Fiction
East of Eden. By John Steinbeck. (Heinemann. 15s.) Young Men Waiting. By Chapman Mortimer. (Cresset Press. 12s. 6d.) NEVER, I think, a writer who has let imagination get the better of his considerable powers of contrivance, Mr. Steinbeck has yet deserved serious attention here as a representative American novelist. Dos Passos, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck—for some time now those have been the accepted older names. And no doubt all in this respect is entirely as it should be. Only what in the name of reason and courtesy does one say about East of Eden, Mr. Steinbeck's latest novel ? I have not the least doubt that it will be hugely, di77ily successful and even in some degree merit success, but at the same time it seems to me a quite shockingly crude, meretricious and trumped-up piece of work.
Of Cathy Ames, the leading lady in Mr. Steinbeck's luscious drama of good and evil, the wrapper tells us that she is " probably the most vile and wicked character to appear in any of his novels." This I can believe. Murderess several times over (Cathy made a start as a demure schoolgirl by roasting both her parents alive), specially handy at arson and poison but an unsuccessful assassin by other means on quite a number of occasions, prostitute, thief, brothel- keeper, blackmailer, informer, corrupter of moderately clean American minds and bodies, and—until she became stout and arthritic—a dazzling blonde into the bargain, the lady clearly knocked Messalina into a cocked hat. The only trouble that I can see is that Cathy has no qualities, no recognisable attributes of mind or character, and in fact bears no resemblance to a human being at all. It fell to her, Mr. Steinbeck so contrives, to marry a man named Adam, a throw- back to the scheme of things before the Fall and as starkly and inhumanly virtuous as Cathy was wicked. And from their brief union in the American garden of Salinas, in northern California, came twins in the vaguely symbolical shape of Cain and Abel, over whom watched a Chinese servant of infinite Chinese wisdom and compassion. There is scarcely a word of this long, fluent and industrious novel in verbal technicolour that I could believe. The story-telling energy is there, I admit, but the dramatic passages seem to me preposterous, the philosophising a tissue of platitude and tinsel rhetoric. In spite of the unmistakably serious purpose of Mr. Steinbeck's conjuration of episodes of his family-history in northern California, almost the only thing to be said in favour of the whole rich and absurd farrago is that one does go on turning the pages in order to find out what happens next.
I found it little easier, I fear, to believe in Young Men Waiting, a third novel by an author who has had rather outsize bouquets thrown at his feet and was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize last year. Not that there is a great deal to believe or disbelieve in this random and tenuous story of three young men in a Montparnasse café and an innocent fourth who, with scarcely so much as a blink of the eyelids, played havoc with their lives. The mere Rresence of this stranger with a dog among them vastly upset Bull, Paco and O'Connell, each an artist of some sort, precipitated a mute quarrel between two of them and led one to bang his head against a wall and expire and the other to cut his veins with a razor. I was willing enough to be persuaded, but clearly all here is in the telling, which is curiously thin, dry, trivial and inarticulate. It is possible to read all kinds of considered aesthetic motive into this dumbness of style, but one may as easily be wrong as right and no attribution of motive would give the book a satisfactory illusion of life or truth.
Mr. Howard Clewes in An Epitaph for Love promises more than a brisk middlebrow professionalism can run to. A professional novelist for hero always suggests the drying up of impulse and akays depresses my spirits, but a further slice of life in the shape of a heart- to-heart talk between novelist and publisher makes matters a lot worse. There is no real reason, as it happens, why Harry Lucas should be a writer at all. Living in Italy, where he had fought with the partisans towards the end of the war, he learned that oil had been discovered in the Po valley. The next thing was that he found himself in Florence in the midst of an international oil conference, the Italian elections, violent Communist disturbances, and the guilty amorous secrets of his past. Had Nina Castiglioni, with whom it had taken him about two minutes to fall recklessly in love, been a traitor or not ? She was waiting fol him, in the guise of a chamber- maid, in the British Consulate, and truth will out. The earlier Italian pictures are pleasant and unaffected, there are later moments of excitement, but the story is rather clumsily put together. By comparison with these three other novels, Mr. Niall 's The Boy Who Saw Tomorrow has a particularly refreshing simplicity, directness and veracity of manner. The theme is both slight and odd. At the age of five, Jimmie, a village carpenter's son, had a vision of a witless old man drowning himself in a pond. The thing did, in fact, happen next day. Was Jimmie mentally sick or abnormal ? Not a bit of it, apparently ; like his great-grandfather, he merely saw the future. At the age of ten he had a similar vision of his father's workshop gutted by fire, and was the means of his father being put on trial for arson. Moved to a small industrial town, he saw a chimney-pot fall on a baby's pram, and was then a passenger in a crowded Cup-tie charabanc which he had likewise seen hurtling to destruction. A plain and vigorous narrative, free from theorising about time and the rest, enlivened in the early chapters by some happy bucolic passages, The Boy Who Saw Tomorrow has not quite enough realistic substance to hold the readei 's interest at what might be thought a requisite level of seriousness. R. D. CHARQUES.
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