Fiction
By GRAHAM GREENE
The Balliole. By Alec Jraugh. (Cassell. 88: 6d.)
The Children Triumphant. By Phyllis Paul. (Seeker. 7s. 6d.)
THE business of a novelist is illusion, illusion all the time. A complicated technique is not valuable for the sake of its complications ; what one admires in Conrad and James and Mr. Ford Madox Ford is the increased depth of the illusion, not the technical devices for their own sake. - The rather simple story-telling of The Ginger Griffin would not be open to criticism if it really fulfilled the purpose of creating an illusion of life.
Miss Ann Bridge's novel has many merits : it contains a great deal of interesting information about China (but much of the information is not strictly relevant to the story and is rather of the order of a nice intelligent girl's letter home), and there is a charming naivety in its account of an English girl who visits relatives in Peking to escape reminders of an unhappy love affair, and there becomes emotionally entangled with a poet (Miss Bridge is tactless enough to print two of his poems), and an amiable, not very clever horsy fellow. She marries the horsy fellow, but she loves the poet. The subject is not Intrinsically important and the 'treatment does not lend it depth, but there is a gentle integrity about the author's outlook Which will make many readers, I am sure, forgive the inefficiency of her methods. She is like a charmingly unsophisticated debutante among hard enamelled faces ; it does not really matter, they will feel, that she dances badly. -
But the technique of the novel in England has progressed since mid-Victorian days, and nothing valuable is to be gained by reverting to the methods of novelists who possessed almost no literary quality except " genius.', When we read as early as page 7 of The Ginger Griffin: " While the Grant-Howards were canvassing Miss Amber Harrison's reasons for going to China, the subject of their speculations was riding slowly along a hill-track in Gloucestershire, munching a ham sandwich and deep in thought," we realize that we are in the presence of a novelist who has never troubled her head at all with the method of creating an illusion. She does not realize that the reader and the author have a quite different reality from her charac- ters and must be kept rigidly. out of the book if the characters are to make a proper impression. The story must not be interrupted in order that Miss Bridge may write an essay, however amusing, on leave-takings at Tilbury, however interesting on the Temple of Heaven outside Peking, nor should it be advanced by pulling the reader forward like an-uneasy gate-crasher : " Mrs. Grant-Howard, whom we meet powdering her nose . . . "
There were times when I doubted my ability to read the novel to the end ; its progress is so lacking in compulsion (" A few days later a ride was arranged at P'ao-ma-ch'ang . . . Two days after this conversation Amber lunched with the Leicesters . . . Amber's visit to the Forbidden City with Rupert was a distinct success ") that it takes an ardent picnicker to match the author's own enjoyment of the innu- merable excursions. And how noisy are the luncheons and the rides and the walks with earnest discussions on life and sex and Amber's character and Mrs. So-and-So's and what Rupert is really like " inside." But after a lapse of days something does emerge ; and in retrospect one remembers clearly and gratefully the exactly and sympathetically observed figure of the Embassy Chancellor, Grant-Howard.
Mr. Alec Waugh has written a very long post-Galsworthy novel and quite an able one, although he tries to break from the start any illusion of reality by introducing his intimate history of the Balliol family in the first person. No " I " could possibly know even his own family as well as Mr. Waugh tries to make out that " I " knew his friends, the Balliols. But the novel is much more competently written than one
has learnt lately to expect from Mr. Waugh, and it will cer- tainly appeal to admirers of The Forsyte Saga. I am preju- diced myself against this " slice-of-social-history-summed-
up-in-one-family " type of novel ; it seems to me to be taking far too literally the perfectly true apothegm that fiction is history. His novel covers too much ground of a purely factual interest ; it reminds one of facts, but it does not do much to increase our sensibility towards the facts. And, strongest objection of all, this type of novel is so painfully obvious : it runs so foreseen a course—the suffragettes, the War, post-War morality ; and the trick of representing it all through one family is so unreal. There is a sentence on the dust cover of this novel which sums up the falsity and-the tedium of the whole type : " What Edward, Francis, Hugh, Ruth, Lucy, James and Helen feel, think, desire and do is what everyone who knows his England and his Englishmen knows them inevitably to have felt and thought, to be capable of doing, to have wished in their hearts to achieve . . ." Inevitably. Grim word and grim conception, as if, like Pavlov's dogs, all Englishmen have been so conditioned as to drop saliva to- gether at the ringing of a bell..
Rhondda. Roundabout is a more legitimate example of the novel as social history. It is a careful study of a mining district suffering from an economic depression which has lasted now for so many years that the new universal de- pression passes unnoticed. The characterization may be superficial, but it has an admirable range ;- Dan the young Congregationalist minister, his uncle a miner, Big Mog the generous popular bookie, the draper, the insurance - agent,• -the 'gild at the Bon Marche, the. Com- munist agitators and local councillors and unemployed, and Llewellyn Benyon the old Eisteddfod conductor. It is a charming study of a district for which the author does not trouble to conceal his deep affection ; it reminded me of a far finer novel, Lore on the Dole. Mr. Greenwood's novel expressed a discriminating hatred, Mr. Jones's an undiscriminating love. Mr. Greenwood's novel was uncom- fortable reading, Mr. Jones's will probably have a larger public because it is comforting. Mr. Jones is rather too tender to his characters, he is guilty of shaping events to give them happiness : they marry the right girl or escape from the pit disaster or are elected to the county council or get seats at the boxing match through Big Mog's generosity. Even his satire on- the Communists is touched with- tenderness because they are Rhondda men. The characters are real, the scene—the dusty little town between the mountains—is excellently conveyed, but one is not convinced by Mr. Jones's optimistic plot-making.
Miss Paul is the only one of these novelists with a serious claim to be judged as an artist. There is a communal touch about the style of Miss Bridge and Mr. Waugh their books might have been written by scores of other accomplished, but rather pedestrian, authors. Miss Paul's has been soaked in a temperament. The result is not always agreeable ; sometimes Miss paut# grim, study of a child murderer seems perilously close to the poetic whimsies of Mary Webb (Miss Paul may yet find herself adopted by itoliticiansj,, but the conception is admirable : of the young" girl forced by their mother's death to bring Alp her father's step-children, driven into hatred of all children by the long dutiful-years, the ugly self-sacrifice, so that even after she is released -her -hatred of children remains, a blind hysterical spot in her careful nature. .We have only to compare the opening paragraphs of these novels : the " Mrs. Grant-Howard, whom we meet powdering her nose . . " method -of- Miss Bridge,- the-first person singular method of Mr. Waugh : " The Balliols entered my world in the spring of 1907 " with Miss Paul's careful noting in the first sentence of her theme to recognize a novelist who cares 'for her art and knows exactly what she is about " With• the icy bars of the garden railing pressing her-forehead, with rage and scorn in her heart, she looks back at-the house, " It is not because 'of its darkness, that it. has..suoh. a close, unfriendly air, but because a slit of light here and there in the blind walls betrays its secret gaiety ; and because high, long, incredulous cries reach her above the horny rattle of the ever- greens, and laughter, which has a sound rather too sweet to one who stands a little distance off, sunk under the cold and wizened susuiration of the wind."
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