FICTION
The Arrogant History of White Ben. By Clemente Dane. (Heinemann. 8s. 6d.)
SIR HUGH WALPOLE occupies an official position among popular writers: he is the liaison officer between them and the arts: he has a pedigree. Henry James himself saluted his setting-out thirty years ago--or rather wept, " tears of pity and
sympathy," at the thought of " the long and awful vita of large production " ahead. This is his twenty-eighth novel and forty-fifth book, and nobody can help feeling sympathy for such unremitting pressure on the creative instinct. His style has not come through unimpaired, but he has remained readable ; he writes loosely, carelessly, but with speed—his novels do move, and his plots have an enviable simplicity. One thinks of his rivals—new and o'd—in popularity : Mr. Priestley, Mr. Morgan, Mr. Deep:nu, Mr. Brett Young ; they all seem a little stuffed beside him. Sir Hugh Walpole has remained young—too young, perhaps.
His prevailing mood has never changed, and the strict puritan may raise a dubious eyebrow at the part played by pain and cruelty : we remember the father beating his son in Fortitude ; the woman driven nearly crazy with fear in The Old Ladies ; the man with red hair. The new book ends in a positive orgy of red-hot poker, slipping pyjamas and naked
flesh, when old Mrs. Field, driven mad with jealousy—that is the whole story—attacks her too lovely daughter-in-law. " Mrs. Field had roasted the end of one of the '70 fire-irons red-hot. She was holding it by its red leather handle. She was swaying a little on her short thick feet, and her mouth was wet, dripping a little as a dog's may do when he sees food." It is a little crude and sensational (references to Hitler, Mussolini, the violent world outside fail to give a
wider significance to the private fantasy); the physical explicit- ness is sometimes embarrassing—there are passages which would be erotic if they were not naive ; The Sea Tower certainly has neither the fastidiousness nor the general implica-
tions of a really good novel, but there remains something . something rather like a schoolboy's world, full of bullies and understanding older people and incredible day-dreams about girls, but still a world. When the nerve of fear and pain is touched Sir Hugh writes best. Sentimentality and foolish- ness creep in with virtue—the author's compassion has the false air of a father with a cane : " This hurts me more than it hurts you." Then the style becomes wordy, unbuttoned and grotesque. (" For weeks they had been constantly together, and during the last week had been without a break in one another's arms, spiritually when it had been too public to be so physically.") Only once—in The Old Ladies—has he allowed himself to go all the way with his temperament, and we must suppose that he has gained in popularity by the long loose robes he drapes his nightmares in. We are re- minded of his own excellent description of a too bluff, too literary sea-captain: " a kind of fake iridescence, shining and stretching over the hard true bone of . . . experience."
Miss Riding is a poet of reputation. She has higher pretensions than Sir Hugh, but how far less readable she is. Readability, of course, is a vague term, and depends, she may fairly claim, on a similarity of interest between reader and writer. If one likes red-hot pokers . . . But there are, I none the less feel, degrees of unreadability, and the greater part of Miss Riding's historical reconstructions are unreadable in an absolute sense. Miss Riding is so afraid of falsity that her prose has the gritty grapenut quality of a school text-book. She picks out her adjectives like a prim woman removing the bones from a kipper.
" After he had driven out the Scythians, Cyaxares went into Syria again, and renewed the siege of Nineveh ; which this time fell to him. And now Babylon, to the south of Nineveh, at last was able, with the help of Cyaxares, to shake off the Assyrian yoke. The stern Assyrian Empire collapsed ; and a new kingdom of Babylon was formed, with Nabopallassar at its head—who had been governor of Babylon under the Assyrians. This Nabopallassar was the father of Nebuchadnezzar, of Biblical fame, who succeeded him as king. To Nebuchadnezzar succeeded . . ."
The shadow of the school certificate falls across the page, as she deals in turn with Cyrus, Alexander, Herod. According to the publisher's description, " the stories are firmly centred at the domestic hearth of life ; in the minds of the women who lived along with these men either in love or hate." That may at first have been Miss Riding's intention, but the women are soon edged into the outer circle, and we are left in the dry company of dates, generals, sieges.
Miss Dane starts her book with an admirable fantastic idea. It is the 1950's and the last Great War is petering slowly out. A woman evacuee has to find new clothes for the scarecrow in the garden, and routing in her attic she chooses an assortment belonging to her dead husband and brothers ; a surplice, military gloves, a surgeon's coat and a grey Ascot hat. Her child adds a mandrake as a heart, and in the night the scare- crow comes alive—his memories rooted in his clothes. The idea is magnificently difficult ; an extreme technical cunning is required to carry it through, and one is hardly surprised that Miss Dane loses sight of her problem. In no time at all White Ben has thoughts, recollections, tricks of speech which have nothing to do with his clothes. He becomes an English Hitler—the fall of the Nelson Column takes the place of the Reichstag fire, and there is a June 3oth purge. The book is neither quite fantasy nor quite satire—Miss Dane tricks herself into irrelevant sympathies, and as a narrative of revolution the world it describes is curiously empty—half a dozen characters and no pressure from the mob outside. The style is rater over-dressed for its subject—so many irrelevant dawns and sunsets, and jewels five lines long. A dead Ophelia. may wcar flowers, but they look a little vulgar on a Roehm.
GRAHAM GREEN' .
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