Fiction
LOOKING at these three American novels with a nostalgic eye one wonders how soon the restriction against the importation of foreign books will reduce us to a state of literary starvation and parochial thought. The iron door against the outside world has already slammed; what we have here must have been with the printers or some time. Upton Sinclair's latest enormous novel in his ominously titled World's End series is the most difficult to recom- mend. Thomas Wolfe, who also worked massively, would have filled this book with wild poetry and sweeping undercurrents of embittered emotion, but Upton Sinclair uses a journalistic technique a la Gunther with no pretence to probe under the surface of things. This is not " art " but an accurate, if superficial, reconstruction of the war between 1940- and 1942.
The hero of the book, Lanny Budd, outwardly a picture- dealer but secretly a Presidential. Agent, starts off- with an interview with le fripon mongol, Pierre Laval, and the behind- the-scenes revelations, mixed with biographical snapshots which are sometimes over and sometimes under exposed, go on at full pressure right up to the last interview with Stalin at the end of the novel. Personally I found Lanny Budd something of a prig and, in European matters, deliciously patronising. Who today, in Socialist- Communist France, would dare to call a porter mon bonhomme And who, in his right senses, would pompously tell a French driver the story of Abelard and Heloise and be surprised that he had never heard of it? As Lanny progresses from famous country house to smart hotel his conversations with the political bosses of Europe— Hitler, Goering, Vichy officials—are naïve in the extreme and the formidable tyrants are shown, engagingly, en pantoufles. Yet despite this, Upton Sinclair is definite entertainment value ; he tells the reader in a foreword that over seven million copies of his books have appeared in different countries, and though there is little argument about that I found myself wishing that the material in this book (fifteen or sixteen hours' solid reading time) could have been pro- duced even more effectively in a monster Hollywood film—and in a fifth of the time.
Vera Caspary is also entertainment, since technically Stranger Than Truth is a "crime-novel" with all the old lure of a human- being done foully to death ; but, as with her previous books, Laura and Bedelia, there is a good deal of material which is of serious interest. She has not yet, I think, reached the level of Simenon in The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By, but her latest book will please those who demand something more than a stab in the back or the sound of a revolver shot. In some respects it reminded me of Maugham's Cakes and Ale, for Stranger Than Truth, in its modest way, contains as much satire of writers and their ways. Miss Caspary digs quietly at American " pulp " writers and big-business Messiahs of the " How to Win Friends " type with great success. The descriptions, for instance, of the whole monstrous set-up of the Truth and Crime magazine which the narrator edits, and all its subsidiary papers, up to Noble Barclay's best-seller, My Life Is Truth, are, it seems to me, a diagnosis of a sinister trend in the American way of life. Noble Barclay's successful recipe of " truth-sharing " is, of course, only another version of how the human need for confession and reassur- ance in the face of death and failure has been exploited by various sects and " societies " all over the world, particularly in America, The truth of her observation, the choice of her material, which- is always something more than just a " setting," and the sharpness of her characterisation are where Miss Caspary differs from other writers of the same type.
Her people are very much drawn " in the round." Who haSn't met Lola, the frustrated, bitter poetess, either in Greenwich Village, Soho, Montmartre, the Vieux Port or. Chelsea, some time in his or her life? The Lolas of this life are innumerable ; they make love desperately ; they write a single memorable poem ; they drink night after night, and finally they are found in a back room, without a penny, dead. For every successful poet there are a hundred such as she. Noble Barclay, too, is an easily recognisable monster of the twentieth -century. He' is the vampire of credulity, the father confessor of a thousand devoted disciples who fasten on his broad shoulders, for a consideration, the terrors of a lifetime. In dealing with these people so well Miss Caspary must have found the con- ventional " plot " of the crime story an unfortunate imposition. If she breaks down anywhere it is in the fact that one can see too quickly the end, but this, I think, detracts little from a book that is eminently worth-while reading.
The third book on my list is something of a puzzle. The style of Do I Wake or Sleep is-highly individual—a literary marriage between Henry James and Katherine Mansfield—and as one wanders down the gilded staircases of subordinate clauses, through long purple passages, one wonders indeed whether one is awake or sleeping, and where, oh where, is the story? Though I kept my attention closely on Millicent's thoughts as she lay in bed, or walked around New York in 1939, or listened to Bridget's confessions, or listened again to the self-pitying conversations of the man she thought she would marry, I nevertheless found myself confused. It was like watching a clever conjuring trick ; one wondered all the time what was happen- ing behind the illusion.
" She knew that young men were never entranced with her and that, fascinating as she thought they were, and much as she yearned to attract them, those mysterious little nets woven round most young women, filaments so vibrant that she could actually feel the air quiver- ing whenever two people of the opposite sex had begun to spin them together, would never be spun around her—something was lacking, inasmuch as, long as she might for these moments of penetrating sweetness—this mystery to weave about her and someone of the opposite sex—she was incapable of paying out the first fine filaments."
From this I gathered that Millicent needed love, but whether she got it in that brilliant New York summer of 1939, with the war approaching and chaos opening under her feet like a chasm, I never
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