Fiction

By PETER BURRA

Nlghtwood. By Djuna Barnes. (Faber and Faber. 10s. 6d.) Foster-Girl. By John Metcalfe. (Constable. 8s. 6d.)

Song of Friendship. By Bernhard .KeHermann. Translated by G. D. Gribble. (Bodley Head. 8s. Cid.) Somewhere in Silence. By Patrick Brand. (Bles. 7s. 6d:) Level Crossing. By Phyllis Bottome. (Bodley Head. 7s. 6d.) Cross-Double-Cross. By Lewis Masefield. (Putnam. 7s. 6d..) Two Exiles. By Julian Hall. (Seeker, 7s. 6d.)

Wrrn Nightwood it is clear that • a new writer. of genuine importance has made herself known to us. It would be more than rash on the evidence of one book to try to place Miss Barnes in the contemporary 'scene; but one can safely say that she belongs temperamentally to the elder generation of living _writers who present life in its essential nakedness and seeming hopelessness, rather than to the younger ones who are bravely trying • to dress it up in a coloured shirt. " Life itself," wherever it may be hidden, has certainly no more clothes to bless itself with than a living creature at birth, and most novelists are little better than fashionable tailors.' Nightwood is a completely undreSsed book. A grim, sordid, and depressing story, it will be called. That is necessarily the side of the picture that will catch most atten- tion, and there will not be wanting peisons to deplore it' as unhealthy. But to return to this book after reading the rest of this, week's list.ha...s been like coining out of the stale atmosphere of a windowless room, where millions have been scribbling over each others' shoulders for generations, into a fresh mountain wind.

" Must I, perchance," cries the drunken Irish doctor of the story, " like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers ? " Miss Barnes has certainly taken every precaution against our coming to any con- clusions too readily. Her characters are startling, but few ; her story is startling, but easily followed. But the force and brilliance and flow of language in which she discusses it from all sides prevent one stopping at any one point to declare that here, finally, the thing is assessed. There is no final assessment and the story barely ends. The crux of the matter is the hopeless love of Nora Flood for Robin Vote, a .strange androgynous character .who has. already left her husband Baron Volkbein after bearing him a child, and is constitutionally incapable of remaining faithful to anybody. One recognises, if only by reference to the remaining books reviewed on this page, that the very excess of fiction his left the plain account of normal life so pointless for a writer whose purposes are so searching as Miss Barnes's, that she must torture it and distort it, and pursue it down, its most abnornial course to get anything out of it at all. Human pas-

sions, it was once generally agreed, ultimately justify them- selves in the propagation and continuation of the human race. Miss Barnes's helpless lovers play with dolls ; and what she offers us to contrast with their barrenness is an extremely witty por- trait of a neurasthenic Jewish Baron, Felix Volkbein, who suffers an obsession about continuing his race into the future that is based on a completely spurious obsession with his fictitious title and 'a fictitious past. Robin- provides him with his son and it is cretinous. So much for normal love with its ulterior motives. In the light of this, Nora's love for Robin appears as the purest, most sexless passion, with no object more than itself, a kind of ideal picture of the human' passion in its struggle for satisfaction, in which the Ewig Weibliche plays its part with exceptional appropriateness. It .recalls the anonymous passions. and yearnings for loves lost or never. won which arc celebrated in The Waves. Yet the characters

of Nighiwood are complete, rare and astonishing individuals,

every . one of them carved out in words with genius. The story is told swiftly and with immense vigour, while common- place incidents and the repartee of salon or café are absorbed into the style. with perfect .riptness. The action is twice interrupted by long dialogues between Nora and the--Irish doctor who is a kind of chorus in the book, but also important. to the action, and the most original and witty invention of

all. Their .discussion of Robin's night-wanderings and Nora's love is the most sustained piece of imaginative prose we have had since The Waves.

One cannot recommend Nightwood indiscriminately to the novel-reading public any more than one can describe it plainly as a novel. But almost everything else in this list is the usual comfortable version of normal existence, where nature has a nice motive in every passion. The- players have their ups and downs, it is true, but we are allowed to remain on the level without being required to disturb our

posture or rearrange our way of thinking. That does not quite fairly account for everything in Foster-Girl, which is an elaborate and conscientious history of the natural child of an

unfortunate chorus-girl, who is dragged up and down from one level to another, and upon whom is lavished all the coolly calculated pathos which is well earned by this least of creatures.

Mr. Metcalfe 'certainly manages to evoke some wonderfully varied atmospheres of natural horror ; and he contrives various scenes and situations with a warmth of emotion which belongs to an older tradition of story-telling.

The one thing which Song of Friendship emphatically never succeeds in doing is to " sing." It just chatters its 500 pages away in bland contempt for anything but the simplest Aryan sentiments. Hermann returns from the war with four devoted friends—we take the author's word for their devotion—to build up his „farm from ruins, in the face of poverty and many picturesque obstacles. Need you 'ask if they are at last wonderfully successful ? You need not ; for you are told so resoundingly in the very first words of the book ; and apart from that initial assistance it is also clear-within a few more sentences that here we have a modern Swiss Family Robinson. It says much for the state of mind we have been worked into, that it is almost impossible to avoid reading the book as an idyllic fable in praise of a Four-years' Plan, although there is not a word of politics in it. It is very easy reading, with some entertainment to be had out of the minor characters who are only there to amuse. The author himself seems to have found Hermann too dull to cope with, for he-drops right out of the middle of the book, and with him goes the last of the theme of friendship, which never looked like being more than a little ,sentimentalising over accidental attachments. There is a nice scandalous small-town widow who wears all her frustrations well sewn on to her ileeve,"itrid after worming her way into the house of an old misanthrope despoils him of his silver and linen. Surely the author must somehow have forgotten her too ? It is intolerable if she was really allowed to get away with it. Wickedness may go un- punished in such a book as Nightwood, and the book be some- how the richer for it ; but in a world of such small and fixed values as this it must be utterly and absolutely routed by the last page or the poor little world will be split right through. What is the point of five splendid youths successfully accom- plishing their purposes, if an intriguing widow is allowed to accomplish hers as well ? This is a grave case of sabotage by an author against his own book.

Somewhere in Silence seems to me to be a sincere and unpretentious discussion of an interesting theme. By the chance of narrating the events of his life plainly in a book, a young Yorkshire fisherman in Icelandic waters is brought into contact with the semi-literary world of Chelsea. His impact upon that world, and attempt to adapt himself to it, ending in tragedy and an inevitable return to his own life, is told effectively, with a few outstandingly good scenes.

Level Crossing pretends to be concerned with problems of character and experience, but it is hard to believe that these mattered half so much to the writer as the -driunatic (in one scene, crudely melodramatic) gangster story, which leaves the heroine in a simple dilemma, that is still more easily solved for her. Cross-Double-Cross is such an odd pastiche of a story (armament-firms, &c.) that it hardly holds together even as a story, and the characters themselves are pastiches. But there are some entertainingly fantastic moments ; and perhaps if Broadcasting House is stormed often enough in fiction, and Dictators encouraged to get some of their strutting done on paper, it may take the wind out of reality's beastly sails. Two Exiles describes the arrival and first appearance in England of a distinguished actress exiled from Germany. The entire cast is so slender a disguise of well-known figures in the theatrical world that it hardly invites more attention than that which we usually give to the gossip-column—unless it is

to pay- a tribute to the discretion of the reporters - -