NEW FICTION

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21904, 3 October 1936, Page 17

NEW FICTION

r A SPRIGHTLY PIECE Rearguard Actions. By C. L. SpwBaigent. Methuen and Company, 363 pp. , The pen-name C. L. Spear-Baigent ( disguises two young men of Christchurch, Messrs C. S. Spear*and L. A/Baigent, who have, amiably and successfully collaborated in writing a novel. “Rearguard Actions” is a clever qpnversation piece, compact and tidy. The action is set, or the talking is done, mainly on an island tourist resort in temperate seas. The reader is introduced to the distant scene and to two or three of the characters as the tourist ship approaches the island at dusk; he is rift of scene and characters when the story ends with a surprise on board an outgoing tourist ship a week” or so later.. This is a neat and tidy setting to begin with; _ and within the time and space limits a great many giddy and exciting things happen. The events of a crowded week are marshalled cleverly; no one seems to lack energy and those whose conversation is iqane give many splendid opportunities to those who are blessed with sprightly wit. To read the book at a, sitting is a somewhat merry-go-round experience; many of the incidents will-leave the average reader feeling slight y flushed and breathless. Very occasionally the double authorship may be given away by this characteristic; an incident or a conversation whirls to its conclusion wit b bewildering speed, so that the redddr imagines the authors gleefully brightening • each other’s already scintillating dialogue or adding another glass, an extra mile an hour, at suitable tables and corners. The result is a most jolly and entertaining book without pretensions —despite the quotations of Latin, preek and Alexander Pope—either moral or philosophical. HILARIOUS Rain in the Doorway. By Thorne Smith. Arthur Barker, Ltd. 365 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs. Here is another of Thorne Smith’s fantastic stories told in much the same style as those that have pre-, ceded it. This time .a respectable solicitor,- vdth a wife who is ’ not so respectable, falls among and becomes a co-director with .an utterly mad and irresponsible collection of dipsomaniacs who run a department store on wildly unconventional lines. The story pursues its hilarious way to a typical Thorne Smith conclusion.

RULERS OF ORPHANS Committee. By -Diana Darling. Holder and Stoughton. 319 pp.

A current fashion in novels is to collect one’s characters under a convenient roof, follow them out into the world, examine their private lives and re-pollect them under the same roof at the end of the tale. The author of this story has selected an orphanage as her starting point and her characters from the persons on the orphanage committee and staff. This gives her ample scope in social grade#! and plenty of variety; in environment and personality. It is,not a particularly vital story, but the character drawing is carefully done and the tale is enlivened with a dry humour and a skilful portrayal of the clash of personalities. * SECRET SERVICE Nigbt Action. By Sydney Parkman. Hodder and Stoughton. 317 pp. Here is a thriller of quality by a master of his craft. Dick Franton, a prematurely retired naval officer, joins an unofficial secret service inspired by the leadership of a man who believes that England is rather letting things go in the secret service business. Franton soon finds plenty to occupy his time and his wits when he comes up against a foreign gang who are frying to engineer another European war. Danger and thrill# abound, and suspense is well sustained in the story of the subsequent adventures of Franton and his friends. The plot works up to an exciting finale when the “service” unmasks the villains. COSMOPOLITAN STORIES Mixed Company. By Eleanor Mercein. Harper and Brothers. 296 pp. The author’s “mixed company” is a collection of short stories of widely differing types but all told with distinction and consummate art. They range over many countries, gathering character and force from each, so that the writer gives the impression of an intimacy with races and types and environments and the ability to take from each a cut from life itself, each clear and distinct from the others, each with its own peculiar atmosphere and intent.

A FAMILY AFFAIR Tambour Terrace. By Eleanor Dunbar Hall. Harrap & Co. 307 pp.

Tambour. Terrace is a terrace of houses in a, small Lancashire town. They are earned by William and Ellqn Bradley, whose source of property is a great deal more highly developed than their sense of human values. ( The story is of their disastrous attempt to model the lives of their family along their own placid lines, to get them safely married and settled down, each occupying one of the terrace houses. One of the daughters marries a mental sadist, another a dancing professional; the third remains a bitter old maid. The younger son marries a common and slatternly woman, the elder,. whose marriage is the only happy one, a widow whose encounters with life have left her glad to find refuge in the comparative peace of Tambour Terrace, The author has played skilfully upon the clash of perspnalities and the misery of incompatible temperaments as disclosed in the married life of the two youngest members of the family,’and the beating of their wings against the prison bars of the terrace. It is an unhappy story but enlivened by shrewd wit and clever character drawing.

RAPID MOVEMENT Kitty, Brown’s Princes. By Edgar Jepson. Herbert Jenkins. 307 pp. • Crooks in high places and low, a nasty prince and a nice prince, a good, energetic'brother, a couple of comedy gunmen, curious foreigners: these people project Miss Brown rapidly from one alarming situation to another. ‘ Battle, mur- i der, and sudden death are passed oft’ affably by Mr Jepson. as less l than the dust stirred up by his, j heroine’s breathless progress. Bead at the rate of one page, a day, 1

LITERARY GOSSIP CASUAL CrLEANBSFGS :

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A'. E. Housmazi left an estate valued at £7900,. In his will he gave permission to his brother, Laurence Housman, to publish poems' existing in manuscript which appeared to him completed and not inferior in quality to the‘already published verse. All other pbems and fragments, together with his prose manuscripts, were ordered to be destroyed. He also expressed the wish that none of his writings which have appeared in periodicals should be collected and reprinted. The wine in his cellars (and'he was a connoisseur of wine) was bequeathed to the Family Dining Club at Cambridge. The poet, whose ashes have been buried under the north wall of Ludlow Church, has his name commemorated on a store let into tne wall. It'bears the following inscription taken from a poem # which wni appear in the collection More Poems,” to be published shortly:— Good-night. Ensured release. Imperishable peace, . Have these for yours. Included among these new poems is one “For My Funeral,” which was written in 1925. Here it is:— O thou that from thy mansion. Through lime and place to roam. Dost send abroad thy children. And then does call them home. That men and trib:s end nat.ons •And all thy hand hath made •, May shelter them from- sunshine Ip thine eternal shade; , We now to peace and darkness And earth and -thee restore Thy creature that thou madest And wilt cast forth no more.

An account of his recent travels in Palestine and Turkey has been written by Beverley Nichols and published under the title of “No Place Like Home.” It will succeed as all Beverley Nichols’s books do, but that does not mean that Mr Nichols, as an author, lacks fairly severe critics. This latest book provoked Graham Greene to novel rage in the “Spectator.” “For all I know,” he writes, “Mr Nichols may be a middle-aged and maiden lady. I would hazard that she housekeeps for her brother, who may be a canon or perhaps a rural dean,” Then he goes on;

It is impossible not to grow a little fond of this sentimental, poetic, and whimsical lady. She conforms so beautifully to type (I picture her in rather old-fashioned mauve with whale-bone collar). A Christian but only in the broadest sense, emotional, uninstructed and a little absurd, as when she writes of the Garden of Gethsemane: “Here I had the greatest shock of all. For the garden was not even weeded.” She is serious about Art (“try a little experiment. Hold up your hand in front of your eyes so that you bisect the mature horizontally”), a little playful (■“Durers so great that ycu feel you must walk un to them on tip-toes”) .... But what engaging company on these foreign cruises and excursion! a maiden lady of her kind must have been, exhilarated as she was by freedom from parish activities.

A study of George Gissing written by Samuel Vogt-Gapp and published by the Pennsylvania University Press was reviewed recently in “The Times Literary Supplement.” The reviewer gave the following accurate enough summary of Gissing’s life and work:—

There is something inescapably pathetic about the figure of George Gissing. When all is said and done, he was a man whom life defeated, who found a lasting serenity, or even a fighting courage, nowhere, whose test was second-best. The bulk of his novels have' a dubious vitality; written, many of them, -under adverse circumstances and far too rapidly, they survive more for their documentary than their poetic quality, they are depressing tombstones rather than uplifting monu--men’ts. His persdhal life, too,, was unfortunate, not least in its most intimate relationships, and his responses were too often negative, not decisive. He was the victim, never the master, of his fate.

“Between the Wars” is the title of a new book by H. W. Nevinson, the eminent publicist and war correspondent. The book consists of a collection of 50 articles on assorted subjects written in years of peace. The author considers that they represent his best work. In an introduction to the volume, H. M. Tomlinson writes: “It has always seemed to me that if a foreigner wished to , understand the English people his simplest coUrse would be to study Nevinson and his books. Before he had finished with the task he would either know what no other foreigner ipiew, or would be mixing straws in his hair.”

In an article on .holiday reading which R. Ellis Roberts wrote for the ‘.‘Observer,” he said: “The first rule of holiday reading is to, improve your acquaintance with neglected branches of literature. Most of us read, at any time, a great deal of fiction, but' how many of us keep abreast with poetry? So here are some of the books of .verse you should pack: T. S. Eliot’s “Collected Poems,” John Masefield’s “A Letter From Pontus,” C. Day Lewis l s “Noah and the Waters,” Richard Church’s “Twelve Noon,” L. A. G. Strong’s “Call to the Swan,” Herbert Palmer’s “The Vampire,” Elizabeth Daryush’s “The Last Man.” -

“The Oxford Book of Modern Verse,” edited by W. B. Yeats, will be published shortly by the Oxford University Press. This volume will complete the series Oxford Books of Verse running from - the sixteenth century to the. present day. The anthology covers the period 1892-1935 and includes more than 400 . poems selected from the works of 100 English and Irish authors.

■ Frank Scully, in a jrecent number of “Esquire,” a popular American magazine, claims that he was author of the greater part of Frank Harris’s biography of Reraahi Shaw. Frank Scully says he was “ghosting” for Harris, and he' completed the bool? after Harris had; produced 65 pages.of worthless,script.