Fiction
CHILLED, perhaps, by his labours on Doctor Faustus, Dr. Thomas Mann has chosen a warm, almost rollicking tone for his much briefer legend of a child of incest who became Pope at some unspeci- fied point in the Dark Ages. His publisher is anxious to emphasise this change, and certainly The Holy Sinner is lighter reading ; Château Beaurepaire, the birthplace of the fated boy and girl twins who love one another, is a troubadour's setting, and there are times when we are reminded of Aucassin and Nicolette. But however much Dr. Mann might like to be a troubadour, he is too much preoccupied with sin and morality to embark on such a career at this stage ; it is through the mouth of a mediaeval monk that he tells his story.
His text is that " where there is a blemish there is nobility. Base- ness shows no blemish." So the issue of incestuous love at Beaure- paire, a handsome young man rejoicing in the Rabelaisian name of Grigorss, grows up with knightly qualities which lead him to defend, and later to marry, a princess who turns out to be his mother. With this double enormity of incest to atone for, he spends seventeen years on a rock in conditions of solitude which outdo those of any hermit or stylite of whom we have knowledge. At the end of this period an act of divine intervention at Rome secures his election as Pope. If the knighthood of his youth was the product of his sinful origin, the saintliness of his mature years thus springs from his own, even greater sin.
There are memorable and splendidly told episodes in The Holy Sinner, of which the most successful are perhaps the hero's combat with his mother's most dangerous suitor, and his liberation from the isolated rock. The whole narrative is assured and unmistakably the work of Dr. Thomas Mann, if only because we have tasted every one of these ingredients before. The problem of sin and greatness is the subject, not only of Doctor Faustus, but of Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice. The " mark on the forehead," which distinguishes the Holy Sinner's parents, is to be found with similar significance in four other stories written between 1906 and 1949. The Byronic isolation of the hero is not very differ- ent frora that of Dr. Mann's Joseph, of his Goethe in Lotte in Weimar and of Adrian in Doctor Faustus. What is new is the jocular affecta- tion of an archaic style. This, too, we have met before, in Doctor Faustus. but only in the mouth of the Lutheran Devil and for a few pages at a stretch. The mixture is otherwise much the same, and the tedium is enough to spoil our pleasure in the scattered evidences of a great talent. Even the protean Mr. Henry Green seems to be in danger of repeating himself under the pressure of his past achievements. Doting, like Nothing, seems to imply an awareness of powers only partially exercised ; if we are going to interest ourselves in characters and emotions like these—Mr. Green seems to say—why, the fact is they go like this. Mr. and Mrs. Henderson are middle-aged members of the middle class, and it may be symptomatic of abdication in that old-fashioned order that they are immune from the time-honoured bourgeois preoccupation with money, solidity and status. Their anxieties are feverish, but limited to their hold on one another, to their sexual attractiveness in general and to a denial of the approach of old age. Under the sway of these hopes and fears the protagon- ists of Doting show themselves capable of all the malice, disloyalty and chicanery which their ancestors (described by Balzac and Dickens, but not by Mr. Green) exerted in pursuit of grosser and more impres- sive gain. In his relentless investigation of every twist and turn of their manoeuvring, Mr. Green shows a brilliance and sureness of touch which few, if any, of his contemporaries could equal, but for that reason alone we must demand a change of scene in his next novel. The provisional title might be Something.
Silver Wings is an extremely neat story told with great skill on the model of Les Faux-Monnayeurs by Andre Gide. We are first presented with a brief triangular love-story in which there is a compelling element of the uncanny which invites further comment. We are next given an Oxford professor's analysis of the story which throws light on its origins ; but in the third and final part of Silver Wings this analysis is proved to be mistaken by the son of two people who were the originals of two of the main characters, and we are left with the correct explanation.
M. Georges Simenon offers two short novels in The House by the Canal, both about Belgians, the first sordid and compelling, and the second no less compelling but with an epic quality which lifts it on to a higher plane. In both M. Simenon succeeds in combining the flavour of a locality and a race with emotions which are universally valid. After becoming an international pedlar of international wares, M. Simenon may, it seems, yet become a national poet.
TANGYE LEAN.
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