TWO NOVELS

By GRAHAM GREENE

The Death of the Heart. By Elizabeth Bowen. (Gollancz. 8s.). Days of Hope. By Andre Malraux. Translated by Stuart Gilbert and Alastair Macdonald. (Routledge. Ss. 6d.) Miss BOWEN'S new book will inevitably be compared with The Awkward Age, though the society it describes is more well-meaning and less corrupt than Mrs. Brookenham's circle. It can stand up to the comparison ; there is nothing

in James's rather cramped novel quite so finely rendered as Miss Bowen's Climax—the badgered child flying for refuge into the Kensington wastes and meeting in the private hotel, among the mauve sweet peas and the smell of dinner, only embarrassment and common sense. Is there another living novelist in this country with so delicate—and horrifying—a perception of human relationships ? Mr. Forster ? we are disturbed by whimsicalities, pfuderies, occasional whispers of Lost Boys and the Never Never Land. Mrs. Woolf ? she skims with high-minded elegance the surface—a chance meeting in Bond Street : a shopping expedition : pathos in Peter Jones : she may—perhaps—be the Congreve of our day, but she lacks entirely the sense of horror.

Miss Bowen divides this tragedy of the awkward age into three parts—the world, the flesh and the devil. The world is a prosperous cultured Regent's Park world, existing on about L'3,000 a year, into which Portia Quaine, a girl of sixteen, emerges from a shabby existence in foreign hotels. She is the fruit of an absurd middle-aged shame-faced adultery. When her parents die—of colds caught on the Continent—she comes to live with her half-brother, Thomas, and his wife Anna, in their stucco house in a Regency terrace. Her back- ground is drawn for us in a long brilliant hard conversation between Anna and a novelist, St. Quentin, one of Anna's half-friends, as they walk ferociously in the " empty cold clay silence of inner Regent's Park beneath a darkening sky." It is a courageous beginning—this idealised conversation to explain complex relationships, a successful sublimation of all the butlers who ever explained matters to Edwardian theatre audiences.

Anna has come on Portia's diary and read it—without hesitation. " There does not seem to be a single thing that she misses, and there's certainly not a thing that she does not misconstruct." The world unused to innocence suspects what isn't there, gets ill at ease, finds its ephemeral

gestures lose fluidity under that uncontrolled observation, finally breaks in a kind of panic for France, and the child is sent to stay at the seaside with a former governess and her family, a devastating household superbly rendered. The world, too, includes, besides the resentful dutiful Anna and the muddled Thomas, Matchett, a gruff maid whose unaffec-

tionate sincerity gives her some contact with innocence ;, Major Brun, a canine, terribly loyal ex-soldier who hiunts

house as if it were a camp fire in the-desert, and Eddie, whimsical, hysterical, unreliable and good-looking, with whom Portia makes her first ignorant approach to sexual love.: The stage is set for the death of the heart, the enormous, expectations and the commonplace treacheries. Eddie visiting her at the seaside holds hands with the governess's daughter in the cinema ; St. Quentin lets casually out that he knows all about her diary ; Eddie plunges deeper. The accumulation of small betrayals drives the child hysterically to seek refuge with steady, pitiful Major Brutt (whom the Quaines have also mocked), living in the Kandahar Hotel, keeping up appearances. He is embarrassed, inadequate.

" He swivelled round on his chair, as wretchedly as a schoolboy, to look, in glum, dumb, nonplussed communication at his own rubbed ebony hairbrushes, his stud-box, his nail-scissors—as though these objects, which had travelled with him, witnessed to his power somehow to get through life, to reach a point when one says, It doesn't really much matter."

The only alleviation of the last betrayal—back into the hands of Anna and Thomas—is contained in the terms she makes Major Brutt announce down the telephone. " He says she'll come home if we do the right thing." The intellectuals discuss feeling desperately over their dinner, decide to send Matchett, and as Matchett arrives, firmly, disapprovingly, authoritatively, at the drab hotel, we are allowed to feel they have at last done the right thing.

This, I think, is Miss Bowen's best book. Days of Hope can be considered either as a piece of rapporrage by an able writer who has himself fought in Spain or as a novel. It cannot be treated, I think, as propaganda : the author's sympathies, of course, are with Republican Spain, the book contains condemnation of the Nationalists, a few references to atrocities, but the author is not trying to make a case, he is lent posing—like so many on both sides—as the just man looking down on the combatants and awarding moral black marks. He has immersed 'himself in the element of warfare, brutality, uncertain idealisms : he speaks out of the storm, and it would be false reporting as well as false fiction to pretend impartiality : his characters are fighting men.

As reporting it is admirable. A kind of sculptured dignity is snatched out of the turmoil of the civil war. For a long while the cinema has had a preponderant influence on this kind of writing, and it is a refreshing change to come on an author who has rejected montage, the quick cut, the camera eye, the brilliant superficial glimpse of action, in favour of something older, more akin to music and painting, something Kinglake would have appreciated.

" They ran noiselessly—almost all were wearing canvas shoes— and took cover in the doorway of a street at right angles to the Diagonal. A street of rich folks' houses with wide, deep porticos. The trees along the boulevard were alive with birds. Each man saw in front of him, across the way, a comrade, revolver in hand, motion- less as a statue."

The book opens in Barcelona with the insurgent troop's pushing on towards the centre of the city, the resistance of the workers under the unwilling leadership of the anarchist, Puig (" all that lay deepest in his heart forbade him to give orders ") and the turning of the scale when the Civil Guard moves against the troops. The formation of the International Air Force, exploits of heroism with out-of- date machines, the reiterated cry " When will the Russians send planes ? " : the spotlight turns here and there confusedly characters loom up fixed in a gesture and disappear again in a shell-burst for ever : first the enthusiasm and then the organisation : atrocities on both sides (" It is always hard for a man to credit the vileness of those beside whom he is fighting ") : planes taking off with their bombs and returning with the killed (" The landing was interminably protracted ; planes freighted with the dead are slow to take the earth ").

The first part ends with defeat at Toledo : the second describes the fight for Madrid (" Siry at length had his first sight of turbans, moving behind the trunks like fat, furtive pigeons "), the air raids to which there was no reply. (" Mercery could see Madrid below him in a lightless pit. All lights had been extinguished and the town was outlined only by the distant fires flapping, like bull-fighters, their scarlet capes across the darkness.") At last the arrival of the Russian planes (" the roar of half a million voices, a wild, inhuman, exultant paean, rose to the dim sky, loud with the thunder of the people's planes "). The final section ends with the victory of Guadu- lajara. There can be no two opinions of this rapportage (and the translation is magnificent).

As a novel concerned with characters—not only with the

movement of events—it is more open to criticism. It is unskilful, for instance, to insert the first physical description of one of the chief characters as late as page 113 : there is some shoddy workmanship in the long unreal documented conversation on the attitude of Unamuno to the revolution : characters are sometimes allowed to describe things which they could not possibly know. Perhaps only the character of the Catholic Loyalist, Colonel Ximenes, really emerges from the violence of events. But the general theme is managed here more skilfully, I think, than in La Condition Humaine—when the author tried to make the events stand for too much : the horror drowned the theme (it is not after all the human con- dition to be burnt alive in the boilers of Chinese locomotives). The motive here is introduced by the smallest, least obtrusive touches, as in the description of the firstuentries of the volunteer army—" everywhere, too, the quaintly sheepish gestures of sentries handling a rifle for the first time. The first time in a hundred years." It comes into the open only In the title and a few sentences such as this : " Nothing remained but this memorable night, fraught with a vague and boundless hope, this

crowded night when everyman had his appointed task on eirtii."