Fiction
• By SEAN OTAOLAIN
The Royal Way. By Andre Malraux. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. (Methuen. 78. Bd.) Events in the Early Life of Anthony Price. By Philip
Henderson. (lioriswood. 68. )
Yonder. By Ambrose South. (Grayson. 7s. 6d.) HERE are five books of fiction. Four of them are introspective, subjective; the fifth is the good old-fashioned type that no longer seems to appeal to either readers or writers. It is characteristic that the four arc also much interested in sex. Literature seems to have gone that way, definitely—towards individual introspection, away from objective description ; and inevitably the result is an affirmation of scepticism and a criticism of what the mass believes. The novel used to be a synthesis. Now it is a process of disintegration.
M. Andre Malraux's book, The Royal Way, asks to be taken seriously, and if one does take it seriously one must be prepared for a long pause. Its subject matter and its analytical method combine to suggest Conrad. Two explorers, a young and an old, are hacking a way through upper Cambodia in search of bas-reliefs from deserted temples along, an ancient royal route from Angkor to the Menam river basin. Their adventures are exciting enough in themselves to have formed the basis of a very different kind of book that might have been written by G. A. 'Henty or Ballantyne ; but M. Malratrx has a curious indifference to action for action's sake and is not even directly interested in character, Instead he lays the emphasis through- out on the peculiar significance action may have in relation to the brooding, introspective soul of a man who is mainly preoccupied with the frustration of life. Perken is a strange character who has come to be a power in the wilds of Siam and is now, a widower, at a point of life where death is sufficiently near the horizon to be a warning that, his plans may never be fulfilled while Claude, the other white of the party, is a young man who accepts, also, the challenge of death to life and embraces adventure as the only proper reply. All that . happens really happens inside these two, and in so far as they are abnormal the effect is weirdly nightmarish. But all is related even at that distance to reality, and the atmosphere of the jungle, impressively built up in a heavy, languorous prose, fits artistically into the scheme. Not all may enjoy it : nobody can fail to be impressed by it : but how remote it all is from the old traditional novel of the nineteenth century, and how remote from common faiths and common beliefs ! It is a book, one might almost say, by a literary anarchist, likely to evoke as much wonderment as admiration.
Yes—all that is Siam and Indo-China, but here, in Idle Hands, is a London novel which would have puzzled our grandfathers even more, the matter being, so familiar. Hilary is an art critic, • and he lives and loves in a highly personal and erratic way that exasperates and annoys so much that one is at a loss to know whether to praise the author's skill, and (on this assumption that the character is true to life). to be irritated by the younger generation ; or to be annoyed by the futility of so. much endeavour wasted on inconsequentiality. But this is typical, again, of modem fiction, which refuses so passionately to take sides that it ends by taking what old traditions would call " the wrong side," Mr. Charles will not give his erratic characters the sound smacking they deserve ; he is, if anything, harder on the sensible ones--Hilary's father, Bishop Holdsworth, for example, is presented without sym- pathy, and poor Miss Bowen, the secretary to Hilary's art- paper, is a figure of pathetic absurdity. There is an idea behind the book, expressed in Hilary's–Words : " If you deny the need for aesthetic knowledge, then either you must al:rept religion and ,ethical appreciation! and ethical criteria : or we must, be as animals only living in our bodily sonsat ion:;. If you won't have a standard . . . of beauty out ugliness, then you roust have a 'standard of good and ev mitirh is the less tolerant t" And in the-last line, Mary, Hilary's long-suffering wife, cries, " Why can't we live as animals and be free, free, free ? " But as it isn't clearly demonstrated by the action one feels that it is just another teasing idea cerebrated before being felt, i.e., not artistically worked out in novel form.
This method of cerebrating fiction is nicely employed by Mr. L. A. Pavey in a number of his short stories. Take Nikaldon, a story of a dilletante who wanders over Europe rejoicing in the pose of the artist frustrated by: industrialisni. He is the greatest of all writers, he feels, but lie has written nothing. He meets a genuine writer who takes hint away on his yacht, studies him as " copy," and reproduces liiixii Nikaldon reads this novel and seeing himself for the, first time as he really is becomes cured. He ends as a shopkeeper's assistant. The idea is good, but it has not ' been held long enough to sink into the region of the emotions. Why slim' it, one might ask ? No reason on earth ' why it ,should, ione replies, except that if it had one would have felt it more deeply. Friends of Old Henry, on the other hand,. i.S. a warm, hurnap, lovable story about a group of old men, who talk of old Henry, their friend, who is bullied by his daughter-in-law. There:is no ingenious idea, here, • but there -is' feeling,., and Mr. Pavey shows himself a true artist when he is working like this out of his emotions. • But modern writers do not seem to be able to distinguish between these two methods. They think they are putting themselves at the centre of their story because. they analySe their characters from the inside, 'where an older writer described friam the outside. In fact they are at the centre but, they have not identified themselves utterly with their characters at the centre, because 'they insist.on retaining their own personal consciousness all the time in order to analyse. And the result is that it is the author's personality which speaks and not the character: That is very well seen in Mr. Pavey's story Home Town. " His mind reverted to the days-of his youth "-- " she thought back to the days of her courtship "—you just don't believe it because you know you are Overhearing Mr. Pavey, not overhearing the character.
Mr. Henderson's Events in the Early Life of Anthony Price is a first novel by a writer who can, it is clear, feel a character but who is also in grave danger of succumbing to this preference for dissection in cerebro.
" The floating population of such rooms is made up of people the radius of whose lives is the factory, the pi:iwnshop, and the pub, the latter being a social centre equivalent'to the Piccadilly Club. 01 more prosperous people. It is true that the pub:doei not afford . .
and so on. How strange this sounds in a period which mocks ac 'Thackeray for his personal comment" intruding 'his broken nose and his myopic spectacles" into the emotions of his people, as Mr. Ford Madox Ford once put it. You never, quite know with Mr. Henderson whether you are living as his character, or living as Mr. Henderson. Here is one sentence in which, for the first part, one is thinking as Anthony Price; at school, and in the second part thinking as Mr. Henderson out of it :
" Anthony, was left with, the vague impression that sex was some- thing, to boheartily ashamed of and avoided like the plague—for, of Course, there could be no question of .a frank discussion of its problems in a ',clean ' English schooL'?
The: external criticism of those inverted 'commas breaks the mood at once, the comment being clearly out of charatker at that stage. Apart, however, from these lapses, Mr. Henderson has written a novel in which there is a good deal of human sympathy and which shows that he has the gift of projecting living people with vividness, especially young folk. He is not yet sure of his touch ; the emphasis' here is too heaVy, there too light ; the selection rumbling. With Yonder, by Miss Ambrose South,, we. are in the 185(),'Sf, both as to matter and method. The scene is South Africa and the method is pre-Meredith. There is no analysis here in the; modern sense, and we arc back in a world *here all things Werei well-arranged and authors shared in the common acceptance of traditional morality. It is a gently moving book that gives to the lives of quiet people the tribute of interest that modern literature generally withholds. In Jan van Sluyskin, the Laughing Auctioneer of Capetown, and his wife and children, we meet with a simply drawn type of the family man who rarely receives more than a walk-on part in fiction, or serves as more than a background to various degrees of abnormality. One wonders if so uneventful a book will please many readers ; and one also wonders a little if, as Hardy said, a story-teller should halt the wedding-guest unless he has a more exeit ing yarn to tell. One may none the less congratulate Miss South on her effort to bring art and life into the,one room,
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