Fiction
331 L. A. G. STRONG.
Mn. PRIESTLEY has hitherto been the novelist of locale rather than of personality. He has been more interested in places than in people. This is not necessarily a defect, though it is certainly a danger : and, in his case, it is even harder to assess, since, unless I am completely wrong about him, it is the direct cause of the defect which paradoxically often gives us his best passages. None of Mr. Priestley's characters has been able to walk down a street without tempting him to tell us all about the street : i.e., to desert personality for place. His angel pavements are more profoundly felt than those who tread them, and his characters slip around corners which remain in the memory long after they have passed.
This may be a permanent quality of mind, though there is evidence to point the other *ay. The masterly English Comic Characters and the little book on English Humour could hardly. have been written by a man who had no deep interest in character : and a play of very high quality, Dangerous Corner, devoted altogether to the study of character (even if it does treat its people as if they were maps), argues that Mr. Priestley has all the equipment for investigating the human being as well as the human scene. Faraway catches him in two minds. The novelist is definitely beginning to dominate the essayist : the digressions are fewer, and more directly connected with the story : but they are still he highlights.
To William Dursley, maltster, of Buntingham in Suffolk, blows in one day (the phrase is exact) his uncle Baldwin. William, who has not seen him for years, gladly puts him up. After the visit of the sinister Garsuvin, Baldwin, at the 'point of death, tells William *about the Island of Faraway, rich in uranium ore, which contains radium. He tells William the secret, revealing also that he has told another friend, Commander Ivybridge, the longitude of the island, and a third, P. T. Riley of San Francisco, the latitude. Then, to our regret, he passes from the story. William meets Commander Ivybridge and his friend Mr. Ramsbottom, who comes—can you guess from where ?
"Ah do like good stoof. Ah've always been used to good stoof, and Ah know it when Ah see it and taste it, which is more than most people do."
Ramsbottom agrees to help finance the expedition, and they go off to San Francisco to meet P. T. Riley. The only worry William has is a letter from Garsuvin claiming a deed of partnership with Uncle Baldwin, which proves to be correct. William has destroyed the copy he found in Baldwin's papers. He meets P. T. Riley, who turns out to be a girl !
Mr. Priestley has set his stage royally, and I am not going to spoil anyone's fun by revealing how the story goes on :
but it does not follow the lines which I, simple-minded creature that I am, had hoped. I freely confess that, if a story begins as a fairy-tale, I like it so to go on. The odds are always on the giant rather than on Jack, and that is why it is so pleasing when Jack kills the giant : for which reason I cannot help feeling a little resentful at the note of common Sense, unanswerable though it is, which tones the end of this story. It is exciting enough, and lively enough—not unconnected with films, Garsuvin, and a Chilean battleship : but I wish Mr. Priestley had made a real, all-the-way holiday trip of it.
The characterization is definite, and crystallized with many an excellent phrase. William looked "as if he had been put into cold storage at about his twenty-fifth birthday." Listening to Mrs. Garsuvin was like hearing "the ordinary tinkling feminine music being played by ten brass bands." The descriptions of America and the Pacific, and the portfolio of thumbnail character sketches are all lively and amusing. But, to my mind, Mr. Priestley is at his best at home. The accounts of Buntingham in the evening, of Lugmouth and its hotel, are simply first-class. No one alive is a better or a more heart-warming guide to the 'provincial town and to the good fellowship to be found in it. The first two hundred
pages of Faraway have for me a delight and a companionable
thrill, a gusto of perceptive enjoyment, which is rare outside Dickens : and, by their standard, the later parts of the book, with their tang of satire, seem to have gone a little sour. I felt as if I were a child suddenly reproved for enjoying myself and being told it was Sunday ; as if an actor I was watching with delight had suddenly become self-conscious, and made me self-conscious with him. Be all this as it may, Mr. Priestley's recent work, with its many sides and its many possibilities of direction, makes him one of the most interesting figures in contemporary literature. He is a quick learner who is always learning : and lie starts from formidable knowledge.
Herr Liepmann's wanderers wander in a mist indeed, though one cannot help feeling that they are personally responsible for three-quarters of it. They not only live in a wale—to borrow Mrs. Gamp's phrase—but go much more than half way to take the consequences of their sitiwation. It is true that Feodor began life with a good deal against him. His mother had most unwillingly borne him to the local squire, one Szegedin, a hard-drinking brute who vented. his native melancholy in orgiastic ill-treatment of the peasantry : and, as a child, he had to be hung up in a basket to be able to sleep. Still, such a life as his can only be explained in terms of a definite germ in the blood which prevents the victim from ever being happy. Once we can accept this premise, Herr Liepmann's is a most moral book. Szegedin is so conscious of guilt that, when Feodor's supposed father goes to ask him a favour, he thinks it is blackmail, infects the unhappy man's livestock, and has his cottage burnt down. The results are inconvenient for Feodor, because he has just decided to ask Szegedin to murder him, when the. incensed villagers arrive and execute their squire with a chopper. The mortality average is kept up, however, by the death of both parents. Feodor joins the Russian army, fights, collies to Berlin, falls in love, is thwarted by his tem- perament, leaves the girl, and, failing a Szegedin, tries to commit suicide. Finally, after being mixed up in a robbery, he tells a comrade that "only criminals arc good men." The book is powerful enough, scene by scene, but I fear it will be dillicalt for English readers to take it entirely in the spirit in which it is intended.
Miss Pratt, science mistress at the finishing school which houses Evangeline Edwards and her four companions, urges her charges never to be afraid to experiment, and to form their own conclusions without prejudice and without fear of the consequences. Evangeline, bound for an aunt in North Oxford, takes the advice, and experiments with a theatrical impresario named Andre de Croissant. He takes her to Deauville. Soon he is succeeded by Alexci, a Russian violinist of suicidal tendency : Pedro, gondolier-cum-painter, a man of highly cosmopolitan talent : Heinz, in whose company Evangeline visits a nudist colony : and Count Ferdinand, who makes her the stakes for a game of cards, and loses her to a Greek. Evangeline's next adventure is to be captured and placed in a harem. An American rescues her, and sends her back to her aunt, just a year after the date on which she was expected. Mr. Laver is always high- spirited, always lively, and often exceedingly funny ; so funny that it seems ungracious to suggest a reservation. It is perhaps hardly his fault if the excellence of A Stitch in Time wrought up my expectation to something even funnier and subtler than this happy piece of nonsense : yet I will not admit that it is altogether mine. This is a welcome addition to the two or three really amusing novels of the year : but A Stitch in Time was unique.
Mary's Neck is an old,. respectable seaside resort on a New England promontory. The Masseys come there from Logans- ville, in the Middle West, and Mr. Massey tells the story of their efforts to penetrate its social system, at the heart of which were the Bullfinches. On the whole, they succeed. An engaging book, full of easy, happy portraiture.
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