Fiction

By GRAHAM GREENE 7s. 6d.)

MR. CALDER-MARSIIALL, whose About Levy was one of the most interesting novels published last year, proves himself again

in Al Sea a writer of great technical daring. He is a writer for writers ; no novelist can fail to be interested in Mr. Calder-Marshall's experiments ; but there is no reason why he should not also be a writer appreciated by a large

public. For there is nothing obscure about his experiments, and in At Sea he tells an exciting story in a manner

which might arouse the admiration even of that popular master of suspense, Mr. D. W. Griffiths. How one still remembers, after many years of technical improvements, the agonized face of a Gish sister fading into the hurrying hoofs of her Klu Klux Klan saviours, the careful stop-watch timing of rape and rescue. It is with this quite primitive excitement that one watches Mr. Calder-Marshall's camera flash back and forth, from John and Elsa adrift in the Channel with one oar lost and darkness and thunder coming up, to the fishing village where they had taken a room for their honeymoon, to the apathetic seedy villagers so slowly becoming aware of their plight.

This is the beautifully simple plot of At Sea. On this framework Mr. Calder-Marshall builds. His chief concern is with the contrasted characters of John and Elsa. "He lived on land, on reason ; she swam in feeling." During the long day and night of dangerous drifting they get to know each other with the merciless injustice of a long marriage. They analyse each other's characters with the wide margin of error which such analysis always contains, they hover as it were over the truth about each other. The exact truth is the reader's ; he finds it in their instinctive actions in moments of special danger and in the half-conscious drift of their thoughts during moments of quiet. These thought sequences are Mr. Calder-Marshall's main experiment. They are not, as this example of Elsa's thoughts will show, naturalistically written. They are stylised, closer to the soliloquys of Jacobean drama than to Mr. Joyce's "stream of consciousness."

"Ever (in her mind), drifting, drifting. The slow decadence of the Onslows, a house sinking deeper each generation ; statesmen and soldiers begetting clerks, begetting failures, purblind old maids. Drifting, drifting ; the Major in ragged carpet slippers, egg on his moustache, 'Where are my spectacles ? ' On yer forehead, you old fool ! You're wearing them, father.' Ha, ha. Shoots from the sheath of laughter, a deadly needle. Hate, like dust, breeding in corners ; and Must be loyal to father," Stand by mother killing the Onslow girls."

Elsa with her too nervous strength, her early desire to be a man transformed into a contempt for masculine failure (" But what they miss of being men, in their sports coats, leaning against bars. To be a man's now to drink too much, tell smutty stories, lust and go home to a lonely bed ; they've forgotten what it's like to be a man. They can't treat us as women") is forced during' the hours in the small leaking rowboat to discover how typically the man she has just married belongs to his time : the impotence caused by anxiety, the hate aroused by responsibility, a desire to assert himself only equalled by the fear of the consequences of assertion, a longing for peace at any price, a deep sense of inferiority and failure. "His hope had always dwarfed fulfilment, ' running in giant country. - What he wished seldom came true ; when it did, it was smaller than he had imagined, like. dried fruit laid beside fresh." But as a novelist Mr. Calder-Marshall does not belong to the immediately post-War generation. His novel does not leave an impression of despair or of desiccated satire. He belongs to the succeeding generation - who are discovering grounds of faith, Mr. Calder-Marshall from Freud as others from Russia. John and Elsa in their fight with each other, as- desperate as their fight to survive, reach understanding ; their final state of love owes nothing to illusion. All their fears have been brought to light, dredged up from the unconscious, during the undignified humiliating ordeal, and the most devastating fear of our generation has been dispelled, "the fear that evil has the last say."

Miss Young is not an experimenter ; she is that very rare person, a novelist who _knows her own ability and the limits of her genuine experience to a hairsbreadth, and who

is lucky enough to have material which is exactly fitted to a traditional -form (for how much creative intensity is

dulled in many writers by their uneasy testing of a new 'form). It is a good thing to be reminded that there is still value in traditional methods to some artists. The failure of a writer like Galsworthy *as less a failure in the tradition

than in the use he :tried to make of it. " Miss' _Young might be compared with Emily Eden. She is a writer on the margin of contemporary literature, but because of the

authentic nature of her feminine material and the grace

of her style (long sentences trailing down the pages like a rather unfashionable but timeless dress) if would not he surprising if her work survived at least as long as Miss Eden's. 'The critical reputation of noveliSts– rests, perhaps Unfortu-

nately, to a large extent with other professional writers,

and it is only natural that these should _Prefer an author from whom they an learn. Nobody will' ever learn anything

from The Curate's Wife, With its delightful material of church

bazaars and sewing parties, for you cannot teach grace and authenticity. Miss Young has a large -Public, but she does

not come naturally to the mind of the critic who is writinl on the contemporary novel. Yet this subtle study of dove- tailed relationships, the vicar and his wife, the curate and his wife, deserves serious criticism. When technical experi- ments have been accepted and absorbed into the tradition of the novel, then it will be possible to judge Miss Young's work fairly against that of her contemporaries. "This was not so much like a game as like a dance, like a minuet, gracious and witty whatever the secret troubles of the dancers "—this reflection of Dahlia, the curate's wife, on the marriage relationship describes Miss Young's careful mathematical idea of the novel's form. She describes what she knows, she is never tempted into falsity ; tragic emotions, "the secret troubles," are carefully damped down as they usually are in life.

Miss Wallace's work cannot help suffering a little from its proximity to Miss Young's. Her material of a country parish is not very different ; the village flower show is even more amusing than Miss Young's sewing party, and though her relationships are more strident and the drama of preg- nancy and suicide seems rather obvious after the undertones of The Curate's Wife, the introduction of contemporary problems, of socialism and the tithes, will give her novel to many readers an urgency absent from Miss Young's.

A reviewer has reason to be grateful for any novel he can read with pleasure, but Mr. Calder-Marshall and Miss Young have set a very high standard. One misses in Miss Wallace's novel a unifying atmosphere, a dominant mood. She is amusing, she is satirical, she is angry and pathetic, and these scraps of mood do not join. They are not enclosed, as it were, by the author's temperament. Miss Wallace gives the effect of writing with part of her mind, the conscious

part ; but the unconscious has played its role in the work

of Miss Young and Mr. Calder-Marshall. In Barnham Rectory the characters and incidents are observed truthfully, but they have not had time to be matured in the author's mind and to emerge as personal as well as general symbols. This is the danger to the writer who is occupied with imme-

diate social problems ; his indignation, his reforming zeal hurries him into print. Haste' is to be discovered in Miss Wallace's work, not in her excellent direct style, but in the photographic quality of her imagination.

Miss Velia Ercole sometimes writes very 'falsely, but her novel has the unifying- atinosphere lacking. in.,•Barnhain Rectory. A young Australian girl comes to live with her Breton relatives on the death of her father, and her sense of being excluded, of a life impenetrably secret is very well

conveyed. The tired unhappy voluptuousness of her married cousin engaged in deceiving her family, the heartbreaking importance of small provincial occasions, the snatched moment at Mass, the appointment with a (limn:taker, indicate that Miss Ercole has read Flaubert to advantage.