Fiction
By WILLIAM PLOMER MR. CECIL DAY LEWIS, in his excellent new book, A Hope for Poetry, describes how the poet today stands between two worlds, and how " on the one hand the Communist tells him that he is no better than a dope-peddler unless he ' joins the revolution, while " on the other hand, the bourgeois critic rebukes him for allowing a sympathy with Communism to drive him into a Mild of writing that at any rate sounds very like propaganda." Both these critics, he says, are " right up to a point," but they are apt to forget that " poetry, in fact, whatever else it may or may not be, must be poetry." The novelist today also stands between two worlds, and is some- times judged according to whether he is satisfied with old- world ideals or is more intent on helping to " build a new world." But it is just as important for the novel to be in the first place good as a novel as it is for a poem to be good as poetry. Since fiction is concerned with individuals, and indi- viduals cannot be considered apart from society, nor society understood without some knowledge of its political and economic factors, the fashionable• social-political -way of criticism must be welcomed so long as it helps us towards a fuller appreciation of a book ; but when this way of criticism does not allow sufficiently for aesthetic merits or faults, it is apt to lose force. On the jacket of The Disinherited, for instance, is printed a tribute which sentimentally exaggerates the importance of that book (an able and interesting one) and so does it more harm than good.
Mr. William Faulkner is too richly endowed a writer to be at once classifiable with a phrase or two, but Doctor Martino is by no means without its tributes to old-world ideals. It is a collection of short stories, with no unity of place or time or even of style : their only unity comes from their being the work of one hand. In Mr. Faulkner's writings certain types recur—the reckless airmen, the unprincipled young women, the lonely bachelors or adventurers with or without a dash of black blood, the faithful negroes or negresses, the more or less odious contemporary worldlings. Of all these he writes vigorously and brilliantly, but when he is writing of some man or woman of the Sartoris family, some tired, victimized hero or heroine still faithful to the old Southern feudalism, a special warmth and intensity are perceptible as well, and the author is then often at his best. No story in the present collection seems to me better than "There was a Queen" : here Mr. Faulkner contrasts two women, one belonging to the old world and one to the new, and, perhaps by sheer force of example, the old world wins. The stories are remarkably various. Some perhaps descend a little too much to the magazine level, two are experiments of doubtful success, but many of the fourteen are first-rate. Mr. Faulkner relies over- much on deaths and murders to get his effects : before the massacre is half over, the reader's reactions tend to become automatic. On the other hand, a vein of grotesque fantasy is developed, especially in "Black Music" and "Fox Hunt." In the first-named a small, snuffy architect's draughtsman turns into a faun ; in the latter a man kills a fox 'with his hands and feet. And as a sign that Mr. Faulkner is not without new-world sympathies, the following account of the founding of fortunes from oil may be quoted : " They would come up with a new Ford with a man from the garage driving it and they would go to an Indian and say, ' Well, John, how much rotten-water you catelitun your front yard ? ' and the Indian would say three wells or thirteen wells or whatever it is and the white man would say, ' That's too bad. The way the White Father put the bee on you boys, it's too bad. Well, never mind. You see this fine new car here ? Well, I'm going to give it to you so you can load up your folks and go on to where the water don't come out of the ground rotten and where the White Father can't put the bee on you no more.' " The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of those rare books that may be recommended almost without reservation to almost any kind of reader. Extracts read aloud to an un- educated person have been received with enthusiasm, and it is hard to think that even the most sophisticated• amateur or fiction could fail to enjoy so fine a novel. A word of warning, however, to the diehard. Although this book can be enjoyed simply as a story of adventure—or, less simply, for its tech- nical skill, its psychological insight, and its charm—it is written from a decidedly new-world point of view. It advocates order, not violence, but its tendencies are " prole- tarian," Godless fm the Russian sense), and by no means flattering to the interests of those who believe in laying up treasure and fighting to keep it. The book could, indeed, be called a parable to illustrate the perishable nature and cor- ruptive influence of worldly -wealth, and of the double truth that " as long as you have nothing, you are the slave of an empty belly and of any who can fill it. But when you have anything, you are the slave of your possessions."
It'would be a pity to give away the plot, beyond saying that three American down-and-outs in Mexico trek away into a remote mountain to dig for gold. They find it, but only at the cost of living a life " more wretched than that of a Lithuanian factory hand in Detroit. It was the most miserable existence you can imagine," and yet every moment of it is made fas- cinating to the reader. The gold finally poisons one of the three, and fails to enrich the other two.
Herr Traven writes in a clear, direct way, is a master of descriptive narrative, and obviously fortunate in his trans- lator. Perhaps his chief strength is that he has freed himself from niggling realism without weakening the illusion of reality. His diggers, although American, do not say " we gotta " and " you guys " and so on ; they speak a more universal and at times a much more elaborate language. Herr Traven must be one of the first " new-world " novelists to write in a language that is stylized and highly cultivated, yet lucid and simple. Ile treats his theme with such a mixture of boldness and subtlety, and manages to give his story such solidity and grace that it may perhaps be called classical. At the same time, there is no denying that at times he writes in a way which certainly " sounds like propaganda." Following an account of an attack on a train by bandits, he treats us to a longish passage in this strain :
' The railwaymen of Mexico are all without exception members of a first class union, radical to the backbone and never averse from a strike ; and they hang together to a man. Their organ- ization and the spirit prevailing in it make self-respecting men of them, who are eager to improve themselves as citizens of their country.. . . "
And further on he remarks that the heathen Indians are incapable of " the incredible cruelties of that train robbery," but the crimes and cruelties of the Mestizos and Mexicans are both stimulated and pardoned by the crude form of Christianity which they profess. These opinions might at first sight seem adventitious, and therefore artistic faults, but whether one accepts them or not, they do in fact form part of the author's design.
Both The Disinherited and Youth is a Crime may be de- scribed as social documents. The first is a specimen of proletarian " literature ; that is to say, it is about people of the so-called working class (Heaven knows it is not the only class that works) by one of its members. It tells of the feirtunes of an American worker through the boom and during the slump, when " packing crates, bits of tar paper, tin advertising signs, discarded automobile bodies, ancient delivery wagons, and small houseboats dragged up from the river had been fashioned into the semblance of homes." The spirit of the bOok is expressed in the sentence : " I'll not starve and die like a sheep " ; it is full of realistic detail, and enables an English reader, whose knowledge of American industrial unrest is derived mostly from newspapers, to under- stand better the sufferings and the courage of its victims.
Youth is a Crime has perhaps less immediacy. It tells of the schooldays and adolescence of an English Jewess at a German school in Antwerp before the War, and gives an interesting account of racial and cultural cross-currents, of a rootless sort of existence comparable to that which has been .led by so many of the middle-class young in the present een- tary, and of the effect of that existence upon an individual not without brains and feelings.
Previous page
