by C. E. Montague. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1929. 12mo. 289 pp. $2.50.
ALTHOUGH his earliest book was published in 1910, it was only in the last few years of his life that C. E. Montague became a figure of considerable literary importance. Though not exactly of Fleet Street, he belonged nevertheless to that journalistic company which wrote with both hands. H. W. Massingham passed before him; Nevinson, Tomlinson, and James Bone still survive. It could be said of him that his look was one ‘of lifelong converse with astringent winds and cheerful suns.’ He was, above all tilings, a man of action; and his writing, from the bitterest lines to the starry passages of which he was so poetically capable, is full of the fiery particles that accentuate what we recognize as style. Through long editorship of the Manchester Guardian, he disciplined, over the initials C. E. M., the fluency which has made him a story-teller quite the equal of John Buchan. Out of the war in which he served, lie brought to his desk a colossus of material and the power and vision to write, in Disenchantment, a memorable war book and two volumes of tales.
Action, published posthumously, is the second of these, and, while it contains apparent defects, it has, nevertheless, none of the imperfectly transmuted ideas we are finding now in the last Montague fragments appearing in current periodicals. In portions it is a fine book; and since its chapters are not interrelated, it may be picked up for a story like ‘ Judith’ and laid down again with a feeling that satisfaction has been given. Montague was a writer by instinct, not by avocation. He felt words as we feel a wound. What he dared in life (he was an Alpiner and held the Royal Humane Society’s medal for saving a life from drowning) he dared again in a tine, muscular prose.
In this book the title story turns on the glacial fields of the Alps; others again involve the war; and still others, like ‘Man Afraid,’are not stories at all, but Borrovian interludes full of a queer, salty humor. This is not Montague’s best work. He was too exultant, somehow, to let his pulse down to the cooler ways of majestic writing. He did it perhaps once in Disenchantment, You did not expect him to do it again. But he could always write, as witness now fresh evidence.
DAVID McCORD