A VERBLESS STYLE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 305, 26 December 1931, Page 2 (Supplement)

A VERBLESS STYLE.

DOROTHY RICHARDSON'S LATEST,

Miss Dorothy Richardson, the author of "Dawn's Left Hand" (Duckworth), has been claused by many savants with Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Marcel Proust, which means to those who do not like the taste of "moderns" on their palates that she is quite vague, rather unintelligible, indeed sliglitly mad. Those who do like these mouerns though, have in this book a caviare that is excitingly satisfying. Even to the initiated, however, the first twenty, pages are indeed baffling. Many of the sentences are reminiscent of those schoolday ones that had to be corrected —state reasons I For instance. "Two small women, shapeless with wraps, and a-man- rather tall and with a customary importance in his bearing, but standing with the women in an equality of sincere attention towards the discussion." And yet again, "They sat down on the far' side of the room, a party of conspirators. But speculating towards her, towards the fact, pathetic or improper, of her sitting there alone at midnight. Probably, since she attacked strangers so freely, improper." It would seem that Miss Richardson simply hates verbs. All the same, a quarter of the book done with and the reader, once getting the rhythm of the author's mind, enters into an atmosphere that is charged with a new and subtle kind of electricity. - Then one finds oneself agreeing with Mr. John Cowper Powys, who said that "people who have once read Miss Richardson find themselves bitten with an insatiable mania for her writing." The plot is slight, but that does not matter. There are no "said he's and said ehe's" to guide the conversation. You have to tell by the Sort of remark it is, who is speaking. That docs not matter either, if you like it that way. And Miss Richardson challenges the wits, forces them to remain alert and snaps her lingers at the rest. No, she cannot be skipped or treated lightly. Those who do not like her cannot scoff. Those who do, will wrinkle their foreheads every now and then, but grapple her to their souls and watch her in the future and read her books of the past. But she makes even those who are on her side a little impatient when she gives us a sentence like the following: "Contemplating without looking at them and yet unable to escape the spectacle without either closing her eyes or gazing at the floor or ceiling, it seemed to be- in -the very person of Mr. Orly, seated at the lunch table in the bare-walled basement room at Wimpole Street, where the confronted lunchers were, beyond the dishes on the table and the unvarying lights and shadows made by the electric light, the only external refuge for unpreoccupied eyes, that she gazed upwards and mentally emitted his humorously despairing sigh, glancing at the same time sideways-down at herself seated at his right hand and just growing aware of the meaning, for him and. from his point of view, of one of his kindly sarcasms and yet obstinately set against admitting any justification for -it, desperately refusing to show any sign of awareness and choosing rathor to appear idiotic and justify his sigh than to give him the satisfaction of seeing her look 'rather sick.'" Now children, please . . . but we had forgotten that this book was not for children and' only for the very sophisticated minds.

a TUSHERY."

ELIZABETHAN CLASH OF ARMS.

and Zounds" would be a better titlo for Mr. Jeffrey Farnol's latest romance than " The Jade of Destiny" (Sampson Low), for it is fairly peppered with these and similar oaths. "The captain gave his battered hat the true swashbuckling cock, cast his ragged cloak about him with a superb braggadocio flourish, clashed his rusty spurs, and bowed." When a book opens like this you know what to expect, and from Mr. Farnol you get it. There is full measure of fierce fighting, intrigue, and love, and overflowing measure of the sort of English that a certain type of writer believes was spoken in Tudor and other old times. Stevenson called it "tushery." "Ha!" says the lovely heroine, "buzz not your pragmatisms at me, sin. But and perpend, sir—" Jocelyn, the soldier of fortune, could talk like this till the cows came home, and he was well backed by his companions. "Saha!" cried Florian. "Fight now. Fight or crawl hence for lewd, craven curs!" But Jocelyn was* what Alan Breck called a bonny fighter, and there is some good sword play in this tale.

THE FICTIOtf SHELF.

ENGLISH AND FRENCH CUSTOMS.

Nina Murdoch's "Miss Emily" has returned to the Continent to attend a wedding by the direct invitation of the bride's parents. Miss Emily, horrified by the French marriage customs, ingeniously causes a breach of engagement between two young people about to be mated by parental authority, and sets free the girl to follow the dictates of her own heart. Still in black lace, "Em" is quite a success, learns a little more French, eats y :t more strange food and improves the human qualities of all she meets. "Portrait of Miss Emily" (Angus, Robertson) naturally follows that successful book, "Miss Emily in Black Lace."

Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Walpole having found a ready public for family histories, arid "Whiteoaks" having reached a third volume, to the delight of everybody, we must expect a deluge of such histories from those with patience tr> write them. "The Long Day's Task," by g. C. Lethbfidge' (Methuen), is one of them. "Great wits," said "Q.," "rush ahead and smaller wits hobble after them," but the hobbler is not evident in this novel, although it lacks lightness and has a little conversational heaviness. The young girl who marries because she is in love with her husband's home, and not loving him is tempted to unfaithfulness, is a central feature. Aronnn these two, husband and wife, and the beloved estate, move a number of modern characters of little worth, but Catherine, the spinster, who has less money than the others and says much about her poverty, is unsel.'* -,h and shows up well against the self-centred crowd.

"Starveacres" was, in eVery sense, an excellent novel; it had style, realism and deep human feeling. Now, the authoress, Nora Kent, has written an old-fashioned story of 1860 onwards— in the style of Mrs. Humphry Ward— with crinolines and love, whiskers and unfaithfulness, papa, mama, and domestic dominance, secret flirtation, faintness and tears. Hodder and Stoughton publish this literary memorial, ".Annabel Verinder."