Fiction
By SEAN O'FAOLAIN
Show Down. By M. Escott. (Chatto and Windus. 7s. 6d.) Vein of Iron. By Ellen Glasgow. (Cape. 8s. 6d.) Dr. Morath. By Max Rene Hesse. (Allen and Unwin. 8s. 6d.) Jackets Green. By Patrick Mulloy. (Grayson. 7s. 6d.) HEAVEN knows how many recipes there are for making a
novel, but two frequently met today are illustrated' by the first books on this list. The one is to take a lump of crude life and spatter it on the pages of a book, despising such literary conventions as movement to a crisis, balance of characters, contrapuntal incidents, sub-audible comment by author, carefully arranged suspense, sign-pasts pointing to later developments, and so on. The other recipe reminds us of those trays of fine sand in which a modeller may faintly thumb out a design ; these are the definitely literary books, and their faintness comes from a topical melancholy and is indicated by the subjective note and moodily contemplative music of the style.
It would be unjust, however, to suggest that Mr. Escott's novel is just a characteristic bit of Brutalism. It has, cer- tainly, so much of Hemingway in it that Hemingway might well have written it ; but though I do feel that Farewell to Arms is one of the grand books of our time, its grandness is essentially romantic, and there is nothing romantic about Show Down ; it is more sincere, I think, than Hemingway ever is. Its story is the story of a young woman, " young lady " might be more accurate, who comes to South Africa for a week to meet a ne'er-do-well brother, falls passionately in love with his rough-and-ready farmer friend, Dave Hawkes, and lives with him as his wife (in spite of the fact that he has a wife back in England). The marriage " is an idyll until the old sense of class, the old desires for refinement, come stealing back over the woman. She begins to wander from her backwoods-man to Major Howard, the English gentleman-farmer who had once employed him ; and as the whole point of the book is that the " marriage " was, by agreement, one that depended solely on constancy of desire and was to impose no bonds when passionate loye ceased, the end may be guessed. Dave Hawkes tells the story in the first person.- - He poses. no problem. He makes no revelation. He is not even faintly thoughtful. He just writhes and seethes and vibrates with emotion, and you can't help feeling the excitement of the atmosphere created by that internal storm. In so far as Dave and Anna are symbols of the physical and spiritual disintegration of our times, of the futility and chaos of the modem temper, the book has point and direction. In so far as Mr. Eseott did not see this aspect of his material at all, or is not interested in it, it has power without force, like a lion roaring in the Zoo. In brief, if you believe that life is a swamp and art is not much more than the colours on its scum, this is a magnificent book : if you do not you will collider this book a terrible waste of natural genius.
Neither would it be fair to think too rigidly of Miss Ellen Glasgow's Vein of Iron as a novel of the second type—the type of which Mr. Escott's hero says :
" I don't like things patted into a pattern and made to sound queer and bodiless . . . I'd rather have bad art bursting out of a man than good art being minced out into patterns. Slick and smooth and graceful . . . It's all this plastering over and smoothing things down that takes away from the feel of strength and effort."
For Miss Glasgow, though somewhat' too sweet hi her imagery and pensive over tragedy, would agree with Mr. Escott; indeed, thirty years ago, she was railing at the " evasive idealism " of
the " modern novel." She writes here of the Great Valley of Virginia as she did in Barren Ground, centring her story about John and his daughter Ada, the last of the Fincastles, w staunch Scotch-Irish Presbyterian family who drove across the old Indian road from Pennsylvania to Virginia where for genera- tions they worked as pastors of Ironside and built up ainonn- tain parish. They were a family of strong character but with a tradition of scholarship that ruined this last John when his ideas on predestination ran counter to the ideas of the elders of his church ; after his trial before them he devotes himself
to his four-volume history of idealist philosophy, scraping a living from the land of the Manse. Ada, his daughter, inherits the Fincastle character and her story is her love for Ralph btacBiidc wholstricked atiny from her by another girl ; they
continue to love each other ; he gives her a child during the War ;. and after it he is able to marryher.
Up to this the cast is a large one, and there are . some tenderly -drawn portraits, such as John's ailing wife, loyal to him through all his misfortunes, and the old grandniother, a woman of the stern Puritan tradition ; one of the best scenes in the book is where this old lady, horrified by Ada's sin, sud- denly unbends on the night of the birth. After Ada's marriage the scene shifts to the town—the pastor now utterly destitute— and the disintegration of old ways of life in modern America. This, clearly, is the direction of Miss Glasgow's thought and the aim of her novel—to show a vein of old iron in the soft modern mud, and one cannot but respond to her admiration for the character and pluck of the various people whose lives impinge on the struggling Fincastle household. Old John finally releases them and himself from torment; he drags his dying body back to Ironside for one last view of his lovely and beloved mountains where all his ancestors worked and lived ; there his daughter finds him and buries him-and we see her and Ralph, at the end, settling back into the old Mar se about to begin afresh the old struggle with unkindly Natt.re.
This is obviously a carefully patterned book, and as such its weakness is that it is a trifle too deliberately graceful.' The history of the forbears of Ada Fincastle is, in truth, confusing and over-written. The style has too much of the sadness of the dying fall about it. The images are too mannered—e.g. " Misery broke over her in a curved wave " ; the washing on the line" swayed upward in the breeze, was puffed out in rosy billows, and covered in- a single immense wave the whole field of vision " : a girl has" eyes likasmothered flames under black lashes." The emotion is always likewise smothered into a sigh, and one fears that there is more than a little " goody goodiness " in the general idealism..., For all that a vein of iron does hold the softer material together, and it remains a .book which might well be read by everyone—if there be any left—who thinks that America has no tradition of dignified and gallant living.
The remaining two books on this list are nowhere as good as Vein of Iron or. Show Down, but Dr. Morath is in its own manner a very striking and interesting novel. Morath is a young German who comes to work in a German-colony hospital in - South America. A slender . character, in every way; he seems at first to be full of ideals and the patent graft of the hospital appals him, but by degrees ambition enters into him and he begins to waver. All through the first book we are entranced by the splendidly realistic scenes—operations, clashes between the staff, an intrigue between the prospective Head and a nurse, a polite murder blandly arranged between the two, &c.—and one is constantly thinking. " This book is another Arrowsmith," for it is quick, and vivid, satirical, exalting, and has all the appearances of authenticity. The decline of Morath, however, slows up the remainder of the hook ; he falls in love with a young girl who is not, herself, without ideals, and the need for more and more money saps his integrity. Here we get dozens of finely executed vignettes of South American society, and though the going is a bit tough the sense of external reality does not diminish. One fatal weakness, unfortunately theheavy, Teutonic," subjective technique—here begins to blur the- outlines. Morath does the molt extraordinary things without the slightest appearance of doubt or decision. We become fogged, and end by dis- believing. Nevertheless it is all well worth reading.
Jackets Green is another novel of the Irish Troubles. It covers the whole period from 1920, the height of the Black and Tan regime to the end of the Civil War, and has the unusual interest of showing tis...the later period from the point of view of a young officer in the new Free State Army—the only book to deal with those years from this angle. Mr. Mulloy can write, of that there is no doubt ; but how well he can write I do not know because here he writes without restraint in the worst Brutalist manner. This reaches the climax when we get a description of the results of a mine-explosion and are told that " the intestines of the dead festooned the. telegraph- wires I " In the divisions caused by the Civil War, Mr. Mulloy finds the material for his comment on the cruelty of all idealism. 'The trouble is that lie shoats. it instead Of whisizierini
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