OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch’s Staff of Learned Clerks.)
How you regard Miss May Sinclair’s latest story, The Romantic (Collins), will entirely depend upon your attitude towards the long-vexed question of the permissible in art. If you hold that all life (which in this association generally means something disagreeable) is its legitimate province and that genius can transmute an ugly study of morbid pathology into a romance, you will admire the force of this vivid little book; otherwise, I warn you frankly, you are like to be repelled by the whole business. The title, to begin with, is an irony as grim as anything that follows, in what sense you will find as the story reveals itself. The Romantic is a picture—what do I say? a vivisection—of cowardice, seen through the horrified eyes of a woman who loved the subject of it. The scene is the Belgian battlefields, to which John Conway, being unfitted for active service, had taken out a motor-ambulance, with Charlotte Redhead as one of his drivers. All the background of this part of the tale is wonderfully realised, a thing of actual and unforgetable experience. Here gradually the first tragedy of Conway is made clear, though shielded and ignored as long as possible by the loyalty of fellow-workers and the obstinate disbelief of the girl. Perhaps you think I am making too much of it all; treacherous nerves were the lot of many spiritually noble men in that hell. But little by little conviction of a deeper, less understandable, horror creeps upon the reader, only to be explained and confirmed on the last page. To be honest, The Romantic is an ugly, a detestably ugly book, but of its cleverness there can be no question.
It would appear that Mr. A. E. W. Mason is another of those who hold that the day of war-novels is not yet done. Anyhow, The Summons (Hodder and Stoughton) shows him dealing out all the old familiar cards, spies and counter-spies, submarines and petrol bases and secret ink. It must be admitted that the result is unexpectedly archaic. Perhaps also Mr. Mason hardly gives himself a fair chance. The "summons" to his hero (who, being familiar with the Spanish coast, is required when War breaks out to use this knowledge for submarine-thwarting) is too long delayed, and all the non-active service part of the tale suffers from a very dull love-interest and some even more dreary racing humour. Archaic or not, however, Hillyard’s anti-spy adventures, in an exquisite setting that the author evidently knows as well as his hero, are good fun enough. But the home scenes had (for me at least) a lack of grip and conviction by no means to be looked for from a writer of Mr. Mason’s experience. His big thrill, the suicide of the lady who first sends by car to the local paper the story of her end and then waits to confirm this by telephone before making it true, left me incredulous. I’m afraid The Summons can hardly be said to have found Mr. Mason in his customary form.
"To write another person’s life-history in the first person, and yet give to it the verisimilitude of a genuine autobiography, would under ordinary circumstances be a difficult if not impossible undertaking." So Mr. C. E. Gouldsbury tells us in a note to Reminiscences of a Stowaway (Chapman and Hall), and most of us will cordially agree with him. But, after reading this volume of reminiscences, I think you will also agree that Mr. Gouldsbury has acquitted himself admirably of a most difficult task. The man into whose skin, if I may so express it, he has temporarily tried to fit himself was Mr. Alexander Douglas Larymore, who started his adventurous career as a stowaway in an "old iron tub," and eventually became Inspector-General of Jails in India. For nearly forty years Mr. Gouldsbury was Mr. Larymore’s intimate friend, and has had sufficient data at his disposal to do justice to what was a remarkably full and interesting life. Possibly those of us who retain a tender spot in our hearts for stowaways may regret that Mr. Larymore grew tired of the sea; but his adventures were as numerous and amusing on land as on water, and they are also valuable for the strong light they throw on the India of some years ago. Mr. Gouldsbury has at once provided a lasting tribute to the memory of his friend and written a book which both in style and matter would be hard to beat.
The King. "Look here—this throne won’t do; it is impossible for us to look dignified in it."
The Artificer. "I’m sorry, your Majesty. There must be some mistake. I got it in my ’ead that your Majesty ordered a lounge throne."
Are you a victim to the Tarzan habit? Perhaps your eye may have been caught by the word on bookstalls as the generic title of an increasing pile of volumes; but knowing, like myself, that all things explain themselves in time, you may have been content to leave it at that. Meanwhile, however, the thing has continued to spread, till on the wrapper of Tarzan the Untamed (Methuen), which now at last finds me out, its publishers are able to number its devotees in millions. Well, of course the outstanding fact about such popularity is that in face of it any affectation of superiority becomes simply silly. One has got to accept this creation of Mr. Edgar Rice Burroughs as among the definite literary phenomena of our time. In the immediate spasm before me Tarzan (who is, if you need telling, a kind of horribly exaggerated Mowgli after a diet of the Food of the Gods) is represented as placing himself at the disposal of the British forces in East Africa, and attacking the Germans with man-eating lions. The rather chastening feature of which was my own unexpected enjoyment of the idea. Even, for one disconcerting moment, like the persons in the admonitory anecdotes who taste opium "just for fun," I began to feel that perhaps.... However it passed, and the temptation has not returned. Meanwhile the real nature of Tarzanism, whether some sinister possession or simply the age-long appetite for the monstrous, just now a little out of hand, remains as far from solution as ever.
Mr. Horace Bleackley, whose last excursion into political fiction was a description of an opéra-bouffe Labour Government in action, addresses himself, in The Monster (Heinemann), to a more serious theme. His monster is the factory system, and if I say that this witty novel will provide the ignorant and comfortable with instruction as well as entertainment I hope I shan’t have done him any harm. The author, while making his points against the system, notes truly enough that the risen ranker, the one who had been through the dreadful mill, with its ninety-hour working week for children, became the hardest master during that wonderful period of the Manchesterising of England which laid the train for the explosions of our present discontents. He reminds us also of that admirable speech, made about every ten years for the last hundred or so in the House with the same fervour and conviction, to the effect that any change in conditions or wages would surely mean the complete ruin of the country. A comforting speech, that! Perhaps Mr. Bleackley, presenting three generations from Peterloo to the Jubilee of Queen Victoria, covers too much ground for full effect, but he has pleasantly gilded a wholesome pill for pleasant people. Good luck to him.
I did not take the publishers’ statement that Pengard Awake (Methuen) was "entirely unlike Mr. Straus’s previous stories" as a recommendation, however alluring it was intended to be, for he has good and enjoyable work to his credit. I doubt, indeed, if he has yet written a book more acceptable to the novel-reading public than this tale of "action, mystery and wonderful adventures" (again I quote from the paper wrapper). Possibly in a so-called mystery book the author ought to have his readers guessing all the time, but if I was not perpetually engaged in this rather exhausting pursuit I was, at any rate, intrigued. Pengard, who is also Sylvester, and yet is neither the one nor the other, may be too much for your saner moments of credulity. But Mr. Straus tells his queer story so plausibly and with so light a touch that even though you may affect to scoff at his dashing improbabilities you cannot escape their attraction. Indeed Mr. Straus’s adventure into fields hitherto strange to him has been so successful that I am inclined to ask him to continue cultivating them.