PREFERENCES.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19332, 9 June 1928, Page 13

PREFERENCES.

CONFESSIONS BY CRITICS. (From an Exchange.) VIRGINIA WOOLF:— Your request that I should name some books that have interested mo during the past winter sets mo rummaging through my memory—a proceeding which proves perhaps that 1 have read nothing which mado a very deep impression on me. But I must immediately add that my reading has been neither deep nor wide, and, as is always the case with current books, much at the mercy of chance. Tims some of the most admired books of the winter have, for one reason or another, escaped me. I have been constantly advised to read Miss Bowen's "The 'Hotel," but have not yet come across it. I have heard Mr Wilder's "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" and Mr Julien Green's "Avarice House" discussed whenever books were mentioned. Some critics declare them both to be novels of high and lasting merit; others find in them only skilful imitations of good books. So one waits for the dust to settle. For my own part I would like to praise one novel and one book of short stories, but as both were published at my instance by the Hogarth Press I must refrain. I have also bought and propose to read should my life last long enough the final volumes of Proust's masterpiece. The advance guard who have been to the journey's end speak in the highest praise of it, but [or such an expedition time and courage are needed. As I trace the course of my winters reading I find it irregular, as it is leading steadily away from fiction in the direction of poetry and biography. The most interesting winter's biography has been undoubtedly Monsieur Jean-Aubry's life of Conrad. It is neither a work of art nor a psychological document, but it contains a mass of information from which one can create Conrad for one's self, and for that one must be grateful. Gertrude Bell's Letters interested me profoundly Chance and choice combined to let me read many obscure autobiographies. The most notable are George Start's "Small Boy in the Sixties, Lord Ribblesdale's Memoirs, which have a fine, dashing style of their own, Mr Anthony Hope's Memoirs, a, model of modesty and concision, and the first volume of Lord Curzon's Life. But it is the poets who have given me the greatest pleasuro. One is Lady Winchilsea, whose poems are many winters old but have lived in such obscurity that their beauty seems new, and another is Mr Yeats. Mr Yeats improves poetically as. he. grows older. "The Tower" contains his best, deepest, and most imaginative work. When I say nothing has impressed me deeply I must except that for which alone the winter was memorable. But as I look through the crowded list's I feel with somo distress how likely it is that in the press and scuffle the book I should most have enjoyed has been trampled under foot, and will only be found reprinted when ' I have lain for centuries dead." G. B. STERN:— You ask me to tell you what books published within the last five months have given me that strange quiver, that intense listening feeling as though premonition had been long becalmed' and suddenly the wind had sprung up. I felt it years ago over my first Sheila Kaye-Smith novel, and my first reading of "The Forsyte Saga" and over my first Proust. Oh —and Hergesheimer's "Java Head, "The Constant Nymph," "The Lost Ladv," and every time I read a new Stella Benson or an E. M. Forster novel. And Tarkington's "Seventeen. Well, these are all of the past. But "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" was a novel that wrought that same simple magic. It was the exquisite theme: Did God mean anything?—the eternal theme and eternal question. And though Brother Juniper never quite succeeded in unravelling the Divine purpose which lay behind the sudden death of five separate and irrelevant people after the bridge broke, yet it was more than artistry on the part or the author not to hammer out the point to a neat mechanical conclusion, but leave us with the conviction that though the question was unanswerable, yet somewhere and somehow. somebody was kind and pitiful to humanity s deep stress. After my first Sheila Eiaye-Smith-r'-my last was "Iron and gmoke." She has lost some of Sussex magic, but she has gained—what? She is not so close to earth, but nearer to men and women, is that it?. There is less grandeur and less fanaticism but I ooth like and respect this story of a great friendship between two women which is ratified over the very body of the dead husband and , dead lover. There is dignity, there is reticence in their friendship. It doesn't squelch emotionally as milk from a saucer too shallow .to hold it. Yet it is friendship which can stand,any strain put upon it, and we believe in it because the author understands it so completely and fundamentally herself. Critics have- complained that the book has "* broken back" —but it appears- to no that they are confounding a lapse otseveral years vital to the theme with a non-existent lapse in technique. It thev had chosen they might have com plained instead that Jenny was almost too much of a little fool to sustain npr share in so fine an experience. as xao friendship with Isabel. But even fools can be unexpectedly Aviso in one or two regions. "Iron and Smoke" is aboi-e all things an experienced book. It has a quiet power driving behind it, driving steadily on towards that peace which we all subconsciously seek as the onlv true ending to a book. Rose Macaulay's "Daisy .and Daphne" is as usual a witty tragedy. She always chooses to recognise «■ truth so painful that it can hardly be faced even in this universe of pain. Then she makes you ache with laughter, approaching pain sideways as though in parody. "Daisy and Daphne," a story of bow what-we-hope-we-seem-to-others is ousted from happiness by the perpetual' muddling interference from what-we-know-we-are-rcallv is a scintillating modern rendering of an old-fashioned morality tale without perhaps the visible moral. That is the sadness of modern morality tales. Rose Mncaulav possesses the simple gift of being readable developed to a point of genius. I never want to read anyone else for several (jays after 1 have finished a novel bv her. But I do wish she would not chatteljournalism in a sort of cross pattern whenever she is i>bout to achieve a poignant crisis in fiction. This is sheer Daisy to want only a childishly upsettintr' strong effect, on Daphne. "Red Damask." by Emanie Sachs, was an absorbing study of family tyrannies, rebellions, early mistakes, and late submissions with gleams and flashes of enlightenment stroking the whole canvas. "Chips. Wands, and Swords,' bv Helen Simnson. interested me. too. It was so old in instinct and so yonnc and Tilde in its sudden desires to "bring i"" bits of character, bits of knowledge and bts nf parties just hemuse the au+hor knew something about them. But the strange bond that linked the twins, Celia and Tony, was far more illuminating and believable than the affinity between Margaret Kennedy's twins, William and Emilv. The latter two were embroidered so fantastically that was their natural state of being, so their psychological predicaments lost all semblance to reality. But Celia and Tony werc real; they v,-oro the youth of today and so strangeness in them'.was contrasted with ordinariness as it al-

ways should be if it is to shine strangely at all. Do you, remember, for instance, the first" half of-"Lolly Willows"?

REBECCA WEST:—

Nothing I have read in English during the last twelve months has inter-, csted me so much as Willa Cather's "Death Comes to the Archbishop," a good book in the old style, and a short story by Ernest Hemingway called '' The Killers," which is evidence that there authentically is a new style. -It demonstrates the technique that gives realistic prose the effective power of lyric poetry. It is one of the few good poems about death, ever written and by an astounding virtuosity it does, it without falsification of the unusually ''prosaic" factual donnee. For the rest I have read the last two volumes of Marcel Proust's "A la Kecherche du Temps Perdu," and let the compost tion appear as a whole before my mind. It is one of the greatest works of genius that the human animal has created surely, and is shown by these, concluding volumes to be as deliberate a composition and as free from mere meandcrings as we who lovo, Proust had foretold it would be. Otherwise the season seems to have been notable for the overpraise in Action of polished second-rate and (and in other departments of literature) the unpolished third-rate. There were at least two popular successes in fiction last autumn that fell in the first category. One (which I forbear to name) made me wonder whether Henry James had in vain so portentously askod that question he asked of contemporary fiction sonic years ago: "But what is it about?" So hopelessly was it not about anything at all and remains to the closest scrutiny a piled accumulation of rural details; the other (which I also forbear to name) made one wish the old gentleman had never raised the point, so inexorably was it about an ingenious idea, so resolutely was it hammered to an amusing baroque pattern of design, which was present from the first in the writer's mind at the beginning of his effort, and owing nothing to the spontaneous performances of the characters during creation. And as for our taste in biography, may the powers that be forgive us. But there is a superb compendium of biographies just let loose on us. Uro Oggctti's "As They Seemed to Me" is a scries of character sketches by a suave genius which epitomise non-English cultured Europe during the last thirty years with justness, feeling, integrity and judgment that is past description and that is past praise. Any writer who is worth his salt would eat his hat to do what Oggclti does in a thousand words with the essential facts about Anatole France, Rodin, Duse. Pirandello, Paul Valery, M&thilde Serao, and Pierre Louys. Throw away those dreary, delusive Teutonic books (which are of a nature which in my early days in Grub street wo called B. M. Stickups because to write them the author went to the British Museum, read up his subject and then —but you get the idea), and see how language can really iinpalo the moment, can cause personality to endure forever, and the mood not to perish.