(c) 1951, Times NewspapersDoc ref: TLS-1951-0302             Date: March 2, 1951

THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT FRIDAY MARCH 2 1951 J29

Fiction A STUDY OF INTIMACY MODERN SHORT STORIES READY TODAY

EMYRHUMPHREYS ALBEllTO MORAVIA: Co1fiugal Love. Seeker and Warburg. 7s. 6d.

Conjugal Love belongs to a class of talented enough in their way. Con­novel fairly common in Latin coun- jugal Love stands out as a notable

J. LEHMANN (Editor): English Stories/rom New Writing. Lehmann. lOs. 6d.

NE1TIE PALMER (Edjtor): Coast to Coast. Ang~ and Robertson. 10s.6d. A Change 0' Heart tries, but rare ' in these islands, and achievement in a fo rm of writing that Last year the publishers Of .Pt'IIgllill

almost unknown in America; that is few novelists in this country would New Writing reluctantly decided that to say. a close, unsentimental study waste lime in studying. It is rendered this periodical was no longer an of the rt:lationship between a man into sensitive a nd fluid English. economic publishing proposition; and and a woman. At first sight this might EUZABETIf" COXHEAD: One Grun' on its demise several newspapers ~~:~ o~~h~~~~~~~e ~~~b~~~ft~~V~I~ Bottle. Faberand Faber. 10s.6d. noted the astonishing fact that there tfiat appea r both here and in the CATHERINE HUBBELL: Frances. ~asw~~~o~;:rw~?rerE~f:~j:~~~~nr~ United States, all dealing in one way Gollancz. lOs. 6d. stories could look for regular publica­or another with emotional situations Although mountain-climbing is now tion. Some well-intentioned schemes between the sexes, It is, however, not generally pOpular,a slum-dwelling fac- for remedying this sad state of affairs easy 10 think of one book: by an tory girl is still a rare phenomenon on remain, so far, nebulous: in the mean­author of any standing in which a any climb, and certainly on a .. Very time Mr. Lehmann has' made a romantic or satirical approach does Severe." This', however. is the pheno- selection from the stories published not blur the impact of the kind of menon ,which Miss Coxhead presents , in his magazine, and their excellence storYlihat Signor Alberto Moravia has with an air of the most convincing indicates that when a new periodical to te . reality. It is a would·be seducer who appears it need not lack talented

Its narrator, Silvio , is a well-to-do takes the IS-year-old Cathy lrom contributors: writer-at least he intends to be a Liverpool to North Wales for the first writer when he has written a book- time, but the importance of the wee.k- The course of the magazine New married to Leda, an attractive widow end lies in >he cUmbing passion which WrUillg, later ' Pellguin New Writillg. who in the past has had a number of is its by· product. Cathy devotes all . charted faithfu lly the best hopes of lovers. They love each other; but subsequent week-ends to climbing. two literary generations, from the when Silvio retires to the country with Light, agile, naturally balanced, and Spanish Civil War through the Second the avowed object of working hard at. endowed with tenacity and courage, World War and the uneasy peace his masterpiece, he finds that he can- she is a born climber. Her pro- that ' has followed. The chronological not combine the strain of literary gress i::.' nicely measured out: the arrangement runs from the delicate, composition with the diurnal intimacy Slabs, the Amphitheatre Buttress, disillusioned left-wing scepticism of of love. Since, for some reason, no Avalanche on Lliwedd . .. from easy Mr. Isherwood's sketch of Berlin life middle course seems acceptable, he DifficuUs to difficult Difficults, and on and his wife agree that the demands beyond"; leading to a Very Difficult in" The Nowaks" and the different of the book must come first. The next and on again. There is also the pro- kind of disillusionment expressed by thing Silvio knows is that an gress from being a rock. gymnast to G.eorge Orwell in .. Shooting an appa rently ridiculous tiff has arisen being a mountaineer, and another Elephant," through the horrors between him and his wife on the sub- progress which , in a mountaineering miseries and boredoms of war. Thes~ jeet of Antonio, the barber who shaves book wholly free from heavy sym- are seen most clearly perhaps by Alun hi~ every day, middle-aged, with five bo lism or popular mysticism, is con- Lewis in a memorable story about a chlt~re,n, and-to the untutored eye veyed with fe~ling and sincerity. This sick ward and by Mr. Graham 'Greene of SilVIo-far from attractive. Silvio, is an unpretentious and straight. in a biting sketch of a certain however. tinds that his ow.Q judgment forward novel; the characters are !magi.nary Ministry; but they are this time is at fault. sharp and clear, and so is the exc ite· Ilium mated also, always interestingly

Signor Moravia is by no means ment and the atmosphere of the and often with notable insight and without a certain well-controHed mountains; it is, in fact, a film in sensibil ity, by Mr. R . D. MarShall sentimentality of his own; but it is search of a director. and Mr. Alec Guinness, Mr. Jocelyn only necessary to think of how such Miss Hubbell's book suffers by Brooke and Mr. Joh n Sommerfield a story would have been handled by, contrast ; unpretentiollsness, sharp- and Mr. William Sansom. Set within say, D. H. Lawrence to appreciate ness, and clarity are not its virtues. this general pattern are some delightful the economy and classicism with The story of Frances from Childhood stories ' which have nothing to do w.hich this Italian author approaches until an indeterminate period which with political sentiment or war-'time h ~s theme. The setting is entirely might be called the end of youth emotion: Miss Julia Strachey's different, but the book has something remains somehow hazy. It is also wickedly amusing sketch of a " pro­of ~he infin itely light, and yet serious, rather cluttered wi th trivial feminini- gressive" school, Miss Rosamond satire of 11alo Svevo's Confeni01ls of ties and seems to move uneasily Lehmann's brill iant suggestion of a Zello. Among the welter of vague, between the commercial magazine fu~~II~, w~~, oS. I~~ ;~~~~:t~'sa t>!~nu~li: worthy. shapeless novels. often story and the" significant" novel. fully drawn portra it of a ,. character ..

A famous publisher and a famous cook

"Famous U is a relative term. Mrs. Beeton, for example, is still famous, whereas her husband's renown was limited to his own lifetime, and his name no longer touches a chord of familiadty in the mind.

called .. The Sailor." The I;st could be lengthened. for only in one or two of these stories does technical ski ll seem in danger of descending to preciosity. The whole collection is a tribute to the richness and variety of ta lent that a sensitive editor can gather round him.

The stories in Coasl to Coast, a collection,from Australia, look gauche, perhaps inevitably, by the side of Mr. Lehmann's selection. The writers slill work in the tradition of the

anecdote, and they are often naive: but in half a dozen tales there are signs of fresh talents emerging. expres·

,sive of Australian character and conditions.

QLlVER.ANDER.SQN: In for D Penny. Arthur Barker. 9s. 6d.

VILLIERS DAVID l Pleasure III USUilI. Duckworth. 95. 6d.

Both the novels under review ,are humorous in in tention; both might be said, superficially, to have the same type of theme; country households making shift aga inst present-day austerities. There the resemblance between them ends. Mr. Anderson's story is a farcical fantasy that tries to get broad laughs. Mr. DavJd attempts a comedy with a civilized atmosphere that might be described as reformed fin de sUe/e.

' The hero of In jor a Penny, Basil Chancery, is a young man who has been crossed in love. He goes to stay at a remote Lincolnshire parsonage where Ihe vicar remitlds a reader rather of Dr. Fagan in Declille and Fall ~ his brood are budding juvenile delinquents. Two at least of his ·three daugh ters deserve that much-abused label, nympho-maniac. All are industrious novelists. The son Hugo, a bibulous, epicene, yet hearty painter, visi ts the village "pub" with mono­tonous regulari ty. And when Basil suggests that the three girls sha ll bury their latest novels and let them be dug up and rediscovered as lost mid­Victorian masterpiec(':s, the reader realizes that Mr. Anderson is trying to have some fun at the expense of the Brontes and Bronte-worship. Too much of his humou r is of the smoking·room variety, bot in spite of all his crudeness he has a certa in gusto which may Jead to something in the future.

The opening sentence of Pleasure as UsuoJ-" 'Lady Corbeau expects us to tea to.day,' said Lady Trilby of Tombs, snipping off the head of a dead rose "- suggests- a mild blend of Firbank and Saki. Unfortunately, Mr. David lacks his models' genius for characterization. He has written nicely and polished sedulously, but the fact remains that Lady Corheau, he r daughters, M ing and Sung, Bashall the butler, Aunt Aggi, and the rest, never become really animated, and the scheme for maintaining .. pleasure as usual" in Cor beau Hall hardly sustains the story. Her Lady· ship's device, however, of typing out the mas1erpieees of literature instead of reading them is worthy of Swift's Polile COlJversation. '

A new novel by the author of The Little Kingdom and The Voice of a Stranger. who has been described by Henry Reed as: "the best young novelist to have come up ~ince Ihe war." BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMEND 10/6

MARY PLUM The

Murder of a

Red-Haired Man A thriller with every ingredient of popular success by the author of The Killing of Judge Mac­(arlane, State Department Cal, etc. . 9/6

OUT OF PRINT SINCE 19<42, AND NOW REPRINTED IN RESPONSE TO

UNTOLD REQUESTS

• BB'

Manka the Sky Gipsy

43 illustrations by DENYS WATKINS-PITCHFORD .. I was absorbed from starl to finish . . . the best book of ils type thai I have read or am likelv to read." IQ/6 Brian Vesey-FitzGerald

FRANCOIS MAURIAC

That which was Lost

U It is impossible not to admire at every stage M. Mauriac's skill."

The Times Lit. Sup. 'j M. Mauriac is an artist" 10/6 John 0' London'.

. THE COMPLETE STORIES' OF

Herman Melville

In his new biography, Mr. and Mrs. Beeton, Dr_ H . Montgomery Hyde, M.P., is concerned wich the in· dividual and united lives of Samuel and Isabella Beeton. The author is oonnected by marriage with the Beeton family, and has had access to personal papers and letters, which incidentally provide interesting sidelights on aspects of Victorian and Edwardian activity, especially in the world of publishing.

PROBLEM CHILDREN .. Should provide many a prosperous voyageJor literary psychologists . . Melville has an extraordinary gifl."

This study ~oes ,not end with the death of Mn;. Beeton, and the author is at pains to present the twelve further years of Samuel Beetoo's life.

Mr. a1]d Mrs. Beeton by

H. MONTGOMERY HYDE EF. II!tutrated 101. 6d. IIel Ready March u.sl ~

"' '" "'

We shall also publish on March 21st . a masterpiece of condensation

by

RENE SEDILLOT leading French econoll/ist

and Editor oj La Vie Fransaise

A Bird's-eye View of World History

translated by GERARD HOPKINS

u s. 6d. net

"' "'

JAMES WELLARD: Woman Returning. Werner Laurie. 11s. 6d.

LOUISE COLLLS: Without a Voice_ Faber and Faber. lOs, 6d.

The subject of Mr. James Wellard's new novel is the slow mental and moral deterioration of an English­woman who attempts to adopt a three·year-old Italian child from the Neapolitan slums. Such a story stands or falls, obviously, by the reality of its chief character; and Mr. Wellard's Grace Alison is triumph~ antly credible. Somewhere in the background of her respectable li fe as a-\'schoolmistress is a passionately loved little boy Wl10 died. He was an illegit imate child, the result of a romantic affair in Italy; and now When she visils Italy again, and a small boy sitting begging holds out hIS box of stolen toilet articles, her hear t is touched. It is as a gesture that she takes the child away from his appa l ~ ling family surround ings for a short holiday: but the gesture quickly changes to a compulsive need for the child, a determination that he must belong to her. Adoption of a child, however. is impossible for Miss Alison under Italian law. She must be married. Then she meets Mario, her former lover.

There follows Grace Alison's marriage to Mario, his betrayal of their marriage agreement concerning the child Donato, her entanglement in Italian law, her more and more hope­less attempts to retain the person of the small boy, who fail s utterly to understand what is happening to him. Such a bare recital, however, inevit­ably does less than justice to the pathos, the wry comedy, and ' the mounting emotion of Mr. Wellard's story. Woman RefurninR is a notable iCCond book which more than fulfi1s

th e promise of this author's satire on the ways of Press correSpOndents, Tv a High Mountaill.

]1\ Miss Collis's Wilhow a Voice a child plays an even more important part than Donato in Mr. Wellard's book, but there resemblance ceas~s. Edward is a nervous, imaginative 10-year-old boy, full of inarticulate day­dreams which Miss Collis unhappily makes articulate by the dubious de­vice of letting her readers, as it were, half-way into them. (" He had not been in bed for more than 10 minutes before, exactly. as he had foreseen, a vast and hornfyingly indistinct shape had begun to crawl out Trom under the wardrobe.") A certain unintended touch of humour comes in ; and. what is more serious, this way of tellins: the story alienates sympathy from Edward, who becomes tiresome, rather tban patheti,c, during the course of the story. Miss Collis does not lack skill and intelligence, but as a sym­pathetic interpretation of a sensit ive child's mind Without a Voice is not a success.

==== Mr. Richard Church is contributing

a volume on The Growth of the Eng­lish Novel to the series of "Home Study" books issued by Methuen. Mr. Church's approach is mainly his­torical, and he traces the evolution of the novel through its early beginnings, its emergence in the form in wh ich we recognize it to-day with Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders and the work of Richardson, up to the present time. The novel, Mr. Church says, is fundameotally 1in aspect of poetry, a process of the imagination of man working through imagery and not ' through logic, to a presentation of him self and the world of which he is a parL

Manchester Guardian 512 pp. 16/-

HARGREAVES PARKINSON Ownership of

Industry " Worlh every penny of the price to anyone with an in· lerest in this iJighly importanl field ofi.quiry."

News Chronicle 24 charts 25/-.

CHARLES H. GOREN

Point Count Bidding

"Should be read by every player who wishes to improve his bidding standards." . 416 Daily Telegraph

&. Graham Greene's

THE LOST CHILDHOOD <;:oming March 30th ' 12/6