Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER Song On Your Bugles. By Eric Knight. (Boriswood. 7s. 6d.) Benediction. By Claude Silve. Translated by Robert Norton. Foreword by Edith Wharton. (Appleton-Century. .7s. 6d.) Lingering Walls. By Paul Horgan. (Constable. 7s. 6d.) August Folly. By Angela Thirkell. (Hamish Hamilton. 7s. 6d.) Sever the Earth. By Jacques Spitz. Translated by Margaret Mitchiner. (John Lane. 6s.)

Is Song On Your Bugles Mr. Eric Knight has attempted something very difficult, and if he has not been wholly suc- cessful his enterprise at least must be admired. In brief, he has tried to tell us the story of a young English working man with a talent for painting, a man whose life becomes a violent conflict between his sympathetic longing to share and alleviate the sufferings of the poor on the one hand and on the other his aspirations towards the singlemindedness and social position and financial advantages of a recognised and tolerably successful painter. This conflict has its origins in the blood, though Herrie Champion is not made aware of it until he is grown up. He begins life as a mill-hand occasionally brought in touch with people of more leisure ; talking broad North Country dialect, he is easily able, when the necessity arises, to express himself, owing to the influence of a " superior " mother, in standard English. It is a hard world he finds himself in, and a world which Mr. Knight obviously knoWs' from personal experience. Life seems like a football match with " no goal-posts, no score, no victory, no ending,". and

the extent to which harsh realities have to be faced is shown by this piece of distressed-area folklore : " A man should learn to have no trust at all in a world where there is so little to place trust in. Didn't the Yorkshirenian in the Story put his little boy on tho dresser 7 ' Now, Alfred, thee jump.'

feerd, feyther.'

Nay, thy feyther'll catch thee.'

Acid when the boy jumped, his-father stood back and let him fall oa hrslace, and as the child howled the fathei bent over him. Doan't thee weep, lad. That'lLteach thee riot to talk' onyone's word i' this world—not even thy own feyther's.' " Most of the first- part of this novel is-excellent and could only have been written by someone with a first-hand know- ledge of working men, their troubles, and their ever-surprising childishness. Champion learns what strikes, poverty and privation involve, leaves the mill and-becomes •a- glass-blower, enjoys the constant friendship.- of Harry Tawpun; an ideal mate, cultivates his ambitiOn intermittently at night elaSses,- receives the encouragement of, Sibley,:well-draivrt' and - unusually inspired provincial art-master, and wavers in his affections between two young women, Elsa- the mill-girl and

Daphne, the mill-owner's daughter, fresh from a finishing school at Grenoble.

Half-way through the book, Mr. Knight rather loses his grip. It is not necessary that he should-try and make Cham- pion seem a good painter, which would be hard enough, but in the effort of making him a sincere one with something like a mission he models his career somewhat after that of van Gogh and we are evidently meant to accept him, in his

fall between two social stools, as a genius. This it is difficult indeed to do. " Put it away," says Champion, presenting

Daphne with a picture, " and ten years from now you'll be able to sell it for just oodles." And talking to a private soldier back from the West Indies he says, " It's hard for me to make it feel true that I'm walking next to a chap who has really seen hibiscus. I get a vicarious thrill." No wonder that Elsa—whom he marries and with whom he settles down,

on principle of course, to what soon becomes hate in a cottage --turns rapidly from a slut into a virago : it was enough to snake her, without his habit of giving away money. But even if Mr. Knight alienates our sympathy from Champion and weakens our belief in him, the later parts of the book are by no means without points. It is simply that he has bitten off snore than he can chew. To try and present a kind of cross between Jude the Obscure and Vincent van Gogh caught up in the nasty web of class consciousness was to attempt some- thing almost impossible, but for his courage in tackling such a subject and the success with which he has realised some parts of his design Mr. Knight must be congratulated.

Our . respect . for him is not weakened by -the • next two books on this list, two essays in tasteful nostalgia for the

past, an emotion which, like various others, occasionally

leads to the production of masterpieces. It is conceivable that some readers may find Benediction a masterpiece, for in France that has already happened. A critic in the Nouvelle Revue Franfaise has called it " a perfect example of the novel of atmosphere," the Action Francaise finds it an example of an art " unbelievable, spontaneous and sober, altogether classic," and it is clear that from far-off 1912, when she won the Maille-Latour-Landry prize, right up to 1935, when she won the. Femina Prize, Claude Silve (alias the Comtesse ha -Forest-Divonne) has been able to please some of the people_part of the time. In Benediction she does not, to borrow a phrase "Of Jean Cocteau's, threaten us with a rose ; she pelts us, in slow motion, with pot-pourri. Never, between the covers ofa.single book, can old-world fragrance have been- more lavishly accumulated. Mrs. Wharton thinks this book may -appeal more to English readers than

French ones,-its,nutlines being blurred, and she has something to say about "wand4ielders" and " faery lute,strings."

There is no story.. A .shadowy episode is recollected by an old governess. It-- Concerns., an old castle (built in a very different .style to Kafka's), .a marquise, a bishop, a brace of

dream-Children, and a ,pair_ of lovers who are parted before it is quite clear whether :they_ are covers or not and for no stated reason : we have to put up: with elfin hints. In the

space of a few pages there are references to pixies., wills-o'; the-wisp, gnomes, dryadS' -and sirens. Whiinsy- abotinds " We discussed the date when the little aristocrats of trees would come-back and take their placesakin-A:the- fas'Ade of the .château-like:Duthesses on their ftioiStoOls' before the

King." If you -like - that Sort. of thing, as Disraeli' I suppose that is the sort of thing you would like.

M. .Paul .1-lorgan's Lingering Walls.. have more solidity than those of the Castle of Dampard. - Interested, it would seem, in the sight of ruined or abandoned dwellings• of various kinds hereand there in New Mexico, he has invented a number of stories to match,and_in order to link these stories together has provided a short. but high-flown prologue and epilogue to explain that the ruins may be regarded 'aS monuments to human aspirations. Without straining after effect the book, taken as a . whole, does provide a picture of various aspectS Of a 'whollY or partly vanished society. The endeavours of a missionary are brought to nothing by Indians ; .a rancher is deStroyed by an outhurst of that envy so often met with in pioneering communities ; a rich man sinks his fortune in a vain attempt-to reclaim a desert, and leaves au empty mansion to mock his confidence ; a young woman, who " considered herself a secret member of the younger married

set," and had " only lately discovered that to put feather- diapered carnival kewpies on the mantelpiece was no longer smart.," fails to make good as a smallholder's wife ; and so on. These are plain, short tales with occasional felicities of expression—bows and arrows " singing like harps," artesian water " pluming up from eager wells," " gnarled silverware."

To amateurs of light reading Mrs. Thirkell is well known by now, and Monsieur Jacques Spitz offers an astronomical fantasia about the future. Both authors are adept at getting in the shrewd dig. August Folly is centred on the production of a Greek play in an English village, and it may not be out of place to give a specimen of Mrs. Thirkell's humour for the benefit of those who do not know it. This is Mr. Tebben,

who had a taste for sagas, and did not mean to take a part in the play :

" Greek plays ! I have always felt that the Greeks were easily amused. A stone seat under a burning sun, with the bitter wind that so often accompanies it, four or five people in preposterous boots and masks, plays with whose plots everyone had been familiar from childhood, and there they would sit for days and weeks. Now the Vikings had more sense, so had the Icelanders. The very idea of an open-air theatre was abhorrent to them, if indeed they ever thought of it. Their national literature, stories of gods and heroes, was familiar to them, and they would have laughed, yes, laughed, at the idea of dramatising what was already in the highest degree dramatic. We find no traces of open-air theatres in Norway or Iceland. Practical people, they realised that an open-air parlia- ment, for so, very roughly, one may describe the Thing, or All-Thing, was enough .straiu oa anyone„ wit qpt gesortingto .open-air enter- tainments. If they wanted to be entertained they sat at home, by a fire, and had their skald to recite to them."