Fiction

By SEAN O'FAOLAIN

They Followed Dancing. By John Clappen. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) SOMEBODY said an artist should have no opinions. Certainly a reviewer dare have no dislikes. A handful of books, so many chunks of life, are thrown at him and his digestion is expected to taste and assimilate each with equal relish : all he can question is the cooking. Here are four of them and each one valid in its own way, effective and pertinent in its own way : a book about workers in Scotland, a book about middle-class Galsworthian lovers in London : a book about country-folk, mainly, hoping sadly or merrily between heaven

and earth ; a book about 'movie people which makes things stand on their heads. Four authors in a row all a-singing in

different keys —" This is life ! " It is enough to addle any man —to make him sigh Heigh-Ho for the good old days before the Renaissance and the Reformation and the Revolution (French and Industrial) when all men saw all life as a unity

and opinions had not broken the mould of things into 10,000,000 fragments . . .

But charabter still holds things together. In Lennox Kerr's splendid novel about workers in some Scottish industrial area Mary Bassett is a heroine whose vigour and whose pluck lifts one out of oneself into a state of excitement that makes one feel positive, while one reads, that this one of the quartet is right—that this is life. Its theme is : " Does the road wind uphill all the way Aye, to the very end I "

Men strive in this book, and women too, and in their courageous, blind, defeated, striving one is made one with humanity in the mass. One could, indeed, quarrel with the way in which Mr. Kerr tells about them, but where there is so much

sincerity and so much infectious enthusiasm and love for human beings it seems paltry to say that there is a lack of " art." Before so fiery a book all such impressive dictums as " that art is art because it is not life " seem to become suddenly invalidated and one says, But this book is life itself Frankly, then, this is not a novel to be critical about. What one might feel about it in six months' time I have not the slightest idea ; possibly one might feel very little about it as a book but a great deal about Mr. Kerr's personality and about the stern section of Life he has so evidently experi- enced at first hand. Though I do think that the character of Mary Bassett, the factory-girl, the lover, the wife and mother, fighting for her own sense of pride in her own humanity or fighting for the humanity of her children, is not likely to be forgotten easily by anyone who reads of her. With Love on the Dole, and Means Test Man, it must be added to the list of the indispensable chronicles of the poor ..folk of our

time. But do not think it is drab or depressing. It is, certainly, a challenge to one's weakness of spirit and the weak of spirit will pass it by—but unless one is deader and deafer and dumber than a fish one cannot fail to be invigorated by the courage and the fire of Mary Bassett. If one must, pnwillingly,

be critical, however—thankless and ungrateful task—it might have been wished that Mr. Kerr had managed, or wished,

or been able, or chosen to adopt a less rough-and-ready style than : "They knew and Mary knew they knew Mary Bassett would stand no nonsense. She was still all right,' just as Meg remained A sure thing,' but heaven help the man who tried to be funny with Mary. She could crack a fellow into his place like a man with a whip. And they liked her because she brought no risk to them. They knew Mary was not out to catch ' them. She know the right reply to every High Street joke. And she gave a fellow.just enough sport to justify his manhood without bringing any chancy stuff into his life . . . ."

But—what would you ? Mr. Kerr is not that kind of artist, and every writer has the faults of his own qualities, and there are occasions—I have a vague feeling that this is one—when a critic should cock a blind-eye to the spavin in a winner.

After this graceless piece of .fumbling. through the bushes of criticism it is a pleasure to get into the straight with Mr. Coppard. For he always matches grace of manner with

interest of material, and even when, as in some of these stories, he is fanciful or piquant or even bizarre he never fails to be curious about human beings for their own sakes. Here life is not ingurgitated as it is by Mr. Kerr : it is, rather, sipped 4s by a connoisseur for whom the flavour is everything. So one always has a feeling that life as Mr. Coppard sees it moves in strange lights and takes on whimsical patterns and a great part of his charm is that his characters are unpredictable. This is just a little bit dangerous, however, and because fewer than usual of these stories keep within the round of common experience I feel that there are other volumes I should rather give to somebody who wanted to taste the essential Coppard. Or if I chose this volume I should hasten to mark "The Old Rascal," a tender story about an old sinner who cannot confess to his priest and whom his priest can hardly find it in his heart to chide : or "Uncle Hobart" in which whimsy and reality arc nicely mixed ; or above all, the story whose character gives the title to the book--" Emergency Exit," where full rein is given to romanca and there has been room to build up atmosphere and the story-teller plays on us with his bag of surprises, and yet the sharp tooth of reality is always coming up like a rock through a placid sea. More than ever in reading this volume will the reader feel the affinity between Coppard and Hardy, or that Coppard is a kind of feminine counterpart of Hardy. There is something. of the same—though much subdued— sense of irony : pointed by the contrast between the rich and lovely rural scene and the melancholy event, or by the use of the unexpected incident, unforeseen by the character it affects ; there is the same notion of cluiracter as an unstable and erratic unbalance of emotions ;' the same hankering for romance restrained by a natural cynicism ;. there is the same desire to toy with a " yarn."

Except in so far as he sways always towards the extravagant, is Mr. Francis Stuart really distinctively Irish ? This novel, In Search of Love, with its commonplace title and its most uncommon story—though well related to common things, mainly. the cinema—is one. of.. those curious books that makes a reviewer wish that, as sometimes happens with Commissions and the like, there could be printed side by side a majority and a minority report. For I find that several people who have read the book have found it vastly entertaining and amusing, whereas to ,me it is all written in a style like Mr. Buster Keaton's fade' and with a grave- digger sense of humour that made me want to groan rather than smile. It starts with quite a good idea—that there could be a woman known as Mrs. Public, or Everybody's Mummy, a symbol of the taste of the millions, whose opinion on whatever a cinema corporation planned to do should be an infallible measure of its popularity. But then a new motif comes in—Mrs. Public becomes a movie star and takes part in a whaling picture. Here extravaganza takes the boards and we find Coral Century, the younger star, riding on a whale's back at night in the arms of a harpooner who has made love to her. Is this satire on the cinema ? It appears to be, for the scene is filmed and makes a huge success. But the corporation now takes to making semi-sadistic prison pictures and trans-continental-express pictures and Coral Century makes love to the engine-stoker on the front buffers of the midnight express. But where is Mrs. Public ? And there is nothing about the buffers in the film. And then there is an inexplicable bit about a radiographic camera and a lady in her bunk . and there , are exits and entrances of minor characters whose, function seems to this dull-witted reviewer, at least, to be entirely without point. I am afraid I must take my courage in my hands and, like the child in the fable, say " The Emperor has no clothes."

Victory to the Vanquished and They Followed Dancing drop into their compartments as easily as letters in a sorting office. They are efficient, the former eminently so, sufficiently sympathetic,' interesting enough to make one willing to read on to the end, but' they hardly leave any powerful impress on the mind or lead one to feel that any new world has been opened up by their authors. It is, perhaps, unfair to put them together, for Miss Barbara , Goolden is a practised hand, and one does not need to be told that Mr. Clappen is new to novel-writing.