Fiction
By GRAHAM GREENE
THE French novel has always lived on a few great reputations ; at the end of the last century the presence of Flaubert and Maupassant gave the impression that the French more than any other nation recognized the novel as a work of art ; and not all the efforts of English novelists from George Eliot and James to Mr. Ford. Malox Ford has shaken the superior prestige of French fiction. So Dead. Woman's Shoes comes to the reviewer as striped and placarded as a war veteran in a sandwich board. We are told that "it is difficult to indicate the enthusiasm with which this novel was received by the French critics " ; and perhaps the difficulty is evident in Mr. Gollancz's brief inscrutable quotation (from M. Maurois), In particular Braibant's novel. . ." On the jacket a long eulogy is printed from the publisher's anonymous reader ; one is well acquainted by this time with the happy band of enthusiasts who surround Mr. Gollancz, but if one is to recognize the real merit of this simple, rather sentimental, rather clumsy novel, one must first disengage them from the reader's artless claims. " This first-class novel in the real Balzac tradition," he writes, and one wonders what class he reserves for Balzac if M. Braibant is in the first class. The author, we are told, shows us Mine " enduring the horrors of the siege of Paris," but M. Braibant with an economy not otherwise apparent in a rather long hook has only mentioned the siege of Paris in ten casual lines.
The subject of M. Braibant's novel is a little stale ; we have met too often in fiction and on the stage the domineering mother who cripples her son's nature, and the drama- of whether Ainie will have the courage to confess to his mother, - who holds' the purse strings, his love for a Parisian- of a rather lower social class is protracted to the edge of farce. 'He never confesses and': only, after his death in middle age does his mother learn of his mistress's existence and the existence of a grown-up son. Her reconciliation with her grandson, after seeing her great-grandchild in its cradle, is one of those scenes which a novelist does better to avoid ; just as some landscapes are unpaintable, so some scenes and emotions, however true to this brutally sentimental human race, cannot be rendered, except satirically, in words. M. Braibant does not sufficiently realize the limits of the art he practises.
Technically his story is weak. It is told throughout in the first person by an old friend of Aime's with the result that the narrator has to be present on the most unlikely occasions, and the characters, whose emotions are always described to us and seldom expressed dramatically in action or speech, have the over-simplification of the dramatis personae in a Restoration play. The novel is only saved from insig- nificance by M. Braibant's attempt to make the stale subject of maternal domination represent something of wider im- portance : "the happiness of.security, which is for middle- class people of the present day what in former times the hope of eternal salvation was for religious people."
Mr. Graham's Good Merchant, one of the best novels I have read this year, has what one looks for in vain in M. Braibant's, a fresh, firm treatment aneta strict economy. This first novel has the qualities of a good portrait : Mr. Broadcloth, the English business man, head of a great store in a South Ameri- can capital, is caught in his most characteristic attitudes, not with the photographic realism of an academician, so much smooth face over so much civic robe, the impersonal watch chain as significant as the pink flesh, but with simplification, with the right satiric emphasis ; " the later. on signified the unknown future. The consideration of the later on was an inescapable burden. Mr. Broadcloth ahiays stored up utilities for himself, and, amongst others, he stored the remembered impressions of pleasant ivenings: He had often been able to say, ' Yes, I remember 'meeting you at dinner; let me see, where was it Y' His memory would then probe into that evening and he would be able to credit the individual with the correct friends whoni he would then describe as Jolly Good Fellows. Every time that Mr. Broadcloth carried out this particular toadying he felt comforted ; he felt that he had put something away fora.4, Air the biter on, for the day of want ; if -by a glaistISTInd uncontrollable sequence of events that day ihduld come." - It is the same note as M. Braibant's, the main motive of a generation " the happiness of security:' But one does 'demand of the novelist some moral judgement, though it is best when it is not explicit. In M. Braibant's novel Aime as much as his mother shares the middle-class passion for security, even the narrator shares it ; and the fact that morally there is nothing to choose between them robs the story. of any pathos. The tragedy to this very capitalist writer, and one must be convinced of the value of property to feel the tragedy at all, lies in the unwisdom of the mother who is destroying the security of the family by her method of preserving it. " The indifference of parents with regard to the business, education of their children is what destroys these fine houses, it is a modern form of the plague." But Mr. Graham doei supply in the marriage of Kitson, the store's architect, in the sense he gives of dynamic and not merely static happiness, an implicit criticism of his English Babbitt.
Mr. Graham's novel is almost consistently objective ; this makes for a quick, convincing narrative ; and any lack of depth which one might otherwise feel Mr. Graham avoids by his use of metaphorical backgrotind; much the same use as Pudovkin made of nature in his early films, and once very strikingly by a personal soliloquy. Both can be seen in the passage immediately following a description of one of Mr. Broadcloth's convivial evenings. The nocturnal, bestial sug- gestion in the small scented room, the shaded red glow of the light above the low wide bed, is carried down through the dark city to the waterside :
" Outside in the night, in the docks of the city, a fire had been discovered in a warehouse; and the dark shadows were lit by the flames licking outwards from the joints in the corrugated iron sides of the shed. The rats had known that a fire had begun before the alarm 'was given. They had swarmed out over the dark quays to find other shelter_ and had crawled up the mooring hawsers of the steamers, to be stopped by the plates put there to prevent their progress. The rats which led the creeping, silent advances lost their foothold as those behind pressed forward ; and they fell with repeated small splashes into the' dark water, and swam to the slimy wall to find their way back on to the land.
I can imagine the mind of a rat, as it slithers along in the dark, pointing its sharp nose. But I can never feel happy about it. I must always want to kill it. It contains a principle of evil.' "
Mr. Street's novel, after a false start rather like a parody of one of Hardy's-clumsy openings,- settles down into a satisfying study of village life, of a man of farming stock who stubbornly follows his ambition to own a farm, though he has to earn the money behind. a grocer's - counter. There is a particular fascination in technicalities even when the reader does not fully understand them and the technicalities of farming have a rough individual music :
" The plough seemed to be alive; and he was master of this living, powerful force. The feel of it transmitted from the plough handles to his young immature wrists; the urge of its relentless power, the jingle of the loose links of the traces, the sway of the waybeam and whippances, the grate of the landside, the smell of the sweating horses, the scent of the newly-turned earth, the fleeting glimpses of the red worms and white stones as the endless ribbon of the furrow slice was forced over by the mouldboard, all these seemed to satisfy him both mentally and physically."
Isak Dinesen's short stories, or rather short novels, like Stevenson's, have a fanciful rather than an imaginative source, but the vivid artificial style, the ingenious improbable plots give the same sense of freedom and irresponsibility as one so happily. received when Prince Florizel and Colonel Geraldine, sheltering from the rain in -a Leicester Square oyster bar, watched the entrance of a young man followed by two commissionaires each carrying a large dish of cream tarts. But these seven Gothic tales, with their improprieties and blasphemies, are even closer to pure fantasy, for Stevenson could never quite lose his grim moral background; his irrespon- sibility had severe virginal limits.
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