New Novels
WOMEN DIE TWICE. By Paule Lafeuille. (Gollancz, 10s. 6d.) THE PRIMROSE PATH. By Peter Forster. (Longmans, 12s. 6d.)
Aspects of Love, Mr. Garnett's revealingly self-conscious title for his first novel in twenty years, might be a sort of generic label for most of the week's novels. For as if wary of love as a topic—plain- sailing love, at least, love as the solid, central ingredient of the love-story, like the flour in a cake—novelists now pad round it, prodding, analytical, recondite. Mr. Garnett's kind of analysis ('I always thought your love for Jenny was a sublimation of your desire for revenge on George and of your passion for Rose,' etc.) seems a little bald and dated, but there are subtler methods of being subtle, and this week we meet a number.
Aspects of Love is disappointing. Mr. Garnett's main gift is for matter-of-fact farfetchedness, for a nice mixture of fantasy with accurate and mundane detail; but the world of Lady into Fox or A Man in the Zoo seems gone for ever, and here we have an attempt at realism from a man whose idea of what actually goes on in the world has always seemed a bit hazy. There is a certain decorative charm about his scenes and characters, but no human warmth; across a confusing number of years that would bring us, if I have counted rightly, well into the nineteen-sixties, his people set and change partners with an important precision that makes them appear both trivial and absurd. The book's flavour is odd: a mixture of worldliness and naiveté and the pedantic, almost scholarly reverence for the enjoyment of the senses that has made bores of so many emancipated Englishmen. Well, Alexis and Rose are lovers, but Rose marries Uncle George, a poet; and they have a daughter called Jenny, who from the age of ten is passionately in love with Alexis. Then at Uncle George's funeral (a splendid occasion, a Pagnol film seen through Bloomsbury spectacles : Miss Stella Gibbons, please parody) Alexis meets and falls in love with Giulietta, Uncle George's mistress : which settles everything. 'There is something very extraordinary about our situation,' says Giulietta, unwarily letting Mr. Garnett's cat out of the bag, 'because we provide each other with the only solution to an impos- sible situation.' And the moral of all that seems to be : much falling in and out of love doesn't necessarily make a love-story.
What cools the passions in Aspects of Love, for all the wine and sunshine, is the rigid, repressive, and quite unlifelike self-centred- ness of all the characters. Mr. Frost's people in The Visitants are real enough, so that, though he lacks Mr. Garnett's decorative talent, he is able, with a minimum of passionate preamble, to create an atmosphere in which love is credible and important. Again there is an elderly man, just Uncle George's age, a painter this time, but again much devoted to the memory of an earlier wife, again meeting and marrying a young girl. Good upper- middlebrow, with much accurate social observation, a splendid comical clergyman, and a wry, unexpected ending. . Only a woman, I would suggest, can possibly be expected to judge Women Die Twice as a human document. And 'document' it really is, being more a case-history than a novel, a passionate and quite privately feminine attempt to generalise about the nature of love in women : powerful, ingenuous, and quite out- standingly silly. 'Nowadays,' says the author's preface, 'when women are disillusioned and desperate, they no longer take refuge in a convent. Instead, they go to a nightclub, and drug themselves with luxury—or vice. Only the most fortunate achieve the one consolation that is left to them, the oldest one of all, maternity.' If this means there are fewer nurseries than nightclubs in the world, it seems statistically 'a bit unsound; but Mile Lafeuille's mind runs on nightclubs, and other urban but not necessarily universal commodities. Her approach, as the preface shows, is hysterical, her centre of gravity Paris, her experience (I should imagine) narrow. But there are some excellent things in the book : the girl's awakening into love, her sense of recognition, of 'I have been here before,' the curious foreknowledge of the early stages of love, the first unfolding of sensation. What is absurd is the air of infallibility, of smug possession of all the facts; of having, with a quotation from Sappho and a few large statements like 'There's the mind, the soul if you prefer, and there's the body. They're terribly distinct,' said the last word on women, men, sex, love, and the nature of the universe; and the adolescent belief, angrily propounded, that illusion is somehow less 'real' than disillusion. Mlle Lafeuille can clearly write; she bristles with mis- directed talent and energy: which is enough at this stage, for I suspect she is also young, or, if she isn't, she ought to be.
The Lady in the Tower is a good antidote to the vapours, being slender and eerie as an elegant ghost, and that rare thing, a fictional oddity. Mr. Symonds has a delicate, tripping, nervous style well suited to his improbable tale of love among forged miniatures and auction rooms, antique shops and Victorian bric-a- brac; and this is his first novel. It has charm, taste, wit, and a genuine, though not quite organised, feeling for nonsense, an unusual sympathy for the sly and the grotesque. Miniature emotions, little spurts of pity, anger, generosity, fear, Mr. Symonds can manage beautifully; but the large and simple, and the large simple actions they involve, set him shuddering. He should stick to his admirable phantoms.
There are no ghosts in The Primrose Path, and love appears more by default, by loneliness and longing, than by its actual presence. This first novel has me interested and puzzled more than the rest of the week's more competent fiction put together. For it has quite extraordinary promise and a social sense, a breadth of exuberant observation that makes the blurb-writer's oblique reference to Balzac sound not entirely absurd. Mr. Forster's aim is to portray contemporary life, to show it as full, rich and pitiable; and, taking the decline of a very ordinary young man from insurance broker's office in the City to a Burgess-like
bolt with Communist secrets, he dots manage
a to give a very fair sprawling picture of seedy- fashionable London life at present; of the sort of discontent and hope and morality that actuates a young man like Edward Primrose: bowler-hatted on weekdays, duffle-coated on Sundays, in pub or cheap nightclub every even- ing, at once searching and disenchanted, shop- soiled and ignorant. All this--except the end- ing, which is false and muddled—is very good. But then there is the style, the mechanics of writing. How. anyone with Mr. Forster's re- spectable literary antecedents can write so appallingly has me fascinated. Mediocrely good prose is so common today that thunder- ingly bad is at least a change. Mr. Forster's people 'do a show,' lather themselves into a frenzy,' screw up their eyes in a curious man- ner that seemed to betoken particular recogni- tion of all and sundry.' On the one page he says (of debutantes): 'In them the ancient ideal of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness had been transmuted to High Life, Liberty's and the pursuit of Guardsmen,' and (of a gay young man): 'No good man in the typist's exercise ever came to the aid of a party more assiduously than Roger': enough to send al- most pleasurable shudders down a jaded reviewer's spine. The effect is appalling but not unattractive, and a feeling remains that somehow, in spite of it, Mr. Forster will write well. Because, unlike so many, he has some- thing to say.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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