Notable First Novels

IT has been reported that first novels find slim pickings to-day unless they are adopted by a Book Club. If true, this is regrettable. I know a man is lucky if he can find seven hours for reading a week. Even so, he should discover for himself each season at least one good first novel — such, for example, as Edmonds’s Rome Haul or Richard Hughes’s Innocent Voyage, those two bright spots of last spring. Here are four that have held the attention of Mary Ross, an editor of the Survey and an able judge of books.

OF the four gayly jacketed first novels at my left hand, waiting to be written about, an obvious grouping was easily suggested, for two were by writers in their twenties and two by those who had spent first youth in other pursuits than novel writing. But the difference went deeper than mere statistics.

Here, for instance, were Graham Greene’s The Man Within (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50) and Rex Stout’sHow Like a God (Vanguard Press, $2.50), both of them stories of a man at war with himself. Mr. Greene’s vivid book takes its title from a quotation of Sir Thomas Browne: ‘There’s another man within me that’s angry with me’: an Andrews unafraid, always condemning and confusing the cowardly Andrews who ran from danger like a rabbit, who betrayed his best friend and the woman he loved through compulsions which he himself could tolerate only when he was drugged with stultifying self-pity. There are strength and freshness in this story of a smuggler who turned informer, who failed the girl who loved and protected him, and turned finally in what the author would have us believe is a birth of courage to take the blame of her death on himself. Personally I mistrust that conclusion: it has a little too much the feeling of a predetermined pattern, an outcome too much hoped for, a symbol of what should be; as Elizabeth, the girl, is a symbol of goodness and wisdom, too pure to be an earthly creature. Here is romance, — young, eager, vigorous romance, — acute in its understanding of Andrews’s cravings, persuasive — a little too persuasive — in its conviction that suffering shall not be in vain.

Rex Stout’s How Like a God starts at the other end of a sorry web. Instead of bringing sordid fragments of a life together in one moment of victory, it opens with William Sidney as he is, outwardly successful, prosperous, yet corroded at heart by self-contempt; and its action is the whirl of images through Sidney’s mind as he stumbles up three flights of stairs to murder his mistress in the room at the top. As a tour de force in form this novel deserves the attention that it has attracted: except for a brief italic page preceding each of the chapters to record the man’s progress up the dim hallway, it is written entirely in the second person — William Sidney rehearsing to himself the train of subjective ignominy that has brought him to this extremity in a passion as relentless and intolerable as that in Of Human Bondage. Through this disordered mind, stroke by stroke, the Sidney of the small town, of Cleveland, finally of New York, emerges before the reader in progressive clarity. Yet while the form is striking and successfully sustained, it is the unforced conception of Sidney himself, rather than the literary device, that gives the book its undeniable power. Not a pretty story, surely, nor sufficiently spacious in its sympathies to achieve the lift of tragedy. But an honest and effective piece of imaginative creation, unlike most so-called ‘psychological’ novels in that it does not give the feeling of a special plea. And this detachment (might one hazard a guess that it is one of the compensations for writing one’s first novel after one has had at least a chance to explore maturity?) is very different in quality from the dewy glamour of the coward drawn by Graham Greene at twenty-three.

The other ‘young novel,’ Oliver La Farge’s Laughing Boy (Houghton Mifflin, $2.50), deals with America: the glowing Navajo country, only touched at the rim by the white man’s civilization. Mr. La Farge writes this Indian love story as a novelist; it seems necessary to state that explicitly because in the welter of propaganda and politics Indians are likely to be considered more as a collective cause than as human beings. His knowledge of the Navajo language, his learning in archæology and anthropology, would lead one to trust his details of Indian life as authentic; and his story of young and simple love triumphant even over death is idyllic and really touching in the white man’s tradition. Hut is this the way that Indians feel? I don’t know — I have looked at their inscrutable black eyes, completely baffled us to what lay behind. Possibly Mr. La Farge has it here. It may be caviling to distrust the ability of an alien race to grasp, in true perception, the mind of a people so remote. I should like intensely to know what an Indian thought of this book. But at the very least it is a daring and lovely picture of an American surface which we know too little and esteem too casually; I hope Mr. La Farge will write of the Southwest again.

In I Thought of Daisy (Scribner, $2.50), Edmund Wilson is also concerned with America, the New York of Greenwich Village since the war. I believe (and here with some background to justify a belief) that his picture of this much-fabled and maligned corner of Manhattan is trustworthy — which is something distinctly unusual in accounts of ‘ Village life.’ But beyond that, and more important, it is interesting. It is interesting, in somewhat the same way that Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero is interesting, as an honest record of the philosophy of a bewildered generation. The ‘I’ of Mr. Wilson’s book is a young man who comes to New York with certain preconceived ideas of life and love and art and social justice, and tests them by experience in a merry-goround where the props of conventional behavior are shifting or entirely absent. It is a critic’s novel (Mr. Aldington’s is a poet’s novel) in that it is more interested in trying to evolve a philosophy of individual values than in the delight of creating people just for what they are. It has always, I think, a little of the frustration of the 4intellectual.’ But the conclusion which its hero evolves through love affairs and gin parties and work — in short, in living — expresses in philosophical terms an attitude which, translated into the emotions, would be, I might guess, a signpost toward the writing of great novels or perhaps just mature living. MARY ROSS