MR DAY LEWIS AGAIN

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21464, 4 May 1935, Page 17

MR DAY LEWIS AGAIN

ADVICE UNHEEDED

A Time to Dance. By C. Bay Lewis. The Hogarth Press. 64 pp. (5/net.) The 'New Signatures" poets, especially Mr Day Lewis, have been too well treated. Critics who approved and critics who have disapproved have convinced Mr Day Lewis of his importance, so that no day passes without its line, usually published. .Nearly every reviewer warned Mr Lewis against harping too insistently on one string, against a dangerous facility, against a smug bluntness of denunciation. The time has gone by when this poet needed encouragement or heeded advice, and those who once admired must now condemn and deplore. "A Time to Dance" is one more series of harangues, marked by a more definitely "take it or leave it" assurance, by obscurities and difficulties less gracefully avoided than in the past, and, most irritating of all, by a repetition of the same message almost with the same language and the same imagery, and without a gleam of new light. After four years as a practising poet, Mr Day Lewis achieved the dignity of a collected edition. Ten mpnths later this new volume appears with nothing to justify it but the fact that this young poet has become a fashion unwittingly caused by those who wished him well, but who, still more earnestly, desired to maintain the dignity as well as the freshness of English verse. This young man must leeirn humility.

A longish poem, "Johnny Head-in-Air," might be a weak extract from "The Magnetic Mountain." The old images of blood, iron, wings, and fire lend little strength to "Losers" and "The Conflict." A dissection of the "Sonnet" leaves violent sounds no nearer to making a meaning. "The Ecstatic," Mr Lewis's "Skylark," is the best poem of the collection because it is the least pretentious; but his first image contains several words that the most lenient reader will condemn.

Lark, skylark, spilling your rubbed and

round Pebbles of sound in air's still lake. "A Time to Dance" is a long poem in three parts not clearly related. The first, whose subject is the Eng-land-Australia flight 01 Parer and Mcintosh, is an exercise in the Gerard Manby Hopkins manner with the dignified and the commonplace imperfectly used. The second is an elegy, the most moving part of this book, ls.menting with austerity and sincerity the death of a young friend. The third part is the familiar impressionistic review of the squalor and hardness of modern social life. Technically it is a series of parodies of well-known poems.

Deeper thought and wider experience will make another poet of Mr Day Lewis as die second part of "A Time to Dance" adequately proves.

ANATOMY OF THE SUBURBS On the Hill. By Lewis Gibbs. J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. (Popular Modern Fiction Series.) ."502 pp. (3/(i: net.) Mr Lewis Gibbs has somehow managed to write a novel which should satisfy any fashionable craving for destructive psychological analysis, yet which at the same time preserves a remarkable humanity; we see, as it were, the surgeon both in the operating theatre and in his moments of reflection and re-

laxation. Whether or not Mr Gibbs has successfully persuaded the lion and the lamb to lie down together is a matter for the individual reader to decide. But there is no doubt about the moving quality of his book, which is something more than just an amusement for idle hours. The form of the book is unusual, but not altogether original: to summarise, it might be said that the author has treated a London suburb in the Grand Hotel manner.

The main theme is the family history, if two generations can lay claim to a family history, of Samuel Hollidv, a self-made manufacturer of motor-cars. This theme strides easily over interrupting spaces in which the day to day life of suburbia is presented to the reader, presented without merciful deference to little minds in a little world but none the less with a sympatnetic insight into the comedy and tragedy of human life even at its most circumscribed. The method of presentation is clear and simple: a few typical figures of suburban life are picked out and their fortunes traced throughout the book. One is a young clerk, another a schoolmistress, and another a married man bounded in enjoyment and imagination by an office desk and a suburban garden. All these people knew of Samuel Hollidy only as "old Hollidy," who had made for himself a fortune out of motor-cars, and for them their quite tolerable suburb. In weaving together the fortunes of a number of characters such as these and the fortunes of the Hollidy family, Mr Gibbs has shown considerable skill; a sense of proportion is the first essential to this sort of story, so that the reader may not feel that his attention is at times deliberately being withdrawn from the inadequacy of a central plot. If this tale of the suburb on the hill is not completely satisfying it is not because of any technical shortcomings or because of the author's lack of imagination, but because it is after all only a variation on a familiar theme." Destructive criticism of humanity, with however large a sympathy it may be done, has become the natural function of a great many of the better novelists. Yet ii; is hardly fair to take exception to an apparent literary failing which is probably only the reflection of common social insufficiency.