Fiction
MR. ALEX. COMFORT, a young Cambridge undergraduate, who is also a poet, has now written a novel. No Such Liberty is the .history of a young German refugee who came to England in 1938. The story, which is told in the first person, opens with the return from a sanatorium in Switzerland of Helmut Breitz, who takes up a post as physician at the Cologne hospital which trained him. He has written a prize-paper on a children's disease which has gained him international recognition. During his absence his wife, Anna, has helped men of military age to get out of Germany. Suddenly Helmut learns from a colleague that she is to be arrested on suspicion. Determined that they shall both escape, he tries avenue after avenue, but all are blank. Then one day the disillusioned member of the Nazi Party warns him that all the Jews are to be rounded-up. He feels that he must be with Anna during this period of trial, though neither of them are Jews. By the time he reaches the flat it is already too late, Anna has been arrested. A message comes from the hospital telling him that she has been taken there suffering from con- cussion. Helped by friends inside the hospital and by a series of flukes, they escape down the Rhine in an open boat. Helmut is shot at and wounded as they reach the frontier. A Greek sea and river tramp-steamer picks them up. The exposure and suffering causes Helmut a renewal of his old complaint. He gets better slowly to find himself in an English hospital, where his name and work serve in lieu of a passport. Though not allowed to practise, he is given the post of pathologist. Anna and he had always wanted a child, and soon they know there is to be one. Then comes the outbreak of war. ,At his tribunal Helmut tells the president that he is a Christian. Because he believes that war cannot be justified he acquires registration as a class B alien. During the panic, after the collapse of Belgium, Anna's son is borri. Coming back from the traditional walk of the expectant male, Helmut is arrested. After a period of imprisonment under conditions that were both inhuman and filthy, he was shipped off for Colonial internment. The transport was torpedoed, but he was among the survivors. Influential friends secured his release, but now Anna has been interned, and no news or trace of her can be found. Day after day is eaten up in a vain and frantic
search, until at last she is discovered in the Isle .of Man, her child dead because internment made it impossible for her to feed him. An English character says to Helmut : ". . . the watch- dogs of freedom have something- to answer for. Half the men on that ship of yours were sent by mistake—by mistake, mind yoti! " Mr. Comfort has written a moving book. Its detach- ment and sober objectivity make its propaganda possible for all but the squeamish. Many unfortunate victims of Nazi tyranny still languish in our chains, and if only enough people would read and discuss No Such Liberty a reformation of their harsh state might take place.
Café du Dome, told in the second person, is also about refugees, this time in the Paris of the bogus pre-bore-war period. Nadia, the beautiful Russian, and Martin, the handsome German, have a Morganish flavour, the tide has washed them up so dry and high. Nadia is marking time, enchanted by the superficial Parisian life. Her waiting is at last rewarded by the arrival of her husband, Peter Schumacher, who has escaped in mysterious circumstances from the notorious camp of Dachau. In and out of their lives drift various café characters, such as Pierre, the Swiss mystic, and Irene, the glamour girl of the underground Party. Peter, it seems, has became an agent of the Gestapo ; but by the time the suspicious Nadia finds out that all she has feared is no less than the truth, a child is on the way, and Martin has been betrayed into Nazi hands. Peter is given twenty-two hours grace in which to leave France, and is last heard of heading for Jamaica.
Of refugees generally the author writes :
" We can not stop reading the newspapers, there is the struggle for existence, the problem of work and getting a permit to work, our personal lives, which never run a smooth course when there's nothing else to make existence worth while. And then it trans- pires that our American visas are not granted, that our friends will no longer lend us money, our landlady threatens us with the police . . everything collapses in ruins."
But the story told is much less convincing • possibly the author felt her nationality a handicap in writing the book, which was translated from the German by Trevor and Phyllis Blewitt.
Mr. R. H. Newman is an American • he is obviously very young and very disgruntled, and he dislikes critics. In a three- page apologia, which prefaces his first novel, Far From Home, he states : " It makes no pretence towards impersonality or detach- ment." Why not, then, have written a fragment of autobiography or a tract? His hero has driven an ambulance in Finland and fought with the Poles in France, and some of the reportage is excellent. A brilliant literary manner can excuse ill-temper, but Mr. Newman's tricks are merely tiresome. The phrase, " a girl with hair like a boy's cap curling up at the back," occurs so often that it must surely be his signature-tune. The hero moves loosely in time and place. He dislikes negroes and tries to murder a Senegalese infantryman ; a page later he sees in the French retreat the end of democracy. Mr. Newman betrays such ignorance of the French idea of civilisation that one hopes he will correct this. He might do worse than begin with Montaigne's
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