Fall Fiction
I NOTICE that followers of the fortunes of the turbulent clan descended from Philip Whiteoak and Adeline Court never agree on which of the novels that narrate their history is the best. The argument has started once more with the publication of The Master of Jalna by Mazo de la Roche (Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $2.50), and will be continued, no doubt, whenever the next one appears. To say this is to pay a very high compliment to the author, because it indicates as well as anything could that her knowledge or her imagination is inexhaustible as far as Jalna is concerned.
In the present hovel she continues the history of the masculine, dominant, and exasperating but likable Renny, and concludes the tragic story of Eden, the poet, whose doings precipitated so many crises in the [last. Miss de la Roche has never written with more power than in the scenes leading up to the death of Eden or with finer humor than in the scenes following the death of Augusta. These alone would make the novel exceptional. But the bulk of the book — dealing with the struggles of Renny to keep his estate intact during a period of financial stringency, his relations with his wife, A lay ne, and with the ‘fox-woman,’ Clara Lebraux, together with the love of Wakefield for Pauline Lebraux and of Finch for Sarah; and not forgetting the reincarnation of old Adeline in her namesake, Renny’s little daughter — all this is written with the same flashing energy and easy mastery that made the earlier novels memorable. I do not think that critics have praised as they should the author’s skill in portraying the older members of the clan — Nicholas, Ernest, and Augusta. It deserves mention. In this novel they are only minor characters, but they are a constant joy. The chapter entitled ‘Jig-saw,’coming immediately after those describing Eden’s death, furnishes not only the relief of comedy but a perfect illustration of the combination of love and mischief which keeps life at Jalna from ever becoming monotonous.
The story is obviously not finished, for one is left with an intense curiosity concerning whether Finch w ill really marry Sarah, whether Sarah will some day foreclose her mortgage and become mistress of Jalna, whether Renny will leave Alayne for Clara, and whet her it will be Wakefield or Finch who will marry Pauline. Every reader will have his theories on these important matters, and they will make him wait impatiently for the next novel. May it come soon.
In The Farm (Harpers, $2.50) Louis Brumfield has written what I take to be the thinly disguised autobiography of his boyhood. In the Dedication — to Anne and Hope and Ellen — he says: ‘The Farm is the story of a way of living which has largely gone out of fashion, save in a few half-forgotten corners and in a few families which have stuck to it with admirable stubbornness in spite of everything. It was and is a good way of life.’
The result is a story of very close texture, leisurely in movement, richly illustrated with fact and anecdote, of several generations of a family w hich has its roots in a great farm in Ohio. The narrative is made all the more representative by the fact that the family has also a residence in town. And the author has not hesitated to describe both, with their surroundings, in immense detail, with short biographies of a host of people, who w ere members or acquaintances or neighbors of the family. The story for there is no plot — is simply that of a social evolution from the first settler through the growth and decline of the Farm, as a symbol of the agricultural era, to the rise of manufacturing centres and the influx of immigrants; and this evolution is seen from two angles, t he rural and the urban. In any but skillful hands such a method would be tiresome, unless it were read frankly as Social history; but the author has such an eye for human significance and such a know ledge of his subject that I read the book with a constant glow of recognition and a kind of homesickness for a way of life that really was good. It is a good novel to give to young people to read, in the hope that it may at least suggest to them some values in living that are just now out of fashion.
The publishers’ note says that Paul Horgan spent several years in the musical centre of Rochester, New York; and since his Prize Novel, The Fault of Angels (Harpers, $2.50), is located in Dorchester, New York, and deals largely with musical people, one can hardly avoid concluding that the author profited by his observa - tinns in the Eastman School of Music and the Rochester American Opera Company.
His observations are diverting enough; but I for one wish specially to thank him for making me acquainted with Nina, than whom 1 have not met a woman more lovable and amusing for many a day.
Nina Arenkova, as her husband says at the beginning, ‘has such soul, you understand, it gives out continually.’ In fact, she believes that America in general and Dorchester in particular lack ‘spiritual focus.’ We are afraid of being natural, naive, impulsive. Lake the multimillionaire, Mr. Ganson, we prefer that our charity shall be ‘never personal.’ But Nina, indomitably courageous, sweetly unreasonable, naive as only a Russian could be, has the fault of angels — ambition. She explains her point of view quite clearly: ‘I know humilitsy. Human being is a little tsing in la vie. Wot is talk about angels? Wot do we know? All wot we know: zis is zis: c’est que la vie is filled wiz danger and cruelty, and great mistakes wizzout heart, and like zis. One little human being must do everysink wiz justice, and vision, wiz homble human feelink to help rest of world, C’est tout. Is nossink wiz gods; ce n’est rien pour les anges!’ Acting on this conviction (and her words will serve as a fair sample of her sublime baby talk), she does not hesitate to scout all social taboos and scruples, or even stock notions of morality, ‘wiz homble human feelink to help rest of world.’ She tries to convert the multimillionaire to Tolstoian principles as bravely as she saves plain Mrs. Bliss’s boy from a charge of stealing by pretending to be a shoplifter herself. Of course, hardly anyone believes in her or even understands her. But all feel that her brief flight across the Dorchester orbit has been like that of a bird of paradise through an aviary of ordinary fowls and songsters. She gives up her crusade and goes back to Paris and freedom, but one cannot believe she is soon forgotten.
The deftness with which her personal attractiveness, her combined naivete and intelligence, her ability to weep without being homely, and above all her delicious idiom — the way in which these are recorded makes of the book a rare treat in comedy and satire, but comedy and satire overlying considerable pathos. In order to illustrate Nina’s versatility in ’giving out soul,’ Mr. Morgan has thought it necessary to introduce melodrama in the episode of Mrs. Schrantz and Mrs. Kane; but it seems less happily conceived than the rest of the novel. Nina’s special genius shows best in more subtle situations.
R. M. GAY