FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN
SOME weeks ago the whole British public was counselled emphatically over the air to read a forthcoming American novel called The Grapes of Wrath. The gently pontifical tones of Mr. Alexander Woollcott, breaking over our Sunday supper tables, informed us that, along with Franklin D. Roosevelt's, John Steinbeck's is at present the American voice, the representative one, through which America should be heard and judged. Here it is, then—immensely ushered in, and accompanied, for the encouragement of reviewers at least, by a whole booklet of acclamation of the man behind Vie voice, to say nothing of a full-length studio portrait of
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411 this is very nice, but is the booklet necessary, or even adv*ble? Surely we have heard of John Steinbeck, even in dalkest England? Have we not admired Tortilla Flat and The Cup of Gold, and was not Of Mice and Men a Shaftesbury Avenue success until Hitler put out the town's lights? But Mr. Woollcott's claim is that "a young writer who had already written several good books . . has now written a great one." I do not agree with this. I think that "a young writer, &c.," has now written another good book, but one in which he has had the courage, if you like, to give fuller rein than formerly to a sentimentality which for some of us disfigured his early work.
The theme of The Grapes of Wrath is quite magnificent ; so is its documentary informativeness ; so are its moral and its desolate warning. It is indeed a vivid, generous sermon on modern misery, on the crassnzss and savagery of some who create it, and the nobility of its victims. Mr. Steinbeck's heart is passionately fixed in the right place, but it would be unfair to the great variety of his talents to suggest that perhaps his trouble, quci writer, is that he is all heart.
The story is of the present-day destruction of the land of the Western States of America, and so of the people who, in both senses of the word, live on it. "The land company— that's the bank when it has land—wan:s tractors, not families, on the land. Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If our tractor turned the long furrows of our land, it would be good. Not my land, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But this tractor does two things—it turns the land and it turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this." And in this book we can read about it and see, through the desperate sufferings and adventures of one decent, outcast Oklahoma family, how big business, industrialisation, is destroying the United States.
The Joad family, captained by Tom, the elder son, who is a parole man, having done time for manslaughter, have to flee from their long-held forty acres which the inexorable tractor is tearing up. They depart, a large troupe of all ages, in the shakiest of trucks, perilously loaded. They "aim to" start a new life in California. They have read handbills, have heard of the universal trek West, to the peach-pickin', orange- pickin' sun, fertility and fortune in the West. Their journey is heroic, nothing less ; and their subsequent slow dis- illusionment, though immense, actually does not quite use up their common stock of fortitude. When we leave them at the end, somewhat reduced by death and desertion and with their courageous Tom forced on the run again because of another manslaughter, they and their chance friends of the road are more destitute, more weary and directionless than it is easy to convey—but in spirit they are "a fambly " still, their patient hearts still beat, with "Ma," great creature, driving death off, Heaven knows why—saving the starved, dying stranger in the wayside shed with the unneeded milk of her young daughter's breasts.
Mr. Steinbeck gives us an enormous, vivid setting ; he fills it with odd and lively characters ; he uses an attractive Western States patois, and he tells a terrible, moving story of universal and immediate significance. Why, then, am I not enthralled by his book? Simply because, right or wrong, I dislike hi3 manner of writing, which I think epitomises the intolerabLi sentimentality of American "realism." I think he wreck, a beautiful dialect with false cadences ; I think he is frequently uncertain about where to end a sentence ; I think his repeti- tiveness is not justified by emotional result ; and whereas the funny, niggling coarseness which he jovially imposes on his pathetic migrants may be true to type, it seemed to me out of tone, and to offend against the general conception. But the book is good, interesting and generous, and its wide popularity would be a beneficial thing.
This is the Schoolroom is an English documentary novel —that is, it shows a rich and spoilt young man, withdrawn from Cambridge by sudden ruin in 1935, and being forced to discover the real world. Swaggering and gay in the first pages, and reasonably intelligent always, Marcus Hendrycks, by his pleasant sensitiveness, makes it difficult for us in believe that, gilded and coddled though his youth had been, he was until the age of twenty-one so blandly unaware of how the other half lives. But if he does make rather heavy weather of his own naiveté, he certainly sets sincerely about informing and furnishing his conscience. He tackles poverty and joblessness in earnest ; he becomes a thorough and boring Communist ; he goes to Spain to join the International Brigade, and his experiences there are very well described. He comes back ill and wounded ; he is still an underdog and for the underdog, but he gradually drifts from the Com- munist position. At a very low ebb of his fortunes a girl steps out of a car and kisses him as he stands glooming on Westminster Bridge at midnight of New Year's Eve. She a famous painter whose work he had always admired. They fall in love. It is her first love-affair, his nth. But it is marvellous. It was too marvellous for me—and it spoilt a book which otherwise was steady, amusing and interesting. However, it works out to a very happy ending.
Gentleman of Stratford is a novel about the life of William Shakespeare. It is by Mr. John Brophy, who is a very accomplished novelist, so there need be no doubt as to the adequacy of performance to be found in it ; and those who think that they would like to read a novel about the private life of Shakespeare may therefore turn confidently to this one. Mr. Brophy has spared no trouble to establish a sur- rounding verisimilitude for his ambitious central attempt, and he has even invented a prose style for himself, "which should suggest the period, but be free from obstructive archaisms." He has also—curiously lacking the courage of his conviction— provided an Author's Postscript and a chapter-by-chapter annotation of his assumptions and inventions. He gives u, his bibliography, too—so all we have to do is to read his book and make up our own minds. For myself, I can only say that I could not stand it. When I was not bored by the creakings of scenic effects and "obstructive archaisms" I wa, offended. This Shakespeare is a dumb and deprecatory business-man with a notebook where he should have had a mind. He picks up his own phrases everywhere, almost repeating them sotto voce as they fall from innocent lips.
quotes himself. "Ripeness is all. I said that before." And when he meets John Donne for the first time (by Mr. Brophy's whim) he says: "Perchance a pint of wine would foster our better acquaintance." But as for the explainine away of the Sonnets ; as for the Lady in Scarlet and White, as Shakespeare called her (also Dear Lady Disdain, I need hardly say); as for the explanation of "the second-best bed " —oh, well—great numbers will read this laborious book, and will be pleased to discover therefrom that the greatest and most enigmatic poet in the world would probably have mad,: a pretty decent golfer, and was altogether a clubable sort of chap.
Trance by Appointment is a very neatly shaped story of -I simple girl who early in life manifests her possession of second sight, and who is exploited by a friendly fortune-teller, Madam Eva, and later by a less pleasant individual, Norman Mitch' an astrologist, who marries her. The weakness of the book Is that it is monotonous, and that its characters are necessan1%, either in pleasantness or the reverse, very dull. A pathei- story—but hard to finish.
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