How many hundred thousand Americans have a material interest in the Grand National I doubt if even the Irish hospitals know. But there is no doubt that this great steeplechase race at Aintree has captured our imagination as few other spectacles. The Cinderella fortunes have something to do with it, so has the fatality at Becher’s Brook, but even more magnetic, I think, are the thunder of the hoofs and the thirty jumps that make this the hardest ride in the world. Now comes a captivating English novel, ‘National Velvet’ by Enid Bagnold (Morrow, $2.50), to paint the picture in colors yon won’t forget. To abbreviate this story is to cheat the reader. But comparisons may be suggestive. This is the narrative of an amazing family, the father a butcher, the mother a Channel swimmer, and the children — four daughters and one boy — children who will make you snort with surprise as did the young inhabitants of Innocent Voyage and Striplings. Velvet, the youngest girl with her buck teeth and queasy stomach, is the fourteen-year-old Cinderella, and her Prince is a piebald nuisance of a horse whom she wins in a shilling raffle, trains on the Sussex Downs, and with whom she goes up to Aintree . . . but that’s enough. This novel is made cordial by its love of horseflesh; it is made uncommon by its understanding of and delight in youngsters; it is made enjoyable by the neatness of its English. Some books are to be gobbled at a sitting. This is one.
Historical novels, on the other hand, especially those that incline to stoutness, are like mar miles, to be ladled from intermittently until the dish is done. To feed our pleasure in the nineteenth century we have an admirable translation from the German, Another Caesar, by Alfred Neumann (Knopf, $3.00). This is the long, leisurely chronicle of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who, despite the scandal of his birth, was tutored, nourished, and finally impelled to pursue the Napoleonic tradition. Mr. Neumann, who incidentally is another of the German writers in exile, shows us the sallow, long-nosed youth who is petted and dramatized by his mother, Hortense; he shows us the young dandy whose charm and facility were so often checked by cynicism and sex; he shows us finally a man in his thirties whose self-knowledge, self-criticism, and self-discontent were apt to seize him at the most inappropriate moment. Our interest held by the skillful and quite objective characterization, step by step we follow his sometimes dawdling, sometimes opéra bouffe, but always persistent pursuit of power. The novel, bland, mature, and unemotional, closes with Louis’s accession to a position which he was not man enough to retain. The translation by Eden and Cedar Paul is of their customary excellence.
To turn from a picture of the Third Empire to the picture of the United States in the 1920’s is almost certainly to shift the emphasis from entertainment to argument. The swollen prodigality and the deflated misery which have succeeded each other in our experience will supply thunder to novelists for many books to come. We are in for it and cauterized we shall be if certain determined writers are to be heard. One of the most earnest of them is Thomas Boyd, whose Through the Wheat is part of our graphic, disillusioned record of the war. Bill Hicks, his doughboy hero in this first novel, now reappears in Mr. Boyd’s sequel, In Time of Peace (Minton, Balch, $2.50), which is equally, be it said, a story of disillusion. With no particular aptitude or training, with a body toughened by war and a mind hardened against deception, Hicks seeks the work that will keep him going after demobilization. Disgusted with the drudgery of a machinist’s shop, he tries his hand at newspaper work; proves a hard-working and dependable reporter; marries on a shoestring and, after a desperate struggle with debts and installment buying, finds himself at last on the wave of prosperity. Despite bis natural caution, he allows his household to boat further and further into the stream of credit: new ear, new house (heavily mortgaged), an investment in real estate — so it goes until the wave crashes, washing him far up the beach with the other unemployed.
To judge the novel aesthetically is to find it poorly proportioned, full of misshapen or flat characters (Patsy, Vaughan, Carlotta, Ellie Jones), and, when all is said and done, at loose ends. To judge it as an economic study is to acknowledge the very real masculinity of Bill Hicks and to experience through his eyes the injustice, the petty oppression, and the dreaded insecurity so obnoxious to us in our resentful mood of to-day.
The earnestness with which this book is written, the force which it derives from its war memories, and the likable reactions of its central character are reasons which should keep its male readers absorbed to the end. But let no one pick it up who is not looking for an argument.
Of the new biographies I put André Maurois’sDickens (Harpers, $2.00) first because of its dexterity and because of that luminous logic which seems part of every Frenchman’s birthright, This is not a major work, but rather a wise and kindly study of a great figure, a study that will send you back to rereading Dickens with a better understanding than you had before. Someone has said of Maurois that he writes about the English as if he had just been on a week-end house party and hoped to be invited another time. True, his disposition is a friendly one: had it not been so I doubt if he could have come to such close grips with the English character, which is habitually a shy one.
I have said that this study of Dickens is dexterous. In the first half of it Maurois appears in his customary role as a biographer. He draws you a touching picture of Dickens’s youth. He deals fairly with that subject so widely psychoanalyzed to-day, Dickens’s unhappy marriage, and his conclusions strike me as honorable and rightminded. He tells of the amazing success that came to Dickens in early manhood; he illustrates Dickens’s boundless optimism; he traces the influence which Dickens had upon the England of his time, he shows beyond question Dickens’s love of the dramatic and of acting, and how he came to spellbind huge audiences when he read aloud from David Copperfield and Bleak House. We follow the emergence of each book, observe the reaction upon reader and author, and watch how the links fit into that chain of circumstance which finally brought Dickens to his premature death in 1870.
In the second half of the book Maurois shifts from his right to his left hand. Few of us to-day remember that this French writer began his career as a novelist and that novel writing still fascinates him. As a novelist he evaluates the method, the characters, and the artistic importance of Dickens’s work. His knowledge of the emotions and the experience which are consumed in the creation of fiction, his skill in comparing Dickens’s novels with the work of the great Continental writers, his diagnosis of the strength and of the weakness in the big English oaks which Dickens planted, are throughout expressed with a clear and charming logic.
Here, then, is a volume which will whet the appetite of those who hunger for biography, which will explain to the layman the elements most involved in the writing of good novels, and which must stimulate any young writer to go and do likewise. I find myself surprised only by a single omission. Why does Maurois so deliberately avoid any analysis of The Tale of Two Cities, the one book in which Dickens did his best to write about the French?
For Harvard Men Only. Rollo Walter Brown, the biographer and novelist, has written in miniature as intimate and lovable a likeness of Dean Briggs as I have ever seen. He entitles his little book On Writing the Biography of a Modest Man (Harvard University Press, $1.00). The ‘modest man’ is, of course, L. B. R. Briggs, and with almost perfect perception Mr. Brown has caught the tone of the voice, the embarrassed shrugging of those shoulders, the warmth and crackling humor that — in the space of fifty pages — bring the Dean before the inner eye as we shall always remember him.
Beginning May the first, and thereafter at sixmonth intervals, the Atlantic will prepare a List of Recommended Books. This will not he published in the magazine, but will be available for distribution to institutions and to individuals.
EDWARD WEEKS