Fiction
Counterpoint in Fiction
Mn. ALDOUS HUXLEY'S new novel, like its predecessors, oommunicates an intellectual excitement and a nervous -exasperation. It is an experiment in what his Philip (a novelist within a novel, like Andre Gide's Edouard) calls the
" musicalisation of fiction." The two-part oppositions of voices, imploring, blaspheming, lamenting and resigning, weave a contrapuntal fabric that seems to cease in mid-air. Mr. Huxley begins by describing the heavenly pattern of Bach like any angel ; his own music of humanity is of the Stravinsky kind. Certainly his effort towards capturing simultaneousness in time, though not entirely novel, is stimulating to the intelligence. In the first half of the book, at least, the two-part themes well up wavelike, one beneath the other, with a wonderful iridescence and fluidity of texture. " Story, God bless you, Sir ! I've none to tell you," says Mr. Huxley with the Needy Knife-Grinder. His London Intellectuals and libertines, philosophic and otherwise, dis- enchanted, sardonic, too deliberately satyric, go on talking ; and, for all his fling at Proust, remembering. Enraged idealists all of them, wreaking their disappointed hopes in excesses of materialism, and exploiting viscera instead of hearts with a rather undergraduate kind of blague. Story ? Well, there's a murder towards the end, of an incredibly casual kind. If somebody had murdered the verbose Mark Rampion, perversely put forward as the wise and normal man among his perverse neurotic friends, it would seem more natural.
All of the talkers being contemptuous of love, they are con- sequently rather obsessed by the problem of sex. Mr. Huxley takes too many of his types from the pathology textbooks : old Mr. Quarles, Spandrell, Carling, Lucy Tantamount, that young Messalina with the manners of an ill-conditioned school- girl, are " cases " in need of the alienist rather than the novelist. Yet the book is crowded with provocative creatures, some of whom are mere birds of passage, like the enchanting Polly Logan. The exposure of Burlap, that merchant of the world of sentiment, is masterly as well as ferocious. Moods of sad and lovely regret flower like groups of jonquils in the corners of the bitter chapters. A learning both wide and ardent enriches the pages with remote fair images. The passage in Time which forms this novel, with all its chords of ironic pathos and desperate disdain, has a plangency that must echo long in the disturbed memory. It is the gleaming artificial life of London that lies behind
Mr. Huxley's people, even when their bodies are elsewhere. In a more energetic, less urban F. gland moves My Brother Jonathan, as described by Mr. Francis Brett Young. His
hero is an Englishman at his best, simple, kind, courageous, and faithful, concealing with a sort of shame his passionate responses to " the strange admonitions of beauty." The Black Country, with its still fragrant historic edges, provides the scene in which Jonathan obeys his vocation for the phy- sician's life. This is the epic of the general practitioner, fighting disease and death in the embittered inglorious battle- field of a little mining town, yet carrying great trophies with him at the high mockery of his end. A selfless and intelligent
physician, enriched by the intimacy of his human experience, is one of the best of our modem types. • Gentle, strong, and undeviating, Jonathan pursues his chivalrous ideal ; and WS final victory -With the diphtheric child and the stolen hospital stirs the pulses like trumpets and banners. The first part of Jonathan's history is filled with the-charm of dewy hollows and lapsing waters, and hawthorn and golden glimpses of Edie, that " Tanagra Diana." Edie, later, hardly shows the " fine intelligence " with which she is credited ; the darkly burning Rachel Hammond is much more vital. Jonathan's parents are slightly Dickensian, though grimly drawn. The book is full of vigorous people ; and Wednesford during the War is a biting study. My Brother Jonathan is a leisurely, humane, and generous novel, with a dignified manner made sweet by Mr. Brett Young's invariably limpid and gracious style.
After these two long and crowded novels, in its shadowy grace and withdrawn lyrical movement, Miss Naomi Royde- Smith's episode of The Lover sounds like a lonely little song. An artist, who has lost his way in life to some degree, meets again in a great music-room the woman he had loved and resigned in his youth. Now, grown old and dying, by her indestructible gallantry she gives him back his early visions of Paradise. It is all an intangible web of music, golden light, regret, and the transmission of dreamy, suprasensual emotion. Deliberately but exquisitely written, it makes a lovely nocturne.
It is always a pleasure to recognize the hard, fine edge of the short story as shaped by Mr. Coppard. Though he begins as easily as if he entered into conversation, and ends almost with an airy gesture, you are left with a little piece of experience impeccably, and irrevocably expressed, complete as a sonnet, and with something of poetic or symbolic quality in its content. Even .when his folk are the simplest rustics or Cockneys, his angle of vision gives them a touch of faery. In Silver Circus, his craft has coined many odd and tragic little medals of life. The grotesque horror of the name-story, the bitter grace of " That Fellow Tolstoy," the romantic humour of " Purl and Plain," the heart-shaken regret of " Polly Morgan," are only some penetrating notes among many.
Mr. Coppard's Fine Feathers, a piece of whimsical pathos, appears in that valuable authology compiled by Mr. O'Brien: The Best Short 'Stories of 1928. Other distinguished names adorn the list, and some of younger repute, like those of H. Manhood and Henry Williamson. A poignant piece of writing called Furniture does credit to Anne Corner. For the first time, Mr. O'Brien has admitted colonial short stories, some of them extremely compelling. Such are La Divine Pastora, by C. L. R. James ; Blind Justice, by Ethelreda Lewis, and Pou/t7, 2s. 6d., by Miss Fane and Mr. T..ofting. The collection is both piquant and scholarly. RACHEL ANNAND TAYLOR.
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