Fiction

By V. S. PRITCHETT

D. H. LAWRENCE is xt good stimulus for the young novelist but a had master. He had; in fact, a bad influence upon himself. While it is admirable that a novelist should have something to say, it is even more important that he should convey this something by a new convincing way of seeing things and People, and that there should be no hiatus between the saying and the seeing. The hiatus was not common in Lawrence's work : his people were often a too single and vehement expression of his views. Where the gap occurs is in the works

Of the imitators or the influenced. • Mr: Sfeinbeek, for example, is a good descriptive writer. • He

can describe the Californian land, its richness and fertility, its torrential rains, its scaly droughts with a warm, vivid-. and Simple poetic gravity. He can suggest the pagan past im- manent in the hidden forests.- His VerinOnt farmers- who -go west to open up this splendid land are plain men and women well drawii, and-he has the right touch of realistiethumour in dealing with the Mexican hangers-on. He is so clearly a far better novelist than most, and for this reason will stand much more serious criticism, while one picks out afew conventional words of praise for' his more saleable Made-to-measure con- temporaries. This is one of the injustices-of reviewing, and if I were a reader I should always put down on. my library list the book- on which the reviewer. has spent time, space and spleen in pulling to pieces. Now for Mr. Steinbeek's crime. Fundamentally, it arises- from a failure to understand that there is a difference between truth expressible in poetry and truth expressible in the novel. • • His chief -character, Joseph; loves the land. He feelsa deep, mystical kinship with it._ He worships its increase, he feels it as part of himself and as part of his patriarchal father whose momentous nature he inherits ; he loves with the land-and suffers *Milt. Tints, he performs all kinds of primitive acts. He talks to the tree, calling it "sir," because he sees in it his Abraham-like father ; he does odd things with bits of calfskin-; he visits a forgotten pagan altar-stone on which—at the end of the book—he makes a literal blood sacrifice of himself in order to break the drought which has skinned the land clean. The story of Joseph is one of a man of mysterious intuition, who is gradually absorbed into a cult which Christianity had silenced. It is not an impossible theme for a novel, but the trouble is that we are painfully aware of- Mr. Steinheek, text-book in hand, telling Joseph what to do next. The cult is not truly ancient : it is a revival. And when Joseph marries a schoolmistress and drives home with her across the mountains, there ensues a dialogue which is IL H. Lawrence at his symbolical worst: " . . . and there are times when the people and the hills and the earth, all, everything except the stars, are ones and the love of them all is strong like a sadness.'

"'Not the stars, then ? ' " "'No, never the stars. The stars are always strangers—some- times evil, but always strangers. Smell the sage, Elizabeth. It's good to be getting home."

Joseph has walked out of the Old Testament via Vermont to become a gigantic piece of half-baked mysticism. The hiatus between idea and living man becomes more and more distressing. The result is poetry gone flat. It is a pity because Mr. Steinbeek's grasp of the scene is masterly.

The gay, amoral naturalism of February Hill, another American novel, cleanses the system after this. It belongs to the " tough " school and has a vein of its sentimentality. The Elarrises are a delightful if monotonous family of rogues or originals, from shabby old Grandma, all painted up and singing bawdy songs in her rocking chair, to innocent hard- swearing little Amy who is already (bless her little heart !) looking for "fellers" who will give her presents. Minna, the mother, is of the " toujrntra gai, kid" variety. She is married to an ex-Harvard " soak " and keeps the family by going away for week-ends with nice gentlemen him Mr. Jennings of Texas. Jennie likes solitary walks in the country and " swipes " things from shops when she -needs them. - The

bootlegger whom she marries is rather ashamed of her happy

family. But, as Jennie says, "They're good." Grandma, for example, ingeniously and cheerfully gets herself gaoled for

a time so that Minna can go and stay with little Amy in Texas. As Jenny says again :

" It ain't no good, trying to mix with them other folks as if We was them. It goes right through sort of. We're funny, sort of, the whole lot of us. We're different to other folks. Even Dottie's different. She's meaner:" Dottie is the unpleasant One. She hates her home, marries _a frugal French-Canadian, and tries a little blackmail in a prim,

ignorant way. the is a sweated factory hand and she is very well drawn. The story thinks its analphabetic way along.

Jenny of the simple, wondering eyes, the quick-as-a-needle mind and the disconcerting fingers, loses her bootlegger. Mr.

Harris gets a job and it kills him. Joel, the neurotic boy, goes on reading Shakespeare in the attic, weeping.

"Funny thing of that is," says Grandma, "how it hardly

ain't no different at all. Livin' or dead, I mean. Not now Minna's home again."

Grandma herself looks better after a spell in gaol. "It done her good, showing she could manage for herself like that."

The merry side of the lower depths.

Good old human itature. There's nothing like it, I say. And so says Mr. F. W. Lister, a learned, graver but spirited historical novelist. I have, I hope, as many prejudices as other reviewers and it was therefore with a sense of strained

virtue that I prepared to grind my way through his novel about four Roman legionaries enduring historical agonies on Hadrian's Wall. How agreeable to find virtue unnecessary and to discover a book alive, exciting, well-written and rich in character and vitality! How refreshing to find history both good-htunoured and dignified, detailed and yet not dull. The four legionaries are good characters and are well-chosen, Leno Gratus, the only one with any mind or imagination, living in the common terror of the Pict, falls in love with a Pictish girl. Lartius, the sardonic Briton, is his friend. Obidus is the debauched old soldier. Marcus, a Belgian, is a convert to the Roman gods, more Roman than the Romans in religion, destined never to see Rome but- to catch new Christianity. The atmosphere of the camps is managed very well Indeed.

The fear, the boredom, the corruption, the anger and the

humour of the Roman outpost,. half aware of the impending collapse of the Empire, are vividly done. And the vitality of the book is not that spurious highly-coloured stuff which is injected by many historical novelists into their Wardour Street dummies. The four legionaries are men. There is point in Mr. Lister's choice of period. His style may be some- times overcharged, the going sometimes rough and craggy, but these are the faults of a writer who has a lively recon- structive energy.

Miss Esther Meynell is for the recovering of melodies no longer heard. She does not reconstruct so much as invoke; and the past returns not in splashes of nostalgia or romantic poetry, but clothed tidily in its veil of detail. The realism in which she recalls the Leipzig of Bach is the fruit of sensi- bility. What Mr. Lister preferred to acquire with both hands seems to pour into her through intuition.

The story is ingeniously told and is a study in the artistic temperament. A boy who has been taught by Paganini

comes upon some letters written -by Bach to a kinsman, and they affect the boy's -imagination so strongly that he acquires

the dream faculty of reliving the past of Bach's time. Bach's daughter, he thereby discovers, was in love with an ancestor of his. It is a story containing other stories and parallels, a delightful thing like those elaborate boxes within boxes within boxes. The manner is lucid, the world a privileged place under the domestic shadows of the masters.

We pass finally to parody in The Bazalgettes, purporting to

be a Victorian novel written between 1870-1876. There is a danger point in parody which is reached when imitation sets in ; and half way through this amusing book one realizes that the joke has gone on long enough. A few more pages and the book will conscientiously be trying to be what it sets out to mock. Parody must be brief.