FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN The Education of Hyman Kaplan. By Leonard Q. Ross.
(Constable. 5s.)
FICTION reviewing has its vogues and period-catchwords which may be supposed to bestow on troubled critics something of that uncertajn reassurance which a woman compels herself to derive from knowledge that her new hat, however ludicrous, is " what they are wearing." Not long ago, therefore, the vogue being then extravagant, every respectably shaped novel was a " masterpiece " ; later, in natural reaction, " masterpiece is a word I shrink from," we said, and we regretted our inability to recommend any contemporary effort • to the " fastidious reader. But this autumn, cheering up again, we have taken to the boutonniere, readability. • The outstanding fact about Mr. Christopher Isherwood's new conte is its readability for Mr. Isherwood's generation, as for the generations a neck ahead and a length behind. It is a gay, deft, good-tempered, sceptical little story of an English cabaret-girl who more or leis lives on her. wits in Berlin in 193o-3t. The author is fond of her and sees her through a series of indeterminate adventures, mainly comic and all sordid, until she disappears to Paris and sends him a postcard. She is a graceful, dirty, goodnatured and egoistical creature with green-painted nails ; she is without morality and has a fine conceit of herself and her talents ; an irritating creature, but good company if one happens to be in the right kind of amiable and indolent mood—which mood the author evokes with cunning by the simplicity and lightness of his narrative method. There is no pomp whatever here, and Sally is not suitable society for those who like to weigh the pros and cons of behaviour. She does so, and so, and passes on, half drunk but incurably optimistic, to her next 'attempt to be a famous actress or a rich man's mistress. One of her saving. graces is that although she never crashes to disaster, she has no' luck. Her adventure with the " European agent Of Metro7 Goldwyn-Mayer ". is. a brilliantly touching piece of craziness. The story will leave the right reader with a grateful taste in the mouth, and a curious soft light of tenderness in the memory.
College Square is an entirely different variety of the " read- able " book. It deals with the clash of policies and personalities in a small " seat of learning " in the West Country, a training college which aims at becoming a university. At the opening of the story the old, easy-going Principal of the college dies, and Edward Marshall, the Vice-Principal who is also a clergy- man and a man of somewhat utiscrupulous ambition and drive, has to accept as his new Principal a young layman from a northern university. The two are incompatible, as are their divergent intentions for the future of the college. The clash is worked out to a good natural crisis. Miss Goodyear has a compelling way in the creation of character ; her pages are full of good sense and she is not afraid of sensibility. And even if, in her manipulation of the two pleasant stories of young love which ripple through the main plot, she yields to the English magazine-story trick of emotional dodging of emotion, still she does convince us that her creatures have feeling, and in her examination of the pride, bitterness and pathos of Edward Marshall we are entirely with her, and perhaps even more with him than she would consider entirely fair. But she has not clarified the essential problem of Marshall's lovely, sensitive invalid wife, in whose presence one reader was perpetually embarrassed. However, Marshall himself, his touching daughter Nicolette, John Dyson, the young Principal who loves her, and all the minor characters, make up a real nucleus of society, and their manoeuvres and emotions are shaped into a true-ringing and very " readable " book.
The Sword and the Rose is written unblushingly, and on the whole very expertly, for those who hold the Regiment sacred. And perhaps, on the side, for one or two who don't. It is all about the Herefords, the Old Hundredth, The Brass Roses, whose motto is Spectamur Agendo, and whose regi- mental march " The Forest of Dean." Its action takes place in r919-2o, when the regiment is shipped from Tilbury to Kurdunagar, and after a taste of ordinary Indian barrack life takes its part in a North-west Frontier action, loses some of its men and officers, says goodbye to its devoted retiring Colonel, and on the last page begins its ritualistic -life again under the command of aneurman -from the Guards. F:or those unfamiliar with BritiSh regimental life it reads esoterically both in its passages of ,,moral exposition—the " officer and gentleman philosophy -'smi-43:6-at to the point of absolute mysticism—and in its matter-of-fact record of details of behaviour; mesaroom etiquette and so on. The canvas is crowded, but the author knows his scene and hiS writing is authoritative and manly—here and there unnecessarily manly, it may be. The lives, dreams and desires of too many officers, rankers and sergeant-majors, to say nothing of sweethearts and wives, are crowded in with blustering energy. One at least of the emotional situations—that of the impeccable Vivori and Natasha, the Russian wife of his friend, Julian Rayne— is pure " Way of An Eagle," but it carries, as did that famous story, a _romantic, impossible conviction of pompous passion, and because the writing is so much firmer than Miss Dell's, almost we are persuaded of emotion, against an attitude which we believe to be entirely false and comical. The book really has—allowing for individual reactions of mirth and disbelief to such creatures as Vivori, Colonel Plant and Sergeant Proven readability." . There are descriptions of duck-shoots, fatal encounters with tigers and gallant disasters on the frontier which—take them or leave them—are written with knowledge and energy. But the book has one real creation—a great smirch on the Regiment—Lieutenant Pribram. - An officer of the new post-War type, you understand. The kind of person who is not desirable for the Old Hundredth. A cad, one must suppose, by any definition. But a weak. and living man in trouble. A real creation; most touching, unhappy and absurd. Worth any novelist's trouble; and, for the reader to whom Spectamur Agendo means nothing, perhaps even worth the time he will have.. to spend listening to the immaculate adjutant addressing grown-up men in phrases which surely no grown-up man can take from a fellow-creature. Even worth the time spent watching the decanter go the right way round, Pribram in his misery and-folly is a novelist's triumph. Those of us to whom the Regiment is not ;sacred will clOse the book disloyally hoping that its author does in fact know his own wheat from his own Chaff.
For the rest—I have a fairy tale to offer, and a funny book. A heavy, coy, German fairy tale—clerk-into-sparrolk and back and forth and it never matters which. , A story which you will either adore or loathe. But you can settle the whole question in advance with Sparrow Farm by reading The Foreword by the Diffident Author. You will either love the note that strikes, or be nauseated. Alas, I was nauseated. But I cannot bear fairy tales unless they eschew whimsy. AboVe all, Germanic whimsy. I cannot bear such writing as this ? " ' What need has man of wings . . . has he not love ? ' She said no more but flew into his arms, and into the bliss of the seventh heaven."
The Education of Hyman Kaplan is for those who like funny books. It tells of the pursuit of learning in a New York night- school for adults by a naive and genial American immigrant with a Jewish accent, who pursues English grammar and spelling with a most winning gusto, and whose delight in his own surging linguistic contribution should indeed be enough to turn any night-school pupil into 'the idol of the class. How he must have cheered things up—even for Mr. Parkhill his so anxious teacher ! " The plural of cat is Katz," said Hyman Kaplan. And when asked to introduce the word " dock " into a sentence, " I like roast duck." Yes, he must have been a welcome and cherished class mate—it would be heaven to catch such impromptues orally springing. Yes, orally. Set down in a book, or, at least, assembled so as to be a book's raison d'être, they fail of their effect. Taken week by week in small doses in the New Yorker they probably carried spon- taneity—but regimented here they sober us. Mr. Kaplan conjugated " to die " as " die, dead, funeral." This assemblage of his funny mistakes is perhaps the conjugation of Mr. Kaplan —" die, dead, funeral." "
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