Fiction
SEEING how enjoyable and fresh are the greater number of these new short stories by Mr. Rhys Davies, it is perhaps ungracious to begin by saying that too many short stories are being written now. But then, too much of everything is being written ; there are too many novelists, the poets are too many and portentous, and wherever a cat jumps there are only too many observers-on-the-spot ready to whip out their notebooks. Inspiration seems to lie very thick on the ground in these days of despair. One wonders why. But as to the short story, it is possible that the form suggests itself to the unsuspecting as easy to manage, easy to trick.
Mr. Rhys Davies is anything but unsuspecting ; on the contrary, he is a most accomplished, skilful writer, who in his best work shows himself again and again as complete master of what he chooses to do. It is odd, therefore, to find him in one or two of these new stories, notably Orestes and Spectre de la Rose, letting them write themselves, with passages of dialogue that are slipshod and sometimes even untrue, and with a kind of slackness towards the whole theme which is disappointing, and leads him in Orestes at least to an improbable and cheap conclusion. Spectre de la Rose, which is about a night of the Blitz in London, is not very well written, and leads one to wonder why so far so little that is really good has been done on a theme which must have burnt itself into the imaginations of most writers. But some of the opening pieces in this new book are in Mr. Davies's best manner—and that is as good as need be. When this author writes of Wales he takes wing ; his pages vibrate with poetic. truth. An ease invests him then which reminds me of Frank O'Connor when he writes of Cork. It is an especial, luminoUs certainty which we take from such stories as The Benefit Concert and A Dangerous Remedy ; it makes them a delight to read. Accuracy, light-fingered and gentle, and drawing form- and feeling together into a single, unaffected state- ment, is Mr. Rhys Davies's great gift, and he gets beautiful results from it here in six or seven of these eleven new stories.
Mr. James Hanley, who writes sometimes so magnificently of the sea and sailors, has chosen for a change now to give us a nightmare of life on land. What Farrar Saw is a tale of 1948 in England, a night when motor traffic. pouring north through Birmingham and Lincolnshire to John o'Groats, gets itself into one gigantic and un- manageable block—a block which stretches for two hundred miles, dislocates the whole life of the island, and finally has to be broken up by dive-bombing. An absurd conclusion, it seemed to this reader. I began the book with much interest, and was attracted by the pace and manner of the first part—the two young factory-workers tearing north from Walthamstow in their baby Austin for a pre-marital honeymoon at John o'Groats, and getting more and more nervy and strained as the pressure and curious panic in the thick traffic assaults their attention—but I fear that, once we reached the actual breakdown in the lonely fen country, Mr. Hanley's nightmare became just boring and repetitive, like so many people's narrated nightmares, and like them went on being boring to the bitter end. The drive part was frightening and effec- tive, but after it the climax seemed oddly silly, and the attempts to wind up the mess even sillier, and not at all frightening or impressive. One supposes the book to be some kind of warning parable.
One Fair Daughter is by the German novelist, Bruno Frank. The story is set in the Galician border of Poland, and it runs from
1914 to 1939, covering all the terrible history of that part of the world in those terrible years. Its chief characters are a beautiful Jewish music-hall singer and her daughter, born in 1915. The book begins with a conventional love-idyll between this woman, Recha, and a charming young Austrian officer, who marries her and is killed in the first campaign of 1914, leaving her to bear their child and bring her up to all the desperate racial and economic problems of all the years since then. The story is very full, and is written honestly and out of great generosity of feeling—but it is written in clichés, and this English translation does nothing to help it come alive.
KATE O'BRIEN.
Previous page
