A Group of New Novels

IN a prefatory letter to a friend, Richard Aldington tells how he began Death of a Hero almost immediately after the Armistice in a snow-covered cottage in Belgium, only to destroy the manuscript and recommence it ten years later. Straight out of the horror of war came a remarkable crop of stark books by young men — Barbusse, Latzko, K. E. Cummings, Dos Passos. Now, after an interval when young authors seemed more anxious to write about the May moon or green hats or anything else unconnected with mud and cannon, comes a second fruiting.

The mood in which Richard Aldington writes is summed up in his judgment of post-war London journalism: ’If this, or indeed anything, much mattered, one might be tempted to deplore it.’ The life of the hero — Ceorge Winterbourne — did not matter much to himself or to others. But he would have been a little shocked as well as heartily amused and somewhat relieved to see how little his death did matter to the four whom it might have concerned — his father, his mother. his wife, his mistress. Mr. Aldington states his theme in a prologue. Somehow we feel we must atone to the dead, the violently murdered soldiers. But it is not in them but in ourselves, he believes, that lies the blood-guiltiness, ‘the poison that makes us heartless and hopeless and lifeless — us the war generation and the new generation, too. So in the next three parts and in an epilogue he tells the story of George Winterbourne and the generations that begat him: George, a symbol, unassertive, inarticulate, honorable; and why his life did not matter. Beneath a superficial insouciance, here is deadly earnestness. The war only brought to a head and let loose the corruption that betrayed these generations. Mr. Aldington is too much of what he writes to avoid the skew that warped the lives of his characters; but for that same reason his book has passion and savor, and its vigor holds it above the petty sentimentality of pathos or reeking realism.

In strange contrast, out of the war Ernest Hemingway has drawn an idyll, one of the last things one might have expected him to draw out of anything. I suspect that A Farewell to Arms has been a long time in Crystallizing through and beyond the smoky clatter of Montparnasse cafes. This story of the Italian front and Lieutenant Henry and the Scotch nurse, Catherine Barkley, has the strange power of his earlier books in suggesting overtones through laconic dialogue; and beyond this technical mastery a wider and deeper reach of emotion than Hemingway has dared before. Catherine’s death did matter, terribly. Here, in a sense, is the antithesis of Aldington’s story: the same war generation, in the one case finding in the crucible that the residue was dross, in the other glimpsing its gold only to lose it. Possibly A Farewell to Arms is one of those few books which may find favor in the eyes of both the younger generation and the broader-minded of the elders.

It is like taking the Paris express to turn from this to A mire Maurois’sAtmosphere of Love in the translation by Dr. Joseph Collins. Here is a very different sort of love from the fervors of German schoolboys, and yet, though it concerns adults only, I imagine a psychiatrist might rise up to call it somewhat adolescent. Philippe Marcenat could break his heart over his wayward child-wife Odile; and yet, when Isabelle succeeded Odile, bringing the utter devotion which he had thought he craved, Philippe himself became the wayward heartbreaker. Atmosphere of Lore is sensitive, restrained, subtle, and, above all, intelligent; quite perfect of its kind. Its kind is a little remote; it has more the tone of a memoir than of a novel. Even amid the emotions M. Maurois is more the critic than the creator.

Across the Channel, in far less detached vein, Sylvia Thompson also discloses adult male childishness. Chariot Wheels sweeps the reader through the vivid story of Cressida as a young girl, her marriage to Lester Midge, a buoyantly successful journalist and novelist who never managed to be quite a gentleman, and their daughter Stella. Cressida yearned for emancipation in the good old pre-war way. Running counter to the serene traditions of her leisureclass family, she married Lester Midge and the glamour of his ideals and his ability. When she came to see the man apart from these, it never occurred to her not to accept the bargain and make the most of it. Because she was not capable of using people to serve her own ends, she continued as the victim hound to Lester’s chariot wheels, an ever-present solace to his vanity.

’Artists, observed Cressida’s eccentric aunt, ’are like modern domestic servants — they claim privileges, and don’t seem to feel any obligations. Cressida was a victim (though happily not a martyr — she had too much integrity to pity or even dramatize herself) of a successful husband; in the end it was she and not Lester who continued to believe in the ideals that he had taught her. ‘I suppose,’ young Stella said bitterly to her father, ’you’re like lots of successful people. You’re repelled by failure because it’s the grisly thing that might have happened to you and did n’t. You’ve been successful in your career, in health, in love — in everything. You can afford to be sarcastic about lost causes — but very often they’re the ones that matter.’

Smaller and smoother words would be needed to describe the newest book of another leading English woman novelist, G. B. Stern’sModesta. Miss Stern can write richly and powerfully; she did so in The Matriarch and A Deputy Was King. But here she is being charming, very charming, in an ultramodern Taming of the Shrew, gayly satirizing the English, the Italians, the Americans, and so on. Her Italian sunlight will seem pleasant in the dull days of November. Modcsta would be an entertaining offering for a traveler Europe-bound on a maiden voyage.

And for a traveler similarly bound to America, what could be at the same time more enlightening and more puzzling than a trilogy of native novels of the past few weeks: Maristan ChapmanHomeplace,Fannie Hurst’sFive and Ten, and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant’sShort As Any Dream?

Like its predecessor, The Happy Mountain, Homeplace is a story of the Tennessee hills in the bright clear imagery of the speech of the mountain people. Miss Chapman’s prose has something of the quality of J. M. Synge. Possibly it is because both have written of remote places and simple people whose emotions and senses are quick to be stirred by the uncomplicated pageantry of the life about them. Homeplace is a happy story of lovers whose troubles finally are driven clean away, an almost unreally happy story it seems to some of us who live under the canopy of city smoke or have glimpsed Miss Chapman’s Tennessee only from the outside of its unpainted houses with the lean sentinels of hounds.

Five and Ten has the lush vitality which is Fannie Hurst. Here is the America of staggering fortunes, of great Fifth Avenue houses fronting on the park, of sables, motor cars, and country clubs. But beneath this opulence there is no satisfying happiness for John G. Rarick, who has seen his chain of five-and-tens sprout like magic from the little Nick Nack Store in St. Louis; nor tor Jenny, his narrow-faced wife, whose tiny patrimony started the venture; and still less for their children, restless Jennifer and silent Avery. Their house of gilt is hollow; and in the end Rariek seeks to end his curse of Midas by turning his hundred and eighty millions to preventive philanthropy. Beneath its grandiose display of detail (like an extra-super-movie attraction) and ardent manipulation of character, Miss Hurst’s story has human warmth and more than a little salty common sense.

Of a very different lineage comes Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant’s Short As Any Dream. This is the America of the pioneers — in eighteenth-century Maine, in Minnesota during the Indian wars of the sixties, in the early days of California, and the youngest generation back in Maine and alien New York. These Americans had no need to batter down walls of gold. Their trust lay not in betraying riches, but in the beloved traditions woven into the meaning of home. Close to a century and a half runs through this family chronicle in bright Hashes glimpsed through moving time, like pebbles in the clear bed of a brook. Its poignant distinction is as different from the flamboyance of Five and Ten as a mayflower is different from a peony.

I have saved to the end the book that is hardest to write about — Ultima Thule. Its author, Henry Handel Richardson, is a woman who has written under this pseudonym for twenty years, and Ultima Thule, a complete story in itself, is the third volume of a trilogy whose first two parts met with commercial failure. But through these years the author has gained a quiet mastery of her characters which now produces one of the most impressive books of the season, perhaps for many seasons to come. It is the story of an English physician, no longer young, who returned to Australia to try to remake the fortune he had won there and lost, and of his wife and their children: the lives of them all, and his death. To say that it is pure tragedy may give an inaccurate impression of gloominess, for it is the tragedy of Aristotle, ‘complete and whole and of a certain magnitude,’ by pity and fear lifting us beyond our own concerns. In a book so deep and sure as this it would seem irrelevant to talk of nationalities or older and younger generations. It is not a mirror of the past or present, but of the realities that we all face when we have the courage.
MARY ROSS