Fiction
Fontagre. By Jean Orieux. Translated by Naomi Walford. (Lane. 8s. 6d.) The Devil in the Flesh. By Raymond Radiguet. Translated by Kay Boyle. (Grey Walls Press. 8s. 6d.) Fontagre, a French Academy prize-winner, is written to a theme that rarely fails, in Europe's present .moment, to arouse interest. The fall of ancestral homes and crash of family fortunes, while happening as an outcome of planned policy, sounds a note that speaks not only of desolation in the shrubbery but also of a hidden continuance that makes each stronghold, after its more or less sordid downfall, one with nature, dignified in its new rock-bottom security, ineradicable. So this rambling, awkward old chateau amongst the Dordogne woods and farmland affects the schoolboy who comes home to his sombre tower-room and the family headed by his uncle but dominated by his aunt the inexorable Elia, Marquise de Fontagre. Theirs is a tight-lipped, obstinate struggle for survival on a mort- gaged estate with its old dignified debts, its loud new liabilities, and a certain sum to meet recurrently by wits or faith or prejudice. The remedy is all the time at hand and pride refuses it ; for the rich industrialist Ladureau who would buy everything, even with tact and mercy, is the father of Elia's impossible daughter-in-law Odette, a woman outside their way of life, disapproved and disapproving—a symbol of that progress which, in the matter of culture and tradition, is decay.
Of this tottering situation M. Orieux has given a memorable pic- ture, justly balanced. His narrator, pro-Fontagre and anti-Ladureau by roots and breeding, not only analyses Odette's ineptitudes but shows up every wart and wrinkle on the old Marquise while appear- ing to display her without censure. Through her arrogant obstinacy Fontagre is sold up. The grandeur and absurdity of this collapse require no melodrama to endorse them, and a false note is struck in an otherwise fine performance by the manner of the ailing Marquis's death. It happens suddenly. Elia, unmoved, decides, " It's the attack. Another Fontagre gone "—a bagatelle beside the château accounts. This would be good, without a further story of the Marquis's poisoning by his gipsy mistress who gets Elia herself arrested on suspicion of murder. The affair is perfunctory, M. Orieux himself losing conviction and depriving Elia of all the force and character she has shown when arguing about class-principles with Odette.
If the boy in Fontagre exists solely as a doorway to the château, Raymond Radiguet's astonishingly precocious schoolboy is the be-all and the end-aii of his narrative. Radiguet died so young that he can hardly—or only just—be suspected of grafting mature reflections on the simpler mind and actions of eyOungster. The boy, having at sixteen a flourishing love affair with Mantle, who is married and three years older, is both guileless and knowing, diffident and bold. He appears to have rounded on experience, going by some slipway into an understanding that sets him forth as a sunlit, delicate organism combined with a cocky, insufferable little goat. We have to admit that without the goatish aspect the book would lose in bite and the boy in humanity. Even so he would have sinews lacking in the curious British schoolboy of Mr. Laurie's White Fire. The common reader might describe this as a " pretty " book—an adjective the common reviewer, being hard-boiled and impervious, prefers as a rule to shun. It is also, apparently, a treatise on upbringing,
demonstrating how the child of a couple with theories can defy the usual coarsening processes by reading Housman, fighting only for his trampled flowers and having a relationship with a young school- master that is far from the sexy, the "Oscary Wildey," affair it seems to the beasts around them. In the result young Anthony grows up so unfitted for the rough world we live in that a merciful bomb is sent to remove him from it. This perhaps was a conclusion worth working for, though presumably it was not Mr. Laurie's intended text.
A question of moulding the young appears again in Line on Ginger. On the surface Mr. Maugham's approach looks different ; yet behind his clean-cut, sharp design in post-war pigments lurks a something we have met in crude, old-fashioned drama. Ginger Edwards, who since the war has become a minor gangster, robbing his old officer, is tracked down by the latter and discloses—not the expected tale of post-war misfit but a story of childhood whippings and a painted lady who deceived and mocked. There is a kindlier spirit than in Mr. Maugham's previous story The Servant, and his dialogue has a crisp theatrical quality ; but the- broad heart of the novelist's matter seems yet to evade him.
Mr. Brophy, on the contrary, writes with leisured expansion. His discussions are so camouflaged as to make one with the surrounding landscape of Judean wilderness and the grey problem-growths of race, religion and loyalties that sprout in it. Julian's Way is what used to be called an "ambitious" novel ; it belongs properly to the more earnest epoch of those aspiring second-rung giants such as W. j. Locke and Temple Thurston—an age when Mrs. Humphry Ward was writing Eleanor and Sir Hall Caine a Life of Christ. It says much for Mr. Biophy that in drawing the Palestine situation into his foregroun4.he unconsciously recalls these earlier ardours although falling short of their performance. At best the novel of argument and "ideas " is hard enough to reconcile with art. How much latitude, in fact, may we allow a novelist because he is dis- cussing a search for faith ? Inconclusiveness—certainly ; shapeless- ness and prolixity—perhaps ; passages that read like a conducted tour of the monuments, with talk that neither reveals character nor fosters thought or action—surely not. Too often Mr. Brophy, set- ting out to find the key to Nazareth, unlocks the portals of a suburban Mission Hall instead.
SYLVA NORMAN.
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