Fiction

By PETER BURRA There Ain't No Justice. By James Curtis. (Cape. 7s. eid.) The Great and The Goods. By Ivor Brown. (Hamish Hamilton. 75. 6d.)

The Flowering Aloe. By Sylvia Stevenson. (Cape. 7s. 6d.) Not With Me. By Marjorie Deans. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.)

These Foolish Things. By Michael Sadleir. (Constable. 7s. 6d.)

PROLETARIAN literature is much under discussion nowadays, though, as Mr. O'Faoliiin was saying flare _last week, " it is

still an aim rather than a reality," and will remain so until it has finally decided what its aim really is. For the time being two headings suggest themselves. The proletarian novel may either be a propagandist expression of discontent with proletarian conditions, written by a proletarian, or by a bourgeois sympathiser ; or it may, more importantly, be simply a story whose values are intelligible and significant to the proletarian reader. Obviously, the vast majority of novels, written by the bourgeois about the bourgeois—such as fill the second half of this week's list—must remain completely meaningless to the proletarian reader, who has no knowledge of the values of their world. A corresponding proletarian world is waiting to be exploited, simply as entertainment by the proletariat for the proletariat, rather than as a social interpretation for the benefit of the bourgeois. In fact, the bourgeois may be as completely excluded from proletarian literature as the proletarian is from bourgeois. If the bour- geois writer attempts such a work on behalf of the prole- tariat—many have already done so—he encounters just such difficulties as when he tries to describe the life of a foreign country. Meanwhile, the proletarian may attempt the work for himself. The trouble is that, as things are, a proletarian such as D. H. Lawrence, who becomes a writer, automatically ceases to be a member of the proletariat,—a circumstance in which a whole host of complications is involved.

The Brimming Lake seems to be a genuinely proletarian novel, written as an objective and purposeless work of art, by an inhabitant of its world. Such a world is too self- conscious of its struggle for rights to avoid mention of them, and the scenery—though not the theme—of the story is the

fight for Socialism in a slum London borough. That is the unromantic background for the figures of Magnus Haggerty and his wife, Deirdre. Magnus is a distinct and original creation, the Socialist demagogue whose devotion to. the cause is little more—though it takes everyone but his wife a long time to realise this—than the accidental result of his genius for tub-thumping.

" Magnus's surest possession was his words. With these he entered his own estate. . . • When he had made some impressive phrase he retained it. . . . Thereafter, when he thought, of the feeling he thought of it in the phrase he had used, and he thought what a strange sensitive person he must be to have such feelings as those."

Perhaps it is a little unskilful. of the author to give away this analysis of his hero at the start instead of waiting for

the action to discover it ; and the climaxof the story, the swing over from confidence to despair, is more effectively coa- trived than probable—everything does happen so terribly

at once. But that does not affect the impressive truth of the character of Magnus, whom this proletarian world has brought forth. As Mr. O'Faolain says, " The ego is in the end the main

interest of every novelist," and the best aim which the fresh imagination of the people's writers can have is the creation of such living figures.

Mr. Curtis describes the dirtier side of the proletarian picture,

and is an extremely racy exponent of it. One would hesitate to suppose that he actually inhabits that world, and indeed he does not quite convey that sense of equality with his subject that Mr. Smith achieves, though it is evident that he knows it very well. There Ain't No Justice repeats the whole manner of the author's first novel The Gilt Kid, the story of a London

burglar which was described here as " a document without comment." The new book differs in that the document speaks the comment rather loudly from the title-page onwards, and the weight of the book lies in its moral indignation instead of in the sheer intensity of story-telling. The plea is for the correction of abuses in the humbler quarters of the London Losing-world, and the author says " he will be more than happy " if he " succeeds in gaining for the small-time prelimi- nary boy any ventilation of his grievances." Meanwhile he does good work in letting the bourgeois reader know, without a scrap of sentimentalising, just what an attractive person the Cockney tough is, and how his environment plays upon his strength and weaknesses.

A great deal of 'indignation of a more general order bah resulted in -The Great and The Goods, in which Mr. Brown chastises with his customary venom the theme of Careerism. Dr. Chirrup is the incarnation of blatant opportunism, and the careers of a number of his pupils at the College of Triumph- ant Living are presented to us for admiration, including a Headmaster, a Bishop, and a Foreign Secretary, while other subjects at which he has a whack are the Beauty Parlour, the Brainless Beauty, the Stage, Modern Poetry, and Dramatic Criticism itself. Mr. Brown's stories are, one must say at once, excessively funny, if in a fairly simple way, but they are so close to the borders of pure farce that there Is hardly enough verisimilitude *left for the satire to begin to work. In any case many of the objects of Mr. Brown's wrath do not seem to be very important ones. Academic and ecclesiastical careerism, dramatic criticism and modern poetry are, as we all know, utterly sickening ; but is there time to stop and

worry about them ? •

The remaining three books are all concerned with the familiar bourgeois world, from which other values are excluded. In The Flowering Aloe, it is true, the heroine's daughter is interested in social work, but that is only part of her own bourgeois problems. The theme of the story is the search of a widow mother of children just grown up for some kind of faith to hand on to them, and her final return to a plain philosophy of acceptance and endurance would have more weight if the earlier alternatives which present themselves to her—Buchmanism, all kinds of South Kensington spiritualism, and most kinds of modern doc- toring—were not so obviously futile. But it is a careful and delicate picture of family life.

The opening chapters of Not With Me are so unpromisingly ordinary that they give no hint what is to come, thougb one recognises later that they contain some well-planned ironies in the light of the future event. A Church o. England parson, who has lived stolidly with wife and family in one parish fcr many years, is converted to Rome while leading a party of English female " pilgrims " to Assisi. The constematicn caused by this event, the sympathy of his daughters and dismay of his wife and son, develop into an impasse which is admirably contrived. Just as the crisis is approaching, he is knocked down and killed by a 'bus. The suspicion' that this may have been suicide is manifestly inconsistent with the strength of his character ; and the book ends with its certain disproval in a letter written on the day of his death to a Jesuit priest. As the latter- comments, " God sometimes makes things all right for people, in His own way." This piece of mysticism is the only false note in the story—or rather, it is false to the other terms of the story ; and indeed it is too evident that the authoress had contrived so perfect a dilemma that she herself failed to discover any solution of it but the 'bus ; all too literally, Deus ex machina. But the comedy of the Italian journey ; a certain Miss Courtney, who looks like a caricature and suddenly turns into a- 'swift, and complete study of frustration, and helps Mr. Farmiloe to his conversion ; that event itself and the following dilemma all have a quality which suggest that this writer may before long produce a very good book.

Mr. Sadleir is already a novelist of achievement, and k takes an experienced hand to interest us, as he does, in the adolescent love-affairs of a rather ordinary young man. It is the " story of a Sentimental Education," and during its agonising progress the hero learns the depths and the heights of which women are capable. . The theme is simple, is vividly and picturesqUely piesent6d in German and French settings, but is perhaps a little too simply handled. The Education seems rather to follow a mathematically pre-calculated version of experience than to be actually acquired and tested through the events of the book.