FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN • Castle Corner. By Joyce Cary. (Gollanez. 8s. 6d. I'm Not Complaining. By Ruth Adam. (Chapman and Hall.
7s. 6d.) I Can Get It For You Wholesale. By Jerome Weidman.
(Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) Strangers. By Claude Houghton. (Collins. 8s. 6d.)
I wits almost alone last year in my inability to be enthusiastic about The African Witch, which seemed documentarily so sound, but which I believed lacking in that pervasive, power which makes a fiction true without reference to the accuracy of its foundational facts. Now, reading Castle Corner, which I find a hundred times more to my liking than Mrs. Cary's earlier novel, I am still puzzled and uneasy, while copiously entertained. Too copiously. This book is too long and too repetitive of its effects. A common fault, but one which writers less informed, observant and witty than Mrs. Cary can, if possessing a certain sustained authoritativeness which she lacks, make more bearable to the reader. And yet—how entertaining it is ! How brilliant in understated comment, as when a young British officer forces hirnself upon the attention of a dangerous African tribe. How twisted and ironic in tenderness sometimes, as when a little boy dies. How amusing and clearly pictorial, as when an Irish landowner climbs a ladder, in presence of his admiring servants and tenants, to touch up an old set-piece of the Queen, in prepara- tion for the Diamond Jubilee. This unimportant scene is immortally bright with the sense of summer morning, comedy and good humour. The putting in of the high light on the Queen's eyeball—" Lave her now sir," " Ye'll spoil her," " That's the last touch "—it may seem trivial to harp on one such slight thing in a book that is constantly illuminated with more significant brilliancies, but the point I am trying to arrive at is that, on the evidence of this novel, Mr. Cary is a writer of short stories, and that Castle Corner is in fact not a novel at all, but a collection of brilliant short stories. It deals with an Irish landowning family in Donegal in the period between the death of Parnell and the South African War, and it embraces their, adventures not only in Donegal but in Africa and England. The family is very fin de slide— but very Irish, a reservation which paradoxically relates them more to Tchekov than to Wilde. To be just to its high quality and to one's own cavilling one would need to quote illustratively—and the temptation to quote is immense. But other novelists wait on my limited space, so in haste and indecision I can only say that I believe the author of Castle Corner to be an important short story writer who has lost his way ; and I commend his interesting problem to those who care about the art of creative prose-writing.
I'm Not Complaining is laconic, complete, informative and— except in the matter of grammar—every way commendable. It's as dry as a Bath Oliver biscuit, but by no means so snobbish. It is all about the goings-on of staff and pupils in a provincial board-school and their encounters with clergy, police, inspec- tors, &c. One may marvel that so much happens under the surface in so ordinary and depressed a setting—but in life, too, one is often asked to confront the same marvel. The book is very contemporary and beautifully neutral. There is one awkward passage of sentiment towards the end when " I "- a teacher called Madge Brigson—becomes emotionally involved with a " Red " clergyman who is already affianced to a colleague, but the embarrassment blows away by God's mercy, and surface is restored—a matt, hard surface. An admirable piece of work—I'm Not CoMplaining.
By choice I know little about hard-boiled eggs, but I suspect that their chief merit may be that all question as to the soundness of any particular egg is lost in the hard-boiling. (This sentence is profoundly symbolical.) The New York Times has said that I Can Get It For You Wholesale is "as hard-boiled as a twelve-minute egg " and though I think it should have written " twelve minutes egg," , I do not otherwise dispute this vague verdict. What I do dispute is the blurb's comparison with Babbitt. Babbitt was a book about a lunnan being, about someone very low indeed in brain power, as most of us are, but richly normal in sensuality, sentiment and an every- day kind of sensibility. Babbitt was a warm book which only a moron could call unimportant. But this book of Jerome Weidman's is about a moron—indeed it is about something sub-human. And why not ? There are plenty of sub- humans walking round in trousers or skirts. But the 'difficulty here is that one is not sure that. his creator really understands how atrociously and humiliatingly sub-human is his clever little dirty worm of a Harry Bogen. If he does- O.K. My mistake and no bones broken. Any material, which its user fully understands, is legitimate material. But all through this book I had a suspicion that its author asked me to sympathise in a very quiet. way with the .impossible badness of his clever little Jew-boy from the Bronx, and that I was expected to find something touching in his selfish, coarse, moody, megalomaniac love for his old mother. .These allevia- tions escaped Me, but compensatorily I loved the Bronx and Seventh Avenue slang. . Still, in the name of the author of Babbitt and all ,novelists of sensibility I protest against being asked to read 34o pages all about a megalomaniac moron.
The Property of a Gentleman also claims, on its wrapper,
comparison with an novelist. This time—implicit in the title—the challenge is to Galsworthy. But Galsworthy was a natural novelist in that conceptions of character moved him to imagine situations, whereas Mr. Ullmann makes the tyro's error of believing that situation, once invented, hands out character as a sort of coupon gift. Oliver Brooke, the central figure of this novel, is an " invented " character—invented as flagrantly as are other minor characters to fit the author's im- probable theory-plot. Oliver is the victim of a vain, selfish father whose love for him wrecks his first marriage and, making him incapable of love for a woman, yet obsesses him with the idea of continuity for the Brookes. That Eve, the young woman-novelist whom. he persuades into a grotesque mariage de convenance which is to give him a child but none of the boredom of a wife —that Eve young and old, especially old, is as incredible and rootless as is the child of her marriage, Carol, is only one proof among many in this book that fiat must in these matters be said by the whole imagination, not merely by the industrious brain. Carol, the child of Oliver's curious marriage, Carol who rediscovers her mother and who is in all essentials such a disappointment to her pseudo-Soames father—is in- fact a quite touching figure, and the book's clearest symptom of its author's imaginative powers. But are we persuaded in fact of her potentialities as a murderess ? Not we. Her attempt on thlt life of her maddening father is, in its context, beautifully incredible—as untrue as that the old, tippling Eve, redisCovered, is the same woman who, in .intelligent youth, consented to Oliver's fantastic plan and gave birth to Carol. Mr. Ullmann is still at sea about the relationship between the artist and hji design. He seems to thitik that the latter is the captain °Idle ship. Fatuous,- surely, to argue this with him ? In any case his own natural talent, of which he has plentY; „is almost bound to force home at last the reality of the novelist's undertaking.
When I opened Strangers and read that " Grantham was above middle height, slender but powerfully built, with a well- poised head and thick chestnut hair " I suffered a wave of comfortable surprise which yet, alas, was not enough to prevent my turning to read the clues to the author's ability set out on the back flap of the wrapper. And there I learnt—Claude Houghton being a new planet in my ken—that in the opinion of my betters he is this, that ,and the other that is very im- portant indeed, among other things that he is the " foremost - exponent of the metaphysical attitude in fiction." Well, well ! The book is all about the gentleman I have just described to you, who is in middle life, doing well in a very smart way in the wholesale textile business, married to a wife for whom he has now only a mystical, spiritual emotion of some kind, possessing three children and in love for three parts—not the last part—of the book with a young woman called Crystal, who loves him whole-heartedly. Also he has symptoms of heart disease whichmak,e.it,.clear to all_experienced novel-readers that he will dropdead in the second-last chapter.- Which he does, to Mir relief, ,leaving- room in the last chapter kir_ poor Crystal to' be very Caddish indeed to his wife. There are a great many characters, there is a romantic journey in Czechoslovakia, there are innumerable conversations which I take to be " metaphysical," and there is an embarrassing
repetitiveness in the love-making. _
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