Fiction

Bx V. S. PRITCHETT The Secret Journey. By James Hanley. (Chatto and Winclus.

10s. 6d.) - - - The Rock Pool.. By Cyril Connolly. (Paris : The Obelisk Press. 50 frs.)

Going to the Sea. By DOreen Wallace. (Collins. 7s. 6d.) - The Golden Heart. By Richard Strachey. (Martin Seeker and Warburg. 7s. 6d.) Tim technical clumsiness of some novelists has often, after a few novels, an obstinate, incurable " dug-in " quality not without its eccentric charm. The loose wangling sound of an old crankshaft in some of Hardy's prose, the garrulous tom-

tom of repetition in pages of D. H. Lawrence, and the broken-winded auctioneer in Theodore Dreiser flogging his way through the lots—to take random examples—all end by arousing in " the addicted reader " those groans of affection one feels for some preposterous Baptist ehapel or grotesque row of villas once they are familiar. The English novelist of vitality- has usually been a jerry-builder, so awed by tradition that he cannot help 'piling on a little of everything ; and,

sooner or later, if one has not given up English fiction alto- gether, • it is .a question whether the very vices have not become virtues through being large and persistent.

Mr. Hanley's novels illustrate the point well. I suppose there is no novelist of his importance who writes dialogue as clumsily as he does and who wades more cheerfully into a sea of matter without consistency of point of view, without hesitating to use any character that is handy to say a few

words on his private behalf, and who allows all to step forward to make long asides, Lyceum fashion, about their forthcoming villainy or whatever it may be. Working-class people, one complains, do not, talk as he makes them talk nor have they

the academic loquacity—dialogue in essay form—which one thought had died with the Victorian novel. And yet, as these vices persist in him, they have gone from the chronic to the momentous. A slight adjustment of the critical lens to their monstrous proportions, and they seem to be virtues ; and particularly in The Secret Journey, the most mature of his books and one for which I have profound admiration.

This was extracted from me in the teeth of prejudice, for if The Furys—its predecessor—went on and on with the dreary impressiveness of the Mersey itself, the Mersey can hardly be called a work of art. But this book, in which he laid out the scene of the Liverpool slums and set his family going, had the usefulness as well as the excessive pretensions and mystifica- tions of an overture. Having done with that he could survey his characters in the sequel with calm and judgement. Mr.

and Mrs. Fury, as they appear in The Secret Journey, are fully made human beings. Mrs. Fury, the dominating mother who

has fought the battle of poverty for her family and seen child after child elude her tyrannical will and desert her, while she is left with her pride and her remote Irish memories, is drawn with a marvellous sympathy and exactitude. She is transformed from the irascible to the truly tragic, carved clean and austere out of circumstance. True to her race in being a woman of fixed ideas, Mrs. Fury has now allowed her pride to drive her into the clutches of a money-lender. This creature, Mrs. Ragner, who has the whole neighbourhood in her grip, is a monster, and yet not entirely inhuman. Women drown themselves, are thrown out on to the streets, clinging to their few sticks of furniture, sink to prostitution to pay her preposterous rates of interest, while she, hire some creature out of Balzac, sits in her gloomy house probing into the lives of her clients with the detachment of a surgeon.

There are really two Mrs. Ragners in the book ; the dull, depressed, business-like woman living in her dowdy house near the pickle factory ; and the monstrous, outsize creature, the type monstrosity who belongs to the world of Irish gods and giantesses and to the Expressionist drama. Half the quarrel with Mr. Hanley's dialogue is due to a failure to see that from the Irish in him he has the outsize, legend-dimensioned view of character and the sense of the dramatic that goes with it. The senten- tious periods of Victorian dialogue and the self-explanatory are disconcerting, but are not ill-fitted to such a view.

In the end the deciding thing is the vitality of a writer and Mr. Hanley's vices, if they arc vices, become virtues because of his force, his power of covering a large canvas not only with broad strokes, but with the smaller. ones of is close texture. What a variety of living character and scene there is : the speechless, moving end of a quarrel between Dennis Fury and his wife on a park seat, Dennis Fury signing

on and going to sea again, Mrs. F_ury, dressing her deaf, dumb and paralytic old father for Aunt Brigid to take him to Ireland, the priest persuading her to take him to Lourdes, in the hope that a miracle will restore his speech so that he

can say what he has done with his pension, the recovery of the body of one of Mrs. Ragner's victims from the dock, an eviction brawl, Mrs. Ragner's confidential servant making his rounds, the shock the amiable Mr. Kilkey has when he discovers there are worse slums than his own—the effect of such things upon the imagination is unforgettable. These people are a complete mythology in themselves. Mr. Hanley's writing has become simpler ; even when his slow moving pages are repetitive they do not tire, but rather weave the web of circumstance more closely. I do not know that I care much for the melodramatic end of the book ; but one puts it down with the sense of having read something within the shadow of greatness.

It is a descent after this to the cleverness of Mr. Connolly, the matter-of-factness of Miss Wallace, and the bizarre antics of Mr. Richard Strachey. Sharing with Mr. Connolly an un-English preference for unpleasant characters in fiction and feeling often like busting up the whole simpering and mumbling tea party, I expected to find in The Rock Pool some scabrous abominations. They were not, however, so much abominable as futile ; and being futile had nothing to say ; and having nothing to say were boring. Perhaps it is not the duty of the futile to say anything ; perhaps they should be either disastrous or ridiculous. But under Mr. Connolly's direction, his collection of artists left behind in the Mediterranean after the slump, are dingy, the victims of. Mr. Connolly's. excessive intelligence. That seems to me the trouble : Mr. Connolly is too intelligent, too drastically lucid a floodlight to play upon the promiscuities, bedroom quarrels, studio drunks of the surviving crustaceans. It is unfair, like keeping the zoo up late on Thursday nights. Of course there is some stinging farce and Mr. Connolly is expert in all the slashing intellectual savagings of self-defence : Naylor, the virgin Wykehamist, the mean, swindled, snobbish would-be lecherous biographer of Samuel Rogers, sits at the end of the decade, the last of the expatriates, reflecting :

" And what was more, he liked the troglodytes, these fierce, unfashionable expatriates. What was fine in them, their refusal to conform, their independence, their moral courage, was their own ; what was weak, their instability, their hopelessness and predatory friendships was the result of a system : of the clumsy capitalist world that exalts money making, and poisons leisure, that suppresses talents, starves its artists and persecutes its sexual dissenters, that denies opportunity, infects charity and encourages only the vulgarity of competition, the triumphs, the suspicion, the heartbreaks of the acquisitive."

This passionate outburst looks like an afterthought, for where in this book have we seen the fineness of the refusal to conform ? We have seen only the dinginess of it. The lens adjusted with brilliant critical concision to a scene, invective, withering exaggeration, the superb fusillade against publishers and public which appears in the dedication to this novel, seem to be Mr. Connolly's strong points ; not people. He does not like himself enough to make them interesting.

Miss Doreen Wallace's three stories are a disappointment. The sensibility of her earlier books has degelierated into a chatty- shrewdness about her characters, and the writing in the first , story—the account of a schoolgirl's first love—is really bad. There . is an improvement in the last story which describes the abortive love-affair of a woman writer with a neighbour.in the genteel idle society of the Cumberland fells ;. but there is only a thin coat of life on any of the people. . Mr.. Strachey has written a modern fantasy whose plot and people it is impossible to describe. The reader must take my word for it that this is a naughty, clever, high- spirited and bizarre novel about a number of fantastic people who go off with one another's wives, are lyrical in fast cars and tread the antic hay on the Bournemouth road. The wit, lyricism and tedium of hedonism are in it.