Young Renny
MAZO DE LA ROCHE
[Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $2.50]
ONE way of measuring Miss de la Roche’s accomplishment in creating the Jalna saga is to ask oneself how many other novels one remembers with such lasting clearness and pleasure. The concerns of the family of grown-up children named Whiteoak are of no worldshaking importance, and any lessons one may draw from their antics need no such prolonged illustration to make them comprehensible; and yet from the live stories so far published one gets an almost startling picture of life as lived during the past three generations, as well as a fresh realization of various old truths about life in general.
The reason for this freshness is that the Whiteoaks are a family who live by their instincts, only slightly hampered by their traditions. It is their traditions that keep them from being completely wild; it is their unthinking fidelity to their passions that keeps them from being predictable. For the pride of race is so hot in them that they could very easily become snobs, but their soul-stuff is so tough, their pugnacity and egotism so strong, that they never let their class-consciousness get in the way of their desires.
The theme that runs through the entire series is the strength of blood. They are like the breeds of horses and dogs which play such a part in their life. Reading the latest novel of the series, Young Renny, I was amusingly reminded of the way in which traits much like theirs run unfailingly through generations of dogs or horses from one dominant ancestor.
Old Adeline Court, who would be a harridan if she had not a sense of humor and justice, is well aware that the Whiteoak traits are simply hers, however modified in her several children and grandchildren. Speaking of Ernest, the one mild and conventional member of the clan, she says: ‘I don’t see how your father and I ever got him.’ And at the end of the novel Malahide, aroused by anger to a prophetic strain, says of little Eden: ‘This is the flower of your flock, Philip, and I hope you will live to appreciate him. Give him to me and I will take him back to Ireland and make a civilized gentleman of him.’ Eden, it will be remembered, was to become a writer, as the still younger Finch was to be a musician — more civilized, perhaps, in Malahide’s sense, but no longer convinced, like the rest of the clan, that might makes right and the battle is to the strong.
In Young Renny, a retrospect which takes us back to 1906, we find the future Master of Jalna still a boy, though emerging into manhood. Granny Adeline is only eighty, Philip is still living, and Maurice is involved in that incident which is to postpone his marriage to Meg for twenty years, Ernest and Nicholas are already set in their mould. Augusta and her husband, Sir Edwin Buckley, or Bilgely, as Adeline persists in calling him, the Laceys, Alary, Meg, and Vera are all here, as are the babies, Piers and Eden. But the main theme is the struggle of Renny with his instincts — his lust for Lulu, his love of Vera, his hatred of Malahide, and his passion for power in the management of spirited horses. The rather melodramatic villain of the tale is Malahide Court, a sycophant, parasite, and cad, who fastens himself upon the family, wins the protection of old Adeline, and cannot be pried loose, even by the cruel practical jokes of Renny and Meg. It is only when Adeline is at last convinced of his real character that he packs up and leaves.
Of all the incidents in the book the one entitled ‘An Old Coat and an Old Mare’ seems to me the finest. It concerns merely the burning by Philip ot an old coat that had belonged to his father and the shooting by Renny of an old mare; but it furnishes a welcome insight into certain sentimental depths in Adeline, her son, and her grandson. Such incidents redeem the not very amusing vindictiveness of the young people and the incredible sycophancy of Malahide.
It is a great pleasure to reverse the usual process of fiction, by seeing characters develop, so to speak, backwards. That the author has succeeded in what must be a difficult task suggests that she all along has seen the Jalna folk as real people, who, being what they are now, must once have been thus and so. The clan portrayed in Young Renny would logically live on as they do through the series down to The Master of Jalna.
R. M. GAY