Fiction
Together and Apart. By Margaret Kennedy. (Cassell. 7s. &L) The Grimoire. Collected by Montague Summers. (The Fortune Preis. 7s. 6d.)
Shallow Brown. By Stephen Hockaby. (Michael Joseph. 7s. fid.) The Fool and The Tractor. By Lennox Kerr. (Collins. 7s. 6d.) Tha Two Doctors. By Elizabeth Cambridge. (Cape. 7s. 6d.)
Miss KENNEDY'S fiction continues to move round the four points formed by the juxtaposition of a pair of eternal triangles. At least so far as I am acquainted with her work, that seems to be the matter of constant interest, and it always provides congenial material for her talent. It reappears once more in Together and Apart. Alec and Betsy are the parents of growing children, and have been married for several years with, on the whole, as much success and continued sympathy as anyone has the right to expect. But various accidents and irritations, and defects in the characters of both, bring them rather uncertainly to the decision that they might as well get divorced, and a crisis of bad temper effected by the interference of Alec's mother makes an immediate parting seem in.evitable to them. Alec goes off with Joy, a governess- protege, who has always loved him in secret ; and Betsy joins up with her devoted, eager, rich and titled cousin, Max. The divorce occurs, and the second marriages take place. At this point the mental distress of the children comes into the foreground, and the story uses it to weigh heavily against condoning the parents. A tragic impression of he futility. of what they have done is forced upon them later by i resulting'çisi,in the son's young life, which also brings Max into contact with Joy. It is then ironically discovered that these two, Sharing as they do a difficult enthusiasm for social and political reform, would have been an obviously suitable couple, if only they had known each other before, and that neither of them can ever do as much for their mates as Alec and Betsy did for each other. But it is too late now, and the story ends on the pathetic and regretful note of everyone making the best of a bungled job, with prognostic- ations that some of the younger generation at any rate are not going to be such fools.
Miss Kennedy has, in fact, produced a pamphlet against divorce, or at, least against divorce undertaken without duly responsible thought ; though seeing how hard her own married couple debate the question she is asking rather much. But certainly in terms of her own story she wins her case. The trouble is that, as usual with popular fiction, the story is so particularised and self-contained, so little suggestive of anything outside its own narrow limits, that our interest in the matter ends with them. Inside those limits everything is more or less well. She is clever at inventing individuals with names, faces, and items of behaviour that fit jigsaw-puzzlewise into the pattern of the story. But try to pull the individual and the story apart, and you will find the items of behaviour clinging to the story instead of tothe individual, and the names and the faces flopping like . ,
unstrung puppets. While they are still strung up they have an .appearance of character which " develops " certainly, but one has the feeling that they are only just managing to Catch up with the story all the time. Joy, in particular, barely succeeds in being -got ready in time for the ironical discovery Of her affinities with Max. They all move along in this way, not continuously from an inner life, but as if suddenly jerked by someone pulling the strings. There is something grotesque- in this apeing of life by marionettes, and exactly as at the puppet-show, our reaction is to exclaim, "how incredibly life-like ! " Whereas the whole point of the thing lies in our having sensed the difference between imitation and reality.
Even confessed artists of the grotesque must protest
that their stories are true, and one and all the authors in Mr. Sununers's new and entertaining collection of supernatural stories are at pains to assert the reality of their horrid inven- tions. "What I relate," says one, "I had from the lips of my Uncle, who was a truthful man, and not prone to fancies." Indeed, as Mr. Summers has pointed out elsewhere, no one can quite tell a ghost story with the savour of conviction, who does not in some way believe in it himself. And, on the whole, ghost stories are not much harder to believe in than the ordinary run of novels. The instinct for indulgence in mysteriousness is obviously a common human need, and it only matters that it shall be satisfied. Mr. Summers has made an extremely interesting selection of typical supernatural stories over a period of about a century, and some of them are genuine literary curiosities. Ile includes the celebrated Vampyrc of Byron's friend, Polidori, which was Often attributed to Byron himself ; a story by Maturin dated 1825, in which it is interesting to find a reference to Lucy Gray in a "Gothic" context: Pushkin's Queen of Spades ; a version of the original of Irving's The Bells, by Erckrnann-Chatrian, which is the only item in the book which remains on an (almost) strictly natural plane ; three curiosities by Le Fantt ; a story by Keats's publisher, Charles Oilier; and several examples of the Victorian manner taken front magazines, including a really exquisite tale of a Venetian Jewess, secretly converted to the Christian faith, who haunted her own grave. Finally, Mr. Summers's own contribution, The Grintoire, is a spectacular connoisseur's piece.
Shallow Brown and The Fool and the Tractor are picaresque stories about toughs. The former is at once the more sub- stantial and the more romtuttic ; in fact some of the narrative would in itself seem naive but for the excellently persistent toughness of the hero, and for the attitude of equality which the author maintains towards his proletarian cast. The hero's indecently weak Salvation' Army brother is used very effectively to increase the glory of decent toughness. In The Fool and the Tractor the hero combines something of both these characters, and his enterprise is always frustrated by neurotic gullibility. Mr. Kerr somehow fails to make It clear whether some of his reactions to the Empire theme are sentimentalism or satire, so that, whereas the book might have been the more subtle of the two, it is in fact the less certain in its touch.
With The Two Doctors we are taken right back to the world of Jane Austen. One recognises it by a few externals as brought up to date, and the pace of course is so much quicker that the subtler virtues of the world are lost ; but still it is the same kind of selection from reality as Miss Austen's, with the same interests and the same values. Miss Cambridge describes such a world very delicately and care- fully, but it is a pity that the upper and lower strata of village society, whose interests work together at the outset very compactly, tend in the later stages of the tale to separate and go off on tracks of their own. PETER BERRA.
Previous page
