Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER

'The Young Joseph. By Thomas Mann. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. (Seeker. 7s. 6c1.) Happy Man. By Hermann Keaton. Translated by Edward Crankshaw. (Tito Bodley Head. 7s. 6d.) 'THERE is perhaps no living. writer whose works , are more artistically sound and impressive, or more individual, than those of Thomas Mann. The fact that they are largely con- cerned with .what may be called .defaillance, that they are .dyed in the colours of sunset, may make them displeasing 'at present to the very young, but although it is unsafe to prophesy, it seems likely that Haddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and the shorter stories, so finely wrought and so full of wisdom, will be found more durable than the ramblings and theorizings of some of Herr Mann's more loudly adver- tised contemporaries. His biblical trilogy, Joseph and His Brethren, of which the first and second parts are now available in English, is a magnificent vision of an ancient, patriarchal life through highly civilized eyes. There is a dignity that approaches grandeur in Herr 'Mann's enrichment of the familiar legend ; and the manner in which he treats hap- penings and feelings essentially sOple, natural and universal, .

charging them with a weight of symbolism, makes them memorable and poetical in a new way. Writing, one might

say, under the shadow of the Golden Bough, he has never dpne better in the creation of atmosphere and character, and in showing how much a situation may imply.

This second volume opens with Joseph learning reading and writing, numerology and astronomy, from his old tutor Eliezer, and through it all there mounts up the growing jealousy among his, brothers of the Near, vain, brilliant, wheedling youth of seventeen," in whom beauty and wisdom were combined :

." The unprejudiced eye must look with rapture upon such a Manifestation of godlike case and= absence of strain ; while it can ouly give rise to feelings of bitterness in those who have reason to find themselves injured or eclipsed by its-light."

What finally exhausts the forbearance of the brothers, whom Benjamin describes as " all louts in the sight of the Lord," is of course Jacob's present to his favourite son of the coat of many colours. The most vivid part of the book deaLs with the whole episode of Joseph being cast into the pit and sold into slavery. The pit stands for

`` the abyss into which the true son descends, he who is one with the mother and wears the robe by turns with her. It was the nether- earthly sheepfold, Etura, the kingdom of the dead, where the son becomes the lord, the shepherd, .the sacrifice, the mangled god."

We are left with the terrible intensity of the father's mourning for the son. There have been many attempts in the West to re-create Oriental legend and myth, but few more stately and harmonious than this blending of " the fact and fable, the legend, dream, song and story of primitive time."

To turn from The Young Joseph to a *feverish modern novel like Happy Man produces a feeling of abruptness, somewhat smoothed over by the fact that the lesser book has been praised by the author of the grealer. The scene of Hermann Kesten's story is that now pretty familiar hunting- kround of neurosis and exasperation, post-War Berlin. His hero (Max Blattner, born 1900), a member .of--that tormented generation of which we live eertAinly not yet heard the last, feels himself a foreigner to the world, a stranger to life," feels that humanity has excluded him from its cities; dwellings, dreams and ideologies, and asks, " What have I done with my life ? Nobody ever measured me for life, and now it doesn't fit me ; ifs like a badly-fitting suit . . ," Sec., &e. All this is already an old and slightly Dostoievskian story, but it must not be dismissed lightly, for Max's troubles are genuinely emblematic of those of his own generation, who were brought up to believe in a world which had ceased to exist before they were grown up, and who have survived to become the prey at times of a suspicion that

"man is now only a commodity, marriage a statute, love a system, past culture a mistake, future culture a party programme, freedom has changed from a conception to an outworn illusion, humanity to a< collective entity, and the individual from a divine atom to the induhtrial product of an endless belt.". Max utters some bitter aphorisms, with which' the narrative itself agrees, as in the following sentence :

" Ten days after the operation Frau B. died, and the traveller hi wine, undermined by grief and hunger, put his head in the gas oven, a proceeding which so increased his unpaid gas, bill that the gas company cut off his supply."

Max's cynicism is, in the first place, the result of his want of work and money, and in. the second, of the frustration of a

love that is not even " on the dole." When he falls in love with Else Pileiderer he seems to have something to live for,. but unfortunately in embracing Else he embraces at the same time a horrible and hopeless complication, partly economic and partly emotional, which leads him from a bad situation into a worse one. When Else appeals to Krummholz, a " lucky pig " who is in a position to help them, with an " Aren't you human, too ? " Kruiwnholz replies that the force of that epithet has diminished very greatly since the last war.

Some people would call Herr Kesten's book dismal, defeatist, and perhaps even cowardly. Others, who may have come closer to certain kinds of misery, will find it a painful illustra- tion of that want of confidence in themselves and others which is the root of all evil for some who today have neither the steadiness of many of the middle-aged nor the hopefulness of many of the young.

After Herr Kesten's 'black draught Mr. Gathorne-Hardy seems to offer us a distinctly pale ale.. Coronation Baby is a mild and pleasant account of the childhood of a boy born into

the leisured class at the beginning of King Edward's reign, and so a contemporary of Max Blattner's : the difference

between Max's life after the War and little Harry Crowthorne's before it is hardly susceptible of Measurement, except perhaps by economic standards. For instance, Mr. Gathorne-Hardy, who does not burke old-fashioned asides to the reader, preaches forbearance as " the only true morality, the only desirable principle for law-making," and 'says, " live your life as you wish, and if you've harmed no one else, you've not been a bad citizen of the world." Live your life as you wish—what a pre- War, leisured-class piece of advice to the Max Blattners of this world, who cannot live as they wish simply because they cannot afford to. But Mr. Gathorne-Hardy also notices that the world suffers from "the ant mentality," and comes forward to exalt the " innocent private life " of the individual, a process which he also conceives to be " the duty of the State." In the upbringing of Harry Crowthorne, idyllic as it was in many ways, may be traced the first shoots of a character that will

not easily succumb to conventional ideas about, for example, religion and patriotism, and it may be that the liberal philo- sophy of this amiable and leisurely writer is just as strong as that of Herr Kesten, who may have suffered more but who is no more determined to champion the future of individual liberty.

To enjoy such high spirits as Mr. Linklater's is a gift and, virtue in itself ; to be able to communicate them by means of an excellent power of broad comic invention into which' no malice enters implies, no doubt, that Mr. Linklater is likely to be read by a half a dozen people to every one who reads any of the books noticed above. Ripeness is All turns upon the surprising will of a Major Gander, who left a sum of £70,000 to whomsoever of his relations should succeed within two years in producing the most children. He himself died a bachelor, but mentioned hi his will that " the chief ornament of marriage is a full quiver " and that children are " the ripe- ness of the fruit of the Tree of Life. And, as Shakespeare says,

Ripeness is All." First the consternation and then the com- petition among the expectant heirs gives Mr. Linklater some

splendid opportunities, and he makes the most of them, while a benevolent shade, bearing a remarkable resemblance to Juliet's nurse, seems to hover at his elbow. Off he dashes with the greatest, gusto, robuster than Saki; more sophisticated than Wodehouse, and so up-to-date that his public schoolboys run communist magazines, his young elegants read Pound, and his bridge-playing matrons know their Culbertson by heart. There seemed every certainty that George, who always leapt before he looked, and suddenly returned from India with an off-white family, would win the procreative stakes—but Mr. Linklater's large and delighted public is all ready to be led to a conclusion which I shall most surely not betray here.