NOVELS
THE CLINTONS AND OTHERS. By Archibald Marshall. Collins. 7s. net.
PETER JACKSON, CIGAR MERCHANT. By Gilbert Frankau. Hutchinson. 7s. 6d. net.
PRELUDE. By Beverley Nichols. Chatto & Windus. 7s. net.
LIMBO. By Aldous Huxley. Chatto & Windus. 5s. net.
Mr. Archibald Marshall is, we dare to say, one of the good writers most neglected by contemporary critics. He has brought nothing new to the development of the novel. If a general description were necessary, he might be most briefly and accurately classified as a descendant of Anthony Trollope. But his talent in his own generation is unique; and no person who enjoys or studies the fiction of this age can afford to neglect it. In some ways his latest volume is the climax of his performance and displays at their height his peculiar method and gifts. It consists of six stories. One, perhaps the least interesting, describes how John Clinton, a prosperous city merchant in the time of the Regency, rescued the family estates from his elder brother, the prodigal Beau Clinton. The second deals with a scientific peer, innocent and absorbed, who very nearly married a woman scientist, of origin much lower than his own, who was attracted to him only by his wealth and position. The hero of the third is a speculative builder. The fifth narrates the misfortunes of a patient and gentle clerk. The sixth is a story of old Squire Clinton's reactions to the war and of how he was reconciled to the different reactions of those about him. The fourth, which we have removed from its place, tells how Ann Sinclair, a day-pupil at Miss Sutor's school, was sent to Coventry by her companions because she was unjustly suspected of having damaged in malice Mary Polegate's illuminated chart of the kings of Juda and Israel. This is the longest story in the book, occupying over one hundred pages. The principal characters are all school-girls of various ages, and no extraneous interests are introduced. It seems almost impossible with this material to hold a reader's keen attention for twenty odd thousand words, and yet this is what Mr. Marshall has done. All the persons are vividly alive and convincing; and there is a whole range of them, each individualised and given a real personality. The story is an especially good example of what Mr. Marshall can do and how he does it. His narrative is extraordinarily quiet and unemphasised, and shows by its restraint the author's complete confidence in the interest of his subject and in the adequacy of his method. In all these tales events more or less moving take place or are referred to; but the teller never raises his voice or gesticulates. He has no tricks. His characters reveal themselves in speech or action; but if they do not he has no modern prejudices against telling the reader what are their motives and what is going on in their minds. His explanations are so quiet and so straightforward that they immediately carry conviction. When old Squire Clinton was passing through Paris with his daughter to see her husband, wounded and interned in Switzerland, he was displeased that his other daughter should take them to lunch in a restaurant:
He would not have objected to exactly the same meal served in her apartment. He would have eaten and drunk whatever had been set before him, and enjoyed it in spite of his always strongly expressed preference for English food and English cooking. The wine he might have noticed and commented on, because he knew about wines, and because you pleased your host by approving of his taste in them. But this ordering of your meal in public, in consultation with your guests, with a maître d'hôtel standing at your elbow and booking your orders, not without advice of his own, struck him as very like taking part in a mistress's consultation with her servants—almost an indecency. The restaurant habit was, in fact, entirely unknown to him. In his expansive youth it had been unheard of. The nearest he had ever come to it had been in giving luncheons or dinners at one of his clubs—meals as elaborate as this and as carefully arranged, but arranged beforehand, so that the guests should get the right flavour of hospitality, and accept the good things set before them as they would have accepted them at his own table. Neither Joan nor Nancy divined that half his displeasure, which he could not hide, was at being obliged, under Inverell's hospitable pressure, to express his preference for this or that luxury, with the price of it staring him in the face on the menu, when indulgence in any sort of luxury was so far from his mood.
So delicate and exact and truthful is this delineation of a small tract in the old man's character that it would be almost possible to reconstruct the whole without any other guide, as is done in the case of louder roaring monsters than Mr. Marshall's creations.
Mr. Gilbert Frankau's Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant, presents a curious contrast to the method of Mr. Marshall. Mr. Marshall's virtues are so quiet and unobtrusive that it is possible to overlook them altogether. Mr. Frankau's defects are so vociferous that they tend to obscure his real merits. He paints in violent colours. He paints his sentimental passages with a yard broom. His style, as Mr. Arnold Bennett once observed of somebody else, is such that even in Carmelite Street the sub-editors would yearn to correct it. He has almost entirely eliminated the conjunction from his own version of the English language: the "ands" and "buts" omitted from this book would, if they were restored, increase its length by a hundred pages or so. Their absence gives the reader the impression that Mr. Frankau is in an enormous hurry and is very short of breath. All these defects are closely woven into the texture of one of the most strident novels ever written; and it is quite impossible to escape from them. Nevertheless this tale of a business man who became a gunner is one of the most lively and credible pictures of the war which we have yet had. It matters little in the end that, whether he is describing the purchase of a cigarette-factory or a love-scene or the battle of the Somme, the author scores exclusively for brass and big drums. This method certainly eliminates the love-scene, but it is not inappropriate to the other subjects; and in his accounts both of war and of business Mr. Frankau produces a huge, crowded chaotic picture which stuns and bewilders the reader, but at the same time convinces him that he is seeing at least one aspect of the truth. Mr. Frankau's high level of verisimilitude and interest in such passages as the description of the Battle of Loos depends to a very great extent on his peculiar power of packing much detail into a small space; and it is to this perhaps that we owe the somewhat regrettable lack of "the smaller parts of speech."
Mr. Beverley Nichols's book is another of the triumphs of precocity—a novel describing the Public School system by a writer with very recent experience of it. And, like other novels on this subject, it is a novel with a thesis. Mr. Nichols is far from disapproving of the system. He sets out, on the other hand, to show that it is capable of receiving and making comfortable the most eccentric of boys if he will only make the least effort of adjustment to his environment that can be reasonably expected of a human being in any circumstances. His hero, Paul Trevelyan, has in an extreme form all the characteristics of the heroes of such books. He has been coddled, he has unusual tastes, he cares nothing for games. But, very refreshingly, Mr. Nichols treats with a firm hand both his characteristics and his sufferings. Paul undergoes just such discomforts as are required to rid him of effeminacy and priggishness, and mould him into a boy capable of taking a place in human society with satisfaction to himself and his companions. The thesis of the book appears to be that the Public School system does not necessarily deprive those who come under it of their individuality, does not necessarily crush or torture those who depart from the normal, does act as a civilising agent on those who are in need of it. As a piece of evidence, the book is interesting and useful. As a novel it is less remarkable than Mr. Waugh's Loom of Youth. That book was not only a contribution to a dispute; it was also a work of fiction astonishingly well put together for its author's years and experience. Its characters and many of its incidents were extremely well observed and drawn. Mr. Nichols fails as a writer of fiction. His characters are vague and unconvincing: they have no fundamental individuality. The construction of his novel is extremely loose and uneven; and the passages of reflection are introduced with a very clumsy hand. Whether he will succeed in correcting these faults it is impossible to predict; but he clearly has gifts which ought to come to something. Precocity in the things he lacks is not always a certain indication of success in maturity.