Thunder on the Left
by . New York: Doubleday, Page and Company. 1925. 12mo. vi+273 pp. $2.00.
THE most characteristic qualities of Mr. Morley’s new book are not its best qualities. As in Where the Blue Begins, he stands and takes his ease among fancies which at first glance look more significant than they really are. The initial fancy of his conception is delightful. A group of children plan to spy upon their elders, to find out if grown people enjoy themselves. But before the chosen spy has come among them time has delicately dissolved and flowed, and the people whom he visits are the children themselves, grown. In the end, time once more dissolves, so that young and old are what they were at the outset. This initial fancy, however, is stretched thin, running through the whole story in a thread which is now tangled with symbolism and now almost lost. And the variations played upon it occasionally fall into a vagueness which distracts attention from the firmer elements of the plot.
The plot has firmer elements. Martin, the spy, strays into a household which is on the edge of disruption, George and Phyllis alternately enrage and fascinate each other. The presence in their house of the unimaginative Ben and Ruth perturbs them hardly less than the presence there of Joyce, with whom George is in love as well as with his wife. Under the maddening sun the general irritation reaches a peak which might have meant catastrophe but for the fact that Martin, a man in person and yet a boy in spirit, acts as a kind of cool precipitant. Playing his part, so difficult to analyze because so subtle, he is not only his own boyish self but also the unspotted youth that George has once been. As Martin draws back from this confusing universe, so George draws back from his confusing situation. The narrative would run its course on its own power even were it not fated to reach a snug conclusion when the original fancy reasserts itself and folds up the plot.
The most solid and most valuable matter of the book lies in the adult characters and situations. From Ben, always a native to the world of mature dullness, to Joyce, who still belongs halfway to the pure, adventurous world of childhood, the persons of the story are nicely graded, though each is a person and not merely a figure in an ordered rank. And the situations, between George and Phyllis, between George and Joyce, between Phyllis and Joyce, between Phyllis and Martin, between Martin and George, are closely, penetratingly imagined. There are touches of the sharpest observation; pictures of a charming loveliness; clear, sweet prose. Certain readers will perhaps wish that the stage had been set without the gauze curtains of fancy which serve to remove the scene into a poetical distance. But in that case Thunder on the Left would be a different book, and would lack the special traits of playfulness and yearning without which Mr. Morley appears to feel at a loss. However that may be, it is strikingly true that he has justified his method by the skill with which he fuses reality and fancy. They do not fall apart at the analytic touch, any more than soil and air fall apart when they have joined to make a tree.
CARL VAN DOREN