Fiction

By SEAN O'FAOLAIN

7s. 6d.)

Gone to Ground. By T. H. White. (Collins. 7s. 6d.) THE- first three novels here are by American writers who Seem to present themselves as candidates for the highest kind of praise, for they are serious, thoughtful, and intent ; and two of their books are of great length. If they fail to sub-

stantiate their larger claims it is because their seriousness is too near solemnity and I do not see why, having read between

the three of them something like a David Copperfield and a half, and covered three _kinds of modern life, I should be left with the feeling that there is not a laugh left in the American

world.

The motto of Years are so Long might be " 0 dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon; Irrecoverably dark. total eclipse, Without all hope of day . . ."

No more gloomy book could be imagined, and none more foully untrue. We are informed that the author is on the staff of a newspaper which maintains a department to answer legal questions-and it was the large number of queries dealing with the right of parents to be supported by their childreh that gave her the idea for Years are so Long.' SO she takes the case of' Barkley Cooper, come to an old age- Where he can no longer support himself or his-Avife, and at the beginning of the novel we find him calling on his children to fulfil their obliga- tions. This set scene tells us, at once, what we are in for : " A growing hostility edged the faflier's. tone. What about gratitude Don't you owe us gratitude for our love and. care ? For the sacrifices we made to educate. you, the things we, went without to give you more ? ' ''Hi;iknees trembled, and the nervous tremor secretly alarmed him . .

No, Father. I can't _see that we . should be grateful. You apparently assume that we wished to be born in order to be the subjects of this love and care you talk about. No child has ever

asked to be born.' -- - His mother, honest terror in her grey eyes, cried out, ' George ! Haven't you any natural affection at all ? ' Perspiration, even on this winter day, glistened on her heavy black eyebrows like glass beads. Her fingers shook as she settled her steel-bowed spectacles more firmly into place . . . A tomb-shaped clock on the mantelshelf ticked tinnily; The wheels of a wagon passing on the road outside creaked, lumbering and shrill. In the chimney the wind began to howl_despondently; and a sudden gust whipped a spatter of snow against the window- panes."

After this we are not surprised that the ungrateful children separate the father and mother, that the father dies, and that the mother is doomed to live out her lonely old age in a Home. Throughout there is not a trace of loveliness, not an atom of beauty, not a tender note ; always the loud stop full out, the blue limes on, and the orchestra playing with muted strings ; for that " tomb-shaped clock " is typical, as is the inevitable snow outside the, window, and the wind " howling despon- dently ; in short, all the old clap-trap of melodrama. That such events do occur one does not doubt. Everything occurs somewhere at some time. But one refuses to believe that they occur in this way. Life does not go by patterns, and its com- monest trick is to surprise us by the totally unexpected at the same time that it amazes us by its variety. But this book is,

taken not from life but literature and that is the literature of L'Assommoir. And yet this book was chosen by the American

Book of the Month club and here recommended by the Book Society ! Well, well ! •

In a sense Solomon Levi is also a propagandist novel, this time for the Jewish race. Its, scope is _wider and its sympathy is deeper than one might expect of mere partiality, however,- and we do at times feel all our interest engaged by the chief character, Solly Rosenbaum, whose career we follow from childhood on. Under the tutelage of his old grandfather; Ley,inski, he is reared to think of the Jews as a people for whom the God of Abraham has foretold a mighty future, but although this faith warms him all through his youth there is. little in his later life to bear it out—an unmagnificent career in a dry-goods store, cruel victimization in Germany, poverty' and separation from wife and child in New York. And this; in effect, is a weakness in 1VIr,. Gregory's book—for wehave beeiZ led to think of Solly as a young man moved _by a greatfaith, and,it -is not clear. at the end whether he has abandoned it wholly, become merged into the inconsonant millions of his race, or still lives in the hope that encouraged his boyhood. On the other band, if this may be a fault, there is the corre- sponding virtue that the set theme is not harped on mechani- cally, as happens in Years are so Long : the characters are permitted to live 'outside the theme and in their own right as human beings they break the set mould. We -are, in the end, more interested in what happened to Solomon RosenbauM, the man, than in what happened to Solomon Rosenbaum, the Jew, and that is, I suggest, as itshoulcl be. As to how intensely we are interested, that,' of Course,- is:the . last test of any character, and I could have wished in this case for a more vital and a more intimate hero than, Solly. Since it may, however, be part of Mr. Gregory's scheme to emphasize the deflating effect of racial origin on Jewish character we may forgive this lack of vitality ; the lack of intimacy is serious and in remembeiing that lack I must admit that a good deal of Solomon Levi was rather heavy going.

Miss Rachel Field's slow chronicle -novel of the Fortune family of ship-builders on the Maine coast has only one main purpose—to communicate to us something of the quality of life on that coast between 1875 and the first two decades of the present century, the • period during which sailing-ships went out of date and Maine began to be developed as a Summer resort for New England. She does this by creating a character, Kate Fernald, who comes to Fortune's 'Folly as a -child of 11 when her mother becomes housekeeper to the Fortunes. Kate's playmates are young Nat—frail but talented—and his sister Rissa, - who is devoted to Nat and whose ambition is to give give him ,an opportunity to become famous as a composer. The novel is, in effect; Kate's recherche du temps perdu, and it -progresses by slowly 'passing milestones that mark the gradual decline of Major Fortune—the loss of his ship, the sale 'of his land, -the-overthrow. of his hopes to make Nat into a sailing-ma-n, the flight of his son and daughter. As one expects, it is by individual scenes that one begins to realize the nature of this life into which young Kate has stepped, and it is finally by the insistent accumulation of events, some graphic and impressive, such as Nat's return from an ift-iated 'Voyage or his triumph, later, when a great audience applauds his symphony, that one is induced to believe in the reality of that life. The movement is definitely largo ; it does not quicken perceptibly even in the " big " scenes, so that one is inclined to feel at times as if, by presenting the story in the first person and in a mood of recollection, the author has sacrificed to her mood of nostalgic detachment a good deal of the crispness of immediacy and objectivity.

By way of contrast we dive into two gay hi-As from this Old World. It is hard to believe that Miss Claudia Parsons has not written before now or that her book' is a first novel. In effect it is much more like' the merry diary ofa young woman who has actually been paid companion to all those odd, sometimes unpleasant, but mostly pleasant people- whose adVeritbreS. she 'Shares "froin- time-to Ulric. -It is very much a June book, and as witty as it is cheerful, though not without an impish feminine claw darting now and again through the fur.

By comparison Gone to Ground smells of tobacco and fish- scales and horse-sweat, and if it, also, is a June book it is a typical English June when only fishermen and farmers are happy—for the time-being—and the rest of us lounge in a chair before a fire that spits of raindrOps. In a setting which is of

no importance and which might:have been dispensed with, a number of hunting and shooting people tell some excellent

tales, all of them drawing the long bow SOMQ. weirdly fan- tastic, but always in a so telling—even so poetic—a style that one wonders why each storyteller 'wasn't earning

a first-class living 'as an author. Indeed, in these yarns, and yarns is the word, about trolls and werwolves and mer-

maids, the 'telling is everything, unless one excepts that gorgeoui story' in which the foxes chase the hounds, which is so nearly one of the bat- sporting short-stories I have ever read, that-I look with high hopes to Mr. White to become in time the- g6trierVille and-Rosa Of the English hunt.