NEW FICTION

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26129, 3 June 1950, Page 3

NEW FICTION

First View. Stories of Children. Selected with a Foreword by G. F. Green. 260 pp.

This is a very interesting selection of 13 short stories childhood by eminent modern writers from the period before the first world war to the beginning of the last. They are linked chronologically in such a way as to show how the triumphant glorying in the directness and purity of the child as E. M. Forster sees him in the witty fantasy, “The Celestial Omnibus,” has changed in the intervening years to the foreboding mood of Alun Lewis’s “The Children.” They are also grouped in sections according to similarity of subject and tone—for example, three magnificent stories by Walter de la Mare, Graham Greene, and A. L. Barker are all studies in the reaction of the child to the world of adult passions and the fact of death. Most of the stories achieve their tension and poetic effect through the juxtaposition of the child’s world and the adult’s world. Some are merely written to show the inferiority o*f the adult world; while others do not blink the cruelty and “inhumanity” of children. Perhaps some readers will quibble at the selection of authors made in this volume. Surely, among stories of childhood and the loss of innocence. Elizabeth Bowen should be represented. And is Dylan Thomas’s slight and rather formless little piece worthy of inclusion in the same volume as such masterpieces as D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse’’ or James Joyce’s “Araby”? But whether we approve, the selection or not. the idea of this book was good—a demonstration both of the suitability of chHdhood as material for short stories and of the flowering of the art of prose writing which the period encompassed has seen.

Drama in Ostend. By Salamon Dembitzer. Translated by Gladys von Tschirschky. Villon Press, Sydney. 184 pp.

The psychology of gambling is a subject which has attracted many ot Europe’s most gifted writers. Schnitzler and Pushkin immediately come to , mind; and filmgoers will be reminded :of Sacha Guitry’s “The Cheat.” re- , cently shown in Christchurch. “Drama in Ostend” is a powerful, if bitter, tale • of an author and idler who by chance becomes a gambler and. seized by the terrible fever of gambling, loses all at the Casino, voluntarily courting his own destruction, always cheating himself with the vain hope that he can win back his losses. Salamon Dem- • bitzer is a German who has written many other books, some of which have been translated into various European languages. He writes in a snare and sinewy style—and has a sardonic and penetrating wit—every word tells. By seemingly simple means he achieves a deeply tragic effect. His story of the downfall of a gambler is made the more moving by being set in 1939. with hints and prophecies of disaster to come filling the background. , Within the Labyrinth. By Norman Lewis. Jonathan Cape. *258 pp. Norman Lewis, the author of “Samara,” which was published last year, has a magnificent command of language, and his second novel is well worth reading. It concerns a wellintentioned British officer who is sent at the very end of the war to become sole remaining allied representative in , a remote, devastated, and bandit-rid-den town in Southern Italy. His departing predecessor advises him not to take his job too seriously, but he is a man of conscience and he insists on attempting to grapple single-handed with the mass of corruption he finds confronting him. In describing this corruption, Norman Lewis gives a depressingly vivid picture of the breakdown of public morality which follows military defeat, accompanied as it was in Southern Italy by poverty and political and economic chaos. He is, in fact, obsessed and overwhelmed by it all. and. in allowing his hero to be manoeuvred into a false position and so finally defeated by the sinister local chief of police, he is proclaiming his belief that good intentions and vague idealisms in the individual are impotent against a svstem on violence and fraud. But as a “Weltanschauung" this defeatist nhilosophv is not enough: the truth is \ that Mr Lew’s is unwilling to accept i the evil in human nature, and alI though he writes so well, he will not | progress beyond his present achieve- : rpent while he remains merely in- . dignant wHh humanity for its infinite i corruptibility. On a Dark’»ng Plain. By Phnebe Fenwick Gaye. Jonathan Cape. 408 pp. .Miss Gaye is a most inventive author who packs her long novels with dramatic incident, as readers of the first two books in her trilogy will know. The history of the Vandervoord family was begun in “The French Prisoner.” continued in “Louisa Vandervoord,” and is now concluded in “On a Darkling Plain." which covers the period from the eighties of the last century to 1900. Each novel is complete in itself and can be read without reference to the other volumes of the trilogy. The “darkling plain" is Europe, and the novel ranges in setting from Suez to Brussels and Nanlps. from the Balkans to the Lake District and a lonelv snot on the Suffolk coast. The links between these nlaces are the railway lines in which the family have made their money. The story centres round Louisa Vandervoord Davison the heiress of the family fortune, her strange gift of second sight and her love for a hunted Them 31-0 not manv pauses for reflection in th’s romantic novel, but there’s nlenty of life and movement. Little Sqirre J ; m. Bv Robert K. Marshall. Macdonald. 224 pp. This novel provides a fresh and unexpected view of rural America. It may have more than a suspicion of the J sentimental and “folksy” about it. but 1 it is amusing and robust and full of ! the- genuine folklore and idiom of the ! ’’emote mountain country of North I Carolina. L’tt'e Smuro J>m i<= the last • of the Boydens—an old family among ■ whom it wa' an thing that ■ thmr should end un getting ; killed: killed riding after the lightning; killed chasing another man's : wife, always killed and buried in the =ame little cemeterv near tho moulder;ne o’d familv mansion. The Souire is a worthy descendant of his vigorous ancostors As a sou’re should, he does good on the quiet, depositing furni+ure at the door of newly-weds etc. His amorous are manv. but his grea’oct devotion is to the great bay s+al]ion who is his companion on all h ; s adventures. A shy and elusive, half legendary figure, he. ; s a disf'nct and welcome change from the kind of +o bo found m American nov°ls of modern urban life. Cat On Hot ricks. By John Atkins. Macdonald. The hero of this novel is. as he says of hjjns oK . “what the Americans call a heel.” He fails two women, and he :

fails in any work he attempts to do: he begins to fall into a life of irresponsible drifting. All this, says the author, is the result of inability to settle down to civilian life after service in the Army. Put the connexion between the past and the present is not clearlv enough established, ' and the character does not hold together convinc’nyiv. However. John Atkins can carry off incidents, th° dialogue is good, and the fields the reader’s attention—especially the first nart which is set in Tnd ; a and includes, as background, a climbing expedition : in the Himalayas. Ladv of Coventry. Bv Lewis Sowden Robert Hale, Ltd. ’2B pp. Although written within a historical framework this is not properly sneaking a historical novel. Mr Sowden 1 tells us in his prehid g that the famous legend of Lady Godiva’s r ! de is dismissed by historians as unlikely to be true, but the tale has been preserve l ’ nevertheless, and. in his view, we need not take the historians’ as final. Th whole storv may have been more complicated than the legend has t. There mav have been mole reasons than a mere impulse behind the decision of Leveric to make Godiva’s nakedness a condition of his granting <he town of Coventry freedom from tolls. So Mr Sowden sets to work to build up

round the historical personages a ha in of imaginary circumstances of which the famous ride is the necessary culmination. It is a lively and readable effort, but not really convincing. The sceptical historians still seem to have the best of the argument.