Perfect Entertainment
To Step Aside. By Noel Coward. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.)
To Step Aside is a collection of seven short stories, apparently the first that Mr. Coward has written, and one may as well admit at once without hedging about standards and limita- tions that it is the most entertaining book that has been published for months. It is a little late in the day to remark on Mr. Coward's versatility, but despite his accomplishments in the several fields he has invaded, the technical assurance with which these stories are written remains astonishing. Each of them is a perfectly conceived and balanced creation, the characters seen in perfect perspective, the style, purged of the breathless epigrammatism of Mr. Coward's plays, possessing a quality of cool and astringent wit that gives an impression of consistent brilliance without ever being cloying. If prudish tastes did not exist (which some of the minor epi- sodes in these stories would undoubtedly disconcert), one would say that this was a book of universal appeal.
In scope and setting these stories are a varied lot. There are two very short ones, which are the least successful. One of them is an ironic sketch about a fashionable young writer, which though brisk and amusing is on the whole rather commonplace ; the other is a story about a popular actress fretting over a desire to see her lover before she goes to sleep ; it is rather sentimental and has about it a faint aroma of word-spinning. Next in the scale of effectiveness are Traveller's Joy, a bitter little story about an odd and curious affair in theatrical lodgings, and Nature Study, which is a cool and sophisticated treatment of a D. H. Lawrence plot. Finally, there are three quite devastatingly good stories with the scope of miniature novels. Aunt Tittie is a description of how a child was brought up by his aunt, a cabaret dancer, moving from one European capital to another and hovering erratically between extreme poverty and relative competence ; The Kindness of Mrs. Radcliffe is a suburban character-study, pricked out in acid ; What Mad Pursuit? is the completely devastating account of an English lecturer's week-end in i violent American household. Each of these three stories is absolutely perfect. Mr. Coward needs a little more space than the shortest stories give to be entirely effective. He takes his time over Aunt Tittie and Mrs. Radcliffe, and when he has finished we know everything there is to be known about them and the contrasted horrors of their respective ways of life. In What Mad Pursuit? he pursues not one character but a crowd, and it is a massacre, but a massacre in which, despite the killing pace, each character is miraculously paraded, identified and judged before being demolished. This, story is madly funny, and the most entertaining in the book, though neither Aunt Tittie nor Mrs. Radcliffe is far behind it. All three of them are perfect entertainment ; and the other stories in this collection, which are not perfect, are still, most emphatically, entertainment.
DEREK VERSCHOYLE.
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