Novels of Society

SOCIETY, someone has said, is made up of the exclusive and the excluded. Too often, it seems, our novelists write about the former in a way to satisfy the latter. I can think of no more difficult task in the field of fiction to-day than to picture those men and women, cultured or prosaic, warm-hearted or cynical, who walk the upper crust of American life.

THROUGH forty years of a woman’s life Margaret Ayer Barnes has traced in her novel, Years of Grace (Houghton Mifflin, $2.50), what might be called a study

in American codes. Her protagonist, Jane, had the advantage of starting with a happy childhood; no deep violences to her spirit hampered the course of her maturity. It was a symbol of the inevitable conflict between the generations when Jane decided to go to Bryn Mawr in the nineties, instead of yielding to an immediate début. Her mother was forced to resign herself to that decision to compensate for the family’s verdict that at seventeen Jane could not marry or even consider herself engaged to the young art student, André, who always remained to her the purest symbol of whole love. The same gesture came in the next generation when Jane’s daughter, Cicily, who had n’t wanted to go to college, did marry at nineteen.

There was one difference. ‘Children,’ Cicily told her father,—and he agreed that it was a step toward progress,—‘Children don’t think you are right any longer, just because you are a parent.’ Jane pointed out that nevertheless that made life terribly difficult for parents, and perhaps terribly difficult for children, too. Of this she felt very sure several years later when Cicily got a divorce to marry the husband of her best friend. It took a long time for Jane to realize that Cicily, too, was acting according to a code, a code perhaps better, because more direct, than her own. When a lover had come Jane’s way in the middle years, she had turned away From passion to choose the more abiding satisfactions of husband and children.

In the large canvas of Mrs. Barnes’s story there are exemplars of most of the modern problems in mores and morals that vex the stage and current literature— parents and children, husbands and wives and lovers, marriage and divorce, the sometimes conflicting claims of love and work, social acceptability and 'duty.’ Mrs. Barnes has chosen for her characters the ‘best, people.’ those who have managed to keep abreast, socially and economically, of the shifting tides. In each of the three generations that we see, the problems in abstract terms are not very different; the sometimes startling appearance of difference is due to the change in codes against which the problems are projected. For each the solutions are much the same — that compromise which keeps one in the line of survival: money to live on and feed one’s self-esteem; children and the other long-term emotions of stability and continuance; harmony with one’s self and the social setting, at a price sometimes recognized and sometimes ignored. Of these things Mrs. Barnes writes temperately, vividly, and with acumen; her people are not mere counters for problems, yet hers is preëminently an approach of the mind in which the question as to what they could or should or might have done is of more immediate importance than how they felt.

By contrast, it is the unique and individual creation which gives quality to Rex Stout’s second novel, Seed on the Wind (Vanguard Press, $2.00). Many readers will not accept Lora Winter, but by the very angry denial of her validity there will be proof of her claim to life. What little reliance Lora Winter originally had to place on others was dispelled at the beginning of her career by a series of outrageous experiences. She had the resources of a beautiful and sentient body, a durable spirit. Instead of embitterment or wounded withdrawal, she went her way from that point by accepting what offered and taking what she needed and could get without the involvement of emotion. Objectively that story of Lora and her five children by five different men is almost incredible; yet, in the daring and the wholeness of its genesis out of Lora’s own character, it has a foundation not easily shaken by the intellect.

Here, as in his first novel, How Like a God, Mr. Stout has used an effective technique. He projects you at once into a baffling moment; then through seven eighths of the book unravels lucidly the years that have led up to that crisis, and finally re-creates it and its dénouement in the closing chapters. Whether or not one likes it, — and many will not like it, — Seed on the Wind is a powerful and an original story.

While Mrs. Barnes shows conventionality as an achievement of character, and Mr. Stout the achievement of unconventionality, Carl Van Vechten’s new novel, Parties (Knopf, $2.50), shows the unconventionality that comes of disintegration. Hardly one of its characters ever experiences a sober moment; when it is not gin or Scotch or ‘sidecars,’it is likely to be ‘snow’ or an orgy of self-disgust. A really intelligent propagandist for temperance or even prohibition might use it as a tract. ‘Nothing goes on at all,’declares the wife of the hero. ‘Nothing whatever. Just parties, that’s all.’ And the hero aptly compares his set with blindly waltzing Japanese mice.

Despite some acute observations, despite some vivid writing and a great deal that is merely smart or a little clever, Parties seems to me a cheap and feeble attempt to épater les bourgeois.

Above these battles of moralities, or the conscious withdrawal from them, comes Edith Olivier’s charming tale, The Triumphant Footman (Viking Press, $2.50). Here is a conte in the true manner, a sophistication that is witty and amusing and unimpeded by sick obsessions. To bound the bubble would be to burst it — so I shall not tell the story of Alphonse’s gambols amid expatriate Britons in Florence in the latter years of our dear late Queen, nor disclose the rungs whereby Alphonse climbed from a cockney childhood to the peerage. For a couple of hours of light-hearted and not unintellectual enjoyment, it is capital.

MARY ROSS