Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER

Family Curse. By John Hampson. (Chapman and Hall. 7s. &I.) Sixth of June. By Stanley Hopkins. (Cape. 7s. 6d.) Waters of Life and Death. By A. Voronsky. Translated by L. Zarine. (Allen and Unwin. 7s. 6d.) Salka Valka. By Haildor Laxness. Translated by F. H. Lyon. (Allen and Unwin. 88. 6d.) THERE has never been anything flashy about the writings of Mr. John Hampson, who made a name with his first book, Saturday Night at the Greyhound, and is sometimes represented as a sort of Midland regional novelist. His second book, 0 Providence, made it clear that he was not going to aim at any facile smartness, but at a careful and not at all conven- tional delineation of the aspects of life that interest him.

Next came Strip Jack Naked, a touching story of two working- class brothers, in which the quietness of his manner was

particularly marked. And now he has produced his most

ambitious and perhaps his best book. Family Curse, I am happy to notice, is not a family saga or cavalcade. It does not tell us what Granny's granny's reactions were when she heard

that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton, or how Auntie Maud sincerely regretted the Passing of a Great Queen. Mr. Hampson does not peer fondly upwards into the branches of a family tree, but, using a very sharp axe, brings it to earth with a crash.

Old Mrs. Sumerle, the widow of a Birmingham wholesale baker, took a turn for the worse, and most of her seven children received a telegram that said " Mother failing rapidly," and ended with a summons to her bedside. The effect of this news upon them and their behaviour in obeying the call are used by Mr. Hampson as a basic theme, from which he develops, with obvious delight and a mixture of mocking humour and

deep seriousness, the hidden truth about their lives and characters, playing subtly on all the open and secret variations of family feeling. As a technical feat the book is remarkable,

though I can imagine some readers may find that some strings are a little too much harped on ; as a story and a truthful presentation of a side of contemporary life it is irresistible, and if Mr. Hampson gets in some shrewd hits below the belt, that is only because he is engaged in an all-in grappling with the problems he has set himself. Old Mrs. Sumerle

" was a good woman, a very good woman. She went to chapel on Sunday, she made her children go too. . . . She visited the sick, providing that they were respectful and respectable. She neither drank nor smoked, nor would she allow a pack of cards in the house. She professed obedience to her husband, and demanded obedience from her children. Was that not enough ? She was a woman, wife and mother, who put her husband and children before herself. . . . She believed in appearances, in orderliness, in tradition, in ertho- doxy, in ritual, in capitalism, in capital punishment, in success. She was a good woman. 'Don't let mother know : it would upset her.' That was her reward."

How easy it would have been for Mr. Hampson to abandon himself to irony and caricature ; but no, Mrs. Sumerle and all her children are human, they love or hate this, they are afraid of that, and though they have their limitations (there can be no possible mistake about this) they are not figures of fun but of flesh and blood--with the emphasis rather on flesh, for Mr. Hampson is nothing if not honest. The deathbed scene is especially good, with its mixed motives, its terrors and trivialities. Since the family tend to be a mixture of the con- ventional and the petty, the stupid and the pretentious, those members of it who show generous feelings, treat their children sensibly, or have a touch of imagination, shine by contrast. But Mr. Hampson takes us deeper than that, as his prefixed quotation from Mr. Yeats foreshadows : " What if there is always something that lies outside knowledge, outside order ? What if at the moment when knowledge and order seem complete that something appears ? " Among the Sumerles " something " appears in Johnny, the black sheep who is neither black nor a sheep, the artist among the bourgeois, an instrument of " the wild untellable power that lay secret in the heart of man, the power that fluttered and struggled with dim insistence against the rule of organised formal authority . . . the secret enemy."

If the secret enemy expresses itself through Johnny Sumerle by making him an idealist among philistines, a facer of facts among prevaricators, and a homosexual among the much married, in the other three books on my list it is bodied forth

in the idealist as revolutionary. Nathan Fies, the revolution- ary who appears in Sixth of June, makes a pretty and fashion- able foil to the smugness of the well-to-do. This is a book that

bears come resemblance in plan to Mr. Hampson's, for it also deals with the life of a family on a single day. Miss Hopkins's first novel was praised in various quarters for the ease and

maturity with which it was written, and I have no doubt that this second one is just as smooth. ' After Family Curse it

seems a little high-flown, a little too " artistic and straining after what certain kinds of Anieriaans lOve to Call sophistica-

tion, but this does not mean that Miss Hopkins lacks intelligence or what is called a knowledge of the world. She.uses these

qualities to paint a rather depressing picture of people who do not seem to belong there trying to " hold on to the old ways " in Virginia.

In Waters of Life and Death the " Secret enemy " comes very much into the open. This is described as an " autobio-

graphical historical novel that "deals accurately. and from the inside with the birth and growth of the revolutionary movement which culminated in the establishment of the

present U.S.S.R." The author, the son of a priesti:was born in 1884, joined the Bolsheviks in 1904, was imprisoned, sent

to Siberia, and was one of the delegates to the Bolshevik conference at Prague in 1912. In 1917 he became chairman of the Odessa Soviet, and later edited " the foremost literary journal in Russia." As a critic, we are told, " heinsisted on the necessity of good style and appealed for a new revolutionary romanticism." I do not know if this book is an example of " revolutionary romanticism," but it gives an extremely interesting account of a life devoted to the " secret enemy." It succeeds in conveying the." indescribable, haunting flavour of those days, the romance of the first barricades, 'and of en- chanted youth," and, ldoking back at the years of trial• and danger, Voronsky says : _

" My friends and I lived an outcast existence that was devoid of all the personal ' elements Which sweeten the ordin4y round of normal life. Sometimes . . I have a feeling of regret that I had to sacrifice so much. But . . . I know that my sacrifices-were neces- sary ; I know that they were worth making, for I can say with pride that I, too, played my part in the making of a new life, in the birth of a New Russia."

There are glimpses of Lenin and his sister, Gorki, Ordjonikidze,

and other famous persons.' The portrait of Lenin is particularly lifelike :

" And sometimes, perhaps most often, I experienced, in looking at him, a warm, expansive feeling of vitality. _ Everything in- him was extraordinarily quick, tireless, encouraging, stimulating and comforting. He was reshaping the human species . . ."

We know by now that revolutionary fervour, particularly among Russians, is akin to religious fervour, and just as one need not be a Buddhist to admire Oriental art, so one need not be a Communist to admire the force which has been lent to Russian activities by conviction. A considerable part of this book describes, often beautifully, the author's exile in Siberia, and it was there that his conviction of the necessity of socialism seems to have ripened. He sees it as an attempt to

free mankind from the mindless, onward flow of the waters of life and death," thei_blind forces of nature, and to subdue " the organic forces of the instincts-" to reason, so that man-

kind may " at last emerge from the dominion of necessity into the realm of choice and freedom."

Sulks Valka, the second Icelandia novel to appear in this country lately, also has its Bolshevik idealist, who is in the long run mote effective as a philanderer than a reiolutionary.

It seems that there are only 100,000 people- in Iceland,' but they think so highly of Halldor Laxness that they support:him on an annual parliamentary grant. He depicts a woman of

considerable horse-p'o'wer in a laugh environment where it would be useless " to lie oh One's back and wait for roast geese to come flying along with knives and forks on their backs." Into an atmosphere of cad'i heads and poetry, coffee . and hymns, godliness and primitive passion, the " secret enemy " arrives not only in the shape of Bolshevism, but bringing such " foreign notions " as " lirishnamurti, bobbed hair, and influenza." But primitive passion is the thing, even though it has a fishy flavour "When he embraced her a smell of salt fish rose from her clothes ; even her kisses were salt."