Fiction

BY GRAHAM GREENE.

After the Party. By R. D. Dorthy. (Seeker. 6s.) Hindu Heaven. By Max Wylie. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) Mutiny ! By Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. (Chap- man and Hall. 7s. 6d.)

MRS. WHARTON and Herr Plivier make an amusing contrast, possibly a significant one. Mrs. Wharton writes hr the tradition of Henry James ; from that superb portraitist she has borrowed a trick or two of style, the use of alliteration for example, the habit of introducing her minor characters in an ironic vignette and her general scene—the. more " visited " of Continental cities. Human nature, exemplified

in particular by wealthy Americans, is her study, and her attitude, admirably maintained, is cool, aloof, a little

withering. Homan nature, in fact, does not come well out of the ordeal of being closely regarded by so shrewd and unsympathetic a critic. A widow, whose son has been killed in the War, combs Europe to find her illegitimate child, born before her marriage, who had been adopted by a pair of Americans called Brown. She is deceived and ruined by a trio of adventurers, a terrible middle-aged

flapper " with layers and layers of hard-headed feminine craft under her romping ways," her young consumptive lover Stephen, and her elderly husband, " Boy " Brown, full of jocular allusions and arid anecdotes." The widow herself is admirably described in her sentimentality, her weakness, her absurd beauty. " When she sat on the beach beside the dozing Stephen, in her flowing white dress, her large white umbrella tilted to shelter him; she reminded me of a carven angel spreading broad wings above a tomb (I could never look at her without being reminded of statuary)." Deception, which was Henry James' prevailing theme, is Mrs. Wharton's also in these stories : a wife returns to her husband in America, after living for six months with a painter in France, and is greeted with a pulverizing Rotarian generosity. " Joy in the House " is written above the door in flowers. Next day the wife discovered the meaning behind the " Joy in the House " : her lover, when she left him at Boulogne, had killed himself.

The surface of Mrs. Wharton's stories have an ingenuity

and a wit almost equal tVier, master's ; but one wonders how far her attitude to human nature has been borrowed, for it is broken occasionally by sentimentalities : " You're

a lovely buried lady that I've stumbled on in a desert tomb, shrouded in your golden hair," the painter tells Christine. This is certainly not Henry James ; one has an uneasy feeling that it may be Mrs. Wharton.

There could be no greater contrast than Herr Plivier. In his novels individuals are unimportant, the psychology is crowd psychology, the characters are the masses ; his method (he uses the historic present) is to plunge the reader back into the excitement, suspense, exultation and disillusion of the moment. Revolution is his theine, revolution stirring in the factories, in the power-stations, in the slums, in the food queues, breaking in the ships at Kiel when the order to attack the English fleet is given and the stokers put out the fires, failing finally in Berlin, when Ebert, the astute Socialist politician, outwits the Communists, and calls in the Officers' Corps to discipline the masses. Trotsky in his history speaks of a revolution " now first feeling its power, feeling the unnumbered masses it has aroused, the colossal tasks, the pride in success, the joyful failing of the heart at the thought of the morrow which is to be still more beautiful than today." = That is what Herr Plivier conveys in a book of

astonishing scope, which moves with an equal air of authen- ticity from the- eleetrical works to - the Grand Fleet, from the Reichstag to the General -Headquarters at Spa.- To Herr Plivier the _triumph of the Social Democrats over the; Communist Revolution in f 918 was a tragedy. The Social Democrats _" stand in principle for peace,- yet they have

served war. They stand --for- the overthrow of capitalist society, yet they have served the capitalists." But the

novel does not depend for its interest on a Marxist moral ;I it is significant of a movement in fiction to subordinate characters to environment, invention to fact. Perhaps the .next..few years may see, the end of the psychological novel as the dominant form. 4t present there are few writers with Herr Plivier's ability to popularize the new form, while ' the old can still call on writers as able as Mr. Dorthy. It is an astonishing 'ebtinple of the quick passage of time - that one inchides Mr. Dorthy among the conservative writers. He is obviously influeneed by Mrs: Woolf. He uses with great skill the " stream of consciousness !' 'method which only a few years ago seemed so exciting, so vitalizing, so new His -"novel is subtle, sensitive; understated. The characters, two brothers, Edward a successful advertising man John a competent less successful advertising man, are hardly differentiated ; one has to peer very closely to catch the distinctions: John marrieS, his brother takes as mistress Anne, who -was once the mistress of john ; the father, an unpleasant man With religious' mania, pensioned by his sons, is killed in a street accident. : That is all, immense skill and subtlety, but vagueness and a slight feeling of dissatisfaction. "- He was post-War, he supposed, and semething of the war-time nerves and restlessness, the avidity for life and certainty ..)n the midst of danger and insecurity, had entered into his beries." But the War had been over now for fifteen years ; _ one is a bit tired of .disillusionment ; and the tech- nique seems a little outModed, for the novel has shown no signs of advancing along the path Mrs. Woolf laid down. The future' is more likely to be Herr PliViersi: Mr. Wylie and Mr. Boden both show signs of getting away from the analysis of individual psychologies. Mr. Wylie's novel is marred by the curious he-man sentimentality Mr. Hemingway has popularized and a terrible straining after effect : " The Ford coughed ahead indifferent to topography, pursuing,a white jet of steam that hissed from its boiling coils." His subject is the American missions in India. " Missionaries muscle in on each other's territory and grab each other's converts as if it was a beer racket and every Indian a barrel." Post-Millenarians and Pre- Millenarians struggle for scalps. They are killed by the climate, they go Mad, they lose faith- even -hi the virtue of a balance-sheet, and Mr. Wylie manages to put on paper the sense of the-hinge population 'untouched by their teaching, the whisper of unrest, the little sinister secret societies, u ith their comic methods, the blind brutal pushing of the mob. It is a depressing, uneasy, curiously frightening novel.

Mr. Boden's is on,,a much lower level of accomplishment. His first novel, Miner, was highly praised, and he should not be unfairly, judged by its successor. A first novel some- times absorbs too much of a writer's vitality : he has not learnt to harbour his resources, and when it is a success he is driVen to write another before he is ready. - Flo is the

novel of a tired man. It is appallingly adjectival. The physical appearance of his characters is described over and over again ; more than twenty Wires we learn that Elsie has fair hair, that Flo has dark _eyes. Whit is interesting. and promising for Mr. Boden's next book, is the subordination of the individual story of Flo's fidelity and Ray's elopement

with the -wrong woman to the scene—the country landscape and the streets and the • great ,railway--yards. The figures diminished by trees, by cranes,- by crowds, lose some of the triviality of their particular story and become representatives

of their class. "

Mutiny ! is a very competent piece of reconstruction. The story of the mutiny of ` The Bounty ' is told in detail,

with the minimum of invention. There is a good deal of

information as to the customs of the Tahitians and the ways of sailing ships ; those who like instruction given with the least possible mitigation will enjoy this novel. No one on accuse it of being merely entertaining, or even to my mind of " being entertaining at all. " Thacker, her new maid—a black-eyed Devon,,girlame tripping down the path.

She

dropped 'My mother a curtsey and held out a letter on a silver tray. My mother took the letter, gave me a glance of apology,`- and began to read, seating herself • on a rustic bench." It is that sort of novel. One is not spared the rustic benches.- They. help. ,t6;_maye the novel more than four hundred .pages -loeff,