Fiction

By SEAN O'FAOLAIN

THERE are times when one is sick unto death of books and of -writing. One envies bricklayers. So a friend of mine has a

regular nightmare when he sees all the stories of the world passing before him in hasty procession—endlessly. " It was a warm day in early June. . . Or, " On a late afternoon in the winter of 1875 a horseman might have been seen riding from Banbury Cross in the direction of . . ." Or, Julia Callanan was about to have another baby. . . ." In that bitter mood one feels that fiction is the Father of Lies. Then, suddenly, one's heart gives a little leap. One beats the breast. One has found a real writer.

Mr. D. M. Low is such a writer and he must be saluted at once. His novel This Sweet Work commands immediate

respect. And if it does suffer from a certain slightness, a lack of surety, a refusal, which seems common to Englishmen, to be full-throated, it has so much else that one asks of literature that it is, patently, not merely a piece of entertainment but a work of art as well. It has sensitiveness ; it is balanced ; it has restraint, its values are real values ; and it has a power of suggesting a character without, apparently, a word of description. (And how rare these things are—especially any sense of values at all—in modern fiction !) The " sweet work " of his title is the devotion of Helen Masters to her widowed mother Lady Masters, a devotion which threatens to choke out, miserably and horribly, all the natural spon- taneity of the girl's youth. Helen, fortunately or unfortu- nately moralists may decide, develops swiftly, thanks to her meeting with the son of a parson who is separated from a wife who will not divorce him. The conflict in herself, between her love and her moral sense, and later between her love and her sense of responsibility towards her mother, is told with a real feeling that is all the more impressive for being restrained almost to inarticulateness. The other characters are done with an equal appreciation of the diversity of human nature and its lovely fluidity and waywardness.

A critic is always timid of a too great feeling for a book— fearing that it has pleased or displeased him so much merely because of personal predilections ; but even allowing for that and repeating that This Sweet Work is a little too retiring, even underwritten, and acknowledging that I know nothing of Mr. Low—for if he is a young man, " one never knows what a young man will do next " and if he is not young, " is there time to develop ? "—I do say that this book is in the best tradition

of the English novel, and that its author may yet be a very con- siderable name in modem English fiction.

Miss Viola Meynell, if it is not an impertinence to say so at this date, is also a writer ; though not necessarily a writer of prose or prose fiction. Indeed, her sensitive novel of two unhappy lovers is such an Anatomy of Melancholy that (though it has none of its acrid Swiftian humour) it reminds

me rather of seventeenth-century verse. It has a love of the sounds of words, it dallies leisurely over inward complications, it is detached from life, it suffers from taedium vitae. Perhaps I am reminded of Burton, too, because it was he who invented, among many others, the phrase " all our geese are swans "- for in this novel about the groups in a UniversitY-and-Cathedral town all the geese arc not merely swans but peacocks. So that a novel which in intention moves towards stateliness has an effect of stiffness—rather like a grand piano walking down the

street playing Chopin. The very names arc too lovely— Rowena, lanthe, Elissa, Dennis, Vernon, Arthur, Fay, Norma, with, to cap them all, a bookseller named Tristram. They

move, to borrow a typical phrase from the book, with too much of the " attractive art of behaviour." Their conversation is so dignified as to be artificial—I wonder is there one of them who does not quote verse in his conversation ?—until, in the end, when somebody mentions Woolworth's or the tele- phone the effect is as indecent as trousers on a statue of Hermes. The style, finally, crackles like satin. Two girls talking about dress or lipstick " shared expert secrets in the

art of adornment." Another girl, strident by nature, proves submissive- to the dictates of the dance." If, however, one

can overcome a distaste for this grand-piano style there i/4

underlying and informing all a grave sensitiveness and a real poetic feeling that reminds one of Hardy at its best, and is seen at its best in formal pictures of the country. These attain

such a real loveliness that one feels the writing of novels is hardly the proper metier of this author. It is as if her sensi-

bilities were even too refined for the workaday world of flesh

and blood. The result is that I feel that -whoever reads this novel will remember it always with a keen delight in the con-

ception, a delight in the great charm of the author's per- sonality, and a keen exasperation at the manner and mannerisms of the execution.

After these two subtle books Burmese Days seems very heavy-handed.' But the comparison is accidental and should

not be made—Mr. Orwell has his own merits and his own methods and they are absolutely competent in their own class. His novel is the story of a man who, because born with an ugly birthmark flung in a blue ugliness across his cheek, is doomed to be a misfit. When we meet him he has been for years buried in Burma, and is already half-rotted there : then an English rosebud comes out to him and life shines again. He is by now, unfortunately, sunk so low as to be a reader of books, a Socialist, a disbeliever in the white-man's burden, and a friend of the natives : and his only virtues in the eyes of the " Kipling-haunted Club," where there is " whisky to the right of you and the Pink 'un to the left of you," is that he drinks like a fish and keeps a native mistress. The bitter tone of the book will be apparent, and with a savagery that knows only a passing pity and eschews all reticence Mr. Orwell depicts the life of this misanthropic and unimpressive character. He gives incidentally so grim a picture of Burmese life that while one fervently hopes he has exaggerated, one feels that the outlines, at least, are true.

As a matter of criticism that is crucial with this type of book, the evidence is too good ; it all hangs together too well —the sweat and the drink, the loneliness and the dry-rot, the birthmark and the misanthropy, the misanthropy and the anti-social ideas, the anti-social ideas and the ostracism.

Poor Flory hasn't a dog's chance against his author. How- ever, one advantage in weighted dice is that the game is secure, and if one does not perceive that Mr. Orwell is being too Olympian then the course of his hero's life will seem natural and ineluctable as Fate, and one will say, " Yes, it rings true—it had to happen that way."

Neither can one charge Mr. Casey with oversimplifying. He would reply, as Mr. Orwell is entitled to reply, " That's

my method." To which there is no riposte except that one doesn't like the method—which is not conclusive. One; can, however, say that he imposed too many limitations

on himself in taking such a simple character as Margrove,

the successful business-man whose private life (mainly amatory) is the subject of his novel. For Margrove was

not merely simple, but stupid, a purely instinctive creature without any defences against the world outside his business- life : a man for whom love is a sucked orange, and marriage a failure; while as for success he wonders occasionally where it is all leading to. Unlike Mr. Low's heroine, Margrove has no sense of values at all—other than business, values ; and as a. result all his. amours begin as an escape and. end

as a bore. (Would he have understood—was it Villers de Adam ?—who explained the value of religion to a critic who asked him why he la-pained a Catholic though

a sinner, saying, " Ah, but you do not realize the voluptuous- ness of feeling damned" ?) Within these limitations, however, Mr. Casey succeeds—he does make us pity the poor wretch and he does make us laugh at him, at his Napoleon complex,

his rushing and racing, his over-ingenuous schemes, such as Culture, -Ltd., and the leviathan lovemaking. One does not indeed believe for a second that such a person as Margrove ever 'did or could exist ; but then the effects of the carica- urist are sui generis and really outside the scope of literary Criticism entirely.