Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER They Walk in the City. By J. B. Priestley. (Heinemann. 8s. 6d.) Clochemerle. By Gabriel Chevallier. Tr. by Jocelyn Godefroi. (Martin Seeker and Warburg. 8s. 6d.) Frightened Angels. By Joanna Cannan. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep. By Richard Sale. (Cassell. 7s. 6d.)

I SEEM to remember a news-film that showed Mr. Baldwin seated at a desk. Looking very upright and downright, he was explaining or appealing for something. Wearing a:

" strong " expression, he suddenly leaned forward and said in the most forthright way, " I think you can trust me "- and then, after a pause, and with great emphasis—" by now." Being ignorant of politics, I have no recollection

as to what he was to be trusted to do, and no certainty as to whether he might have been trusted to do it, but the moment fixed the character and marked the actor. This, one realised, was that Honest Stanley one had heard about, putting himself across, only unsealing his lips to insert a pipe

between his teeth, and only removing the pipe to tell England what England expected of him. Now if in a similar film one were to see Mr. J. B. Priestley, seated likewise at a desk, one's response might not be wholly different. The linea- ments would be less familiar, but there might be a pipe, an equally resolute air, and an assurance of plain dealing on the usual terms. Instead of bending straight forward to

catch the voter's eye, Mr. Priestley would be leaning, I think, perceptibly to the left. Otherwise he would be just as acceptable as a representative Englishman of his time,

not necessarily " bluff, stormy, rude, abrupt, repulsive, inaccessible 7 (the . adjectives . are Landor's), but coming before the public as a sound product of England anxious to keep England sound. On the whole he would probably be more acceptable, for he has a greater faculty for using words. When politicians do manage to say something it conies as a shock, whether it be a personal revelation, as that their blood is boiling or that they admire Mary Webb, or someelated discovery of a painful truth, such as that " the lights are going out all over Europe." We listen to .them in a kind of stupor, but novelists have to be read, and ask a greater effort of their public. To make an Englishman read you must flatter his interests a little and leave him with at least a vague feeling that lie is being improved or uplifted. With one hand you must pat him on the back and with the other sketch a few hints for building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land. Since Shakespeare did both of these things, apart from all he did besides, nobody need be ashamed to follow suit : it is very easy, and is often done by patriotic clergymen and retired soldiers on speech-day platforms as well as by heaven-sent geniuses on paper about once a century or so.

Without entering into the question-whether Mr; Priestley is or _is. not a heaven-sent genius, there seems every reason to suppose that he has gained the confidence of a large public.

Let us take a walk in the city with Mr. Priestley and find out why he is for many a good companion. To begin with, there are signs of an expansive benevolence. Certainly a

writer who is eager to fold all mankind in a warm embrace may only be hugging himself all the time, but not, I think, Mr. Priestley, who appears to honour, to love, and to derive

both his strength and his weaknesses from the people who are vaguely called ordinary or simple—from the people, in fact. Accordingly the good and bad points of They Walk in the City are of a sort that may be expected in a popular novel. Mr. Priestley's pages suggest a kind of hopeful and encouraging .vitality, an appetite for life. He has a power to feel and to convey the feeling of pleasant or unpleasant situations of a

kind that might come within almost anybody's experience : on this occasion the power is used to show the agitated beginnings of young love in a manufacturing town, and the difliculties of young lovers going out into the world to earn their livings and work out their happiness. There is an admirable lack of complacency : we are forcefully reminded that the world is' still populated by " half-civili4ed Man and we are even cautioned against Mr. Everyman :

" Outside his work, he was solemnly silly, and dangerously so because his professional, training and standing gave; a' certain solidity to the nonsense he repeated out of the newspapers, the

•

ridiculous flimsy opinions he picked up anywhere, from anybody. In. Britain America, Germany, there, are millions of Herberts ; little technical men, or minor professional men ; fellows. who used up all their wits and courage and resourcefulness in their teens or early twentieS for their training and that precious first aPpointmeni; and are decent, kind citizens Who never neglect an obvious' duty, stout little pillars of their communities, who never meanny harm. But from them flows out a tide of stupidity and prejudice that goes rolling round the world and, when some wind of wickedness lashes it, goes spouting up until it falls in dreadful cataracts of blood."

Besides all this, Mr. Priestley has a sense of wonder which, impressed by the life of London as " eight million parts being acted in a gigantic Mystery;" is aware, perhaps "equally, of the good things of life and of " half-starved children listening to the rats in the darkness of a back room in Hoxton." Over against all this one disadvantage (though popular taste may not consider it such) is outstanding. It is that parts of the story seem to • be designed to please a low order of intelligence. Good sense and good taste are liable to be sacrificed, and narrative energy to be devoted to passages' of crude melodrama and false sentiment. " Very soon nothing was left in the whole universe but Rose and Edward

and a black shoulder of moorland and a glitter of starss" is a phrase only on a level with a cheap seaside postcard, and

exaggerations of innocence and villainy can seem not only old-fashioned but absurd. To introduce into fiction a soulful young man dying of an incurable disease is not only rash, it is hitting below the belt, especially when he grows vocal in such terms as :

" You know, they say it's terribly empty, in the sky, space. And perhaps it really isn't. Perhaps I'm helping to fill it. Whole

At such moments we feel that Mr. Priestley must be terribly empty. And he really isn't. It is simply that, in this book at least, we can trust him, as a humanitarian, " by now" —but not' as an artist. And that happens again and again

with popular `English novelists.

While Mr. Priestley may not be a good cothpanion for the

irreducible highbrow, M. Gabriel Chevallier may easily repel prudes and francophobes. It seems that Clochemerle has

been read by quite a million Frenchmen, and although it might not be true to say that a million Frenchmen can't be wrong, at least they ought to know what they

Described by its English publishers as "a French Cranford written as it were by an Anatole France," Clochemerle is ari energetic and cheerful satire on the life of a French village.'

Everything turns on a decision of the mayor to set up " solid landmark on the road to the achievement of his .ambi: tions " in the shape of a " hygienic structure " in the centre

of Clochemerle. A great deal of enjoyment is found by M,. Chevallier in the circumstances attendant upon• the process sometimes oddly described as " washing 'one's hands,". and. he is always ready to laugh heartily • at"religion, politics, and physical deformities, so it will be understood that his point of view is appropriately un-English. The village beauty, the cure and his housekeeper, the schoolmaster,

the embittered old maid, the cuckold, the lads of the village, and the lady of the manor (" The imbeciles of our class are

not vulgar imbeciles," she declares, though it is no longer true), all play their parts in a comedy as gay as but more robust than those of M. Rene Clair, and as different from Mr.

Priestley's as burgundy from beer.

Frightened Angels might have been called Murder with a Straight Bat. Although we have grown used to grini account.

of school life, Miss Quintal's schoolmasters could not be surpassed in the way of the dismal and revolting. The heartiest one, who goes to the length of kicking kittens, is

rubbed out by a milder colleague, with the most surprising consequences. Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep looks at a first glance as if it might be a tough thriller) with - a bunch of convicts escaping from a diabolical island settlement, but before they even embark they begin to go all groupy. The book may be recominentled to admirets of The Passing of the Third Floor Back, for it ,contains a .thysteriotts stranger who" changes " companions : His voice ,was loud.

and clear and his eyes kind of ,sparkied with tkometliing made you feel all good inside.';'