Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER The Head of the Firm. By Hjalmar Bergman. Translated 4y Elizabeth Sprigge and Claude Napier. Inticduction by Dr. R. G. Berg. (Allen and Unwin. 7s.6d.) An 'Ordinary Life. By kart)! Capek. Trarialate by Maud R. Weatherall. (Allen and Unwin. 7s. 6d.) Times Like These. By Gwyn Jones. (Gollanez. 7s. 6d.) The Darkling Plain. By Harold Ford Rossetti: (Constable. 7s. 6d.)

HJA I.MAR BERGMAN, we learn from Dr. Berg's introduction to The Head of the Firm, died in 1931. Although only in

his forties he had written 21 novels, 13 plays, two books of fairy tales, and many short stories.. He. had also oecupied himself in reading Pickwick ten times. He ts said to have had gifts rare among Swedish writers ; he grew famous and popular but " bewildered and frightened people." No wonder, for he took " a melancholy view of the mutability and cruelty of life, of mankind's folly and stubborn defiance. We are born human beings but we change into monsters,' he once wrote. . . . Burlesque and irony, freakishness and grace, wide vision, despondency and grave pathos characterise his later work." I began The Head of the Firm with some apprehension that a heavy Nordic hand might have been attempting a light touch, and that the result might be like a soufflé made with suet, or the progress of a hippopotamus with springs attached to its feet. What I actually found was an odd book in which a Dickensian influence is certainly discernible, a book whose melancholy, always underlying and often patent, is only emphasised by the " freakishness " of some parts of it. It is not a book for those who like straight narrative or the curt dialogue and frequent punches in the jaw which in some quarters are taken as evidence that American fiction is more alive than European fiction. Bergman mingled gloom and caricature according to a recipe of his own. The head of the-firm was IngebOrg Balr.iir, and the firm was an old-established millinery business in Stockholm. We see her losing her grip on emmereial and domestic matters, and falling in love with her prospective son-in-law, Louis de Lorehe : we see the causes and effect of " spring unrest, summer joy, autumn melancholy, winter wisdom." It was a feat to describe Ingeborg's situation without letting us in for a mass of tedious realistic detail. You never know which way Bergman is going to turn next, but his digressions are always worth following : there is a brilliant passage on what peasants think of town-dwellers who visit the country, and what town-dwellers feel there. He has a gift that second-rate writers never have, the gift of making fresh generalisations.

" It is the worst of poverty that even in well-bred people it blunts the sense of what is fitting " ; or " Every completed chain of rational actions ends with a superstition " ; or,

" This too exacting love is the driving force in huinan develop- ment. That man was certainly in love who first hit upon the queer and preposterous idea that mankind ought. to be good. This invent-ion of over-exacting love has meant more for humanity than all the discoveries of science put together. That great and in truth far too exacting lover, Christ, created modern society, which at a very sluggish, groping and uncertain pace attempts to realise a part of his ideal."

Sometimes these generalisations seem to verge on what the Japanese call " dangerous thoughts," thoughtS full of doubt and disillusionment. For instance

" Our day is over . . We shout about progress and development v: ay much as children who want to he allowed to stay up a little longer cry out :hat they have forgotten to leard their lessons . . We're too tired now to learn anything new. Let us spend our last hours in peace, pilling with our mechanical toys, our aeroplanes, our wireless, our increasing duration of life (as if there were not enough old men), our rapid communications (as if we shouldn't do just as well to stay still), our material civilisation, our increase of population (as if there were not already too many of us) . . . Nor lot us forget the glittering, bewildering and capricious toy which has been entertaining us so gallantly for thousands of years—love. But let it be an unexacting love. For our moral imagination has become extinct."

Those words are put into the mouth of Louis de Lorche, a contemporary young man.

" While hundreds and thousands of prophets in constantly increasing hosts proclaim their several doctrines to mankind and scourge it each with his scourge, mankind, perplexed and spent with weariness, has sought rest in the slack water which may be called cynicism or tolerance or indifference. One thing may be as good as in-other. Reducii all standards, and the feat of living bet-oft-Les easier."-

If Louis-was unexacting because he was weak, Ingeborg -was unexacting because she was strong. Perhaps she stands for duty and love and Louig' for irrational impulse.

A relationship between duty and irrational impulse may also be said to be the subject of An. OrdinaryLife, but in this

case inside-a single individual. A stationmaster-sits down to write the 'story of his life. Equipped with all the talent of Karel t apek, he makes it goOd job of it, and tells a pleasant story—reminiscences of childhood as the son of a joiner,

schooldays, life as a student in Prague, early days in the service of the railWays, marriage, and so on. Bid in the middle of it lie becomes suddenly endowed with all the insight of Karel Capek and discovers that " his apparently respectable and conventional life contains treacherous undercurrents," and that his autobiography lacks important parts, perhaps. the most important parts, of the truth. " It was an ordinary life,"_ he saysbut was it ? A man cannot speakto himself with one voice, for he " contains multitudes." The station- master turns psycho-analytical. Had not the good worker, the dutiful public servant, also been " a small person who wanted to be bigger " ? What was the truth about his feelings towards his father and mother, and hoW had those feelings

influenced him? Was there not a hypochondriac self inter- mingled with the ordinary, happy man -arid' "the- One with

elbows who wanted to scramble Had not the virtuous

man been depraved for life at-eight yeir&old by tasting the delight of evil " ? Certainly the ordiriarY -man was the strongest and most persistent, -jeit- a beast of burden, and so

lie was myself oftenest and longest." _ And what is the point,

the moral, of all this ? The point is. that .tre do..ncit respect the stationmaster less for knowing so much about hinf : on the contrary, we recognise our kinship with him-; he is not just a uniform and a moustache; an 'utterer of &Cic1-.inorning,s, but an ordinary life built up in spite. of, and with the aid of irrational impulses. He has a pist,:lie lia.s depths, lie is linked

up with other people. Each of us contains "countlesapos‘ risible ones."

" Even you could be what the other is, you could Ix)gentleman, or a beggar, or a day labourer stripped to the Waist ; " Aid could b that potter, or that baker, or that father of nine children smeared with jam from ear to ear. You are ALL THAT because in you there are various possibilities . . . if you search you will see in everyone a fragment of yourself, and then you will recognise with amazement in him your real neighbour . . . Whoever you are, you -are my innumerable self . . . The more people I leans to know -in their lives the more my own will be fulfilled . . . "

What is this realisation of the plurality of the individual but a simple, perhaps even a slightly obvious, -triumph of imagination And now for a _book which takes us right. away from the speculative level to that cif ordinary-story-telling: Times Like These is a much better book than Mr. dwyn Jones's first novel, which was about Richard Savage : it seems to have his heart in it as well as his head. Neither in his choice of subject nor in his method does he break any new ground. He writes of a depressed area in South Wales before, during and after the General Strike, and is principally. concerned to tell us what people there are like and what they have to put up with. He succeeds very well. The inhabitants of Jenkinstown are

recognisably- human. Mr. -Jones invites sympathy with them by setting forth their touching domesticities as well as the frightful odds against which they have co Struggle' for an existence—" at the best a life of denial and - poverty, at the worst degradation." If you or I were Mr. Jones we might well

be far more bitter and doginatic than he kis story is full of human kindness but could not have been cheerful. " Bah," says an old collier, " is one. thing that- do count ; death is another thing that do count. Times like these., everything:that

do lie between um don't seem to matter at alt" And " Indeed to God," says his son, " what- are we in the ,world-for ? Every-

thing do seem so useless, somehow." -

Mr. Rossetti's novel begins well and has its points, but- his account of the muddled lOve affairs of .Middle class young people, though no doubt: faithful enOug6,4s. laaing in elan,.