New Novels
So Perish the Roses. By Neil Bell. (Collins. 9s. 6d.) Doctor Addams. By Irving Fineman. (Cresset Press. 8s. 6d.) Miss GWEN BRISTOW has written a fresh, solid and extremely competent novel on the well-worn theme of the conflict between the Southern way of life and the rest of the United States. Kester Lame, the charming, casual owner of a Louisiana cotton plantation, marries the daughter of a self-made engineer. Eleanor has a genuine feeling for the grace and beauty of her husband's home and the patriarchal life of the plantation ; but when, a year after their marriage, she discovers that the place is mortgaged and her husband heavily in debt, all her inborn contempt of Southern easy-goingness comes to the surface. She ruthlessly and efficiently takes matters in hand, sells family heirlooms to a greasy dealer, and saves money in other ways that make her husband wince. The cotton slump in August, 1914, faces the Lames with ruin ; but while their charming neighbours play at relieving the situation by charity balls, Eleanor is reading up the uses of gun-cotton in the encyclopaedia. She holds her stock till the Allies' demand for munitions makes the price soar, and the plantation is saved. But Eleanor's ambition is aroused ; having saved Ardeith, she now wants to improve it, and the way is easy, for the price of cotton goes up and up. So her husband comes home from the war in 1919 to find a factory rather than a plantation, a luxury hotel rather than a home. He tries hard to be pleased, but after a few months he can stand it no longer and leaves home. Eleanor is desperately hurt and angry ; she had only been doing her best. The two finally come together over the sick bed of their six-year-old daughter—a situation full of pitfalls, which Miss Bristow handles with great tact and delicacy.
In This Side of Glory the emotions and affections do not operate in isolation ; they are part of a world which also includes planting and growing, buying and selling, and without making us doubt the genuineness of Kester's and Eleanor's love, Miss Bristow shows how closely it is affected by such factors as the market price of cotton. The two are divided by no black-and-white issues ; there is no question of efficiency being better than charm, or the other way round ; and we believe in the final reconciliation between Kester and Eleanor because it is based not on the rightness of one particular view, but on the realisa- tion that no good quality is enough by itself, and that husband and wife each need the other's virtues to make their own tolerable.
Mr. McDowell has evidently made himself as familiar with the history of Ontario in the seventeenth century as Miss Bristow is with the cotton plantations of Louisiana ; but he has not been able to give his characters that organic relation to their setting which Miss Bristow achieves so admirably. In his careful, worthy and wordy story of the Jesuit missions to the Huron Indians, the people are conceived on the expected lines ; the Jesuit martyrs are always noble, the Captain of Musketeers always brave, the enemy Indians cruel and treacherous, the loyal Indians faithful and devoted. And although the story is eventful enough, with plenty of battles, escapes and surprises, by the end of it we
feel we have learned a great many facts about a most interesting chapter in Canadian history rather than entered imaginatively into the lives of the people who made it.
It is a little surprising to find that the hero of the romantically titled So Perish the Roses, with its dust-cover picture of a pair of handsome young lovers, should turn out to be Charles Lamb. Mr. Bell considers that the Lamb of the biographies is " a bogus creation " ; actually his Lamb is not strikingly different from the recent biographers', though we stop to count his drinks rather more often. Mr. Bell hovers rather uneasily between the two modes ; as a biographer, he may' well find it " surprising " that Lamb, " with his gifts, with the memory of his former love for her . . . could beat out nothing richer than this limping exercise in verse-making," on the death of Hester Savory ; but as a novelist it was surely his business to make such surprises con- vincing. There can naturally be no formal plot, but Mr. Bell has made his story more rambling than it need have been by including a good deal of incident and information that has very little bearing on the Lambs. We suspect, for instance, that the pages on Coleridge's debts and the plans of the Pantisocratists appear because he came across these facts in his reading for the novel, and could not bear to leave them out.
A bad American novel can be very bad indeed, and I should be surprised if a greater piece of pretentiousness has crossed the Atlantic this year than Doctor Addams. Aeschylus, Shakespeare, the Talmud, the Bible and Spinoza supply the section-headings. The novel makes a great show of grappling with the problems of sex ; actually it takes 450 pages to arrive at the conclusion that complete sexual licence does not bring satisfaction, even by the standards of the hedonist. Meanwhile we have been treated to endless talk up and down the subject—it is the one topic on which the characters can make conversation or write letters— and to descriptions of the loves of human beings, dragonflies and seaweed. For Mr. Fineman insists that his approach is " scien- tific " ; his characters all research into some aspect of sex at a medical foundation, their liaisons are " experiments," their decisions " equations," and the novel ends with the printing, in mathematical notation, of a "hydrodynamic equation." " In my young days," as the parson said of another novel, " we called it
Previous page
