Novels for Christmas
READERS who like Charles Lamb’s idea that grace should be said over a particularly delectable book may well bow the head in thankfulness over J. B. Priestley’s latest novel. Wonder Hero (Harpers, $2.50) is a too quickly swallowed draft of enjoyment. But in this book there is matter for dark reflection too. The monstrous absurdity, vulgarity, and ruthlessness of present-day publicity methods are by no means a new theme; but Mr. Priestley deals with it so pungently that at the end one is ready to say in all simplicity with young Charles Habble, Wonder Hero of a fortnight, ‘I’m not so sure it’s any laughing matter. Makes me think a bit, this does.’
By a coincidence that in our day is no great straining of the probabilities, two celebrities in the making are simultaneously brought up to London: Ida Chatwick of Pondersley, recently become Miss England, the Beauty Queen, winner of Morning Pictorial’s competition; and Charles Habble of Utterton, sensational savior of the A. C. P. works in that town, and Wonder Hero of the Daily Tribune. It follows as the night the day that these somewhat staggered young people are severally lodged in the New Cecil; for the New Cecil embodies ultimate grandeur. For the drama that ensues, the spectacular activities of the Daily Tribune and the Morning Pictorial are partly responsible. More responsible, however, is the Wonder Hero, who, though a comparatively simple young man, is not quite so simple as he seems.
This fantastic comedy, while doubtless less important’ than Angel Pavement, is to my thinking Mr. Priestley’s deftest piece of fiction, as well as his most enjoyable. Its admirable compactness in no way hobbles the play of the author’s very lively and masculine quips and cranks; and its causticity is not without an infusion of compassion.
The Curse of the Wise Woman, by Lord Dunsany (Longmans, Green, $2.00), must surely be liked greatly or not at all. If one is displeased by a book that gives promise of being one thing and turns out to be quite another, or dissatisfied with a plot too simple to be called a plot; or if one is bored by long chronicles of shooting, or fails to be amused by Irish humor or charmed by Irish cadences — then this is emphatically not one’s book.
As truly as the heath in The Return of the Native, the bogland is the protagonist in The Curse of the Wise Woman. This romance, beginning like a mystery story, turns almost at once into a passionate hymn to beauty.
Of this hymn the long snipe-shooting and duck-shooting episodes are among the most lyrical and lovely passages; for the joy of this sport is the heart’s core of the Eton lad who tells the tale, and the enchanted beauty of the bogs is his heaven. When the coming of industry threatens the immortality of this beauty, the passion of the narrative deepens; and at the wild climax the most Anglo-Saxon heart may well turn Celtic for a little.
The unflagging vitality of the fourth and last chronicle of the Herries family, Vanessa (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50), is a thing to marvel at; and it is easy to understand the sadness in Hugh Walpole’s Prefatory Letter as he dismisses the vivid multitude of his creating and watches them troop away. It is less easy to decide whether Mr. Walpole’s best achievement in Vanessa is his dealing with periods and personalities or with the Cumberland country — sometimes the scene of the action, always felt in the background as the stuff from which the wild ones of the Herries race were made. ‘ Don’t you love this country?’ says Benjie, the rascal of the tribe in this last of the series. ‘But of course you do. . . . All stones and clouds. One stone wall running up a hill, one sky with the clouds pouring over it, and you re happy. It’s so old. ... It’s so strong. . . . It’s so wide and smells so good.’
The whole of the long novel is enlivened with the vigor of its two principal figures. Vanessa, a rebel Herries placed by destiny among conformers, is a warm, brave, high-minded creature bowing to no law but that of her own moral sense, saved from heroic stature by her fits of temper and of conscious unreasonableness. Benjie, her lover, is one of those violent, picturesque, now and then faintly chimerical figures that Mr. Walpole loves to draw. It is Benjie, grown old and relatively quiet, who speaks, I think, the real last word of the Herries cycle: ‘The world seems to be crumbling, but it has crumbled so often before.’
This worthy ending of Mr. Walpole’s most sustained feat of creative imagination is related to his other work as well by the fear-motive that sounds in it. In almost all of this author’s books the black beast has been felt prowling near. In Portrait of a Man with Red Hair it missed its jump, to my thinking, and fell on its back. In that technical masterpiece, The Old Ladies, it sprang with terrible effect. Even in that sunny walled garden, Jeremy, it could sometimes be heard huffing and puffing through the chinks. In Vanessa Mr. Walpole restates what I think is the core of his creed. ‘It’s a great thing to conquer fear,’ reflects Benjie. ’Anyone who does that is a god.’
Bonfire, by Dorothy Canfield (Harcourt, Brace, $2.50), is the story of the conflagration that bursts out in a Vermont village when young Dr. Anson Craft, who desires with passion to pursue research but who has a debt of honor to pay, settles fiercely and bitterly to general practice in his dull birthplace; and when the magnetic little wildcat, not to say hell-cat, Lixlee Burdick, comes down from Searles Shelf in the mountains to do housework.
This novel is a compact and finely rounded piece of work. Both major and minor characters are drawn with skill. The ladylike old bachelor who likes to regale the summer boarders with tea, and with delicate mockery of his simple townsmen, is pictured wickedly but without cruelty. The central figure, Anna Craft, a nurse and the doctor’s devoted sister, is an excellent study of the type in which the high passion for serving is tangled with the evil passion for possessing and dominating; and her brother’s warring and tormented nature is as well portrayed. I am inclined to think that this novel has greater emotional intensity than any of the author’s previous work, particularly in its portrayal of the fury of jealousy. And the beauty of the Vermont setting is most lovingly reproduced.
ETHEL WALLACE HAWKINS