Fiction

BY GRAHAM GREENE

bias. MILLER'S novel has won the Pulitzer Prize for 1934 ; the prize-giving has even less literary significance than our own Hawthornden high-jinks at the Aeolian Hall, but it has a good deal of psychological interest. The terms of the

award ensure that the Pulitzer Prize book depicts America as America would like to appear ; small wonder then if the

latest prize winner finds it necessary to go back for her subject to a period before the Civil War and writes of the simple pioneer rather than of the simple gunman. One can imagine a special Pulitzer technique emerging : corre-

spondence courses which ensure an adequate idealism, the right note of wistfulness and quietude. For the novelist, if he is to win the Pulitzer Prize, must not be concerned with historical or psychological truth ; he must have the right bedside manner ; he is ministering to a deep uneasiness in the American character, he has " dreams to sell," life is being rearranged for the tired magnates of Wall Street and Detroit.

Even nature is modified, until the Georgia wilderness, Mrs. Miller's scene, hums with the high-minded activity of a bird sanctuary :

Her mother had brought her three settings of eggs—one of geese, long and white ; one of guineas, small, speckled, curious- looking, like bird eggs ; and one of chickens. Already Cean's red hen was huddled over the twenty guinea eggs in a nest of pine straw under the house by the chimney. Cean would set the goose eggs under the hen that was laying under the dead log by the wash- trough. The chicken eggs could go under the nest by the back step. Soon her yard would be full of little things running about."

Lamb in His Bosom may possibly appeal to nature lovers and bird watchers. The laying habits of the hen under the dead log, for all I know, may be adequately rendered ; as a study of human beings the novel is sentimental, bogus, horribly

embarrassing. Again and again one is reminded of a coy school mistress demonstrating sex with flowers. " The little

unknown thing was growing within her as suddenly and softly as the first touch of spring on the maples. It 'was putting out its hidden, watery roots as simply and surely as little cypresses take root in a stretch of swamp water away off

yonder." No attempt whatever is made to convey the simplicity of the characters : a few words of dialect do not disguise the falseness of the thoughts credited to these people.

She was like to lose her mind, for she kept thinking that breaths were like threads on a mighty loom, drawn tight, woven among one another, broken singly as each life reaches its frayed or short-cut ending." One might have believed, remembering Freckles and The Girl of the Limberlost, that this type of novel was peculiarly American, and represented a peculiarly American day-dream, if Mr. Baldwin had not tardily but unnecessarily discovered for us the novels of Mary Webb.

Mr. eapers Hordubal is quite another affair, a cynical, amusing, rather grim study of peasant life. Mr. (apek has not been content with the difficulty of creating any simple character—a character generally lives in his subtleties (Strether in his unexpected passion for the Old World and its corruption, Moll Flanders in her domesticity, Bloom in his paternal love of Dedalus) ; he has increased the difficulty by using the minds of the Slavonic peasants as his camera eye. None of his story is outside their slow deliberate range. He never, as Mrs. Miller does, betrays his characters into thoughts beyond their range, and he never betrays his

own method ; the author's view can only be detected in his choice of situation, in the marshalling of his absurd lawyers and policemen and witnesses in a heartlessly funny trial scene. Hordubal returns to his wife and farm after eight years' absence in America. His wife has taken a lover and his fields have been sold to buy horses for breeding. He ]mows nothing of horses, he finds himself in humiliating dependence on the hired hand who is his wife's lover. At last they murder him, crudely, without the skill to escape detection. It is a study of savage clumsiness, of unrealized motives, of life on the outer rim of reason ; little more than a tante, with no pretences to tragedy and the barest appeal to the emotion of pity, it arouses admiration perhaps more for what it avoids than for what it contains, for its com- plete contrast with the bird sanctuary, sower of the seed school. We have become accustomed, in spite of the stories of Mau- passant, to associate the land with a lyrical nostalgia ; it has become the home of the ill-adjusted. One is grateful in Hordubal for the mere absence of the poetic, for the sense of dull men doing a dull job in stony fields, the quarrels at night in the inn and the unsleeping curiosity of neighbours.

The World Went Mad attempts to give a wide picture of the War years by quick cinematographic flashes : the old cricket- ing clergyman locked out of Lord's ; the Arabs looting the dead ; the trial of Casement ; the riots in Liverpool ; child- birth and night in the trenches. I had seen it attacked with peculiar 'wrongheadedness by a reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement because the view of the War which it presents is one-sided. This War is never heroic ; the best qualities which emerge under its influence are patience and indifference. But I cannot see that the justice or injustice of Mr. Brophy's view has anything to do with the artistic value of his novel. When Swift wrote of the Yahoos that they were " cunning, malicious, treacherous and revengeful . . . of a cowardly spirit, and by consequence, insolent, abject and cruel," he might have been criticized on the same grounds with equal complacency. The novelist is not in the position of a chair- man at a debate : it is not his business to be impartial, but to present life as he sees it. In this Mr. Brophy is to my mind successful : his irony is all the better for its lack of moral indignation, its quiet acceptance of crookedness, and there is imaginative depth in such episodes as Casement's trial watched by the sick law student, and the departure of the night bombers.

Any dissatisfaction one feels, is, I think, a dissatisfaction with his method. Perhaps the novel should have consisted of entirely unrelated episodes (linked only by Mr. Brophy's ingenious use of a film device), with time and the change of spirit through the years providing the necessary pattern, or perhaps they should have been more closely conditioned by the main characters of Bartholomew Crellin and his family. " The fortunes of the Crellins," Mr. Brophy writes, " were bound up with the whole complicated and often obscure pattern of life during the War. I could not render a faithful account of my chief characters unless I took into consideration all kinds of events, minor as well as major, which influenced them, often without their being aware of it." But it is not easy to understand how some of these episodes can have influenced the Crellin family at all. The Crellins indeed are the least satisfactory characters in a highly intelligent novel. The coincidence by which the life of Crellin's son-in-law is saved by Crellin's illegitimate German son is melodramatic. It is as if Mr. Brophy had been unable to accept whole- heartedly his own episodic method and had made an un- successful attempt to link too many of them into a conven- tional story.

Mr. Richard Oke's fantasy has, as its not very original subject, the deification by a barbaric race of an elderly Englishwoman. The machinery is rather clumsy. Mrs. Yarlove's body lies in a cataleptic trance in her Midland home, while in the brain proceeds her curious career among the Copperskins. She is accepted as a goddess, she tries to intro- duce Christian marriage and abolish slavery, and she is at last defeated by a sceptical chief and his militarist party. The tone is faintly, very faintly, satirical, the style much too decorative : the pathos and excitement of the war between the Victorian idea of progress and the modern idea of fascism, the genuine pessimism of the theme is too often subordinated to the interests of dress designing. One is reminded of an over-produced play : how the elaborate costumes, the German lighting, the specially composed music obscure the idea which has set all those stages revolving : " the slow- grown and bitter conviction that a man, if he would possess happiness, must be fired by the ideals, and imbued with the superstitions, of his tribe and generation."