Out of Soundings
by
[Harpers, $4.00]
ANOTHER book does not help us to get at him. Nobody would say, ‘Here is the real Tomlinson.’ The real Tomlinson has been there right along. Even in a novel he was not lost. That was one of the difficulties with Gallions Reach: all his characters were Tomlinsons. And yet, somehow (as the English say), it came off. The man flows through his writing like a tide. This is dangerous for the reader. He should be warned. In one of the whirlpools he goes down, sucked under; but I submit it to be decent drowning, with like as not the Ilesperides or Gilolo or ‘prodigal largess of fruits and sun and a wide latitude of life’ to claim him when he is washed ashore.
The stupid mistake of calling H. M. Tomlinson a second Conrad has been aired before. He says himself that he owes much to Thoreau and Melville. As to that, we can quote Huck Finn on Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘’The facts are interesting but tough.’ The man is only himself. He writes a fine, liberated prose, not with the careful cadence of the conscious stylist, every syllable falling in its place, but with the richer and healthier vitality of the man whose thought is strong and prolific, and whose powers of observation give rise to noble imagery set down with the light still on it. The Sea and the Jungle has been marked as a great book, and it is not certain that Tomlinson can ever equal, let alone surpass, it. People close it with the need to readjust the desperate puppet show around them. Why bother with his other work? I don’t pretend to know, unless it is that all his writing seems to slip the boundaries of books and refuses final separation by title and subject.
What he has done now is a volume of essays in a mechanically too heavy and expensive, and even padded, book, called Out of Soundings. I doubt if he likes its look or feel. Certainly it does n’t suit him. But the writing is genuine. Collectors of his books will observe ‘A Brown Owl,’previously preserved by some friends in a limited edition; ‘Cote d’Or,’ from the Criterion Miscellany: and other papers first printed in American journals. It is not a book of voyage, nor even a homogeneous assembly. Like ‘Old Junk,’ it runs a long gamut of subject and idea. Tomlinson was devoted to Hardy, and his essay on him called ‘One January Morning’ is of a greater voice than has yet spoken — ‘ While Hardy was with us, his presence gave dignity to our day.’ Vanishing England is touched on beautifully in ‘A Lost Wood’ — Hudson’s England, that is; ‘And when our governing machines, multiplying and expanding, claiming greater space for their wheels, flatten and unify still more the ancient, varied, and familiar things which we did not know were good till they had gone, we feel as though our identity will soon be traceless. We become a little fearful and desperate. It is as though a chilling air were felt from unseen ice gradually advancing, warning of another glacial age, to put our names and works with the Neanderthalers. We rebel from the suggestion that we must go under the cold mass of a mindless necessity.’ Of war books, a long footnote stands for those who appreciated Mottram, Disenchantment, Blunden, and others.
I shall not try to shove up the Plimsoll mark, as he would say. It is all mostly out of soundings, detached and individual reflection pertinent to the hour because it also involves the elements of timelessness. ‘I sang some songs in a riving minor,’ he wrote once, elsewhere. But indeed he never did that in his work, which is perhaps why a good many to-day consider it with an increasingly jealous regard.
DAVID McCORD
THE glamour of Bohemia is forever alluring. The artists who inhabit that strange realm are in their happier moments envied by laymen. Exhilaration, eloquence, and success, marked in a few, are thought to typify the many; the years of poverty, of unrewarded discipline, and of discouragement amounting to persecution — how large they bulk in an artist’s temperament is little realized. But Bohemia is not California, and never was.