Novels Fresh From the Press
Rearden Conner’s remarkable novel, Shake Hands with the Devil (Morrow, $2.50), has for its setting the Ireland of 1922 and for the secret of its power the deceptive dispassionateness that in time reveals itself as the stillness of a guarded flame. With this curious detachment, but with great vigor, it relates the activities, during a few months, of a small group in the Irish Republican Army, as seen through the eyes of a young medical student forcibly drafted into the I. R. A. by an unlucky accident. Above all, it conveys the nightmarish sense of insecurity that reigned in parts of Ireland; the tangle of plot and counterplot; the suspicion that any uniform might be a disguise, any wall an ambush, any summons a trick.
Kerry Sutton, through whose eyes the events of the story are presented, is no flaming hero, but a more than average young man; good at his work, and devoted to it, but able, when snatched away from it, to accept the inevitable quietly, able to be brave when he must; sensitive to beauty; fastidious, but no prig; and thoughtful, with an analytical power not to be overthrown by stress and violence. The figure next in importance is Lenihan, the schoolmaster, and commandant of the I. R. A. — a fiery spirit, driven irresistibly by his dream of the Republic. There is also Kitty Brady the prostitute, a good fellow in her way, but refreshingly not that familiar figure of fiction, the prostitute who proves herself in a crisis to be the noblest woman of them all. And indeed it is as hard to imagine Mr. Conner using a stereotype as it is to see by what skill he makes his perfectly logical last scene come with the effect of a profound shock.
With its occasional bawdiness, its confusion and violence, its horror, this extraordinary book somehow yet gives the effect of a clean dive into the sea.
The setting of Phiyllis Bentley’s A Modern Tragedy (Macmillan, $2.50) is a Yorkshire indust rial district in the present depression. Its theme is the deterioration of a weak young man’s integrity under severe stress. This novel has a Victorian thoroughness and massiveness, but not the Victorian satirical humor.
A rather piquant feature of the book is the grafting of modern psychology upon its otherwise traditional method. ‘Defense-mechanisms’ and ‘escaped complexes’ chime oddly upon the sober flow of the narrative. The psychological searchlight is turned with shriveling effect upon the girl by whom poor young Walter Haigh is dazzled — an excellent picture of the type that has its entire being in its awareness of admiration or of criticism. And it is sternly turned upon Walter’s sister Rosamond, a young woman of almost oppressive rightness; who, though her own harsh judge, somehow still carries an aura of priggishness.
The strength of the novel lies in its living background of distress and dread, and in the deliberate, gradually accelerating sweep of the narrative. I confess — be she never so handsome — to some incredulity with regard to the scene in which Rosamond, pursuing even to his stateroom the hardened swindler who has ruined everyone, turns him back from flight by pointing out that to flee is to show cowardice. This scene can hardly be absolved of the cinema touch, and is, to my thinking, an unfortunate flaw in the unquestionable creative power of this novel.
Private Worlds, by Phyllis Bottome (Houghton Mifflin, $2.50), by far this author’s largest enterprise, owes its strong interest to the newness of its subject. English fiction and drama have dealt with the emotional complications of the staff in hospitals, but so far as I know a mental hospital is an unworn setting. A reviewer blackly ignorant of abnormal psychology is at a disadvantage in commenting on this novel. I must confess to a sensation of being led, staring, across unfamiliar ground, by an authoritative hand.
Of the five principal characters, three are both psychiatrists and surgeons: Dr. Drummond, a patrician and reserved person, newly appointed superintendent of the hospital; Dr. McGregor, impulsive and hotheaded, who passionately desired the appointment for himself; Dr. Jane Everest, for four years co-worker with McGregor, and his understanding and loyal friend, greatly trusted and depended upon. There are also McGregor’s very new, very young and simple wife Sally, and Drummond’s sister, a predatory creature, who has emerged, acquitted and quite undampened, from trial for the murder of her husband. These five figures, inter-involved, move vividly against the background of that strange disordered fabric woven of the patients’ Solitary and secret lives.
The spirit of comedy that waits upon the author when she chooses is pretty consistently excluded from this book, with the result that when now and then it is called in for a moment it seems hardly at home and wears a slightly mechanical smile. It is rather the occasional flashes of beauty, and the clear, if sometimes irritating, childishness of Sally, that lighten this grave novel. For essentially grave it is, for all its spirit and vigor. ’The private worlds’ are not only the miserable solitudes in which the patients grope, but the lives of their helpers and guardians as well, who grope and fumble too. ‘All those poor crocks are just as human as we are,’ says Dr. McGregor. ‘ What we learn on them helps to keep other people sane.’ And the disaster that just escapes being ruinous occurs because two of these eminent wise ones fail to apply their professional wisdom to an obviously dangerous personal situation.
The author, thoroughly versed in her subject as she is, shows no inclination to dogmatize. Having built up effectively a sense of the tragic Isolation of the ‘private worlds,’ she allows her dominating figure, Drummond, to sum up thus for the childish Sally: ‘It’s probably safest for us to be most things to ourselves and by ourselves — it works better!’
ETHEL WALLACE HAWKINS