SEEING LIFE

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22057, 3 April 1937, Page 15

SEEING LIFE

THE WAYS OF TWO WORLDS The Other Half. John Worby’s Life. J. M. Dent and Sonfe Ltd. 279 pp. (8/6 net.) Ten Days Off, By George Dunn. Jonathan Cape. 287 pp. (7/6 net.)

Mr Worby and Mr Dunn are two young men of action, resourceful, fond of speed, men of fortitude, seeking excitement and able to describe their experiences swiftly and vividly. Mr Worby has lived in the underworlds of Britain and America; Mr Dunn walks in pleasant places. Both are Englishmen, truthful, not insensitive, and kind; but life has made them creatures of two worlds with hardly a thought or experience in common. That human beings are capable of such adaptability and response to circumstance is one reason for hoping that the human race will survive the gravest afflictions. John Worby, alias Bonzo, alias the Sunset Kid, looks something like Zealand’s Slarkie, truculent, strong, and resistant. Now 26, he was reared in an orphanage, where repression and punishment and the consciousness of being different drove him in upon himself but could not make him untruthful or cow him. He was shipped off at 14 to Canada to work on a farm, ran away, and crossed into the United States with the aid of a strange brother whose blandishments were not understood by the runaway. Then began the life of the road, far more violent and sensational than anything described by such famous hoboes as Mr W. H. Davies. Romance came with an alliance with a wild girl tramp, and very soon a sense of guilt, for John Worby found it always hard to do wrong ,or be mean. Sometimes he stole, but trivially and in very templing circumstances. He saw the orgies of communities of male and female derelicts excited by petrol and methylated spirits. He learnt to bake his clothes to rid them of lice, and to cope with eccentric and wealthy patrons. The story of the Maecenas of Hollywood is strange enough to be true. Caught at last, Worby was deported to England, where, in the same walk of life, he detected more filth, misery, and disease than in America. He learnt to shun the cold and squalid charity of the casual ward and the Salvation Army home. Life became more extraordinary. He was offered .a job as car-driver to a gang of smash-and-grab thieves; he rejected the opportunity of support by a mistress; he found a good home on a farm, but left it because the daughter of the house loved him, and he felt unworthy of her. He endured the maudlin attentions of a gipsy (it is extraordinary how these wanderers crave sentimental attachments): he grew to love the scenery of Scotland so much that he wrote a poem in its honour; hje r cadged in one evening £7, which he gave to a destitute girl; and he was taken into the luxurious home of a young woman whom, by stern treatment, he cured of drug-taking. All these dire episodes and many others are set down laconically and summarily. So much wild experience appears incredible, so many masochists, homosexuals, and extraordinary women. Adventure never flags, and his resourcefulness is equal to catching and killing a deer with bare hands, as well as to felling a drug-dealer to the ground. Believe it or not. “The Other Half” is a horrifyingly real story, made more convincing by the consistency of the hero’s decency and natural integrity. His style is unadorned generally. Only when he falls into a rhapsody of natural description does his sureness of style fail him: “I knew that the simple life I was leading with nature and the peace of my mind were worth more than all the gold in the world.” Mr Dunn’s book covers the experiences of 10 days’ leave from a military camp and includes a few abnormal occurrences: the discovery of a drowned body, the encounter with a bloody motor-cycle accident, and attendance at social functions with the great. He is horrified by the little depravity that he comes across, and finds joy in the unsensa-. tional events of the road, in trying to discern possible good companions and in striking an acquaintance with them. Indeed his skill as a writer is of much the same naive, simple 14ind. He savours fully, if not elaborately, ordinary pleasures, and, for sheer enjoyment, anatomises them amiably for his readers, especially the joys of English villages and little seaports and the excitement of speed. During the 10 days off Mr Dunn rode many miles on his noble motor-cycle, almost every bolt ol which is lovingly displayed. He drove a fast motor-boat, and travel by air made him dissatisfied with other forms of motion. He is wholesomely thoughtful and observant, While Mr Worby’s friends drank strange drink from an old tin, and rolled, frenzied, among the bracken, Mr Dunn listened to Debussy exquisitely played, talked “for two hours of impressionism, Flecker’s poems, and Beardsley’s drawings.” His reflections are represented by this extract:

The country was for women. They alone could understand the softness of earth, its fertility, the changes of its face. Theirs was the sweetness and the fruit. But man was born to wrestle with the sea. He was one with the unwielding surge of it, the wisdom of its long calms, its rage, and its playfulness, its sweetening of the earth, its acquisitiveness. Both young men are somewhat precious, the one in his starkness, the other in his introspective exquisiteness,• but the reader who wishes to fall easily asleep after reading one of these books will not choose “The Other Half.”