Fiction
Daniel Cavour. By E. S. Evens. (The Bodley Head. 9s. 6d.) Rainbow. By Wanda Wassilewska. Translated by Edith Bone. (Hutchinson. 8s. 6d.)
A Garland of Straw is a collection of twenty-seven short stories which, taken all together in the course of one week, as a reviewer must take them, are an unsatisfactory diet, as of too many rissoles, curries and rechauffies, all hot and dressy on the dish, but dis- appointing, because tediously alike in their pretention, to the palate. It is possible that reading them in single spies—one last Tuesday night and another, by chance on Friday week—one would escape the sense they give en masse of a too obdurate quirkiness, and retain a clearer memory of the moments of spontaneity, tenderness and unmanceuvred wit which do indeed bejewel these otherwise somewhat too uniform displays of oddity. It is true that few collections of anything can, or should, be estimated in a first rush- through; yet it is possible to spend an evening with a volume of Turgeniev's stories, or of de Maupassant's, and close it aware that we have moved in a world which exists in this form simply because it happened to get reflected in a' creative mind—and not because a creative mind saw itself reflected in it. The two things are the same and interchangeable, perhaps, in first:rate work—but the primary impression given by any work of art should be of its own life, not of the personality that projected that life. In fact, it can be loosely raid—though only loosely, I admit, and there is the difficulty—that the author is the instrument and not the music. But in this collection of stories—to change the analogy—one is scurried up and down the pages of an author's notebook, and forced to wear a pair of her very unusual spectacles, and nudged and prodded quite uncomfortably. It is the fault, no doubt, of the New Yorker, which published most of these stories, and which, in the way of clever magazines, was concerned to exploit the un- usual quality of Sylvia Townsend Warner rather than to get from her the best possible story she could give; for the two aims are not merely not the same, but are potentially destructive of each other. And here for the most part the first has won. Yet, in such fluid, gentle stories as An Unimportant Case, When Sweet Voices Die, or A Red Carnation, we recognise, released and at its ease, the light, untrammelled tender talent which gave us one of the loveliest books of our day—Mr. Fortune's Maggot, and that strange and vivid narrative poem, Opus 7.
Daniel Cavour recalls one of those carefully executed oil-paintings, heaVily framed, that customarily hang in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and portray—under a slightly more subtle title—A Magnate of Finance. And, however well the portrait was done it was impossible not to wonder whether the subject had been worth the expenditure of talent and trouble. Daniel Cavour inherited charm, good looks and a, capacity for simple material
enjoyment from his " wop" father, and hardness and a cautious uetermination to get something for nothing on every possible, and even impossible, occasion, from his mother. The author boldly makes these claims on his hero's behalf and then proceeds to justify them competently. All the victories of the self-made Daniel are convincing, with the exception of his marriage. Several people see through him, but are hypnotised nevertheless into letting him exploit them. The book is a very readable story of unscrupulousness, success and in the end—to be foreseen by the least sophisticated reader—the melancholy certainty that " you can't take it with you." All the characters save one, and most certainly the reader, can only feel relief at the death of Daniel. But this is the measure of the book's credibility.
Rainbow, which describes a few terrible days in a village of Ukrahae occupied by German troops, is a naive piece of propaganda which in happier days could have had no place among imaginative works. But now propaganda is paramount everywhere—necessarily; and if this crudely terrible story, so innocent of art, so flagrantly of the orange-box and the market place, helps anyone's courage or does anything to increase hatred of Nazism, one can only wish it well. It has won the Stalin Prize for 1943—but clearly for reasons which have nothing to do with the writing of literature, which may indeed be an irrelevance now. Yet is there any good in crown-; ing sentiments like the following : " Fedossya was sure that in villages where the Germans had left their mark in streams. of tears. and blood even- for a single day, there would never in all eternity; from generation to generation, be 'anyone dissatisfied with the Soviet Government, anyone indifferent to it, anyone lazy or indolent "! This is the plainest nonsense; However, a la guerre comme a fa
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