Fiction
How Much Artist ?
AFTER reading these books one realizes how impossible it is to say exactly what a novel is and how much " pure novel "
any novel contains. It is simpler to define the novelist, to guess how much Mr. Novelist and how much artist went to the writing of a given novel ; for a little gentle scratching will reveal the preacher, the Hyde Park orator, the journalist, the quack psychologist, the merely voluble young lady under the novelist's veneer.
Applying the knife to the writers on this list it seems
to me that only one has written a " pure novel," a genuine work of art ; and that is Colette in Renee Nere. This is not to say that the other books are not good and entertaining, even brilliant in their diverse ways. But Colette's book is a perfect and beautiful whole ; a world spinning on its own axis ; something as delicate, true and shapely as a. piece of porcelain ; a tragedy caught out of transient life as it flies by the sharp tip of her claw-like pen, and given a substantial term of immortality in art. Written in the first person, the book describes how a " star " actress of the cafe chantant,
divorced, lonely, worried by being as old as thirty-four, is gradually tempted to fall in love again. She suspects the idyll of deceit, however, and abandons it for her career and the state of " spinsterhood " to which she is habituated. Colette picks her way through difficult relationships with the
delicacy and pudeur of a luxurious cat. Her mind sees quite clearly where the vision of others would be confused by the
emotion of writing about emotion. It was a hard task to show by what subtle means Renee, through earlier disillusion now impervious to love and treating her wooer with ridicule, could be slowly tricked by herself to the point of surrender ; harder still to know the spinster fastidiousness of her nature so well that the rescue at the hands of her career should appear inevitable and natural. Renee is immensely more interesting than the average actress in fiction because of her intelligence, because she is feminine in her own private and particular way, and not with a generalized femininity. Another virtue in Colette is the use of the stage as a foreground in Renee's life and not as a background, her practical life and her emotional life blending their currents in one tingling stream
which fascinates the reader with its baffling transparency. Reader, I Married Him is about the life of an easy-going
American family in Paris and is lightly concerned with the attempts of a young woman to recapture the lover who has
deserted her. After Colette, it is very poor and tiresome stuff, full of tedious family heartiness. Precious Porcelain is a far more intelligent piece of work, although it has the kind of theme that brings out the quack psychologist and journalist in the author. He has the journalist's attraction to the ingenious idea, his versatility, economy, superficiality, his capacity for giving a vivid impression of a large scheme of places and people, his incapacity for penetrating far into them, and his consequent urge to say something about a lot of people rather than a lot about one or two. It is hard to define in a few words a story which goes off a new tangent with new characters at every chapter ; Mr. Bell's idea is ap. parently to show the havoc a man could play if he were able to project a series of different personalities into the lives of a number of people. Hartley is the name of this dabbler in lives, and his particular desire for experience takes the form of a series of rapes, seductions and murders, and ends in his own suicide. These do not horrify or move the reader, though they do excite him towards the end of the book when he is beginning to wonder if Mr. Bell will ever reveal his point and purpose. Precious Porcelain is a clever book of the kind that spreads rather than develops from its beginnings.
Juan in America is an exciting, witty and caustic expedition into the more fantastic America which journalism has made familiar to us—in fact, it is a fault in Mr. Linklater that implicitly he does not credit us with having read anything about gangsters, rum running, college boys, organized football, odd cults, Hollywood the whole publicity-dulled scene which the Press has created in its tired moments. His " novel" is really a mixture of travel book and an American Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. America is the land of infinite possibilities, Mr. Linklater was told, and he has taken his hosts rather more than at their word. Anything can happen and any- thing does. Juan, who is a descendant of Byron's Don Juan and a throw back to that ancestor, has every kind of absurd adventure, much of it at the hands of a party of gunmen. Mr. Linklater writes vividly, his satire is joyous and cruel, his reflections are original and caustic, his humour vital and electric, he wears the air of appropriately deceptive innocence well. But—the other journalists, though they have nothing like his vitality, and have not his power of leaping into fantasy, have been there before him.
Hunger and Love is written by a man who may be an artist in his next book now that he has got these 800 pages of congested inferiority complex off his chest, but who is almost unreadable in the present one. He is at the moment a raving Hyde Park egotist, one of those people who shout about Man, Humanity and the Human Race, the Bourgeoisie, the Wage Slave, Science and Cells, who apparently wish us to evolve into Higher Beings fit for the Good Life, but who in the meantime are distinguished by a sentimental hatred of their fellow-men. Mr. Britton's book describes, in its earlier pages with remarkable vividness and hatred, the life of a homeless boy from the time when he " begins life " in a greengrocery shop, through his long sweated hours in various booksellers' establishments, until the War. When he is telling us what he sees, what he experiences, he is excellent. He can capture a haunted atmosphere, a sense of the oppressively physical and helpless. All this we know is life made true in art. But when he tells what he thinks, begins to work off his inferiority obsessions and their resulting hatreds, and to tell us all the biology he has learned; he is a most verbose bore, although there is often sound stuff buried in his harangue.
V. S. PRITCHETT.
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