New Look at Old Favourites
A ROUND DOZEN of bumper classical fiction: all for the price of a bad dinner in Greek Street and taking up no more room than a baccarat shoe.
Don't be put off by that smear word, 'tradi- tion': reading books which are more than six weeks old is quite painless, often actually pleasant, and it will give you that something which the other smarty-boots in your set haven't got. Take Tom Brown's Schooldays (Macmillan, St. Martin's Library, 4s.). It has scenes of pas- sion which leave The Fourth of June rotting in the school rears. -And I burst out crying . . . and he sat down by me, and stroked my hand. . . . I don't know what to do, I feel so happy. And it's all owing to you, dear old boy!" and he seized Tom's hand again.' No modern novelist would have dared do it. We can only compare Toni Brown with that master tale of debauchery and embezzlement (not, alas, on this present list) Eric.
What does Thomas Hardy mean to you? Stuffy stories of dreary Dorset? But Thomas could be a real ghoul when he wanted to; and although in The Trumpet-Major (Macmillan, St. Martin's Library, 4s.) he isn't quite at his best, he gives a pretty good idea of how foully they can behave in Wessex when they try.
Galsworthy? (In Chancery: Penguin Modern Classics, 4s.) That old square? But don't forget: the vices, of the Edwardian middle class were much more amusing than our own, if only be- cause they got so guilty and worked up—in JG's world they actually thought it disgraceful to cheat at cards. How's that for quaint? And my
dears, the greed that went on among those Forsytes will strike right into your thieving little hearts.
Ivy Compton-Burnett (A Family and a For- tune: Penguin Modern Classics, 4s. 6d.) is more recent than most of the authors on our list, and I expect some of you have even met her at parties. So you don't need me to tell you that old Ivy's always good for a giggle about some- thing really tasty, infanticide at the least. And as for Katherine Mansfield (Bliss and Other Stories: Penguin Modern Classics, 3s. 6d.), some people nowadays think her tales rather tatty, but for my money she reads as tough and spiteful as a cactus.
So much for England and the English. I'm afraid the Russian selection is rather childish —so hearty. But in Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter and Other Stories (Four Square Clas- sics, 3s. 6d.) you'll find that 'The Queen of Spades' is quite informative about Faro—a game which could make a nice change from chemmy this winter. Then that old hypocrite, Tolstoy: ha was always at his best about horses and soldiers (you really must read his account of a steeplechase in Anna Karenina, even if you can't be bothered with the rest of it), and if you're feeling jaded you'll find that The Cossacks (Four Square Classics, 3s. 6d.) has all the brutal jollity of a boxing booth. Mikhail Lermontov (A Hero of Our Time: Four Square Classics, 3s. 6d.) is somewhat more cool and detached; but the joke was on him in the end, because the pretty duelling scene which he renders here turned out to be a preview, almost to the blow, of the duel in which be himself was killed some time later.
But in the last resort we always come back to the French for titillation, as gratefully as we hurry our hangovers off to our favourite Turkish bath. In The Unknown Sea (Penguin Modern Classics, 3s. 6d.) Francois Mauriac gives us another go of smouldering sin in the Bordeaux country. Eugene Fromentin's Dominique (Four Square Classics, 3s. 6d.), which he wrote in the intervals of being a lawyer and a painter, is about frustration, always so adorable when it's someone else's. And Maupassant's Pierre and Jean (Four Square Classics, 3s. 6d.) will keep you in fits of laughter, because it's about two brothers who get jealous, not only about the same girl, but about Mummy as well.
And so, chums, if you really want to get with it, read the Classics. They're cheap in paperbacks and they've got the lot. For let me tell you, it's ten to one on that the new sensation by Adrian Crutch, out tomorrow and bound in boards at a guinea, will have been lifted from one or another of them.
SIMON RAVEN
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