Fiction
By SEAN OTAOLAIN Call Back Yesterday; By Geraint Goodwin. (Jonathan Cape.
THERE was once a man in tte. West of Ireland who was the butt of his village. • Baited and tormented beyond patience, he sprang up one night in a rage and cried out : "Oh, Heavens ! If I were only Almighty God for five minutes ! . . ." Mr.
Faulkner seems to begin his novels in much the same spirit of misanthropy. It is rather extraordinary that so many
modern authors, with the power to recreate the world to their heart's desire, should have wished to do it in a like spirit of misanthropy. Not that there is any lack of joy of life in Faulkner. But it is a masochistic joy. Pylon, his new novel, is the story of a bizarre group of aeroplane racers—in the words of the publishers" talkie-ese '—" slaves of speed, reckless and indomitable people flying from pylon to pylon behind roaring motors on fragile projectors of cloth and steel." They are Schumann the pilot, his namelesS stunt parachute-jumper, Laverne who shares herself as wife between the two, the boy Jack, " born on a tarpaulin cover," whose parentage was decided by lot, and Jiggs, his mechanic. An eerie, half- human scarecrow of a press-reporter becomes enamoured of Laverne, and when Schumann's outdated plane is put out of action, forges a cheque to buy him a new one. The Mardi Gras speed carnival—the scene is a Southern State—ends with Schumann crashing to his death into the sea, and a fine descrip- t ion of the efforts to recover the body through the dark Lenten eve. Laverne and the jumper • pair off. She leaves the reporter, cursing him bitterly, and he never sees her again. The entire action covers aboutthree clays.
Mr. Faulkner is obviously very much excited by the lives of these strange circus folk—excited,lindeed, beyond coherence, so that he can only present them as if they were not human beings at all ; as if he felt that petrol and not blood ran in their veins, and they were the half-doped robots of a brutal half-doped world.. Yet if it is not a pleasant world he has created it is exciting, disturbing, Dantesque, with all the compulsion and terror of a great talent driven to frenzy. In fact, so much so, that his language, always inclined to be rhetorical, becomes here at times so elusive that many who will begin his novel with interest will finish it more as a duty than as a pleasure. So, when Laverne enters the editor's office, he thinks of himself as .looking at " a canvas conceived in and executed out of that fine innocence of sleep and open bowels capable of crowning the rich, foul, unchaste earth with rosy cloud where lurk and sport oblivious and incongruous cherubim." Or the reporter, in his drink, feels his destination and purpose " like a stamped and forgotten letter in a coat which ire had failed to bring." His eyes, while he is still drunk, are " like two dead electric bulbs set in his skull." And so on. Faulkner is one of the finest American writers of today. but he has not yet learned,'and may never learn, that brutality is not strength, nor facetiousness_ wit, and that, if
America holds nothing sacred, art still does. -• . •
Miss Johnson's world in This Bed Thy Centre is even less- attractive, and, having no urgency, has less excuse. She has circumscribed herself so much by insistingon the reality of sex that her "bed" might be thought less a centre than a circum- ference. All her principal characters have sex on the brain, and all the scenes of her London suburb—the cinema, the pub, the library, the park—are mere vestibilia for the altar on which she sacrifices the liberty of her characters to that modern Venus—Biological Urge. She can describe character, but there is nothing in this book to suggest that she can give it the slightest significance. It is one of those sour books that make one, after reading it, wonder, like Lear, if all hiniatins are centaurs below the girdle, and call, like him, for an ounce of civet to resweeten the imagination.
Where Mr. Faulkner treats of a world 'where tabus do not exist, and Miss Johnson of a world where people ignore them, Mr. Biierley deals with all the torment that arises in a
country where tabus can still measure happiness. Mega Test Man is the uneventful round of a man's life who lives'en the dole. In some ways it is an amazing document and an even more deadly indictment of modern 'civilization than Pylcin. It is a book in which the account of the loss of a threepenny bit can lacerate the feelings so' much that one wants to put aside the book, and yet .Cannot. I have tried it on several' readers and the general response has been that if 1 his record of the lives of our poor folk does lacerate the emo- tions it is worth while being lacerated because it all deals-with what is real and contemporaneous. It is a _book which every man and, still more; every woman in these islands should
read. They will not "enjoy 7., it, but they cannot but be the better for coming so close to the hidden lives of some three millions workless suffering dumbly all around us as we read.
Honey and Bread and Call Back Yesterday are pleasant books. Of the second, an (evidently) autobiographical novel of a young Welshman who comes to ,London to prize open the world's oyster with his pen, one could Wish that the author found some less tenuous material to build on. It is another of those -books that remind 'us that' Modern young men begin 'by making their will and end by making their way—an- autobiography at twenty-five and e novel at forty. It. remindsmie; too,-of a certain kind agarrulons Irishman— all shekhef, delightfill as he fizzes, but of -smOlt-Stomach. The best part of the book is that dealing with- -George Moore ; it shows us that Mr. Goodwin can write. But will he ?
Mr. Davies' novel of . the old 'herdic and druidic Wales being disembowelled for its mineral, N,%:ealtti, might have been a wide canvas on the lines of 'The-House 'under the Inter. Instead he has thrown most emphasis on -.EU. smooth and rather conventional romantic love story young Owen Llewellyn,. whose 'father, an indolent Music-lover, sells the old demesne of Glen Ystrad to- the new prospectors. So we get a flower-like and lyrical novel for an epic' of a lost country, and the main theme becomes incidental to- the romance. As a result we may enjoy Honey and Bread—ifie title indicates the contest between luxury and necessity— almost wholly for its undo kited: cbarnri:-.1- One feels a lack- of.; intimacy and urgency ; things happen a little too much according to formula. But since it has charm and is masterly in its control it remains one of the more - attractive novels on this week's list.
What strikes one about these novels—omitting Means Test Man, which is a straightforward document—is that all four authors have formed for themselves (as, indeed, any four hundred others might do) different conceptions of reality. Sex is the anchor for Miss Johnson's fiction ; socSsl historY*Orl Mr. Davies' ; while Mr. Goodwin feels that whatever has been experienced as emotion may be recalled as truth. Yet of them all it is Pylon—bizarre, drunken, a miasma—that impinges on the mind with the greatest sense of " having happened."
: itis,one of the most exciting puzzles about fictional literature :•—this 7-variety of worlds to .which we are introduced by noVelists, and the. various .ways in which these recreated worlds impress us one by one-with their authenticity. If This Bed Thy Centre, which is pure realism, does not strike me as being at all real, and Pylon, which is a fantasticatiori of normal life, strikes me as being an absolutely authentic and organic whole, I *feel it is, because William -Faulkner, the writer, and . Pylon, his creation; -are inseparable inside ' the pages of his book, and that this bOOk and every book hewrites will be, in turn,- inseparable in the memory; whereas Mr. Davies Or Miss Johnson or Mi. Gecidwin may write a quite different kind of book the next time. The personality of Pylon is Vtiwerful. In •Ite_otheira- a hiatus between conception and execution is 'evident from the beginning. They are fashioned to apien-7-not, simply born. They lack compulsion ; and that lack is something no author can hide,
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