I’VE STRUCK SOME PLUMS

Southland Times, Issue 23182, 24 April 1937, Page 13

I’VE STRUCK SOME PLUMS

(Specially Written for The Southland Times.) (By A.Z.) Long periods go past and we never seem to find anything noteworthy in books, until we begin to wonder: Is the lack in our ageing emotion-depleted selves or in the books themselves? But after a long march over a tundra of ordinary fiction, I’ve at last struck it rich. Linklater, Noel Coward, Ethel Mannin, Beverley Nichols —what do they amount to? Even the famous Aldous, although he’s in another class, can’t resist a sort of fatal slickness. If rr. _ Jem fiction has been built up on the so-called stream-of-consciousness method, most of those nimble young men responsible for it are mere toe-dabblers. Sholem Asch’s “Three Cities” marked the end of the drought (or did I say tundra: remember I have been reading about it in “One Light Burning”). Sit up and live, I said to myself; here is someone saying something at last. It had the old power of making one fly over the chimney-pots of suburbia. As for Vera Brittain’s “Testament of Youth,” I was the duck’s back and it was the water. Result, nil. Now Stella Benson is always Stella Benson, and no one else at all, with as individual a note as, say, Daumier in paint. Her humour and her pathos and above all her irony are so rarely and so lightly commingled that I do not always find her easy. “I pose” had the true touch. Christina Stead Wassermann’s “Letters” to his wife did not impress me as I thought they would. The glimpses (they were only glimpses after all) of a tortured, selfcentred creator were somehow disappointing. Then after a course of sexology and sawdust I came across Christina Stead’s “Seven Poor Men of Sydney,” and this with its powerful pictures of Sydney’s intelligentsia and underworld (in this case synonymous) was a real event. If Christina Stead is an Australian, then I make bold to group her, and her alone, with Henry Handel Richardson. (To be honest, I have not read Katharine Susanna Prichard.) They both have the same almost masculine .grip and unsqueamishness. . Robin Hyde, well ahead of most of us, gave me some new names—the Swiss Dr Knittel and R. C. Hutchinson’s “One Light Burning.” After “Seven Poor Men” I was not prepared to. go under with the newcomer, R.C.H.; but go under I did, and very tremendous I found it Andrew Wild becomes a new and interesting friend, and as for Greta, it gives one a great fillip that the “heroine” should be so lacking in any kind of cleverness, evidently with no looks either, even stocky and overplump. Yet you feel she is hardly a negligible woman; indeed she is important enough to produce that amazing letter from Professor Andrew. “One Light Burning” sets me very determinedly on the track of R. C. Hutchinson. Knittel Again I was not prepared to be so enveloped and snowed in by Knittel’s “Via Mala”; for a whole week I have lived in the bare, bleak chalet among the mountains with Hanna and Niclaus and the lovely flaxen-haired Sylvelie and their mother. I have shuddered with them when their drunken father, Jonas Lauretz, came climbing and stumbling home. There has been no life but my life with them; so that, in closing the book, I felt that something in my life had closed. There remains yet another topnotcher. (This sounds like hyperbole carried too far; but as I said, I’ve struck some plums.) It is Alexei Tolstoi’s “Darkness and Dawn.” I had twice fingered this wistfully in a bookshop. Now at last it has come my way. This Alexei is connected with Turgenev on his mother’s side and Tolstoi on his father’s, so that something is surely to be expected of him, even though the son of the poet Shelley, mothered by a descendant of the famous Mary Wollstonecraft and the more famous William Godwin, produced nothing that we’ve heard of. However, it is a big fat novel, enticingly arranged and printed, very attractive-looking indeed. Although a minor achievement somehow in bulk and livingness, it strongly recalls the older Tolstoi, with the same enormous canvas packed with sharp detail, with scores of human beings (appearing briefly but very real) moving across it much as they do in “War and Peace” —only that this Tolstoi deals with post-revolution Russia, a vastly different cross-section of that huge continent His connection of it all is a masterpiece ofi skill. It was a difficult matter to show the passing of the older conceptions into the new. The two sisters ‘Dasha and Katia might easily be sisters of Anna or Natacha Rostov, or more strongly still of Levin’s wife, whose name I’ve forgotten—l think it was Kitty. And Telegin seems to me a fainter and more modernized version of Levin. It is a gigantic and exciting but very terrible world, a world which holds in it all manner of exciting possibilities. To close “Darkness and Dawn” and come back to New Zealand again, is to come back to somewhere very small but very safe.