As a race English novelists have certain advantages which do not come easily to American writers. They have a tidiness and an economy about their writing that make some of our novels seem rambling as a tramp; again, they cultivate the oddities of life in a way to make them seem both natural and amusing; and finally, they can, when they choose, indulge in irony such as is too little prized on our side of the water. These resources are to be variously observed in the three English novels before me, and I cannot help wishing that without sacrificing our freshness and vitality we might acquire some of this English skill.
Miss Mole by (Harcourt, Brace, $2.00) is an exceptionally neat and skillful book. To hear me tell it you would think it is built of thin material: a spinster of thirty-eight housekeeping for a Nonconformist minister, teaching his motherless children to hold their heads up and incidentally making herself the talk of a sleepy English town. There ’s a plot so small it could easily be lost in Rhode Island. But give Miss Young a chance: read fifty pages and you will find that Hannah Mole, for all her oddity, is a person of mettle and spirit; sharp and tender by turns, she invests the novel with animation; in her presence the characters unfold, the country assumes a real beauty, and the story, never without its humor, rises to a struggle which is hard-felt. In her valiant, eccentric way Miss Mole is one of the most attractive women I have met in English fiction.
T must add that the author, E. H. Young, disappoints me occasionally. I think there is a needless eccentricity running through the opening pages which we must know Miss Mole to forget. I object to so purposeful a villain as Mr. Pilgrim. And toward the close the author is too pat with her love story. So keenly observant in every other respect, Hannah would never have been so slow to understand what Mr. Blenkinsop was trying to say to her. When a book is so good, so neat and so clear-cut, I hate to see flaws.
It is the picaresque, not neatness, that recommends A. P, Herbert’sThe Water Gipsies (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50). Of Mr. Herbert’s versatility, Mr. Punch and several too-littleknown books give proof. Within the scope of his present story he distributes his favors as generously as did Mr. Priestley in The Good Companions, though with not so great a talent. Herbert likes ‘the ends and odds’ of life; he likes the simple folk who live on the outskirts of London in the whereabouts of the Thames; these are his Water Gipsies, whom he gives to you as they drift up the ‘cut’ on their barges, gossip and drink ‘old and mild’ at the Black Swan, play skittles or make merry and sad at the Derby.
Leisurely, affectionately, and in much dialogue that is a delight to read, he invites you to follow the fortunes and misfortunes of two sisters, Jane and Lilly. Their loves lead them into complications that are often diffuse, but so easy is the reading that one hardly objects. One should expect of this story not loud reality but that gentle charm, half humorous, half quizzical, which suspends credulity and opens our eyes to people we shall never know.
As if to make up for past neglect, the critics have been buttering this volume pretty thickly. It is, I think, an injustice to this unpretentious book and to Herbert’s earlier work. The dialogue in The Water Gipsies is surely no better than that in The Old Flame, and the serious writing never reaches the level of the author’s first novel, The secret Battle.
About Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham (Doubleday, Doran. $2.00) you will hear a good deal of gossip. Rumor has it that this satirical novel is pointed at two well-known figures in English letters, one dead, the other living. Those who believe it call the book ‘savage.’ Aside from a natural curiosity I don’t think the charge matters a fig. Whatever the aim may have been, this book is masterful in its terseness, its irony, and its power of characterization.
Three writers are involved in a story which deals with the literary landscape of London and Kent: the narrator, Ashenden, a playwright and novelist of a sardonic turn of mind; Driffield, a novelist, recently deceased, who before his death had become ‘The Grand Old Man of English Letters’; and thirdly, Alroy Kear, writer and lecturer, who amiably, and always with his eye on the main chance, has prostituted what little genius he possessed. The woman in the case is Rosie, Driffield’s first wife, mistress at one time to the narrator, as warm-hearted and generous as Nell Gwynn.
These are all the elements you need to know; to tell more is to destroy the suspense of a narrative whose subtlety is most tempting to follow.
The story, which is absorbing in itself, impinges hard upon the world of letters. Its pungent criticism of writers real and fanciful, its deft deflation of literary pomposity, its wise comparison of the golden '90s and to-day — like the cold spray of a needle shower these penetrating observations of Mr. Maugham make the reader sensitive and stimulated. We are so often gullible and pretentious about our books to-day that a little cold water of this sort may wake us up.
Under Maugham’s cool and sardonic touch the book becomes exhilarating. Rosie, Ted Driffield, Lord George, and Ashenden are people you feel and will remember; and if you will give yourself pause before shelving the Volume you will observe how neat has been the design, how sharply cut the phrasing, and how sage the reflections which have gone into its making.
