Families in Fiction
FAMILY novels — novels, that is, of character rather than adventure — are what most interest the mature reader of fiction. Scott, Dumas, Stevenson, should come before twenty: Tom Jones, The Brothers Karamazov, the Forsytes, War and Brace, Proust, mean most to those who have had more experience in living. Do I hear any argument?
PERHAPS it is no accident that the English novel began to flower at somewhat the same time that the solid middle-class institution of the family appeared in somewhat the guise that we still know. Nothing less than the flexibility and spaciousness of the novel can do justice to that strange welter of emotions and irritations that goes by the name of family life. An epic may lift itself sonorously above the daily routine; a lyric may catch a moment memorable in its pure lucidity; but in a novel, as in a house, there usually must be packed the whole paraphernalia of living — some of it dull and ridiculous, much of it satisfyingly pleasant, a bit of it sublime. No one will be surprised to hear that four leading novels of this spring draw their motive power from family life.
Of these four Lady Eleanor Smith’sFlamenco (Bobbs-Merrill, $2.50) is earliest in time and temper. It starts in the Spain of 1920 with the flight of Lobo, the caló who has murdered his kinsman; follows a gypsy trail over the Pyrenees and through France, where the child Camila is born, and on to the festival at Stes. Maries, to which gypsies came from the four corners of the world. But there, too, Lobo found only enmity, and with his wife, the blind uncle, and the three children, he pressed on to England. In Dartmoor, for seven sovereigns, they sold the little amila to an outcast gentleman who had been forced to flee London with his family because he cheated at cards. The gypsy child grew up in a strange household where the children ran wild on the moors and where master and mistress quarreled ceaselessly. Camila’s primitive strength was more than a match for them. She tried in vain then was too wise to try further - to still within herself the wild flamenco music to which she was born.
Flamenco is a gorgeously colorful tale, at times almost preposterous, yet sweeping one along by its straightforwardness, its frank romanticism. Would a Georgian lady, living in a dilapidated house on the edge of the moors, dress herself in jewels and satins, paint her little daughter’s cheeks, and shriek abuse at all who came near her? Harriet is a lurid creature, yet strangely credible. So also are Richard, her husband; the two sons; Celia, who revolted against her family’s irregularity to marry convention, and Camila — the only one of them who achieved a power to see and direct herself. The families of Lobo, the Wolf, and Richard, the card cheat, are far from the modern mode, yet they fit many of those patterns that we acknowledge under more commonplace manners.
The other three family scenes are of our times. The Square Circle, by Denis Mackail (Houghton Mifflin, $2.50), is the London story of Tiverton Square and the people who went in and out and across it to and from their respectable houses. Never does the book wander farther than the alley behind the Square, where a reformed stable harbored cocktail parties, even as in New York’s Greenwich Village. Like a microcosm, the Square had its rich man, its shady financier, its woman-with-a-past, its great lady, its frustrated young lovers, prosaically married couples, gossiping spinster, babies, urchins, lanky half-growns, and slightly fading daughters. Mr. Mackail catches this galaxy deftly, shows their little concerns (at times with a touch of condescension), and passes on to one or another incident of this little walled world with its central locked scrap of lawns and shrubbery. The young lovers see their rainbow gradually fade away’ in the matter-of-fact sun of Tiverton Square. The family here meaning the safe and stable conventions of the clan — triumphs, even though a few walls away safety and stability are proving irksome at another fireside. Ironically, the family whose members most thoroughly enjoy the Square is the one whom the neighbors consider risqué! The Square. Circle is pleasantly substantial fare, admitting our boundaries, and accepting them with good humor and good manners.
Susan Glaspell’sAmbrose Holt and Family (Stokes, $2.50) might well have been called ‘Ambrose Holt v. Family.’ For Ambrose, who was a handsome and successful American business man, yet fancied himself as a poet, set himself against wife and mother, all because of his injured pride. Against the priggishness and childishness of Ambrose the two women, in themselves so very different, stand out in a shining capacity for realism. I suspect that women will like this story better than men; it pricks too neat a rapier at some weak points in the male armor. Personally I could not feel that much had been settled when Ambrose came home again. As an understanding picture of an American town and of people in it who have sufficient vigor to be part of it and yet be themselves, it will have appreciative readers.
A foreword by John Galsworthy heralds From Day to Day (Viking, $2.50), the first novel by Ferdynand Goctel to be made available to English readers. The book has been widely praised for its innovation in form. It is written as a diary, in which the diarist incorporates a novel he is writing, juxtaposing the conflict of his present life with the war-time recollections that form the subject of his novel. As Mr. Galsworthy points out, this is no mean technical feat, and the point at which novel and diary fuse in the dénouement of the book is both subtle and powerful. Yet it would be a pity if the praise of technique were to overshadow the quality of the book itself, so moving and so simple that this clerk’s study in present-day Poland will become part and parcel of the lives of readers many thousands of miles away. The story of the farm on the steppes of Turkestan where the Polish war prisoner toiled, of the home and wife to whom he returned, the bureaucracy in which he worked, the women he loved, is colorful in that it leads us to scenes and places of which we know little. Yet it is not with the joy of the tourist that one leaves the book, but with a sense of having been at home with people of one’s own kind. Surely one of the strongest novels of this spring, From Day to Day plumbs a very real depth.
MARY ROSS