Fiction
Once Upon a Time. By Vaughan Wilkins. (Cape. 12s. 6d..)
The Parasites. By Daphne du Maurier. (Gotlancz. Ils.)
Two English and two American novels, and I could wish I had had Turkish or Bolivian novels instead. At any rate I have been in some doubt as to the order in which these four books should appear at the head of this review, since all four represent different kinds of popular appeal and achieve different sorts of inadequacy or worse. Mr. Vaughan Wilkins, whose cavorting fancy is even more exuberant than usual, is altogether too irresponsible on this occasion ; his is the vice of mere fabrication or prefabrication of a plot. Miss Daphne du Maurier, with what may be either expert calculation or complete feminine spontaneity, reaches down from the kitchen shelf and stirs a rich flavour of Bohemia into a glutinous pudding of a magazine story ; her trouble, I should say, springs from adopting as a point of view the first romantic cliché that comes into her head. Mr. Christopher Morley, temperamentally much the most sympathetic of the four and engagingly Lamb-like, has all the whimsical graces of an English essayist in Philadelphia or thereabouts terribly addicted to literary allusion •, his is the frailty of the writer of footnotes. And Mr. John Home Burns, author of a novel about G.I.s in Naples, The Gallery, which was highly praised, salutes the United States " veteran " returning from the wars in terms that often reduced me to giggling embarrassment: Mr. Burns's undoing, I am afraid, is a state of mind or feeling that ordinarily belongs to raw adolescence. " How," asks the wrapper of Once Upon a Time—" how can we succinctly describe this picaresque story of 5949 ? " How indeed ? A prologue, dated 59o5, recalls the tale of Majesty's truancy from Cambridge when Prince of Wales forty years earlier and airily contrives the innocent escapade of the daughter of a lunatic peer and her incarceration in a Scottish castle. So to a streamlined " biografactory " with fat business connections in the United States ; on to parachute exercises in Wales and an Oliver from Louisiana who has lost his memory ; on again to the suave, resourceful and incorrigibly literary-minded dandy and sybarite, paunchy Mr. Broth, the ravishing Twinkle and the incomparable Spicey in their travelling furniture van ; on once more to the early Victorian museum that was grandmother's house, and so on, and so on. Mr. Wilkins's invention is lively and unflagging, his thrills follow one another at intervals of a minute or so, his jokes are passable or a shade better. Unluckily, he shows next to no imaginative discrimination at all. Irrelevance and incongruity pile up in a hotch-potch of imaginary history, killings, female elegance, black-market and currency racketeering, comic character, Victoriana, nymphomania, treasure in suitcases, an ex-S.S. gang leader and a great deal more. Mr. Wilkins in the past has been more artful and more restrained than this.
Miss du Maurier has a genuine enough story-telling gift, but what else it is hard to say. The Parasites resumes the life of Pappy and Mama, a great singer and a great dancer respectively, and of the three no less remarkable children that one or other of them had produced by different consorts. The three were Maria, who was an actress ; Niall, who composed not symphonies but songs for the multitude ; and Celia, who was plain but very good at drawing. Telepathically united by common memories, a common devotion to art, a common genius of personality, the trio were invulnerable to the world's standards—or very nearly. Miss du Maurier, though her style is at times slovenly, makes the most of a slangy and sophisti- cated vivacity of tone and has several passages of bright if exaggerated comedy. But this is a little too near to daydreaming tushery. Mr. Morley's tale, told in the first person, is of a literary agent— how oppressively literariness in one form or another dogs the self- conscious footsteps of the novelist today!—a wistful, whimsical fellow with a lovely psychiatrist named Zoe for partner, and the silent, unapproachable fellow-commuter who was his alter ego. The murmured wisecracks, the puns, the parodies, the phrase-making are pretty decorations, but the tale itself scarcely draws breath. As for Mr. Burns's novel about after-war schoolmastering, I doubt whether many English readers will surmount in the first place the handicap represented by the hero's attitude to himself as a " veteran." Its brashness, boastfulness and comic disproportion generally would be beyond belief if one had not already experienced them at first hand. Guy, at any rate, who taught history in a private educational institution, had been transformed by war into "a lone wolf." " Over his fireplace he'd hung two German student sabres and between them a captured Kraut helmet of an Oberst who'd tried to shoot him" • also a Picasso and a Piranesi, also a pornographic etching " looted from Berchtesgaden." The lone wolf, in a school apparently given over for the most part to lechery, brutality and pure mental idiocy, found a sympathetic and admiring spirit in the beautiful Betty Blanchard, who taught Spanish. This was another veteran, who had seen bombs fall on Naples and could therefore control a class of noisy girls. Their love-making, I regret to sal, is as silly an exhibition of male egotism as one could conceive. But what with the pervading air of rather hysterical denunciation, the cheapness of the satire, and the jokes about false teeth, virginity and varicose veins, this is plainly an ill-considered and immature
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