he is talking about, and can penetrate to the passions that animate his people. Since the book is Mainly concerned with the internecine struggles of the Jews ---the old religious school against the Zionists with their apparently assimilable communistic elements, we hear little about the Arabs. We cannot say' that they are misrepre- sented, only that they are, to all intents and purposes, ignored, except as physical facts, men who fight against the Jews. The book, however, really is a novel, not a history (except for one rather unfortunate chapter which reads like a journalistic résumé of events), in which the people are imaginatively grasped and thus real, and the whole is supported by an attitude towards life. It is, perhaps, a pity that the issues should hive been confused by making De Vriendt homosexual, for although personal idiosyncrasies do play a part in history, and may even as in this book light the spark which causes the explosion, the main theme of the book is the modem group struggle, the question as to whether at certain times justice is important, or whether there is a social process going on in which the individual hardly counts at all.. De Vriendt, the old orthodox Jew, is murdered by a young Zionist, but suspicion falling on the Arabs, the whole ghastly business of pogrom and anti-pogrom, is started.

Herr Zweig manages his setting and his tumultuously seething population extremely well. The book is nothing if not vivid and convincing, and moreover, except as regards the Arabs as already stated, he appears to be scrupulously fair : one can easily forgive him his mild sarcasms against the administration, especially as he sympathizes with its difli- eulties. He takes us over a good deal of Palestine, which he describes very well, and makes us feel as well as see the various kinds of life developing in the different sorts of Jewish colonies ; and though he omits the material ugliness which occurs there as well as in other hastily grown unplanned communities, this is made up for by his putting us in touch with different kinds of feeling. But, one must insist, there is more than the local problem in his theme : what he talks about, what he deals with through the emotions of his Characters matters to all:of us in various forms, for we are iii contact with the. primitive struggles which though at the moment disguised here, are nevertheless beneath the surface: In short, Herr Zweig's book, besides being a very good story; does actually matter.

And so, in a lesser degree, does Mrs. Van Ammers-Kiiller's. Those who remember her excellent The Rebel Generation. will turn readily to hear more about the Cornfelt family. But No Surrender does not, like the earlier book, deal with many branches and generations, even if the whole family is intro- duce& to us at old Mrs. Wiseman's ninetieth birthday party, though its theme is still the emancipation of women. In this book, Joyce, the orphaned daughter of the one who went to South Africa, and who lives with her Aunt 'Okra, comes over to England to stay with her relative Hein, now .Cornfelt, and an Englishman with a rich English wife. Here also-she is iuj emancipation " circles, but of the drawing-room variety: the atmosphere of which is tempered and made exciting by the verY anti-feminiSt son: • Thomas. But Joyce gets into touch with the militant groups, who smashed windows; raided the Commons, underwent the hunger-strike, and so on; and lands in prison. The Cornfelts cast her out, but her Aunt Clara comes to her support until she falls off a roof, to which she had fled after a demonstration, and is killed. The issue may seem judged by now, but it is well to be reminded of what happened, and it is still important, because the passions are still there, are, indeed, ineradicable : so in a sense the novel, (very readable and exciting) does deal with. a .Jiving issue. - •