NOTES ON NOVELS

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21348, 15 December 1934, Page 19

NOTES ON NOVELS

* "MY DEAR JEWS" Land or Promise. By Leo Lania, Lovat Dickson. 398 pp. (8/6 net.) When Ludendorff occupied Poland he issued a proclamation to "my dear Jews," assuring them of German protection and sympathy and inviting their co-operation in the campaign against Russian tyranny. Among the trustful was the old man Mendel, who with his daughter Ether fled from the anti-Jewish outbreaks after the war to the shelter and freedom of Germany. jAmong the trustful, also, was the young German-Jewish soldier, Rosenberg, an idealist in arms. His attitude is skilfully contrasted with that of the war-weary but inflexible Heinicke and of a disillusioned, ironic Austrian officer, during a brief sketch of the horrors of war on the Eastern Front. The progress of Esther's connexion and marriage with Rosenberg and of her love for Professor Graber is significantly related to a background in which the resurgent nationalism of Germany, the rise of Hitlerism and anti-Semi-tism, and the bewildering interaction of politics and high finance in the devaluation of the mark are vigorously traced. The author's irony appears in his account of the fortunes of Mendel, who cannot understand why wealth gathers and dissolves in his hands, in the murder of the patriot Rosenberg by Storm Troopers, in the hue-and-cry after Graber, who had referred in a lecture to specific "useless sacrifices" of the war, and in other incidents, bloody and brutal, in which honest, harmless men fall victims to political rage. This is a powerful and illuminating novel, translated into very lively English; and its only defects are those of a slight structural untidiness and of partisan emphasis. AM, ABOUT STEPHEN Winding Road. By Neil Bell. W. Collins Sons and Co. Ltd. 639 pp. (8/6 net.) This is the immensely long lifestory of Stephen Martell, a poor boy trained for a teacher, who turned over to journalism and thence to politics, partly through his own doing and partly through an enemy's crooked hate found his career broken in a divorce suit, and sailed away from England for anywhere with his Dora, leaving his apologia in a letter which (ills the last pages of the book. The ramifications of this history are wide and numerous. Mr Bell's purpose is to explain Stephen, what he is and what he does, at every turn and development, and so he employs a method generically like Theodore Dreiser's, say, in the "American Tragedy." Beyond denial, the innumerable episodes which build up the total structure are lively reading. But the truth is that some of them, and the most elaborate, never reach relevance; and that Stephen never grows substantial or appears to justify the inferences about his talent and strength which are to be drawn from his achievement. It is a significant point, and one which helps 1o explain the want of bone and distinct feature in 1 his story, that although the dialogue has every semblance of idiomatic vigour and naturalness, the voices of different

characters are hard to distinguish in I it. Stephen swears a good deal, but, the swearing has no emphasis, no emotional value. There is something devitalised about all Mr Bell's realism. Probably he needs to concentrate his force more. EVOCATION Breathe Upon These Slain. By Evelyn Scott. Lovat Dickson. 368 pp. The author of this novel, as every reader of "Eva Gay" will acknowledge, is adventurous, strong, and subtle. The question now is whether she has not adventured too boldly, and attempted an excessive subtlety; for while it is the novelist's normal aim to make the reader accept a notion as reality, here Miss Scott is at pains to emphasise the fictitious quality of her characters and her narrative and (it might be said) urges that fancy is truer than fact. Most of the substance of this story is conjured imaginatively from the furnishings, the material and even immaterial human traces and impressions, of a cottage in Suffolk, which the "I" of the story has rented by the month. "In the fortnight since I began to call the cottage 'mine,' " the narrator (a professional writer —inevitably) says, "I have come to recognise, and can identify, these abstracts of features which are reproduced, over and over" in the photographs about the walls. And from this grows the whole history, ample, detailed, supported in some degree by fact, much more by divination—by what, under the mute prompting of the house, is "felt in the heart and felt along the blood." It is a family history that is evoked and, integrated with it, the history (an eclectic history) of a period, the transition from the 'nineties to our own day. It is interesting, to say the least; but, to say the worst, it has the interest of a device, rather than the interest of an image and illustration of life. KM) OF A SCHOOLMASTER I Ooodbve. Mr Chips! Bv .lames Hilton. Hoddcr and Stoughton. 12K pp. ! (5/- net.) From W. S. Smart. i I j The life of Mr Chipping, school-| | master, is a retrospect which Mr Hilton controls and unfolds withj careful sentiment and humour. Thej old man, who had retired to live al Mrs Wickett's, across the road from I the school, had made himself, with 1 his little jokes and his oddities and | his kindly justice, a character and the begetter of a legend. Boys passed on with chuckles "Chips'sj latest." He had withstood for the sake of the school, far more than for his own, an aggressive careerist headmaster. Twice he had been its acting ruler, once when he returned to it during the war from his retirement, and held on to the end. An air-raid occurred as he was taking his lower fourth in Latin. He decided that they might as well stay where they were and went on, before the nervous boys:

"It may possibly seem to you. Robertson—at this particular moment m the world's history—umph- that the affairs of Caesar in Gaul some two thousands years ago are- -uniph-- ol' somewhat secondary importance and that —umph—-the irregular conjugal urn of the verb 'folio' is -umph even less important slill. But believe me umph—my dear Robert son--that is not really the case." .lust then there came a particularly loud explosion - quite near. "You cannot --umph- - judge Ihe importance of things--umph--by the noise thev make. Oh, dear me, no." A little chuckle. "And these things - umph, -that have mattered for thousands of years -are not going to be - snuffed out —because some stink-mer-chanl in his laboratory-hivi. nls a new kind of mischief." Titters o! nervous laughter, tor Burrow. '.lnpale, lean, and medically unfit science master was nick-named the SI inkMerchant. Another explosion -nearer still. "Let us---iim-~resumc our work. If it is fate that we are soon to be

—umph—iiitorrupl.cfl. let us bo found employing ourselves in something really appropriate."

And lie went, on at "Genus hoc oral pugnae quo se Germani exereiuTant."

A dear, good old man, and made a good end. They sent an innocent new boy—an old joke—to see him. and the innocent's "Good-bye, Mr Chips," after tea and walnut cake with pink icing, was his valedictory. Mr Hilton might have played less lovingly with his "umphs' 1 and other endearing quaintnosses; but he has composed a charming portrait, if a slight one.

STII-I. HATTJ.K The Iliifre Shimvnck. By Kathleen Freeman. .!. I\l. Dent un<l Sous Md. 277 pp. This novel, will either be enjoyed very much or not at all, if may be suggested. The "shipwreck'' is that of a girl v :/, "a of her.-; If and of the world to which it is axis. Estella is one of a group at a school called Broster, a group which includes Veronica, placidly attached to her. the stormy Sadie, and the devoted Cordelia; and Estella's idea is that she has in her, if only she: can develop it, the gift of detachment, which will leave her the mistress of her own life, unaifecled by such emotional ties. This faith is tested and broken by the development of their relations with Toby Ungervillt. whom Veronica rejects, and Sadie marries, and Estella, in the end, loses. The story is told in even, quiet accents, almost in undertones, and in a sort of twilight, where shadows and glimpses must convey what the noon would boldly declare; but slow and careful readers will not think themselves defrauded.

SOLE PROPRIETOR Castaway. By J. G. Cozzens. Longmans. Green and Co. .1.82 pp. It is an ingenious .scheme of Mr Cozzens's, to placo a modern, suburban little man anions the endless resources of a vast, departmental store, the survivor of some natural convulsion which has isolated him there, the lord of plenty, but a bungling experimenter in the use of it, and the victim of increasing dread of some intruder,. some lurking, rival, deadly claimant of his estate . . . Mr Cozzens, whose imagination has for servant a style extremely tense and sinewy, makes a thrilling and ironic story of Mr Lecky's labour to feed, comfort, and secure himself; of his blunders and alarms; and of how, at last, he detected, pursued, slew, and recognised his enemy. This is an ironic fantasy and thriller of extraordinary merit. ON THE BORDERS OK ARDEN Shadow Thy Dream. By Rosalind Wade. Chapman and Hall. 274 pp. Miss Kingsley kept a guest-house in Warwickshire. Here, one August, came to Shakespeare's country a troupe of artists and potterers; and their concerns, with those of a few natives and servants, fall under the view of the gentle Miss Kingsley—but also, one is meant to feel, surely, under that of Shakespeare, "unknown, unguessed at." Petty

affairs, mostly, petty people; but through them Miss Kingsley had such peeps at the meaning of the world as he would have widened into a vision. Miss Wade has written sensitively well.

EVERYBODY'S NEIGHBOURS Suburban Saga. By H. V, H. Hedges. John Murray. 316 pp.

A very successful first novel, notable for the certitude with which are drawn such characters as the quiet city clerk, Bert Pinchy, his stronger but narrower and shallower wife, Madge, and her sister Ella, who, after Madge's death in childbirth, takes care of Bert and the baby. The two are well suited and soon discover their affection for each other; but Ella is a deserted wife, and the reappearance of her worthless husband provides the dramatic interest of the later stages of the book.