Fiction
By SEAN O'FAOLAIN 7s. 6d.) Kola areare six novels, presumably typical, and certainly varied ; they are discouraging. It is no pleasure to read books of which one feels that they are all adequately competent and yet all (excepting the honest entertainment of Mr.
Wynyard Browne) wholly superfluous ; and to feel that because they arc typical, the greater part of modern fiction is like the mule who has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity. But to it, . . .
Of Hollywood Cemetery all one can say is that it was made to sell and it will sell. But if it bore the name of Leonard 0-Flanagan ,and not of Liam O'Flaherty it would certainly be much less of a sell in another and much more important sense. It is the adventure-story of .an Irish writer named Carey who has written 'a novel called The Emigrant, and
whose book is about to be filmed in Hollywood. Carey and Biddy MtirphY (transformed into Angela Devlin), another Hollywood " find," 'are brought from Ireland to Hollywood, and both en route and on arrival the publicity-men begin to do their stuff by turning Biddy Murphy into The Veiled Goddess of Love. But Gentleman Jack Mortimer of World Filing, Inc., finds that he has bitten oft more than lie can chew, and promised more than he can supply, for Biddy veiled is one thing, but Biddy trying to act is another, and the results for both Carey, the egomaniacal artist already driven mad by the crudities of Hollywood, and Biddy Murphy, doped out of sanity to keep her quiet, are exciting but painful. Towards the end of the book Mr. O'Flaherty does whip up the story, in his usual way, into a fine old storm, and he gets Mortinier out of his difficulties by an invention that is really savage in its satire on films and film-fans : this is the authentic O'Flaherty, and as before now, in The Martyr, for example, one has to admit that even when a genius is handling poor stuff he cannot altogether stop being a genius. The title seems to be taken from a supposed attack on Carey in a Communist newspaper--" Hollywood is a cemetery where the remains of present bourgeois intellectuals are buried • after being fattened like sacrificial victims on enormous salaries." But if Mr. O'Flaherty keepS on writing this sort of book he will soon be told that there are other intellectual cemeteries much nearer home. There arc hundreds of people who could write Hollywood Cemetery ; there is only one Man who could write such lovely books as Spring Sowing.
By comparison Sheldon's fray is very mild beer : but it is, I think, a good mild beer. The atmosphere is that of a sunny country town in East Anglia, very summery, very picturesque, just the kind of town that is evoked for one around May or June by the pretty railway posters. The scene is the rectory, the hero is the rector, Andrew Sheldon, in his way a saint, the heroine is a lovely widow with whom. the rector falls in love, and the story is told autobiographically by a fetching, rascally middle-aged poet, Adrian Willis, who spends the summer with his old friend, the rector, whom he had known at Cambridge. But the flies in the ointment are (to make a bull) the good rector's leeches--his two pathetic maiden sisters who have brought him up and bullied him and to whom he has sacrificed his life. The story is further kept from becoming saccharine by the drab background of the poet, and the typical small-town animosities, about whiCh the author clearly knows a good deal at first-hand and about which lie holds a fair balance between the comic exaggeration necessary for satire and the realism necessary for credibility.. It is a good three-cornered game, in which the rector (even if he is a trifle too saintly) and the poet (even if lie is a trifle too much Beggar's Opera) and the widow (even if she is a trifle too sweetly desirable) are sufficiently convincing to make up an enjoyable book of the lighter order.
Definitely of the heavier order. is Leon Feuchtwanger's The Jew of' Rome, the second volume of the Josephus trilogy. . .
It is Expedient, being an allegorical novel—or as the diction- ary defines it, " describing one subject under the guise; of another "-depends largely for its effect on what one can read into what one is reading. Lavatta is an imaginary British territory in the East where a shadow Princess conspires in a subtle way against British rule, and a mahatma, Avalla, preaches the Kingdom of God. The English governor, Claydene, echoes Pilate : the Communist's mistress Rhalloth echoes Magdalene : there is a suggestion of a Judas and a picture of disciples stealing away from their Christ. Avalla is executed and the people who have condemned hint thereupon begin to murmur against the British : in the end one is led to believe that his preaching is inure likely to found a new faith than augment a revolutionary movement. Even the Fleet Street journalist is impressed and we hear him saying to Claydene-Pilate : " They may succeed where we have failed. For we have failed. The code of Eton, the English gentleman . . (&c.) leads nowhere. Wo want something bigger.. It won't destroy, this new thing, the best things in our tradition. It will perpetuato and transmute them. . . ."
and so forth. There is a solemnity about the book which may impress and may tire ; it has that artlessness which refers more than once to " eternal mountains " : but it puts the ease for Ideals v. Expediency in a simple way that should make it a fine book for boys and young men.
" Sentimental and sophisticated " adequately sums up this American translation of Princess Marthe Bibesco's novel of
Pierre Caniot, a-Proletarian who becomes President of France, by swinging over to the right under the influence of the Prineesse de Lambesc. The story is syrupy magazine stuff and the translation can perpetrate such sentences as : "Where are the services of honor, so useful to princes for defending themselves against the indiscretion of the public ?"
There is much more satisfaction in the slow and varied chronicle of Mr. Leland Hall, set against the background of an American rural scene, told in a straightforward way; and evoking a sympathetic, if slow, response to the lives of two generations. On the Whole one of those regrettably unexciting batch of books that makes a reviewer, at the close of his review, feel as ashamed as a -host who. stands at his gate•when•a dull party is gone. All I can say, my friends, is that I did not write those books.
Those who will have appreciated Josephus will remember that Feuchtwanger there dealt with the destruction of Judea as a power in the East, casting his novel between A.D. 64-70, when the Zealots led an ineffectual revolt, against the advice of Josephus, who was taken prisoner, spared because he prophesied victory for Vespasian whose name lie took, becoming Flavius Josephus, the Jew of Rome. Josephus had seen the fall of Jerusalem, his fellows butchered in the Circus Maximus, and lived on, into the present volume, to write the history of the war. Here again (after VespasianS death) he is presented as a` man of divided loyalties, seething like a cauldron under the cover of that cold demeanour by which his reason has attempted to stifle his emotions without success. His history is completed, a bust is erected in his honour by the new emperor, Titus, but lie is unhappy with his Greek wife Dorion, loses his son Simeon, and misses her son Paulus (not his son because she will not let him be brought up as a Jew, or share Roman citizenship). This incident is offered as a type of the struggle between the National Republicans, who resent the idea of raising Jews to equestrian rank, and the Liberals who are more cosmopolitan, and suggests something of Fetielltwanger's feeble efforts to give his work a more than antiquariansignifleance. At the end of the book Titus dies and Domititua becomes Emperor, and as Josephus passes under the triumphuf arch to Titus, Destroyer , of the Jews, we leave him; as we found him, still surrendering to his reason which-tells him that he, like all Jews, must do such things if he is to be truly. a citizen of the world. It is a slow book, of which one Would say that it should be cut by a half if it were not, in truth, more history than fiction and more chronicle than art.
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