FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN The Daughter. By Bessie Breuer. (Cape. 7s. 6d.)
THE entertainment level is fairly high m new fiction just now, as it usually tends to be at this time of year. All six
novels listed above measure up conscientiously to spring list standard, and all will probably justify their appearance by a respectable circulation among leisured readers, but only one of them suggests that, say, by Easter, a handful of those whom it entertained may still be able to recall its mood and theme. This one, which, with many faults, has distinction and sensitiveness, is The Daughter, by Bessie Breuer. It appears to be the second novel of a young American woman, and it is an uneven, juvenile work which deserves praise and attention.
It is wearisomely over-written, which is the more regrettable because, had she cut out a great many of her clumps of phrasing, the author has plenty of excellent stuff left in her pages, which would look a million times the better said for the clearing around it. Moreover, she has a rich mind which this book has only begun to tap, and is in no need at all to upholster or strain her ideas. But wordiness overtakes her chiefly, I think, because of her indecision upon the balance of values within her theme, and a consequent necessity to be violently fair—i.e., violently explicit—and is not, as we may suspect with impatience here and there, a mere intoxication of verbosity, pointless and inexcusable.
The story is of the passage from sensitive but hard-boiled innocence into passion, disillusionment, and what may be called " general knowledge " of a young American girl, whose parents are divorced and who is doomed to drift round the world with a restless, beautiful, ever-young, affectionate and amoral mother for Achates. The two are not rich, appar-
ently ; they seem to be of that hard-up class that never has to go without anything it wants. Katy, the daughter, has
played at having jobs, but only in search for reality, not be- cause she ne.xled wages. Her education has been very expen- sive and sophisticated, and she has certainly lapped it up, particularly on the literary side. She carries poets round with her, but don't we all? Only hers are " Donne, Millay, Auden and Macleish," an unforeseen grouping. With them and other rather touching household gods with which, in hotel bedrooms, she faithfully builds her for ever shifting homes from home, she comes with her mother to a little lost place " far down off the gulf shore of Florida." There, against her will as always, for hers is a stiff, reluctant and recessive spirit, she is plunged into the raffish, pleasure-seeking life that her mother always gathers about her. And Katy, who loves this quite dis- gusting parent very much, and is always being miserably shocked by her, is shocked again—as well she may be, think we who are older and less innocent—by the appalling loose- ness of joke and caress in this little lost pleasure colony. She broods, staring lasciviousness in the eye, and looking away from it to the dying, poor life of the fishermen and labouring negroes along the shore. She looks at everything out of grave eyes, and for all her desperate romanticism it must be said for her that she is as intellectually attentive to what she sees as she is emotionally responsive. It is the former char- acteristic which makes her attractive to read about, gives value to her sensibility, and makes us patient with emotional incon- sistencies.
Unhappy, and doing her best to compromise with raffish- ness, and not appear censorious, she learns to drink. And how! The drinking of "corn have a charge? "—of Carlotta and her friends, is downright alarming to read about. Katy takes her " charges " sturdily. She dances with Charlie too, the beautiful young southern waster, who is already busy being her mother's lover. Dancing she falls in love with him, and in amazement and relief, all her poets singing in her, she lets herself sink into a slow perdition of lust, with him for guide.
The rest is a close examination of her struggle with know.. ledge of good and evil, and her bitter, touching fight to rationalise her emotional predicament, and to force her passion for Charlie to become love as her fastidious innocence had understood it. She cannot do this; she loses Charlie, and almost, of her own choice, loses her life. But she learns and observes much, and not all her lessons are of individual good and bad, for under her eyes the primitive life of poor and suffering men is well contrasted with the incredible flippancy and injustice of the " educated " and the " civilised." It is a desperate picture that we get here of pleasure, and of a soul condemned to room with it.
Wait Until Spring, Bandini, also comes to us from America, and has the merits of freshness of subject and setting. It deals with the married life of an Italian-born labourer in a small town in Colorado. He is a man of violence and naive egotism, and he has art infatuated wife and three little sons. The eldest of these plays an important part in the plot, which struck this reader as incredible. Svevo, the labourer, gets involved in a curious lust-affair with a very rich widow in the town. The effect of this on his wife is very violent and home life becomes fantastically troubled. I did not care for the falsely naive tricks of the writing, but the book has an element of novelty about it that is commendable.
Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent, is a straightforwardly amusing and sentimental tale of the married life and difficulties of a hard-working young journalist and her beautiful, easy- going husband. It is a very easy book to read, and it bumps along with tears and smiles to a happy ending. The merit, if we must look for one in so unpretentious a piece, is that the little woman really is a gent, and a truly established character, where all around her are only the gay English figures of West End farce.
What's Become of Waring tells with precision and neatness a very ironic story of the reported death, discovery and re- discovery, in a sense, of a famous traveller-writer called T. T. Waring. The whole thing makes a very funny exposure of all kinds of human follies and foibles, and Mr. Powell's manner is beautifully dry—in fact, I think, has become a little too dry. But he says excellent things. All the characters slip into place in the complicated plot as easily as pennies pop from behind a conjurer's ear, and each as recognisable as dry toast; but the trouble is, that for all the reality of their outlines and the farcicality of their quiet goings-on, we are not quite sufficiently engaged with the whole matter. Nevertheless, Mr. Powell's technique is admirable and his irony a very frequent pleasure.
I had not read Turn, Magic Wheel, Miss Dawn Powell's first novel, but when I read the eulogies of it reprinted on the wrapper of this, her second, The Happy Island, and when, moreover, I found her publishers comparing her to Petronius, I confess I turned in some eagerness to view a new planet. But here, for better or worse, is no feast of Trimalchio. The latter kind of literature may not be much to our present taste or need, but at least it had the contemptuous hauteur of its own kind, a largeness of bawdry which makes it simultaneously honest and fantastic, and a kind of recklessness which relates to the absurd nobility and debauched self-contempt with which Petronius Arbiter could die. But in The Happy Island we have only small, peddling, funny stuff about the naughty boys and girls of New York, stuff such as we have often had before, and which is quite funny in small doses, but is really no more than unbridled gossip column. Many of us have moods in which we can enjoy a neat mixture of wise-cracking and lewd- ness, but I doubt if a whole volume of Miss Powell's thin and localised satire will be entirely pleasing.
In This Nettle, Danger, Sir Philip Gibbs, taking almost no trouble to create characters, has given us the sort of novel that many people enjoy immensely—i.e., a review of events recently lived through, from the Abdication of Edward VIII to the Crisis of last autumn. He tells the well-known story care- fully, and as it appeared to the sympathetic eyes of a rather naïve and sentimental American newspaper man. The opinions expressed are temperate, and the message of the book appears to be that we will muddle through.
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