FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN The Professor. By Rex Warner. (Boriswood. 7s. 6d.) The Bridegroom Cometh. By Waldo Frank. (Gollancz. cos. 6d.) Already Walks Tomorrow. By A. G. Street. (Faber and Faber. 75. 6d.) Caspar Hauser. By Jacob Wassermann (Allen and Unit. Jos.) To read The Professor is one excellent way of reviewing the sources of our contemporary despair: It is a book which proposes' to clarify muddy anguish, and to resolve, only too grimly, all unresolved, romantic hopelessness. It is a fable ; it is topical, cool and incontrovertible. It is a tale told, almost primly, in symbols, which presses some realistically on every civilised breast its own implacable fear—for the death of Europe—by Europe meaning that struggle of say three thousand
years towards a good- society, and into which, for instance, Socrates, Christ, Aquinas, Voltaire and Karl Marx flung their rich and difficult contributions. We are back now at the domination of the brute ; we answer only to the lash and the roar. And if this quiet, tragic story cannot tell us why such retrogression has come about, it does attempt to show us how. It shows humanism fooled and murdered ; it says, through the mouth of one of its blood-and-hate philosophers, that the springs of the real morality are " lust for life, fear and hatred," that " real morality is- the pride of man in -himself, in his possessions, and in the power he can exercise over others." " This is the deepest thing in man," this character goes on to say, an accusation over which everyone must pause. But the hero, the professor, need not beat his breast. A scholar, a humanist, steeped in the 'moral-beauty% of Sophocles,
and perpetually aware of " the existence _and the importance of that other world inhabited still by ghosts greater than the living and able still to live as a source of inspiration," he is unable to believe in the final exacerbated despair of selfish men before the smug failures and ineptitudes of a morality they now call " artificial," but which he knows to have been expressed and demonstrated flawlessly again and again by man towards mankind. He believes, against the iron of his day, in beauty and truth, and even when much disillusioned, " all the living appeared to him as infinitely pathetic, infinitely lovable, not because of their general suffering and their inevitable end, but because of the hopes which were often realised in life, and because of the beauty and goodness which, however transitory, did, he knew, mark almost every life at one time or another."
This man, this professor, is called from his chair of Greek Studies by a frightened, cynical government and asked to handle a desperate situation. A great neighbour-State, a blood-and-iron bully, is about to devour his country, not merely materially, but philosophically. He undertakes to save democracy, national entity and justice. For years, with the help of experts, he has been preparing an economic plan, and he is entirely familiar, as he thinks, with the situation of his beloved and civilised nation. But for all his wit and wisdom, he is shown to be a fool. The moral tide is against all that he knows to be good. In spite of sympathy with the idealistic despair of Communists and, in general, of the young, he cannot as a constitutionalist agree to arm the workers against the rest of the community. He has to stand by his own integrity, and face brute force with only the honourable, impossible defences of humanistic liberalism, the arguments of reason. Within three days he is cheated, insulted, betrayed, tortured and shot " while attempting to escape."
It is a tragic fable. Written in detachment and symbolically, even sometimes artificially, it presents without emphasis but on a strong current of comprehension the madness and doom of our world, its waste, its hideousness. It is a remarkable book, which must inevitably increase sadness in its readers, but which by its clear and impersonal exposition of our plight and its refusal to see light where there is none May even be contributory to the warding off of doom.
To turn from Mr. Warner's method of writing to that of Mr. Waldo Frank is the more depressing because this American writer is also much concerned with contemporary woe and confusion and can on occasion express his vision of our life with power and accuracy. flis theme, too, is good. -It is quite possible to give universal interest and value to the story of a neurotic American girl's progress from crazy Revivalism
to Marxism, and showing the havoc and the good fruits
worked in her by ineradicable religious hysteria to paint a valuable portrait of iridividtialisin flung- against 'the general scene. And Mr. Frank -has many talents, and a vast cross- section knowledge of America. But his book is nevertheless mainly absurd. It has more mystical-sensual sex-drivel to the page—and there are seven hundred and two pages !—than it has ever been my experience to read. .Mary. is, let it be admitted, an interesting enough conception, especially when contrasted, as she very skilfully is, against her more simple twin sister, Martha. She is a plainish, secretive) emotional, slow" and religious child who has to grow into much the same kind of young woman, but is destined-OS arrive at some kind of harmonious understanding of herself and of life only through the exploitation, or rather the outrage of her own boundless sensuality. She . has the Usual- smoky, dark beginnings of experience back home in Marling ;_ she sees " something 'orrible in the woodshed," so to speak, but unlike the Cold Comfort lady, she is not thereby invalided—though in one sense the episode might be described as rendering her bed- ridden for life I Certainly throughout the book she does her share of lying down. But whatever she got out of her high-hat and humourless progress from lust to lust—except, we are to believe, some kind of wordy conversion to marriage with Karl Marx !—remains a secret from this reader. Reiteration is in any case a grave menace to an author's purpose, and if the clarity and revelation of passion ever did strike this determined heroine, the patient reader may well miss the moment. " Ecstasy." " The ecstasy of her woman will." " She stood vised in emptiness, the heart of her confusion." " In her loins the world stirred." Words and sentences flung together like this in oily masses make up a sum of confusion which no sudden cool flashes of talent can excuse and against which adult readers should not be asked to wade. Whereas on the other hand this really is no book for adolescents. As for the blurb, provided by a distinguished Fmglishpolitician- " a great book which will bring enlightenment -And a real gospel of humanity to those who read it "—well, one can only raise the brows in total non-comprehension.
Already Walks Tomorrow is a very thoroughgoing, sound and necessary-seeming warning from a farmer to England and the world of what is going to come to pass very shortly in the food markets of the world if the land is ill-treated much longer as it apparently is by existent agricultural policy. It seems, to one shamefully ignorant of the rights and wrongs it deals in, a very timely tract and one deserving the full attention of those who may have say of any kind in the problems of farming and food production. But it seems to me a pity that Mr. Street wrote it in the clumsy form of a novel which makes it more boring to its well-wishers than it need have been. No doubt its author, passionate to save the English land he loves and to save humanity from the doom of widespread famine, wishes to bring his message to all ears, and believes that the fool in the street will only absorb what can be served up to him in the form of fiction. Bur this is an error. At least 5o per cent, of the stupid are at pains to tell authors of fiction that they " never read novels." Which one is glad to hear from them. In any case, the stupid are going to be of no use to any desperate cause, and the intelligent really expect a novel to. be better made than this is. Mr. Street could have written a very brilliant and simple exposé of the British farming situation as he sees it, and prefigured, as honestly and untheatrically as he does here, what the ignorant world is heading for, and got far more readers than will now have patience with his plodding tale of the perfect, dull Englishman who never put a foot wrong, whose shabby hacking jacket was perfectly cut, and who, illicitly in love, could placate his desire for years with the shibboleth " our sort doesn't poach." Nevertheless, this book holds a tragic warning, and sets it out with knowledge.
To my surprise, as an admirer of Jacob Wassermann, I find myself unable to praise this early work of his, Caspar Hauser. It tells the story of a mysterious youth 'who appeared in Nuremberg in x828 and was believed by many to be the grossly ill-treated son of Princess Stephanie of Baden. The boy's misfortunes make a pathetic tale, but Herr Wassermann's approach to the subject is simultaneously too emotional and rather dull.
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