Finch's Fortune
JALNA REVISITED
by
[Atlantic Monthly & Little, Brown, $2.50]
PEOPLE who have read all of the Jalna books talk about Adeline, Augusta, Nicholas, Ernest, Renny, Alayne, Eden, and Piers precisely as they talk about the family next door. Women, especially (perhaps because women have better memories than men fora clan and its ramifications), remember the entire Whiteoak genealogy and can explain, for instance, that Renny is Pinch s half brother and that Alayne married both Eden and Renny. The fact is, of course, that; very few families next, door a re as amusing.
Readers often tell me that the Whiteoaks are an extraordinary family, but I cannot see why. I should say that they are all, with the exception perhaps of Eden, Wakefield, and Finch, quite ordinary folk, I mean this as a compliment to the books. It is much easier to make exceptional people interesting than ordinary people. What such readers mean, I suppose, is that the Whiteoaks are not like Americans — that is, like inhabitants of the United States. But it is the author’s acute perception and gusto that make Itenny, Nicholas, Piers, and their womenfolk fascinating, rather than any extraordinary quality in the characters themselves. They are really no more selfish than most of us: they are only more frank. They are probably no more materialistic and physically-minded: they are merely not ashamed of being so. They may be a little more pugnacious, but they inherit the blood and the traditions of the Courts, as well as their nose. Their hardheaded Anglo-Irish blunt ness and honesty are their distinctive traits, and their Irishness also shows in their immense talkativeness, quarrelsomeness, and conviviality. ‘Where there were Whiteoaks gathered, there was no danger of dullness.’ Nothing could be more significant than the thoughts of Alayne in that final glorious scene in which Renny, badgered and browbeaten by the entire clan, silently goes to bed in old Adeline’s bedstead. Alayne, you will remember, was an American, the daughter of a New England professor. ‘Oh,’ she thinks, ‘their glorious lack of self-consciousness! Oh, that I could so grandly let myself go! That I could be so magnificently a fool!’ Many an American reader must have breathed I be same wish.
But their Irishness also shows occasionally in the outcropping of a Celtic poetry. Underlying the comedy of Pinch’s inheritance, systematically filched from him by all the others under the guise of family affection, is the idea that he is the best of the lot. ‘You’re t he flower of the flock,’says Eden to him. He has a generosity, an imagination, above all a sensitiveness, lacking in the others. In the same conversation Eden tells the truth about his various relatives—that they have the power of intimidating imaginative Folk because they have themselves no imagination. They are entirely content in their horsiness, their cocksureness, their family pride. But Pinch is not.
The novel is comedy of the best, for the author, without sentimentality or extenuation, sets down every unlovely trait of her personages and yet manages to make one love them. For the Whiteoaks, however selfish and stiff-necked they may be, have no real malice. They express all their petty envies and jealousies without the least shame, hut also with complete honesty. And the manner in which, though only half-consciously, they realize at the end that their ugly duckling, Finch, is really their superior is conveyed with admirable acuteness and humor. Finch himself, a puzzled and self-tormenting hoy, a softy in their eyes, is really, as Eden perceives, the culmination of the dynasty. He has Eden’s poetry without his selfishness, Renny’s persistence without his stubbornness, and old Adeline’s passion without her temper.
One could go on reading about the Whiteoaks almost forever.
R. M. GAY