FICTION
Wickford Point. By John P Marquand. (Robert Hale.
8s. 6d.)
THis reviewer can remember no American novel since The Great Gatsby which he has read with so much delight as Wickford Point. A prominent novelist has compared Mr. Marquand—author of the Mr. Moto books—with the young Henry James ; he doesn't carry those intellectual guns, but he has, as Mr. Scott Fitzgerald had, an airy light-fingered style with a range that extends, say, from the region of Mr. Thurber and the late Clarence Day to that of Mr. Hemingway, and added to this a gift of quite savage literary satire. The humorous, the pathetic, even the sinister flow with extraordinary ease through the careful paragraphs. This is one of the few civilised books to come out of the States for a great many years. The Italian gangster, the half-witted farm hand, the Jewish agitator, lecherous old tobacco growers, sub-machine guns, lynchings, a rape on the cornhusks—these are the sources of a whole literature for which we can find comparisons only in the Jacobean age. Perhaps at that date (to compare great things with small) the gentler plays of Fletcher came with the same relief.
It is hard to describe Wickford Point without giving the idea that it is just another of those tedious family chronicles— for certainly the narrator (like Mr. Marquand himself, a popular writer for the magazines) does go back more than one generation in conveying the odd drifting life of the Brill family at Wickford Point. Out of touch with contemporary life, living on the tiresome literary reputation of John Brill, the Wickford Sage, a poet of the Concord school, the family perform, as it were, in private, all talking at once as though they were in a Theatre Guild play—Cousin Clothilde with her overdrafts and her weary irrelevancies ; Bella, sexual and acquisitive and unscrupulous ; Harry, the snob, who is always meeting the right people with an eye for a job suited to a Brill ; Syd, who has stomach-ache and hopes one day to invent something ; Mary, whom Bella robs automatically of her men ; and the various aunts who die off leaving an accumulation of memories behind. The narrator, Jim Calder, is only a connexion of the Sage : he feels the pull of the Point, but never quite surrenders ; he gets away to France in 1917, then to General Feng and the Chinese wars, to the pulp magazines and the literary racket, but he always returns, drawn by memories of his childhood at Wickford, by the helplessness and fatuity of Cousin Clothilde, by the scent of escape. He compares the Point to " a floating island that had once been solidly attached to the mainland. I can see it being severed from realities when I was still very young, and drifting off, a self-contained entity, into a misty sea. It was a land almost entirely sufficient unto itself, and governed by the untutored thoughts of women." There are no bread- winners and no pressure of economic necessity : he alone has the right knowledge to deal with the blackmailer, Howard Berg, whom Bella has casually double-crossed, but he has to stand hopelessly by when Allen Southby, a Harvard don and a successful critic, with his tweeds and his pipe and his tankard of ale and his unbearable complacency, who has decided to. write a really good novel about Wickford Point, w forces his way in and completes the isolation of the Brills, turning the whole scene into a museum piece. Southby—a savage portrait—deserves to live in memory beside 'Mr. Maugham's Alroy Kear.
One would like to quote at great length from this novel: the vivid, accurate and witty summings-up—" The trouble at Wickford Point was that everybody developed a personality.
In a patriarchal system, if you didn't pay the help enough, they always turned into characters " : " Divorce is like a major operation. You think you are all right and then you have a sinking spell. He was standing there under the lights, and there was nothing much that anyone could do about it. It was like the ending of a story which no editor would want to buy "; the descriptive sense which can turn with ease from the bare spring trees, the wood-smoke and lamp-light and sandy, unmade roads of the Point to the modern scene and use con- temporary images with some of the force of minor poetry- " The South Station had changed. It was as new and shiny and as stream-lined as modern diplomacy. It made you think of five-point programmes, of candid cameras, of leftists and rightists, and of the People's Front—in fact, of all those elements that had cropped up to change the life one used to know."
I have forgotten—under pressure of space—to mention that Wickford Point is very funny. So is Parole D'Honneur, the journal, written with a superb aristocratic impertinence, of an Austrian Baron in the last war. Candide comes immediately to mind—the violent scene, the defeat on the Piave, the hideous experiences of a prisoner marched back and forth through Italy while men fall sick of Spanish 'flu and are piled three deep on wagons to die, are described in the same humorous disinterested terms as Candide's experiences among the Bulgarians, and this Candide, too, has his Cunegonde, an Italian girl whom he takes with him, disguised as a brother officer, to hospital and prison. An amused shrug of the shoulders at the best of all possible worlds, it can stand brilliantly the daunting comparison ; it is Herr Freud's brave reply to twentieth-century civilisation.
Mr. Aldington's story of a war bastard is less cool, more angry. He writes roughly, holding the reader—whom he calls " you "—firmly by the lapel and sometimes shaking him a little. This is one of his most readable books (it is important perhaps in these days to note that it, too, is often very funny). Nature is heard, after one of David Norris's youthful illnesses, threatening the child, " So you're determined to live? Very well, you shall, and just see how you like it," and something of that savage threat gives the book power : its best passages are built of brick and grime and the smell of gasometers. The plot hardly matters—the kindly ineffective grandparents who make the boy into a rent collector : David's poverty in London after their death and his attempts to become a biologist : his final appeal to his father's father, and the spell of wealth and enormous promise on the Riviera which is irrelevantly broken by his grandfather's careless and intestate death. This is the story of life doing things to you, and it would have been better if the author had intruded less and had allowed us to draw our own conclusions.
Mr. Halward in his first novel has done a difficult thing extremely well. A great many novels were at one time written with the sub-title, " A Simple Story," but it was seldom long before their authors gave up the hard discipline of simplicity and fell back on plots. Mr. Halward calls his novel " A Love Story," and that is all it is : Gus, a lorry driver, meets Ida, a factory girl, at a dance hall ; she dislikes him at first, but he wears down her resistance and they marry : Gus loses his job, Ida gets a baby, Gus finds another job. The clear bare writing, the confidence of the dialogue, the authority with which minor people are touched in, the complete absence of rhetoric are impressive, but more impressive is the unobtrusive progress of the characters from dislike to affection, the development from the off-hand brutality of the opening scene, with its raw badin- age and its immature vulgarity, to tenderness and responsibility.
GRAHAM GREENE.
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