New Novels
The Pilgrimage. By Francis Stuart. (Gollancz, 12s. 6d.) THE two chief characters of Mrs. Jessey's novel spend most of their time in a war-deranged train dragging its sultry, surly way across America. The Treasures of Darkness becomes indeed, by page 160, a magnificent piece 'of promotion for air travel. The heat and hub- bub and dirt of a woman-infested Pullman are overpoweringly conveyed, and while Mrs. Jessey picks her disdainful documentary way down the trash-filled corridors the writing is acute and the unpleasantness real. As soon as Helena, her faded Lorelti of a heroine, closes her eyes on the ruckus and slips into a flash- back, the writing, and the situations it deals with, become man- nered and melodramatic. Helena turns into a kind of Kleenex Electra, her mother—whose suspected murder has caused the journey—into a Disney ogress, and her early sex life into trans- atlantic Cold Comfort Farm. The falseness, the over-writing, are all the more disappointing in view of Mrs. Jessey's ability to write well about sounds and smells and sights she has experienced herself. 'This whole trip she had been talking, talking, talking— not aloud, but inwardly. An endless stream of articulation had gushed out of her mind.' So (only at the end of it all) muses Helena. She is right.
Mr. Davies's talking is small-talk. A Canadian, he has put together a readable book in a very workmanlike way. The parts of it dovetail with professional smoothness; the characters are neatly and carefully carved; the construction is all common sense. A false engagement notice in a prairie university town's only newspaper sets off a chain of events which enable us to see something of the lives of a score of its inhabitants : the bald, bony editor; the kindly, half-ineffectual Dean of the Cathedral; the pathetically cunning Mr. Higgin; the distinguished, half-mad Professor Vambrance; Dutchy and Norm, the heartily married social psychologists who are just discovering gin—people observed objectively and, for the large part, superficially, who nevertheless don't just degenerate into types.
There is a curiously nineteenth-century feel to Mr. Davies.'s writing, as though Leaven of Malice was a poor Canadian's Middlemarch. Professor Vambrance is your watered-down Casaubon—and Solly Bridgetower who, with Pearl, the Professor's daughter, is involved in the false notice, rejects the dead hand of scholarship with a fine Eliot-like flair of high-mindedness. I intend no serious comparison of course. But it is to Mr. Davies's credit that he should be sound enough at his trade as to recreate even a hint of the feeling of that straddling, three-dimensional solidity.
grasp, for steadiness as you float, in the sort of dreams Cocteau films, through his shifting, shadowy landscape. His people are of a piece with his countryside : elongated, flattened shapes blown by a wind they seem not to feel. There is beauty in this country. and horror too; above it shine a moon of mysticism and a sun of sexuality, the one spreading a vague, cool veil over character and situation (and sometimes sense), the other pulsing hotly in even the most saintly hands, the most sheltered houses, ugly— as Mr. Stuart sees it—for the most part, but omnipresent.
The characters are no more than the shadows thrown by the elemental forces that move behind and within and around them. Mr. Stuart makes this implicit approach explicit by arranging his novel around the mystical experience of a child. The worldly and the strong exist only in relation to her; and perhaps all you can say about the plot is that it's the story of what that relation- ship (and its side-issues) does to the people affected by it.
Here and there in the mist, scenes light up with unexpected clearness, conversations that were muted suddenly become loud and important, men and women shift into focus and become real beings instead of wraiths—hut this is no more than momen- tary, the mist comes down again and the meaning is lost.
Mr. Stuart is very nearly a very good writer. Certainly, The Pilgrimage has enough virtue in it to be worth re=reading. But he strains his words too hard; and in trying to communicate the incommunicable he breaks the bowl of sustained sense and leaves us only with fragments.
Mr. Wiles has written an unassuming and pleasant little story about life in the theatre. The Try-Out is a sort of up-to-date Good Companions: everything's right on the night, but for modern measure we have an attempted suicide, a touch of homo- sexuality, a bitter, incoherent hero and a few bits of good bed- stuff ('the softness of her thighs enclosed within the bony cage,' etc.). An ingratiating mixture which Mr. Wiles has stirred
pretty well. JOHN METCALF
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