Fiction
A Woman of Means. By Peter Taylor. (Routledge. 7s. 6d.)
LEFT over from the weeks before Christmas are several novels each of which is worth somebody's reading. None deserves to have a fuss made about it, but one is a work of genuine if perhaps minor talent ; another is intelligent, serious-minded and very, very articulate ; a .third mirrors all too instructively the generic failings of a common type of first novel, and each of the other two is an accomplished enough exercise in its not too persuasive or too excit- ing kind. Life, life—how seldom, after all, life is caught with any perceptible fidelity between the covers of a novel. It is your romantic, no doubt, who is always looking in fiction for something styled life. But though life, of course, is one thing and literature is another and different thing, what sort of comment on the output of fiction nowadays makes sense that does not spring from a romantic critical temperament ? Let judgement originate some- where else and you get, alas! only hollowness and perversity.
A Woman of Means, by an American author whose first volume, a collection of stories entitled A Long Fourth, made a very good impression a couple of years ago, is fine-grained and admirably unaffected in style. It is the story, told in the first person, of a boy of twelve, the son of a " drummer " with copy-book ambitions, and of the rich stepmother who adores him, gives him the sort of permanence of background he has lacked until then, and eventually goes out of her mind for reasons that are, I fear, more obscure than they should be. The setting of the story—the city of St. Louis in the era of Lindbergh—is touched in with firm, nicely calculated little strokes, and the directness and lightly-weighted simplicity of Mr. Taylor's narrative manner generally are extremely telling. Unfortunately, the crisis of the tale provokes doubt and argument. It is hard to sec what precisely her wealth has to do with the woman's loss of reason. She is afraid in some degree of being separated from the boy when Quint's father becomes a drummer again, but until her delusions of pregnancy are sprung on the reader there has been no suggestion of anything neurotic in her stepmotherly devotion. Is there a specifically American Angst at work here—the guilt of dollar-consciousness ? It seems to me rather that the son-and-stepmother relationship, intelligible and charming on the surface, lacks something of substance. But this is an attractive and individual small-scale performance, if not a completely harmonious one.
A Goncourt prizewinner three years ago, The Forests of the Night is a long, fairly elaborate and intellectually vigorous novel about French life and character under the German occupation. The scene for most of the time is a small town in the Bearnais from the closing weeks of 1942 until the liberation of Paris. M. Curtis does not flatter France or the French during that stricken period. Plainly he, is very set on telling the truth as he sees it. with the result
that almost the only sympathetic (in the Aristotelian sense) charaCter in the novel is the schoolboy Francis, who secretly conducts strangeri across the boundary into the free zone, is betrayed by a compatriot, kidnapped by another compatriot, tortured by a third com- patriot and shot. The rest are pretty grim specimens and more often revolting than anytning else—the Fiscist types among the haute bourgeoisie, the profiteers, the cowards, the cynics, the declamatory patriots, the thugs, the dubious hetoes of the Resistance. The harshness of the picture clearly derives from a lingering after-taste of humiliation, and an English reader cannot but respect the deliberation behind it. As a novel, however, The Forests of the Night, though its intellectual energy and passages of ribald humour are to be admired, falls rather flat through an excess of explicit statement. It is indeed the sort of novel in which everybody explains what he feels most fluently, at length, in carefully considered categories of thought, and in which the feelings themselves, for all that the author takes them very seriously, seem shallow and trivial. Added to that, the flaming love passages are schoolboyish, the ash-blonde Helene is a wax bust in a hairdresser's window, and I was sorry to observe M. Curtis trying to make a penitent hero after all of a vicious tough like Philippe. A candid and capable novel in its way, but too fluent. The translation is marked now and then by phrases like " the typical ape-like type."
I could believe scarcely a word of Meeting, which I take to be a first novel. No man is so great a iiar, Byron wrote in his Journal —he was trying very hard to be honest at that moment—as when he writes about himself. The " I " of Meeting seems, unluckily, to bear that out. He is a drab and friendless fish, a bank cashier, who hates his own company and cannot bear to read a book, and who apparently has the habit of following people in the street for amusement. In this way he meets another drab fish,_who as it happens has just murdered his mistress out of jealousy. The murderer relates in some detail what has happened, and the other, now aware that the murderer has " lived " and he himself has not, either confers the gift of friendship or has it conferred upon him. Tomorrow, possessed of "the truth," he will be a different man. The tale, I fear, makes a portentous to-do of mere inexperience ; it is made-up and empty. If only the economics of publishing allowed, a great many first novels should surely be circulated privately, among one's family, girl friends, former schoolmasters and so on. Might that not prove a healthy corrective for "the desire to write " ?
Mr. Evan John has produced, in Ride Home Tomorrow—another first-person narrative—a novel about the last years of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the prelude to the Third Crusade. It is a carefully detailed work, variegated in scene and incident, though of a rather too conventional stamp of historical romance. • The new novel by Miss Susan Ertz, about a young woman of discreet good looks and exemplary good sense who went as secretary to two very rich and philanthropic ladies• in a London mansion hung with ancient and modern masterpieces, is sympathetic, observant, skilfully addressed to women interested in clothes and familiar enigmas of feminine
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