New Novels
IT is a little difficult to imagine anyone reading novels by the time this is printed ; but if it should turn out that waiting, or bombless suspension of activity, is still going on for some- of us, here are three novels all worth reading. None of them, thank goodness, invites us to have a good laugh and forget the war ; all are entertaining and intelligent. However, it is pointless to con- tinue to speak of them as a group. Apart from readability, they have nothing in common. Two are novels of some merit. One, Miss Storm Jameson's, is a work of unusual power and brilliance.
I did not read Mary Renault's first novel Purposes of Love, so highly praised by the critics, but I guess that in this, her second book, she maintains her level as a writer and does not attempt anything essentially different.
Her subject in Kind Are Her Answers is love; her treatment of it is voluptuous, with an un-English physical directness. Her manner of writing has a tremendous feminine vitality—that sort of creative gusto which has proved first the strength and subse- quently—controlled by no shaping intellectual maturity—the un- doing of many a contemporary woman novelist. (As with an infant on the wrong kind of patent food, the body and limbs swell out with rosy dimpling fat; the turn of the scales brings, at first, pride and delight to parents and beholders; but no bone is made; the end is rickets.) This novel is about a love affair between a handsome, pro- mising, unhappily married young doctor and an attractive,
affectionate, promiscuous, child-like girl whom he meets in the course of his professional duties. She belongs to that innocent- anarchist or waif type abounding possibly in contemporary bourgeois society, certainly in its literature : gallant, loy-1, generous, pathetic, an uncorrupted immoralist, never to grow up. An inconstant constant nymph. She is sorry for men, and her impulsive temperament causes her to be obliged to say " Yes " to anyone who needs sympathy and comfort. She remains, how- ever, faithful to the doctor after her own fashion, and one is left with the impression that the anchor will continue to hold in spite of intermittent draggings. Many women readers will identify with her, finding her more appealing than I do. I have a prejudice against girls who after emotional stress " stop cry- ing, absently, like a baby who has been given something sweet to keep it quiet. In a little while she was kissing him, her face still hot and sticky with tears; and a few minutes later was amusing herself, in a kind of dejected enjoyment, by making a piece of his hair stand on end." But this is Miss Renault and her heroine at their worst. It seems a bit unfair to quote it, but my object is not so much gratuitous malice as the wish to point out the dreadful pitfalls yawning for Miss Renault : the flavour of self-indulgence, of facile lushness, of letting down the back hair by the fire, which might easily vitiate her natural gifts of imagination, the freshness of her sensuous impressions, and her power of creating character and atmosphere. Some of her minor portraits and landscapes are delightful. There is a superbly malicious sketch of some Oxford Groupers ; and there is a description of a Victorian-Gothic house, its inmates, furniture, lawns, shrubberies and summer houses, which evokes in a rich, full-flavoured way not only itself but a whole period.
Miss Renault is, I feel, at a dangerous cross-roads in her career. Popular she will be. It is to be hoped that nothing and no one will persuade her to pour herself out in an un- stemmed flow of fiction during the next few years.
What Glory? is serious and high-minded: not a smile from front page to last. It is a complex psycholOgical analysis of the causes which led to the death, fighting for the Spanish Republi- cans, of Oliver Waring, a member of the English ruling classes, heir to ancient names and estates. The story is told through the mouth of a middle-aged family friend, a Liberal politician. He is the confidant not only of Oliver, but of Oliver's sister, and of the girl whom he wishes to marry; and, on the other hand, of Oliver's parents; and is therefore, in his midway position be- tween the generations, recorder of the whole conflict of moral and political ideas, confused with personal issues, which unfolds itself. He fulfils his role with sensibility, tolerance and a number of philosophical reflections. Unable to come down once and for all on any one side, he remains fixed in a rather bewildered and bewildering gentlemanliness : or, one might say, caught in the liberal or humanitarian dilemma. On one side of him, the young order embraces an idealistic violence ; on the other, the old order suffers loss and defeat; and all around emerges' the spectacle of English society in decay—the life-blood of the Parliamentary system corrupted, drying up, the empty forms of caste and privilege remaining.
Mr. Crankshaw's style is mannered, delicate, allusive, wind- ingly deliberate—with an echo of Henry James. He makes of it an instrument to convey a concentrated internal drama. He sees his fated figures in a romantic light, and stresses the glamour and nostalgia surrounding the great country houses of England. The characters are all a trifle over life-size : tragic, distinguished, beautiful and doomed, more symbols than human beings. One can perhaps believe in Julie Waring, who deserts her class to live among the Austrian workers and take an active part in the Viennese civil war; whose fanatical Communist principles lead her to force upon her brother his decision to sacrifice his personal happiness to the Cause. And Oliver himself, though almost entirely an historical and symbolic figure, is moving es such; but his girl, an American musical comedy actress, seems to me altogether too bright and good for human nature's daily food, and does not succeed in compelling a willing suspension of disbelief. Here is a fragment of the final summing-up of the causes of Oliver's death: " His indignation, his sense of frustra- tion, would have forced an outlet. Munich, for instance, would have touched him off. Not, I think, the capitulation itself, but the silly smile on the face of the hero of that tour de force. He would have felt you cannot do anything with people who smirk like that when the shadow of fearful retribution for a moment
You couldn't do anything : so he remained where he was, head of the nation, first spokesman of the British Empire.
It is a long time since I have read a novel of Miss Storm Jameson's, and after finishing this electrifying and ferocious book I am left wondering if I have missed much of the work of an admirable writer, or whether a passionate disgust and indigna- tion, combined with a masculine intelligence, have here fused all her powers, enabled her to prune away dead wood and achieve something on a scale totally superior to anything that has gone before. It seems it is easier to criticise books than to praise them ; hard to be persuasive about those one respects, especially if the extent of one's respect surprises one. This is one of the few English political novels I have read which does not suffer from that bleakness, that thinness of those who con- struct to theory, know all the answers beforehand and so lose all sense of curiosity about human beings. Europe To Let is primarily about people—citizens of Europe in the diseased and delirious period between the first seeds of Nazi Germany and the present war. It is divided into four sections : Rhineland, 1923. Vienna, 1938. Czecho-Slovakia, 1938. Hungary, 1936. Each picture is recorded through the medium of a writer, an uprooted Englishman, who travels from one country to another, sinking himself in the life of each. Miss Jameson's sense of history is sharp, and her grasp of the varying social and racial characteristics of her figures—their Jewishness, Czechness, Frenchness, &c.—remarkable. She is able also to give credible humanity not only to the crowd of small-part players swept helplessly along and away in the march of time, but also to the public figures, invented or thinly disguised, of that period. The Czech General Stehlik in particular is an unforgettable char- acter. Her style is nervous, pungent, highly charged, extremely dramatic. The sense of pity, horror, impending catastrophe in- forms the book from beginning to end. Reading it, one remem- bers all over again, or realises more painfully, what it felt like to be English during that time when we were officially assured that our prestige on the Continent had never stood higher.
ROSAMOND LEHMANN.
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