THUNDER IN THE AIR
THERE'S thunder in the air : heaviness and dampness and the flowers smelling acridly in the hedges, and one longs for rain and a wind. There are people, of course, who enjoy a thunderstorm, and they will not be disappointed in Mr. Bates's new collection of short stories, but to me his whole world seems to have grown rather close and small. The Woman who had Imagination, Cut and Come Again—these two volumes represented
Mr. Bates at his superb best : his characterisation was hard and shrewd : and his people stepped out of the story into the vast world of conjecture. But in his new volume his characters are dominated and dwarfed by an undifferentiated sexuality. To say that he conveys the sense of passion far more effectively than Lawrence ever did is only to speak an obvious truth : Mr. Bates has always been able to turn off with admirable fidelity descriptions of nature .: but for the first time he turns off human beings with that air of routine from which his cows in calf, his fields of corn and laden fruit trees have sometimes suffered. Even Uncle Silas is a little diminished in the heavy air.
This is not to say that any other contemporary English short-story writer, except perhaps Mr. Beachcroft, could . produce a volume of equal interest and variety. There are only two thoroughly bad stories in the book : one, " Purchase's Living Wonders," is an amazingly sentimental story of a dwarf who falls in love with the manager of a travelling show and dies Dickensianly of a broken heart when she finch that her diminutive body is repulsive to him. At the end he pretends for her sake that she has grown taller.
" Am I a living wonder ? ' she -said. ' Say I am.'
' Yes,' -he said. ' You're a living wonder.'
"A moment later she let go his hands, and he knew that he had spoked just in time."
The other story is " Spring Snow "—the story of a gestation in a wayside cafe which depends entirely for its effect on the
ugly documentary detail. It is in this story that one finds a sentimental and falsely poetic metaphor which phows how
low a fine writer's imagination can drop. " She carried double armfuls of gorse to bum, carrying them in front of her, so that she seemed heavy with a pregnancy of flowers."
The trouble with most of these stories is an absence of detach- ment. " Breeze Anstey," the tale of two women who run a herb farm, of how the lover of the older woman returns and the younger discovers through jealousy the nature of her own love for her companion, is marred by something warm and excited in the author's attitude. There is a scene of great embarrassment to the reader when the two women bathe naked in a forest pool, and that embarrassment, I think, is caused by the pulse of a private excitement. It is like the effect of a damp enthusiastic handshake from a stranger. -
Of course—it is only to be expected—there are moments of brilliant illumination : the sheaves in a cloudburst floating " like skirted bodies " ; the girl watching the middle-aged lovers—" They held out their love to her, as it were, on a plate, like some piece of juicy steak " ; moments of clarification when the characters break the framework of the constricting story, as in the scene between the lodger's child and the bullying landlady who greets her with unaccustomed bonhomie
after her desire has at last been satisfied with the girl's father- " Cora tittered. The girl's face showed no response. It was hard with the crystallisation of many emotions : fear, hatred, unbelief and some proud dumb notion of revenge." There is an admirable little humorous sketch of a barber's shop, and the story—" No Country "—of a magistrate's court and a wretched exile haunted by the fear of deportation has the hard objective tragic sense one expects of Mr. Bates, but there is little else to put beside the wealth of the two previous volumes, beside such stories as " The Mill," " The Station," " Beauty's Daughters." This is a collection which Mr: Bates's admirers, of whom I am devoutly one, may prefer to forget. _ .
GRAHAM GREENE.'
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