Southland Times Magazine. A Literary Log.

Southland Times, Issue 19757, 3 February 1923, Page 9 (Supplement)

Southland Times Magazine.

A Literary Log.

(BY

"IOTA.”)

CLEVER STELLA BENSON.—Lordy, how long it is ago since I stumbled across “I Pose” and became a slave to Stella Benson, one of the cleverest writers of our time! She is not a best-seller and never will be; but to those who can see into things, who can penetrate to the purpose of a fantasy, who can feel the titillations of finely drawn humour rippling underneath a surface of absurdity, Stella Benson is one of the exquisite joys_ of modern English literature. Miss Benson is an epigrammatist, a poet, a humorist, a descriptive writer with an effective eye, and a limner of character who is never obvious and yet not obscure. Her people are peculiar, they are as fantastic as a Bakst scene, but they are all alive, very much alive and they belong to the realisms of unorthodoxy. “I Poee” dealt in the main with a Suffragette and a Gardener who had no garden, a pair behind the bars of convention—it was a rebellion in flaming poetry. It was an impressive “first” and it was followed at an interval by “This Is the End” and later came "Living Alone,” both revealing that her power of developing and deepening, that the maturing process was going brilliantly forward. Now there has come “The Poor Man,” a penetrating study of a trivial failure, which becomes important by the sheer brilliance of its exposition. One London reviewer described it as the narrative of a “storm in a teacup of a soul” and that description fits Miss Benson’s wonderful piece of" work, which weaves merciless realism in and out of sharpened satire, with bubbling comedy to rescue it from mere acidity and poetic descriptions to lift its fantastical scenes out of the unreal. The central figure is Edward Williams, an Englishman, a miserable failure, whose ending is even more insignificant than his beginning. But while the fall of a great man may make no more noise than the dropping of a pin, the final collapse of this abysmal nonentity is a momentous circumstance rich in the colour of sound. The acene begins in California, where Edward meets with Emily with whom he is in love. Emily is very kind to this exceedingly sensitive man, cursed by a keener perception than ever Mark Sabre possessed, cruel introspection and a damning deafness, and he is moderately happy and extremely miserable in his effort to making a living among people who are not handicapped by any of his disabilities. He seems to have no attributes of assertion; he is a negative all the while. Miss Benson fires some telling shots at the comfortably placed people of San Francisco, and at those folk who speak extremes of absurdity under the cloak of discussing Art, with a big black capital “A.” Emily, we are told, was always “much affected by the skins and shapes of men and women” and she saw the red spots all over Edward’s forehead and chin. Poor Edward; he was a complete failure. He arranged a pyty and got everybody to write poetry for it, so that he could work in a poem of his own for Emily’s delight. Some delicious examples of the horrors that can masquerade as poetry under the license of vers libre were read and just as Edward’s was to be given to the world, a fire-engine came along with a “bestial yell” to suppress a blaze next door and Edward was left unsung, a rubber hose branding his partial outburst. Then poverty strikes at him and he falls into the isolation of those who have only acquaintance to lose. He starts pedalling “Milton for Boys” done into prose and meets all sorts of Americans, a succession of sketches done with a few strokes but stunningly real. In this trip one comes across Stella Benson’s genius for description. Edward, with a Mies Weber, looks as Napa Valley as it lay, like an inverted rainbow before them:

The strange, creased, silken bodies of the hills lay behind the glassy white veil of the air. The shadows* striped and varied them and the night-green patches of oaks, beaten almost as flat as the shadows, where crammed into the canyons. On every side, at a lower and more human level, a conventional pattern of vineyards and steepled masses of bleak eucalyptus trees was printed on the valley. The orchards were alight with the bright golden green that follows the blossom season and in their shade the grass was passionately green: The sweet skeletons Of orchards fire delight. They fire into my sight Quick rays of green and bronze. I am pierced—l cannot bear Their woundings—l surrender. . . The almond blossom’s tender Pale smoke is on the air. . Edward thought wonderful things, but he never uttered them. At another stage Edward follows Emily to China and Miss Benson’s genius again leaps into brilliance. What could be more effective in the description of Chungking and the fighting about it than the stroke telling us that the town “stood in the hush that come when one’s friends have forsaken one and one’s enemies have not yet come,” or the passage of a junk down the river haunted with “turbulent dreams”? Look at and hear that junk! The chantey of the oarsmen was as thin as a hair of sound in the voluminous voice of the river. The oarsmen swung and dipped and bowed and fell back in time to the frenzied baton of their leader. The junk looked dark and nervous, dipping like a dark whale. Or, like a bee, it darted heavily at the whirlpools in the water; it made clumsy feints towards the shining sharp rocks and the cliffs; it twisted, plunged, heeled half over, shuddered, span round and round. Yellow waves washed the knees of the oarsmen but still they sang. There is a rhythm in the passage which cannot be ignored and it creeps in wherever Miss Benson drops conversation for pictures. The trip which takes Edward to China is a wonderful success; but not for him, for there his career finishes, his love affair subsides in a mean failure before the fatuous Tam McTab, who has not enough sensitiveness to be conscious of his own weaknesses. But Emily prefers him and is reduced to a cruel confession that Edward is hopeless, a “poor-thing,” and leaves him in “A desert—a continent of silence.” There is nothing admirable in Edward except the w’ay Stella Benson reveals him She is a revealing writer; she is a genius. And this “The Poor Man” is a book rich with the fruits of her genius. 0 clever, 0 wonderful Stella Benson! “The Poor Man” h published by Macmillan’s to whom go my thanks for my copy of it. ♦4-**>* NZ. LADIES’ MIRROR.— The February number of the New Zealand Ladies’ Mirror is to hand. This periodical of excellence has been making remarkable progress since its birth late in last year and to-day it stands alone for all-round merit in production. ' The features of the February nqmber will enhance its reputation which is already high but before it can justly claim the title of “New Zealand” it must sink

1 Invercargill, February 3. its present aims and admit that the Dominion as the suburbs of Auckland is entitled to more attention. The letter press is not quite up to the standard of the illustrations, but the fashion departments are unquestionably fine. This magazine deserves to expand and its editors will be missing a great opportunity if they do not more often look further than the city in which the Mirror is produced. THE ROMANTIC PLAGIARIST.—WiIIiam J. Locke is one of the few mathematicians who have become successful novelists, and his progress seems to have been made in spite of his Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge in 1884, because no reader, without knowledge of that fact would detect the calculator in any of his novels. The only evidence is the parsimonious care with which he conserves his plots, as if the mathematician were reminding himself always to use as few figures as possible. Locke’s weakness is that he has a lot of fantastic clothes, so that when he wants to write a new novel he simply takes a plot be --has already used, puts on new clothes, and there you are! Of course, he has a delightful taste in attire and he knows how to affix those finishing touches which make the disguise complete. Perhaps in fairness to Locke’s genius in the creation of romantic figures one should say that often his novel is the old plot with new people in it. Of course, so far as the general reader is concerned, this is all nonsense because Locke convinces them every time that everything is new and that attitude of mind betrays Locke’s skill as a plagiarist of himself. The • real Locke dates from “The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne.” Prior to that he was writing melodrama and securing small sales. Carlotta burst into the garden and the life of the bookish Marcus and Locke burst into public favour. ; Marcus has few superiors in English fiction, and Parragat of “The Beloved Vagabond” is one. There is a Gallic element in the author’s work, but Marcus is an English book-lover. Parragat is Marcus thrown into Bohemia, filled with flamboyancy and left unbathed. They are dissimilar in many points of dress, manner and speech, but at heart they seem to me like brothers. “Septimus” slips into the pattern of “The Beloved Vagabond,” but here is a greater dissimilarity. The hero is inglorious in each case, but one is a riot of colour, the other a pale grey. Parragat is a great character, Locke’s best, and you will meet a fair copy of him in “Aristide Pujol.” In “Simon the Jester” Fate plays her tricks to the discomfort and final happiness of the hero, and in “Jaffery” you have the same with a literary theft thrown in. The latest Locke, “The Tale of Triona,” of which more anon, takes a lot of Jaffery and a little bit of the “The Fortunate Youth,” with a literary left looming large. Jaffery has Albania and sea tramps as a background,, and the picturesque Albanian woman as “relief,” while Triona employs Russia and the modest Blaise Olifant, a natural and lovable fellow. Clementina Wing lives alone in the Locke galaxy, and she reminds one of the fact that of the post-Marcus books only two have women as their principal figures. Locke loves the impractical man and loads him with unfortunate circumstances, he loves colour but uses it indirectly. Syria for 'Marcus Ordeyne, Albania for Jaffery, China for Baltasa (the mathematical hero), Russia for Triona, the circus ring for “The Mountebank,” a Yankee company promoter for “Septimus.” He loves France and has a Gallic touch reminiscent of Henry Harland; he is an optimist who sees in the blows of Fate the preparation for happiness; he can be pathetic but never hopelessly so. He is a humorist who cannot avoid pun on a grand scale with a touch of spice in it. You’ll find an example of this in Marcus’s definition of sex and in Triona’s tale Olivia puts another on to Miss Blenkiron. Mention of Triona reminds me that I started out to talk of this latest of the Locke opera. Triona is really James Briggs—remember the clown who became a General in “The Mountebank”?—a poetic soul who can write, but one who leapt to fame by plagiarism and has his happiness endangered by the threat of exposure. Triona is Locke’s is most daring effort, because he has tried to leave his hero with as few redeeming features as possible, and yet preserve the , reader’s respect, he has flirted with the I ridiculous without letting the story break down; and he has left the finest character, Blaise Olifant, unmated—even Parragat and Septimus found mates. “The Tale of Triona” contains some excellent snapshots of post-war life as it affects woman and a honejThoon adventure quite in Locke’s j best style, but I am not certain that Alexis Triona will be accepted. The book should be read because Triona is an interesting study, and his story never fails to hold the attention and never exposes the next page before it is turned, but many women will consider that the author has not been true to his principles in the ending. Actually he has. The Lockyen doctrine of good out of misfortune, the everready ladder for the ascent, is borne out in Triona—but the experiment in this case was dangerous because Triona was a long way down. Not the best Locke novel, 0 • friends, but not a very long way from j the top! “The Tale of Triona” is published by The Bodley Head, my copy coming through local booksellers. A ROUGH BARONET—“Sunny Ducrow” has been such a popular hit that the appearance of the earlier “John Bevanwood, Baronet” in cheap form (for these days) is sure to attract attention. This novel by Henry St. John Cooper is plain-going romance of the kind that annoys reviewers and pleases the public. It is a pretty story and has as its principal feature the transplanting of a rough carpenter into the baronetage with all his superficial imperfections yelling to the high heavens. He had married a beautiful girl of seventeen, “adopted” is the more correct word, prior to this elevation, and she becomes Lady Bevanwood, but disappointed relatives try to separate them with melodramatic plots, only to be thwarted by the simplicity of their victims, who are healthy folk, awkward in new situations, but entirely without the modern handicap of a complex. Happiness reaches them at last, of course. “John Bevanwood Baronet” is sure to be popular. It is published by Sampson Low, London, my copy coming through Hyndman’s. ROSE KNOWLEDGE.—New Zealand amateur gardeners will welcome the chance to get in concise form the advice of an 1 expert of the calibre of James Young of j the Christchurch Botanical Gardens, which contain a rose- garden with a reputation for beauty only slightly more impressive than a view of the rosery itself in the heyday of its col-

our and grace. Mr Young has designed his book so that it must be of value to the i possessor of the small garden as the oper- i ator of a large one. He does not over- I load his study of “Rose-growing in New j Zealand” with technicalities, but packs a j wealth of information into small compass • and presents it in a form defying confu- ‘j sion. At the conclusion of this treasury | of rose-lore there is a chapter dealing with the uses of rose-petals which every woman will value. This book is one of the New Zealand Practical Handbooks, and is one of the best of this fine series, published by Whitcombe & Tombs, whence my copy ; came. BORROW AND DEFOE.—I remember; a long talk I once had with Borrow upon the method of Defoe as contrasted and compared with his own method in “Laven- j gro.” “The Romany Rye,” and “Wild Wales,” and the method of other writers who adopt the autobiographic form of fiction. He agreed with me that the most successful of all stories in the autobiographic form is “Robinson Crusoe,” although “Jane Eyre,” “David Copperfield” apd “Great Expectations” among English novels, and “Gil Blas” and “Manon Lescaut” among French novels, are also autobiographic in form. It is of all forms the most difficult. But its advantages, if they can be secured without makmg too many artistic sacrifices, are enormous. Flexibility, is, of course, the one quality it lacks, but, lacking that, it cannot secure the variety of picture and the breadth of movement which is the special strength of the historic form. The great pupils of Defoe .... Edgar Poe, Wilkie Collins, Gaboriau and others, recognise the immense aid given to illusion by adopting the autobiographic form. The conversation upon this subject occurred in one of my rambles with Borrow and Dr Gordon Hake in Richmond Park, when I had been pointing out to the former certain passages in “Robinson Crusoe” where Defoe adds richness and piquancy to the incidents by making the reader believe that these incidents will in the end have some deep influence, spiritual or physical, upon the narrator himself.

i Borrow was not a theoriser, and yet he I took a quaint interest in other peoples’ I theorisings. He asked me to explain myself more fully. My reply in substance was i something like this: Although in “Robinj son Crusoe” the autobiographer is really : introduced only to act as eye-witness for the j purpose of bringing out and authenticating the incidents of the dramatic action, Defoe ' had the artistic craftiness to make it ap- , pear that the incidents are selected by Crusoe in such a way as to exhibit and j develop the emotions moving within his own ! breast. Defoe’s apparent object in writing ’ the story was to show the effect of a long solitude upon the human heart and mind; but it was not so—it was simply to bring into fiction a series of incidents and j adventures of extraordinary interest and i picturesqueness—incidents such as did in part happen to Alexander Selkirk. But Defoe was a much greater artist than he is generally credited with being, and he had sufficient of the artistic instinct to know that, interesting as these external incidents were in themselves, they could be made still more interesting by humanising them—by making it appear that they worked as a great life-lesson for the man who experienced them, and that this was why the man recorded them. I. . . In reply to my criticism, Borrow said, “May not the same be said of Le Sage’s ‘Gil Blas’ ?”

And when I pointed out to him that 'there was a kind of kinship between the two writers in this particular he asked me to indicate in “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” such incidents in which Defoe’s method had been followed by himself as had struck me. I pointed out several of them. Borrow, as a rule, was not at all given to frank discussion of his own artistic methods, indeed, he had a great deal of the instinct of the literary historiographer—more th an I have ever seen in any other writer—but he admitted that he had consciously in part and in part unconsciously adopted Defoe’s method.—Theodore Watts-Dunton. From “Modern English Essays,” edited by Ernest Rhys. SOME CHIPS.—Lady Susan Townley in “The Indiscretions of Susan” mentions in the course of the story of an adventurous life, the duel she had with American reporters; she won the first bout, but was heavily punished by the fraternity. Soon after her arrival one of them rang her up at midnight to ask what her entertainments were to be. She proceeded to express surprise that he had not heard of her “octaves”—eight viands served, eight wines drunk, eight topics discussed, and so forth. The reporter took it all seriously; Lady Susan was never forgiven for her too successful satire, and that though she had been at first welcomed with acclamation as “daughter of the late belted Earl of Albemarle and sister of the present holder of the belt. Heinemann’s publish the English edition I of Kathleen Norris’s “Certain People of Importance.” Heinemann’s also include in their list three plays “Melloney Holtspur,” a new play by John Masefield; “The Forcing House,” a play in 4 acts by Israel Zangwill; and “Hassan,” a play in 5 acts, by James Elroy Fleckers. Or. Bvo. 6s. Allen and Unwin will publish for Sidney and Beatrice Webb their “The Decay of Capitalist Government,” discussing the result of the present economic system in Britain and the United States. The author’s stand point is “that down to a certain date (perhaps about 1850) the advantage of capitalism outweighed its evil consequences, while its subsequent morbid growths and diseases, leading incidentally to destructive wars, now make it essential to effect a radical transformation.” Miss G. B. Stern (I always thought she was a Mr) has written a new novel entitled “Tha Back Seat.”

Recently John o’ London asked prominent people to make known what they considered to be the most stirring passages of literature, and I am pleased that Stephen McKenna plumped for this wonderful finale of J. M. Synnge’s “Riders to the Sea” where Maurya learns that the last of her sons has been drowned: — They’re all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me. . . . I’ll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south, and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one on the other. I’ll have no call now to be going down and getting holy water in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won’t care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening.

Bishop Gore, of England, recently lecturing on international morality, declared, to the astonishment of his hearers, that he read more French than English novels, because they were better and of a higher moral import. “The modern French novel,” he said, “at least that which pretends to a higher literary excellence, is founded upon reason and it is often the complete and logical presentation of a thesis which is brought to a happy termination. It leads its readers. Thence its value.”

Mr Justice Darling has finished a volume of essays. The English members of the Femin a Vie Heureuse Prize Committee placed Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” third in its order of merit, the first and second positions being filled by Gordon Bottomley’s “Gruach” and Walter de la Mare’s “Memoirs of a Midget.” Previous winners of the prize are:—Cicely Hamilton, Rose Macauley and Constance Hole.