SHEILA KAYE-SMITH
Sheila Kaye-Smith
Talking of Charlotte Bronte, in a novel of Sheila Kaye-Smith’s that goes back to mid-Victorian days, a hairy young man, with a mustache, in addition to the whiskers of the period, agrees that she is crude and outlandish, and adds, “That always comes when women write books. They’re so frightened of being called feminine that they bury what talent they may have under a mountain of manliness—and manliness for them consists entirely of oaths and violence and scarlet sin.”
Whether you agree or disagree with him, the hairy young critic was expressing an opinion that was common among his contemporaries, who have handed it down to a large number of their successors. It was probably half true, and is not so true now as it was. The women novelists now who specialise in scarlet sin have no particular use for oaths and violence. Moreover, though it would be easy to name several who have a tendency to color their pages with sin of all colors, there is nothing exclusively masculine in that and their novels remain essentially feminine. It would be easy to name others who are much addicted to violent scenes and characters, but I doubt whether that is any conscious attempt on their part to be manly—on the contrary, it arises from an inherent, very feminine admiration of that barbaric strength and muscular vigor which the average woman is supposed to find so splendid and so attractive in the average man. It is such an orthodox feminine conception of the ideal male that its presence in a story almost inevitably betrays the sex of the author.
All which means no more than that the woman novelist quite legitimately does her best to draw a man, as the man novelist does his best to draw a woman, and she succeeds nearly as often; and no woman novelist, past or present, has been more uniformly and extraordinarily successful in this difficult application of her art than Sheila Kaye-Smith. It is usual for the male author to excuse his artistic shortcomings by insisting that woman is a mystery and it is impossible to comprehend her; but it seems likely that he may himself be as much of a mystery to woman and that is why, in fiction, the men she depicts so often seem like women in masquerade. Two of our leading women writers, who can analyse and reveal characters of their own sex with an almost uncanny insight, lose that power when they try to exercise it on the male of the species and he thinks, feels and talks in their pages more or less after the manner of women. They are brilliantly clever in every other way, but can only make man in their own image.
But the men in Miss Kaye-Smith’s novels are the real thing; they are the unqualified male in whom male readers unhesitatingly recognize their kind. Not because they are harsh or brutal, though some of them are that; not because they are susceptible to the lure of the other sex and masterfully override the laws of conventional morality, though some of them do that; not because they are heavy drinkers and lusty fighters with their fists, though some of them are this and some that; but simply because in their general habits, their ordinary everyday behavior, in what they say no less than in what they think, they are obviously of the masculine gender. It is easy to create an illusion that your character is a man if you call him a soldier and describe him as acting with vigor or daring; but take this fragment of conversation, chosen at random from “The Challenge to Sirius,” between Frank Rainger and the retired studious Mr. Bellack. Frank is the son of an embittered gentleman who has withdrawn from the struggle of life; he works, from choice, on the farm where he and his father live, and goes daily to the Rectory to take lessons with Mr. Bellack, but has come to hesitate between his love of working on the land and a desire to go away somewhere and know more of life, and asks his tutor to advise him:
“‘The question is which is the best: happiness or experience? If it’s experience, you had better get out of this hole as quickly as possible; if it’s happiness, you had better stay where you are.’
“‘Which do you think it is, sir?’
“‘My good boy, how can I tell you? Personally I would rather you did not go to London and take your chances there, as I feel that, though you have brains and certain rudimentary gifts, it is not the kind of life you are cut out for, and that you will probably fail and be wretched. On the other hand, never renounce what seems to you a good opportunity and a fine experience because an old chap like me hints at trouble ahead. Besides, your father would rather see you starve as a journalist than grow fat as a farmer. Perhaps he is right—perhaps I am.’
“‘Did you ever have to make a choice of your own, sir?’
“‘Certainly I did, and I chose to be Rector of Wittersham with an income of two hundred a year, no congenial society, a congregation of hop-sacks, and for my sole distraction the teaching of a muddle-headed boy who, at the age of nineteen, is still undecided as to how he shall live the rest of his life.’
“‘So you chose wrong, I reckon.’
“‘How do you reckon any such thing? You don’t know what my alternative was. Besides, you may be sure of this, no matter which way you choose you will never definitely know whether you were wrong or right. The great question of all choosers and adventurers is “Was it worth while?”—and whatever else you may expect of life, don’t expect an answer to that.’”
Now if there had been nothing to indicate who the boy was talking with you would know at once he was not talking to a woman, for there is a man’s way of thinking, a man’s manner, even a man’s voice in all that Mr. Bellack says. There is always this subtle, easy, truthfully realistic presentation of Miss Kaye-Smith’s male characters, of the mild, unassertive, commonplace, as well as the aggressive and more virile of them. Her rustic clowns are as roughly human and racy of the soil as Hardy’s. Robert Fuller, half animal, half saint, in “Green Apple Harvest”; Monypenny, the practical idealist of “Tamarisk Town,” who, ambitious to develop and popularize a seaside resort, triumphs over all obstacles, carries his schemes through, rises to wealth and dignity, and, sacrificing to his ambition the woman he loves, finds himself lonely and unhappy on his height and turns remorsefully and madly to destroy all he has so laboriously built; Miles, in “Starbrace,” with his strangely varying moods, his strength and pitiful weaknesses; the stern, harsh, ruggedly heroic Reuben Backfield, in “Sussex Gorse,” wholly given over to his desperate, indomitable fight for the possession of a wild unfruitful common; Mr. Sumption, the dour, pathetic Baptist minister in “Little England,” a graphic, poignant revelation of what the war meant in a rural community, and one of the two or three great novels of that era—these and, in their differing class and degree, all the men who belong to her stories are real, authentic, humans—are men in flesh and bone and spirit, easy, natural, alive.
Her women are drawn with a knowledge that is apparently as minutely exact and is certainly as sympathetic. If I had to single out her most remarkable study in feminine temperament and psychology, I think I should say Joanna Godden; but her explicit interpretations of women are not so unusual as her understanding of men. She knows their businesses as thoroughly as she knows them. If, like Coalbran or Backfield, they are farmers and working on the land, she is not contented with vivid generalities but makes the varied, multifarious circumstance of farming and cattle raising, and the whole atmosphere and environment that has moulded their lives part of her story. When Monypenny devotes himself to the development of Tamarisk Town you are not asked to take anything for granted but are shown how he financed his scheme, acquired land, carried out his building operations, how the borough was formed, and the elections conducted—you follow the growth of the place through its various stages, and Monypenny’s own story grows with and through it. It is this acquaintance with practical detail, this filling in of all essential surroundings that help to give the novels their convincing air of realism.
You would not suspect such broad and deep knowledge of humanity and the affairs of the world in the quiet, soft-spoken, grey-eyed, dreamy, very feminine person you discover the author to be when you meet her. At a little distance, too, with her slight figure and bobbed hair, you might take her for a mere school-girl. Little more than a school-girl she was when she wrote her first novel, “The Tramping Methodist,” which, after being rejected half a dozen times, was published in 1909. She had no further difficulties with publishers, however, for this and her second book, “Starbrace,” next year, put her on sure ground with critics and public, though she had to wait for the beginnings of popularity until “Tamarisk Town” came out in 1919.
She was born at Hastings, her father being a doctor there, and has passed all her life in Sussex. Her first two novels are of the eighteenth century; one or two are of mid-Victorian times; the rest are of our own day. Occasionally she brings her people to London, but nearly always they are at home in Kent or Sussex. In “The Challenge to Sirius” and “The End of the House of Alard” they are on the borderland of the two counties; but mostly her scenes are in the county where she was born. In her books she has become its interpreter and made it her own. She has put something of her love of it and of the rugged lives and passions of its folk into the poems in “Willow Forge,” and “Saints in Sussex”; but her best poetry is in her novels. If you can compare her with some of her leading women contemporaries you have a sense of as much difference between them as there is between the collector of insects and the hunter of big game. Those others take you into a study and scientifically exhibit curious specimens under a microscope; she is too warmly human for such pendantries and takes you where there is sky and grass and a whole ordinary world full of mortal creatures and shows you them living and working in the light of common day. I believe the secret of her power is largely in her complete unselfconsciousness; she has no affectations; the charm and strength of her style is its limpid simplicity; she seems, while you read, to be merely letting her characters act and think; to be thinking of her work and never of her own cleverness; as if she were too sure and spontaneous an artist to be even aware of the fact.