Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER The Poacher. By R. E. Bates. (Cape. 7s. 6d.)

A House Divided. By Pearl S. Buck. (Methuen. 7s. 6d.)

THERE must be very few novelists of Mr. H. E. Bates's generation (he is, I believe, barely thirty) who hate a more genuine talent or one that has been more carefully and successfully cultivated. In his new novel, The Poacher, one is chiefly struck by his sincere, spontaneous, and constant affection for certain kinds of people and their environment, and by the steadiness and finish of his craftsmanship. It is a pastoral novel designed to show, chiefly in the life history of one individual, the transition that has taken place in the country during the last 50 years from an old, physical, swaggering, drunken, brawling mode of life, glamorous but wasteful," to the suburbanized existence of today. The whole story is admirably natural and unforced. Mr. Bates's strength lies partly in his contentment to be lyrical ; without making any attempt to manufacture a saga, he conveys very well the lapse of time, the inroads of respectability, and a nostalgia for the past. There is no tiresome intrusion of period detail and no banyan-like family tree to tease the docile reader ; there are no nagging reminders that we are in the Bates country. All is cool and fresh and grave, like an unspoiled English landscape—not that the story lacks passages of drama and bucolic warmth, since it deals to some extent with the excitements of poaching. In his clarity, and in his acknowledgement of the physical, Mr. Bates seems to

owe a good deal to D. H. Lawrence, but he has none of Lawrence's:intensity and violence, nor does he show signs of having adopted Lawrence's peculiar philosophy. In his draw-

ing of character, as in the actual texture of his writing, we are never jarred or deceived : on the other hand, we are never startled by- a familiar truth or faced with any momentous new one, nor are we led to explore any special complexities of human nature or society. Mr. Bates is not a prophet or visionary, but an English watercolourist, painting his chosen subjects with skill and taste and good feeling, and in his chosen field he probably has few rivals. The Poacher is carefully composed and quietly coloured ; due attention is paid to proportion and perspective ; and there is considerable delicacy in the detail, for Mr. Bates will notice the colour of rain-water in a hare's footprints or the sound of chickens' beaks tapping against the bowl that contains their food. A gentle melancholy pervades the book, and is fitting to the story : in fiction, ,as well as in reality, the countryside is rapidly disappearing or changing character, and Mr. Bates's melancholy is here that of one engaged not in preserving but in looking back upon an aspect of rural England. .

A London Story is a first novel. It is a simple and not altogether unsentimental story told in a simple way. Two - brothers, John and Nicholas, are employed in the large store controlled by Lord Flowerfield. Jo-ha is ambitious and insensitive, and finds his work congenial ; Nicholas, something of a dreamer, dislikes it, and is turned out to face unemploy-

ment and poverty. John is hooked by the pushing Beryl, whose coldness, alas, undermines his efficiency, while Nicholas is redeemed and set up by the sympathetic and very amenable Phillida. Virtue is rewarded more neatly and liberally than usually happens in real life, and big business, in the person of John, is nipped in the bud and generally discredited.

Described thus bluntly, the Story may sound not only senti- mental but naive, but it has in fact definite merits. It is a book with a message, and this message may be read in the choice of theme and the way it is treated. What, exactly, is the message ? I am not sure that it is in the main anything newer than an injunction to remember that there are other values besides commercial ones. When Nicholas was em- ployed in the store :

it was not so much the store, it was the atmosphere, the hypocrisy and self-glorification, the fact that it was the special field where sinister mentalities got uppermost " that disturbed him. He found that " this commerce puffs them all up with self-righteousness,- and when Lord Flower field told him that he ought to show some signs of wanting to get ahead, he replied, " To get ahead of what ? " His

distrust of " the loud voice and the set phrase " led him into a state of loneliness and poverty which is truthfully described.

With his love for Phyllida, " the impulse of his life, which had vanished like water in a dry place, began to reappear,"

and with his customary thoughtfulness he set about trying to understand and explain his own point of view, and to define MS attitude to life. ' He considered himself in some degree a victim of " economic repression " : " Our grandfathers imposed an artificial moral virtue upon themselves with disastrous effects ; our fathers impose an artificial economic virtue on -us . . . false to the true nature of man . . . "

Before the united Nicholas and Phillida " the enterprise in sight was the elementary fact of personal living, the sweet

taste of the apple. . . . ". So far, an good : but the apple proved a trifle intoxicant. To Nicholas, in his " abandonment to the present,"

" the past and the future were unreal. The immense glory of the present descended about him, filling him with laughter and power."

Now Mr. Buchanan has an obsession with the present—he has even written a book about it—and this obsession makes him sentimental, as when he makes his hero declare that to live in the present, one must be always clean and fresh, without prejudices, without dreams . . . or dead bits of history clinging' to one." But it is no good pretending that that point where the future is busily engaged in becoming the past is a spacious, static country where the perfect life may be lived, that we can be always clean and fresh, or can get

along or be humaii, without dreams and prejudices, or ran divest ourselves of clinging bits of history. It is rather in his good resolutions and common sense that Nicholas is to be respected :

" We remain non.specialized—human The secret of non. specialization is the ability to doubt. Funny how everyone is afraid of doubt . . They talk as if it were the disaster of our time. As a matter of fact, doubt is the great human attainment. Listen, who are those who have no doubts ? Why, birds and insects . . . If everyone suddenly doubted, we'd have a bloodless revolution in a day,"

I feel sure that birds and insects have their doubts, but that makes scepticism no less comforting. Finally, Nicholas did not want to conform to " tidy intellectual systems," or to dramatize himself, or to be a defeatist, or to have false humility, and morally he had " only one rule : Do not exploit anyone." There speaks the voice, not of his generation, but of certain individuals in any generation.

If A Londoh'Story rather unwisely suggests that one cannot be a business person and be nice, The Epic Makers rather implies that to be a Jew is in itself ludicrous, if not dis-

reputable—especially if one happens to be a Jew: engaged in the film industry. Monsieur Paul Morand's satire on a group

of enterprising:foreigners who made a successful film "based on " the Song of Roland and called it La Douce France cannot have been easy to translate, for its effectiveness is partly depende:nt on their peculiar French accents. M: Morand explains in a prefatory note his intention to " exhibit as they truly are some of the filibusters, naturalized or otherwise, who have made their furtive way out of the darkness of their

Central European or Levantine backwoods to the lights of Paris," and he' speaks later of " traffickers in sex:appeal, in robot laughter, mass-production tears." Though he speaks of his " understatement," his, tone is perhaps a little more bitter than it need have been, but the story is a topical one, and gives rise to some quite good jokes.

Mrs. Pearl Buck's mind and pen work in a manner utterly different from that of M. Morand. One could wish, indeed, that this overpraised writer had something of his French neatness and brevity. She weaves or knits her story in a plodding, serious, mannered, pseudo-Biblical style which achieves a quaint and to me irritating archaism more often than the simple nobility which is no doubt intended. And that is a pity, for she has something to say. A House Divided

is the third volume of a trilogy which began with The Good Earth. It deals with the Wang family's contacts with Revolution and Western influences, and in particular with Yuan, the son of the Tiger, and his difficulties in keeping his balance in an age of transition.