FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN William and Dorothy. By Helen Ashton. (Collins. 8s. 6d.) Aileep In The Afternoon. By E. C. Urge. (Cape. 7s. 6d.) Men Are Not Stars. By C. A. Millspaugh. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) A Child In Her Arms. By Louise Redfield Peattie. (Hodder and Stoughton. 7s. 6d.)
The journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, which Miss Helen Ashton describes as " adorable," have so far been for me one of those books which I " must read," people tell me, but which somehow I do not read. Thus I am very much handicapped in attempting to review William and Dorothy, so much so that had it been possible to lay hold of the former volumes this week I would certainly have read them before embarking on Miss Ashton's book—but the lonely, leisurely west of Ireland is a bad place in which, to want anything in a hurry, so I can only give a very cautious, uninformed opinion on a novel the constructional method of which appears to me odd and unrewarding.
To write her fictional record of the lives of William Wordsworth and his sister, Miss Ashton says that she has quoted and paraphrased " very freely " from Dorothy's journals. " All the descriptions of scenery in Chapters II-IX are hers, and much of the narrative is as far as possible in her own words. The conversations are based, wherever possible, on the Wordsworth family letters." Where, then, does the novelist come in ? Let them answer who rad this book entrenched behind all the standard Wordsworth-Coleridge- De Quincey records and biographies, but, unarmed, I can only guess that Miss Ashton's sole inspirational function here was to proclaim rev elatorily Dorothy's probable but unprovable passion for Coleridge. But this impulse was naturally tripped up again and again by the obstinacy and multitudinousness of facts, and we are left at the end pretty much as we were before, aware that Dorothy was indeed sadly devoted to Coleridge and perpetually hurt by him, but guessing that the many pages she left behind are, if you like, her definitive novel—long, uneven and naturalistic in result probably, and very likely the only novel to be squeezed out of the material of her life.
In any case the Wordsworths lived too long and were too. articulate to be of much use to the imaginative writer following after. It may be that all writers, however short their lives, live too long to be of service to future novelists—for it is of their nature to leave behind them imaginative statements or re-creations of themselves, in the form of Prelude, Excursion, joUrnals, Confessions, Sonnets or what yoU will ; inspirational impulses which it is useless to seek to strain further in the creative direction, but which it is the function of the bona fide biographer to relate to outer events and sequences. Dog, in fact, cannot cook dog; imaginative writing about departed imaginative writers is likely to be an insipid dish.
William and Dorothy has been written with care, delicacy and love—but I imagine that Miss Ashton was aware sometimes herself as she stitched together her elaborate 'patchwork that the very delicacy of her love for her heroine must inevitably defeat her novelistic impulse. The novelist must have the field clear to his imagination, and if he is so unlucky as to be inspired to re-create an illustrious, recorded life he is perhaps best advised to ride hard at his own conception, ignoring records. He must make his imprudent, imaginative guess and take the consequences. But you can't do that with the Wordsworths. With their perpetual writing, talking, recording and trans- muting they dominated once and for all their own immortality. And their long lives, so prim and good and family-focused, were inordinately cluttered with all the usual fussy details of domesticity. So that the inspirational writer cannot see the wood for the trees. Thus in this book we are fussed by the careful repetition of littlenesses, and by not knowing when we are taking the day's agenda from Dorothy and when from Miss Ashton. We are surprised, too, that an elaborate re-creation of Wordsworth himself makes no attempt on the mystery of high poetic grandeur lodged in that dull and crusty dog ; and the " big " moments are somehow embarrassing, as when The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is engendered in conversation or when Wordsworth hints portentously : " There was a time—," or Charles Lamb -briefly paraphrases his essay on Christ's Hospital. All these things may have happened in this way—I have here no means of checking record with invention—but embedded in a novel they embarrass us.
Nevertheless here is a famous life-story told with care and tenderness; bright with great names and their attendant comedies and tragedies, and presenting an acceptable portrait of a valiant, gifted and unselfish woman.
Asleep In The Afternoon is by Mr. E. C. Large, who had such success last year with Sugar In The Air. This new book is immensely entertaining. It is a novel within a novel' Charles Pry, aged thirty-five, lives with his wife and child in the Essex mud flats near Tilbury. He is an industrial chemist and has been manager of a recently closed chemical factory, He has seven hundred pounds. His wife is expecting a second child. He has discovered a way of lying on the floor in the afternoon, " neither pretending to be active nor pretending to be asleep. He just remained alive, in a condition of pure continuation." He finds this beneficial and stimulating—it leads him into writing a novel, and we, and his wife, are privi- leged to see him through it. We read extracts, follow his investigations, share his moods and decisions and are thoroughly in on the thing from, start to agreeably successful finish. It is an amusing and fresh sort of novel that he writes—round a vast, comic character called Agatha Boom. She is a big, arty, enlightened Hampstead woman, and her creator goes all out after her to make her a magnificent symbol. We watch him heap her up, and we become insatiable. " Do you have to make the woman quite so female ? " said Mary. But we agree with C. R. Pry that he " must get her biology right first, then we can build up the superstructure."
Agatha has a little, quiet, mathematical-genius husband who is thought to be deaf and who sleeps in his attic-study with perfect regularity every afternoon from three o'clock until exactly 6.45. Which' is where the plot begins, and the ultimate fame and public service of Agatha. For Hugo is not deaf nowadays, and he does not exactly sleep in the afternoon. In experiments with devices to cure his deafness, and while that deafness cured itself, Hugo has discovered that a gadget invented for him by an aurist will if applied correctly to the bone behind the ear set up vibrations on the cortex which induce immediate and perfect sleep. Improvising on this discovery he has arrived at a modification of it which produces not sleep, but a condition of extremely pleasant hypnosis, liberating the delights of traumatic phantasia. It is with this excellent modification that Hugo spends his afternoons while Agatha conscientiously " gets her biology right."
But Annie,• the maidservant, experiments with Hugo's gadget, and embarrassingly falls sound asleep on Hugo's divan. So Hugo has to explain things to Agatha, who immedi- ately experiments too and falls asleep beside Annie. Alarmed and uncertain, Hugo confides in a brilliant, go-getting, scientific friend, who naturally sees a fortune in the gadget, and gets it patented and marketed, going fifty-fifty with Hugo in the royalties.
• Great fun ensues. At first only the simple sleep-inducing device is marketed. The Boom Sleep-Easy. Agatha forsakes everything to promote it, and becomes the Apostle of Sleep, But the 'cat, the agreeable modification, gets out of the bag and on to the market. So the thing rages and roars through every kind.of storm. The situation, so pregnant with possi- bilities, gets out of hand. " What are you going to do ? " said Mary. " I'm going to leave it to Agatha Boom."
He writes his book, sells it and succeeds with it. All the details of its adventures, of his narrow financial squeak, and the incidentals of his married life meantime and his rather silly flutter with a tiresome young lady called Ann are very neatly managed, and the all-round mockery—from which, curiously, only writers, publishers and literary cocktail parties are excluded—is Slapped in with a gusto and a sense of farce that are as benevolent as they are energetic.
Men Are Not Stars is a book which a great many people will like. It it slow-going and traditional in manner, but records sensitively, from a boy's point of view, the life of a windy pseudo-genius painter in Chicago around the beginning of the century. It reveals careful talent for narrative and characterisation.
A Child In Her Arms works out the triangle theme in a new way, but sentimentally. The writer's manner is dreadfully pseudo-precious,, and American good taste drips from the pages—but the plot is goodish, and the book is short.
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