Fiction
The Present and the Past. By L Compton-Burnett, (Gollancz.
12s. 6d.) The Groves of Academe. By Mary McCarthy. (Heinemann.
12s. 6d.)
THESE three novels are all in various ways difficult ; they demand more from the reader than most novels, and if they give that much more in return, we may well be satisfied with the bargain. But on the one hand there is no return at all to be had from a casual reading, and, on the other, one must guard against that over-valuation which is like the pleasure of seeing a joke in a foreign language and is as much a tribute to oneself as the author.
To read Miss Compton-Burnett is itself like 'learning to under- stand a new language, and, although proficiency can be acquired in tt bewildered study of the first dozen pages, a kind of spiritual alert has to be maintained to the end, as if on a journey on the Paris underground one was constantly in danger df forgetting French logic or the direction of the key stations. Attributed ,as a rule to Miss Compton-Burnett's peculiar vision of the world, this difficulty seems to be traceable to a single limitation in her power of expression. Just as Virginia Woolf could not write dialogue whiCh was rich enough in its implications of character and situation, and developed all kinds of experiments in description to make good her short- coming, so Miss Compton-Burnett, by 'an opposite process, has called in dialogue to atone for an apparent deficiency in descriptiVe power. Description does, of course, occasionally force its way in, but insubstantially, like a bleak stage-direction in the text of a play.
The dialogue, which forms the body of the book, carries and triumphantly supports the full burden of characterisation, plot and the author's own philosophy and evaluation of her world. This prodigious distortion of traditional technique is the first, and perhaps the main, shock which a new reader has to overcome, because quota- tion marks, which we assume to be the sign of a statement casually made by a character, here simply indicate that a character may be talking to himself, to others, describing himself, being parodied by Miss Compton-Burnett, setting a scene or a relationship, or perform- ing any of a score of functions which are ordinarily performed by the author in supporting comment'. " Our characters are getting worse," says eleven-year-old Guy, as if defiantly proclaiming these peculiarities, and he adds a page later, " My life was over when I was four."
The Present and the Past is the story of a crisis in a family which is re-visited by the mother after a nine years' absence ; she joins forces with her successor, the stepmother, and the weak, rather despicable husband, after a half-hearted attempt at suicide, dies. It is a rich story, told with a far deeper insight and a bolder, more sure-footed appreciation of subtleties than 1 think any of her con- temporaries could achieve. But it is difficult to be sure. The peculiarity of. Miss Compton-Burnett's method is so striking that one's admiration may be heightened by it irrelevantly as by a juggler who achieves a traditional standard of excellence in spite of having one of his arms paralysed.
While Miss Compton-Burnett offers us insight into the secret springs of the ordinary human heart as the reward for following her, Miss Mary McCarthy is difficult because she insists • on por- traying difficult people. The Groves of Academe is an intimate presentation of the group of dons and their wives who• run the pro- gressive American university of Jocelyn. We are admitted among them on equal terms, as if fully qualified at least in modern philosophy and psychology, classical and avant garde literature and the visual arts. And while at first we are relieved to have our credentials taken for granted in 'this way, it becomes a little humiliating to meet so many references to Hobbesian Mirandas, victorious Calliopes, Mantuans, Mondrian paintings, tronometers and females savantes —which come so unremittingly from the lips of Miss McCarthy and her characters that we cannot in the long run fail to note the extent of our intellectual shortcomings. But it is not only Miss McCarthy's allusions which are apt to stretch the half-educated; her characters, who have made the grade intellectually, move about the campus in an atmosphere of neurosis heightened immeasurably by the fevers of the cold war. We meet types of life which are strange to us on this side of the Atlantic, and, while they are brilliantly described, they win neither Miss McCarthy's affection nor our own, and I am not sure that they are worth all the trouble. The first massive volume of a pre-war Austrian novel, The Man Without Qualities, is now given to us in English translation with comparisons with Proust, Joyce and Henry James, and a certificate by its translators as " a contribution to the Geistesgeschichte of our ceivable bearing on tha. subject, and that is to serve as a warning against critical conclusions which are reached on the basis of a few hundreds of thousands of words at the beginning of a million- word novel. The Man Without,Qualities may turn out to have all the humour, grace, emotional coherence and rich sensibility which it seems at present most sadly to lack.. Robert Musil, its author, was a grim and apparently embittered man, who was financed in the later stages by a syndicate of " professional and business men.' His relations with his benefactors seem to have been not unlike Marx's with Engels, for he had a habit of checking their accounts and " would, if it seemed necessary, ask why So-and-So had not paid up for the quarter." We must hope that his attitude to the reader will prove more accommodating, but in this volume he shows, himself capable of truly Marxian rebuffs. " Recognising this,' he says, for instance, on page 299, " brings us to the point where we no longer see the moral norm as the immobility of rigid command- ments, but as a mobile equilibrium continually demanding exertions towards its renewal." And this kind of difficulty verges on the
era." The reference to Proust seems so far to have only one con-
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