Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER

MY fellow-contributor Mr. Seam O'Faoliiin has lately remarked on the futility of comparing various kinds of excellence. One may note also the difficulty of appreciating them. Each of these four books, for instance, is likely to make an excellent impression on a particular public, but it would be an almost unnaturally catholic taste that could devour them all with equal delight. By no ingenuity can they be neatly grouped together, and to a reviewer they present a nice opportunity

to resist the temptation of praising one writer at the expense Of another. He has to keep on reminding himself that it takes all sorts to make a circulating library, and that if one iidmires antelopes and puts up with peacocks, one must not condemn the elephant as cumbrous (for that is his nature)

Or think that by calling the crocodile beastly one can make iirn negligible. With a hasty assurance that this zoological

metaphor has no personal bearing on the authors under review, I turn with delight to the first of them, for Miss Elizabeth Bowen is one of my favourite living novelists.

One can scarcely imagine amore interested spectator of life. Filled with vitality and curiosity, endowed with poetic feeling and a brilliant wit, Miss Bowen follows the movements of her fellow humans with the keenest of eyes. And it is important to notice how she delights in the use and arrange- Ment of words, writing not so much with a flowing as with a shaping pen, using it not to get easy effects but unique and memorable ones... Her books are not hypnotic, but plastic ; It is not vague emotions that they produce but clear impres-, aions, the more so since she recognises that one can " stun the imagination by being exact," that " without their indis- tinctness things do not exist ; you cannot desire them," but that " the mystery is your eye." Certainly she makes a demand at moments on slower minds, as in the sentence " He forgives me for wanting Max while there is my not *ranting Leopold not to forgive me for," but on every page she

sees freshly—a girl reminded of a humiliation " writhes like a hooked fish," a boy has " prune-coloured " eyes, a woman advancing on her knees towards a child " rides at him like the figurehead of a ship." It is hard to describe The House in Paris in brief, for to read it is almost to live it, necessarily a complex experience. The book has its own shape. To

the house conic two children, sent on different quests, and first we learn about them and a certain mystery surrounding

the mother of one of them, a mystery closely involving the occupants of the house. The middle of the book goes back in time to elucidate the mystery, and after that we return tto the house in Paris again for a sequel. I shall not try and tell clumsily in a few words a story which Miss Bowen has told so well in many, creating character and atmosphere with a mastery and ingenuity all her own, but' I cannot resist drawing special attention to two letters which are given in the bourse of the narrative and are perfect examples of unconscious self-portraiture. They are from two different women to the. same woman ; only a woman could have written them ; and

ierhaps the only woman who could have written them is lifiss Bowen. One affords an instance of that common absurdity, insensitiveness masquerading as its opposite ; the other, commending an adopted child to a stranger, of humourless coddling crankiness : . . . his highly nervous, susceptible temperament. . . . We do not consider him ripe for direct sex-instruction yet, though my husband is working towards this through botany and mythology. . At midday he eats anything but should be encouraged to masticate. .

The, appearance of a new novel by Mr. Hugh Walpole is a ' frequent event that gives pleasure to thousands, a fact that sometimes provokes austere persons who have trained their brows into a shape both high and narrow. Nothing is more foolish than to grudge popular and best-selling authors their success, which is usually earned by hard work, by an ability to give form to ideas held in common by a mass of people, and bey strong traits of character and talent. No brilliant powers are needed to discern the crudities, mannerisms and limitations ot such writers, whether they be of the highest order like .

Dickens or on some lower plane. It is really more interesting to discover that their power to attract many readers is almost

always derived from two things : one is what may be roughly called a love of life (amounting often to a belief in the per- fectibility of human nature, and involving a belief that it is

love that makes the world go round) and the other is a delight

in story-telling. Mr. Walpole, who sets much store by these two things, obviously possesses them both. There is no mis= taking the genuineness of his benevolence (even though it

tends to sacrifice intensity to expansiveness) and the zest with

which he spins a tale. In this world there are no villains," he declares flatteringly, believing that we should all be nice if we had the chance. Back in Polehester, we meet again Canon fonder of The Cathedral ; as in The Old Ladies, an im- portant part of the .action turns on rivalry for the possession of an antique object ; and there are more sensational happen- ings than in Harmer John. Anybody who imagines that cathedral towns are dull backwaters peopled by saints, philis- tines and nobodies is advised to take an eight-and-sixpenny ticket to Polchester, where a sinister moneylender haS half the place in his clutches, where the moneylender's jackal knows his Proust and a sculptor is at work who makes Epstein look quite conventional, and where many people have strong feelings and keep telling each other all about them, while in Seatown squalor flourishes and anarchy raises a determined head. Intimacies spring up like mushrooms, and the action is kept moving at such an unflagging pace that one wonders whether Hollywood has not come to Polehester with cries of " Lights ! " and " Camera ! " and with appropriate interiors and backgrounds conjured up at a moment's notice. At the same time a suggestion of mysticism prevails ; the cathedral is taken to be something more than the centre of the religious life of the place ; and there is the shadowy figure of the Inquisitor himself, an intangible investigator of the short comings of the Anglican Church in present-day life.

Those of us who were old enough in 1014 to be fairly con- scious have now had nearly a quarter of a century in which to form our opinions on the War, and we can scarcely expect any new revelation to change our minds, but if a last word be needed, Mr. Humphrey Cobb provides it. Perhaps the appearance of his book about the. last War at a moment when the next one seems imminent may be called timely. Had Paths of Glory been published when the fashion for war-books was at its height, it might easily have obtained as great a' popular success as? for instance, All Quiet on the Western Front, but now that the public taste has changed it is unlikely to do so well. Mr. Cobb will not captivate those who like to dwell on the less revolting aspects of life and death on the Western Front. He has made no attempt to suggest that there were compensations or palliatives for the maniacal horror of the War, or to give a many-sided account of it. Instead, he has selected a single episode of the most frightful kind in the belief that an example of an absolute perversion of human decency is the most telling object-lesson to be drawn from it Whether this episode is correct in every military detail is of little importance, since it is both emotionally true and based, it seems, on established and documented facts. It concerns a useless attempt by a French regiment, acting on the orders of a General Assolant, to' capture an almost impregnable position. The attack has no sooner begun than it is crushed by heavy machine-gun fire. Assolant, watching from an Observation post, is so furious at the failure of his plan that lie orders a section from each company to be shot for cowardice in the face of the enemy. The fact that this sentence is in the end only carried out upon three men does not diminish its detailed horror. I do not think that Mr. Cobb would agree with Mr. Walpole that " there are no villains."

We all have our limitations, and I must confess to a• complete inability to read " Western " novels. Because I could not fix my 'attention on Honey in the Ll'ornnot caring two pins for any of the characters or for the " full-blooded " style, since I find hyperaemia a doubtful literary virtue—I at once asked the advice of an amateur of this kind of fiction, who assures me. that it is an unusually good example of the genre. It was awarded the Harper Prize for 1935, and is recommended by the Book Society and the Book Guild..