JEAN DEVANNY AGAIN

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 115, 5 August 1927, Page 14

JEAN DEVANNY AGAIN

(Written for THE SUN.) nPRULY, New Zealand is unhappy in ■*“ her later novelists. A few months ago we were grieved by the hot scones and tepid sentiment of Mr. Hector Bolitbo, who painted, in “Solemn Boy,” a land where it was always afternoontea time. But now in “Old Savage and Other Stories,” Mrs. Jean Devanny has exposed us far more dreadfully. We are, it seems, a people wholly devoted to the lust of the flesh, and the desire of the eye, a people consumed by satyriasis and nymphomania. Of these fourteen stories, all but two or three have sexual irregularity or crime, for their only subjects—and an embarrassing richness of adulteries. I shall be accused of Victorianism, and referred to such men as Maupassant, who found his chief inspiration in these matters. But Maupassant was a great artist, of his secondary kind; and all the "unpleasant” Actions that one admires have a compensating creative force or beauty of style. That “antiseptic virtue of style,” as. someone called it, is precisely what Mrs. Devanny most lacks. Her manner, never distinguished, is often as coarse and common as her matter. She shows at times a horrid relish for the ugliest phrase, as for the ugliest situation. Sometimes the writing is flatly amateurish, and anon it is disfigured

by scraps of psycho-analytical jargon, or by unwelcome echoes of the American tongue. Her descriptions of sea and bush, and the ravaged mining country of Westland, are fairly well done; but they might be paralleled from the files of a dozen newspapers. She shows no special constructive gift, and little more sense of character; her dialogue is often annoyingly false and stilted. She has too, the same vast lack of humour that marks other of the sexual specialists, like D. H. Lawrence and Sherwood Anderson. And her views on the relations of men and women have been enunciated already, more clearly if not more shrilly, by Ellen Key and other feminists. One might place Mrs. Devanny as a very young writer of some promise—and of appalling precocity. But she is no longer very young, I am told; and it seems unlikely that her work will ever be enjoyable. Apart from these ethical and artistic questions, the book does not satisfy in mere objective truth. Life is sinful and unlovely enough, one may easily believe, in the mining villages of the West Coast. But lam not prepared to believe in a place where all (yes, all!) of the married women are unfaithful that they may buy food and clothes for the children of their drunken, gambling husbands. And listen to this, from “Roy Phipps and his Wife Feodora”: “Roy was a miner from Australia, come to New Zealand for the bigger money here. He was a tall, fairish man, rather good-looking, with a skin as soft and pure as a babe’s, and soft, womanish hands that looked out of place on the end of a pick handle. They knew their business, though.” Did they, indeed? But I can remember, far away and long ago, a little boy who “assisted” at pay-day, and watched the quick scribbling or the laboured scrawling of a hundred miners’ signatures—watched the misshapen great fingers, with broken nails or with none, the gnarled, crushed knuckles, and here and there a huge hand from which fingers had been lost. . . . And so 1 am inclined to think that Roy Phipps, of the “soft, womanish hands,” was a figment of female imagination, and I begin to wonder if Mrs. Devanny has ever seen a miner. And now let me read something else, as far else as may be. Let me not ermember, for a little, the unhappy fact that male and female created He them. ... A voyage of Hakluyt?—or

“Eothen?” —or Lewis Carroll? —or “The Three Mulla Mulgars?” “On the borders of the Forest of Munza-Mulgar lived once an old grey fruit-monkey of the name of MuttaMatutta. She had three sons, the eldest Thumma, the next Thimbulla, and the youngest, who was a Nizzaneela, Ummanodda. And they called each other, for short. Thumb, Thimble and Nod . . .” Yes, this will do. Goodbye, Mrs. Devanny. R.J.B. Auckland.