Fiction
By WILLIAM PLOMER
A NOVEL need be none the worse for having been written with a purpose, for a great many seem to be written with no worthy purpose at all. The purpose of Crooked Cross is to show the effect, during the first six months of last year, of the Nazi revolution upon an " ordinary " German middle- 'class family. It is a first novel, and quite worth reading. It is not without faults : there is too much small talk, an English character makes a number of somewhat superfluous appearances, and a certain wistfulness tends to smudge some of the outlines. At the same time, it has definite merits. It is a blessing to read a novel which deals understandingly, not, as so many do, with the stale lusts of bores; but with a Poignant predicament of our time: The author was obviously moved by her theme, she never rants, and there is little suggestion of the self-justifying autobiography so common in first novels. The writing is unaffected and the general impression by no means unlovely.
The book opens with a simple and happy German Christmas party at the Klugers' house in a Bavarian town in 1932. Lexa, the daughter, is engaged to Moritz Weissmann, a young . doctor in Munich who is a German and a Catholic but has Jewish blood in his veins. At the New Year he is insulted at a dance ; the prevailing Nazi fever rapidly grows more in- tense ; and Lexa's brothers, Helmy and Erich, join the Party. At first Lexa does not realize how things are really going.
" Everything seemed to be -altering ; everyone was taking on a new lease of life. Helmy took on a new fervour, a new confidence in himself and in the future of his Party, and through it of Germany. lielmy, who had never had any decent work, who had been hungry and ashamed to own it, Helmy, who had hated himself for his enforced idleness, now had work, a salary—not much certainly— but his own money at last. He had strong boots and a regular life with a future to it."
Unfortunately Lexa, " carried away by the thrill of it all, did not know that Helmy's triumphant shout at ,the door— so spontaneous and joyful as ,it had been—was the signal for the upheaval of the country, for the disappearance of logic, individuality, of freedom itself." She loved her brother, but continued, while political feeling ran higher and higher, to meet her tabooed lover in secret, for she loved him too and had sworn faith to him.
Now the strength and adroitness of the book lie in this, that Miss Carson does not show up the barbarity of Hitlerism by overstating it, or by flaunting a red flag in the reader's face : she is content to show something of its destructive effect upon family life, upon personal happiness, and upon what is ordinarily meant by civilization.. And she does this • by building up, with many simple and natural little touches, a picture of cheerful domesticity in a charming Bavarian - setting, and then gradually shows the nasty workings of the herd instinct, until we are brought to the point where cruelty and violence are thought right, and gentleness is thought wrong. She notes that behind all this noise and vigour there's a vague fear, a vague doubt. So perhaps that's the reason for all this feverish shouting, this hectic advertisement. It's to reassure themselves—like a child showing off to amuse visitors because it has an idea that it may have to go to bed in a few minutes."
And above all she is aware that you cannot do harm to other people without doing harm to yourself : " Germany's penalty was in herself.... The poison in expelling the Jew, in crucifying him again, was drunk by the very people t hat had administered it."
That is not less true for being awkwardly put. Lexa and Moritz make a disastrous attempt to establish the happiness that racial fanaticism has denied them, and amid the wreckage of innocent lives there linger on the ear echoes of the Horst Wessel song and the tragic stuff abbut " der Tag fur Freiheit and fiir Brat."
Mr. Frank Swinnerton, in his long and somewhat intricate new novel, is content to stay on more familiar ground. Treading the mazes of a complex plot, the characters in
Elizabeth have as background the rise of an English wate dng. place, Seahampton, from the 'nineties onwards. There wa, not one Elizabeth ; there were two. Both their fathers were writers (how writers do write about writers !), but whereas Beth's father, Roland Swift, " an aesthetic kind of Liberal," had contrived, by imagining or pretending to imagine that he " heard from afar the winding of a fairy horn," to become a best-seller, the father of Eliza Cordell was a broken-down journalist, an embittered mediocrity who took to drink Beth was on the whole happy, good and lucky ; Eliza and her family were marked out from the beginning for wretchedness and inferiority, and nothing could save them. This dual theme is the main one of the book, and may perhaps be taken to symbolize Mr. Swinnerton's view of the polarity of life. Some writers would have spoken of Providence and Destiny, but Mr. Swinnerton is satisfied to tell his story, and to show people in the grip of circumstances too strong for them. The author of a study of Gissing, he wears, both as novelist and essayist, a mantle of somewhat Gissingesque cut. To call him a'realist does not mean that he is exclusively taken up with sordidness, or that he is out to annihilate all that's made to a drab thought in a drab shade. He is a sensible writer who does not indulge in flights of fancy. I believe Katherine Mansfield, evoking the shade of Chekhov, once suggested that Mr. Swinnerton " played without expression." Could not the same be said of Gissing ? They have in common a British touch, and give us a feeling that the skies above their characters are mostly grey, but they are both free from the cheap optimism, the "cheerio" spirit, which comes easier to many than the effort of facing facts.
As for facts, Mr. Charles Lorne has seized upon the not very recondite one that nowadays it is no uncommon thing for a number of people to travel together through the air for long distances in a machine. Any circumstance which brings a variety of people into close contact is eagerly noted by the dramatist and novelist : there have been innumerable novels, plays and films about happenings to travellers on trains and ships, and- it is surprising that the destinies of travellers by air have not had more attention. Mr. Lorne's air liner takes off at Capetown and descends finally at Brindisi, whence the passengers continue their journey to Croydon. We are informed by the publisher that Mr. Lorne is not really Mr. Lorne at all, that he is "a well-known novelist and short- story writer who has published at least eleven books," that he served in the R.N.A.S. during the War, though his first flight had been made long before 1914 " when transcontinental air liners were still hardly imagined," and that he " knows what he is writing about." The reader, then, is in experienced hands, and may expect to be piloted safely from Cape to Cairo and beyond.
Certainly Mr. Lorne takes off smoothly and is soon in full flight, but whether he is too intent on -the passengers and the controls, or whether familiarity has blunted a little the sharpness of his perceptions, it is a curious thing that he gives us on the whole comparatively little sense that it is Africa over which), hejs flying. He makes frequent landings, but does not do enough to conjure up, for instance, the peculiar atmospheres of places like Johannesburg and Nairobi. Most or all of his local colour might well have been provided by somebody who had never left the ground or set foot in Africa. It is true, however, that a giraffe, " for all the world like some queer flower swaying at the end of its stalk," stares up at the machine, and we get a very odd view of Athens as a city of " grey houses under a haze of smoke," with the ruins on the Acropolis resembling " more than anything the shell of an abandoned factory." it is natural that the passengers should be Mr. Lorne's chief concern. A mixed lot, they include a vamp, a neurasthenic eloping with another man's wife, a restless Jew, a retired hospital matron, and a blatant vulgarian and scoundrel about whose fate we are kept in suitable suspense until, thank goodness, he gets his deserts on landing at Croydon. The cruise is anything but care-free, and has anything but a sedative effect on the nerves of the passengers, whose preoccupations make quite a good story.
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