Three Stylists

STYLE is one of those serendipity words that as common readers we value too much to enjoy defining. If pushed, we may agree with Charles Maurras that it includes the animating thought, or we may prefer the robust AngloSaxon view that it is only a means of subduing the reader and that — as Caliban so quickly recognized — thought is free. But either position requires of style a certain authority, whether of force or of reason; and those who demand also that it shall be measured in terms of spiritual content agree that ‘no method is forbidden but only falsity and pretense.’

Pearl S. Buck’s method is as old as story-telling. To attack so vast and intricate a field as the China of the last half-century armed with truth and simplicity alone might seem an overwhelming task; in Mrs. Buck’s case they are reënforced by knowledge as well as by a profound sense that tlie present, however formless, slips instant. by instant into the dignity of the past. A House Divided (John Day-Reynal & Hitchcock, $2.50) concludes the trilogy of the Wangs with the lile of the Tiger’s only son as a young revolutionary, as a student in America, and as an occidentalized proprietor returning to take up his inheritance of Wang Lung’s good earth in the full knowledge that he can never call it his own as his ancestors did. Against the brilliant shifting background Wang Yuan’s figure is defined stroke by stroke; like the first bowman in an Assyrian frieze, this one man at the end of the line is drawn with such grave precision that we are sharply conscious of his whole generation beside him, battling with the mortmain of ancient custom on one hand and with the impact of the West on the other. Though the deliberate archaism of language is more obtrusive than in The Good Earth, it reminds us at its most discordant (for example, in the account of Wang Yuan’s intimacy with his American professor’s family) that, contemporary though Wang Yuan may be, in thought and habit he remains remote. At its best it has the sober conviction of a mediæval chronicle, whose authority is independent of idiom.

Samuel Roger’s method, as readers of Dusk at the Grove know, is more consciously modern; the success of the Atlantic’s prize novel has led to the revival of an earlier work. The Birthday (Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $2.50) deals with three episodes in the lives of three people: Katherine, the typical ‘nice girl’ of 1915, educated to preserve a core of childishness in apparent maturity; Gabriel the musician, who might have made her happier than he did; Albert the reliable husband, who might have made her unhappier than he did. In order to give us Katherine and Albert and Gabriel as they were to themselves and to each other, Mr. Rogers endeavors to graft the stream-of-consciousness method upon the bright objective materialism of earlier years. If the book does not achieve spiritual content, it is not so much that the consciousness disclosed is too often Mr. Rogers’s own as that it is not consistently his. He is sensitive, scrupulous, fastidious, anxious to be sure of his ground; yet to identify himself actually with his characters he must do himself a violence that leaves its mark in self-consciousness. Take Garstinger, for instance, that example of all a schoolgirl means by ‘sophistication’: we never feel that the author quite accepts him for Katherine’s friend as he wants us to believe that Katherine accepted him. Or, more trivially, take Katherine’s nauseating reflection upon her plate of lobster. It is vain for Mr. Rogers to protest, notebook in hand, that he has heard people talk like this — so have we all: that is immaterial. The point is that Mr. Rogers is not quite comfortable about it, and so the picture, just at the point where it should be most distinct, suddenly dims, and an element of falsity creeps in. But the falsity is never of intention, and the pictures are there. Gabriel’s anniversary concert is a particularly good example: the sensations of music rendered in the medium of words are so absorbing that one hardly realizes the virtuosity of such a translation; and Katherine’s first ball is not Katherine’s only — the lights, the staircase, the tulle, and the orchestra dissolve and reassemble into the first ball we remember. As one compares The Birthday with the greater maturity of Dusk at the Grove one looks forward with pleasure to Mr. Rogers’s next novel.

No such shyness and self-distrust can be said to hamper Bessie Breuer, whose Memory of Love (Simon & Schuster, $2.00) has stirred Edna St. Vincent Millay and other distinguished literary godparents so profoundly that their promises and vows adorn the jacket. Her theme is a brief and unhappy love, crossed by selfishness and ultimately checked by dipsomania, yielding a few starved hours of contentment in railroad stations and automobiles and lunchrooms before it perishes miserably.

’We seemed to live in that car. It was the only place we could be together. She let me kiss her. She kissed me. I had everything but the final possession. In the daytime it was all right, but at night it was different, the moon the wind the scents, everything made it intolerable and I begged her and I kissed her and I fought her down and I raced the car and I was furious.’

All this is the most stripped and streamlined modernism, and it conveys desperate frustration and frantic clutch at emptiness in a way that subdues the reader, even though he may conceive truth to be a quality that includes rather than excludes. But when Mr. Bromfield inquires (on the jacket) whether this power, this passion, can really be a woman’s, one’s thought perversely wanders away from Alec, whom ‘the fellows called Adonis all through Yale,’ ‘the most imperious man Julie ever saw ride a horse,’ back through a century to another dark-browed ruthless rider, ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know.’ Few care enough for Caroline Lamb to read Glenarvon now; her fashionable flowery layers of thought and feeling are too great an obstacle. But the only two really significant points of difference between her experience and Julie’s are that Julie need not nowadays plead for herself, and that Calantha could believe to the end that Glenarvon was worth the desperation. When the pelican rends its breast there arc probably always more feathers than blood: but it is the feathers that shock us.

MARIAN VAILLANT