Fiction
REBECCA WEST once put up a plea for the " long-short " story, the nouvelle of some 20,000 words. It was, she said, a length that seemed natural to many writers, and it was a pity that there should be hardly any commercial opening for it. Certainly 20,000 words would seem to be an honest length with many assets. it gives sufficient scope for an author to develop character and plot without the limitations of compact brevity imposed by the true " short " story ; it also has the great advantage, particularly for writers who work slowly, that it can 'comfortably comprehend a completed stretch of mental development, whereas the proper novel may often be started under the impact of one mood and mode of thought and finished in quite another mental atmosphere.
Publishers, booksellers and public, we are told, hate the book that is made up of four or five stories of this length. But where the publishers, in this case the Hand and Flower Press, have ventured some valuable writing in a beautifully produced edition, it is to be hoped that prejudice will blind neither booksellers nor public to appreciation.
The author, John Pettavel, is, according to the blurb, a young man whose previous printed works have been poems written in French. Indeed, it is easily possible to deduce that he is young, for all four stories in The Unblest are studies in frustration. The first two are well and sensitively written but are, within this genre, ordinary and obvious ; the nursery-governess and the deranged youth are too easy subjects. In the third story, Mr. Buckle, about a frustrated then demented widower, an ingenious and macabre imagination becomes apparent. The fourth, The Experiment, is excellent. This is the story, tokrin the first person, of the frustrated, (Rs. likable, consciously self-righteous young man and his relationship with Mouse, a waif he picks up in a pub. Fully to create and give reality to an imagined individual is surely the highest achievement of fictional writing, and this Mr. Pettavel has here successfully accomplished. More, in The Experiment (though not in the others) he has shaped a story with a beginning, a developed middle and a brilliantly inevitable ending. I don't suppose that this book will be read with enjoyment by many people, but I do recommend it strongly to those interested in the craft of writing as work by a young man of great potentialities.
All Sweetness Under Heaven is also a first book and also a study in frustration, in this case the frustration of the sensitive young woman married to the man repellent to her ; the title is, in fact, a quotation from Galsworthy about the relationship of Irene and Soames. In Miss Turner's book Emma, the heroine, is presented as capable of living fully only when her emotions are fully satisfied, and as these seldom are she spends most of the book in lethargy of collapse, which tends to become boring. Miss Turner writes very well, and Emma, bolstering her unhappiness with an imagined love that she can never allow to develop to reality, is real and con- vincing ; but for the reader to think it important, as the author obviously does, that Emma should escape from her frustrating marriage into a world of sweetness and light, she would need to be a far more interesting and attractive character than Miss Turner has made her. The construction, too, with the end of the story pointlessly set at the beginning, is ill-contrived. Here, in fact, is a book that would have benefited enormously from the discipline and compression that a length of 20,000 words would have imposed.
The Storm and the Silence has that plot so beloved by young intellectual writers about the working-class fugitive from murder killed in the end. I wish I could perceive what is the psychological compulsion that impels so many of them towards this plot ; I wish even more, since there are so many of them, that I could enjoy it. There is something most unsatisfactory and frustrating in reading a book when one knows from the start that total defeat is the inescapable ending, and it adds little to one's interest whether the chase takes place in the Irish slums, in Midland cities or, as in this one, in the hills of Scotland. (Now, if only it had been Richard Hannay. . . .) It is possible that the authcir is trying to rouse our social consciences by showing us under-privileged people who wouldn't be on the run if they had had a proper chance. But man} of us dislike sociological lectures in the guise of fiction, and would prefer young men of the undoubted talents of David Walker either to entertain us or to provide us with spiritual experiences of a higher order. Miss D. E. Stevenson's books have long been deservedly popular with those who like a cosy story about nice people, but her new one is not, alas, up to the standard of Vittoria Cottage. It is the pleasant enough story of James, demobbed from the Army, going to take up farming with his nice uncle and aunt on the Scottish Border—the things that do go on in Scotland! Unfortunately the construction is too clumsy to get by ; characters and incidents are constantly introduced as if they will become an integral part of the plot, and then disappear, leaving us wistfully wondering why they ever came in. And then, perhaps as a corollary of having the nice people so very nice, the nasty people are so very very nasty. But if you want to read about nice people who are really nice and not in the least " naice," you will enjoy best of all Rain on the Wind. This is about the growing-up of Mico, the son of a fisherman in County Galway, about his family and friends. These are the only people in all these five books who are truly sophisticated in the sense that their conduct is measured by a standard that involves a process of full, not thwarted, development towards complete awareness of good lives. It is beautifully written and the only one of all these books that sets itself simple human limits and inside them attains
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