I WAS speaking last month of I lie young or middle novelists whose reputations were making up in England, and of the kind of books to be expected from them in the years ahead. Such speculation is like betting on race horses a year in advance, and perhaps no more profitable. But I’ll take my chances.
In England, as in this country, the social conscience strives to make itself felt both in fiction and in poetry. In England the threat of war is certainly more pressing than it is in our fiction. And in England I think there are signs that realism perse has reached an earlier saturation point than on our side of the water. It is premature to infer from this that a romantic reaction is now in motion, but the steady advance of the historical novels and the romantic blend discernible in books like My Son, My Son! by Howard Spring (Viking, $2.50) suggest that such a revival is possible.
My Son, My Son! is an eventful biographical novel covering the last half century in England and telling the story of the comparable relations between two fathers and their sons. The fathers are lifelong friends, and one does not have to read far to discover the parallels in their careers. Both men rise from humble beginnings in Manchester. They make first their money and then their artistic reputations side by side. William Essex, the Englishman, becomes a famous novelist, his pal Dermot O’Rearden becomes a skillful wood carver and designer. The Irishman marries first, then Essex, and their only sons are born on the same day. Then, over softly muted strings, you begin to hear the main theme of ‘O Absalom, my son, my son!' Both fathers try to give their sons the advantages they did not themselves possess, and both spoil them to death.
This is a romantic book despite the presence in it of scenes unquestionably drawn from life — like the bakery and the Wesleyan Chapel in Manchester, Donnelly’s visit to Heronwater, and the fighting in Ireland toward the close. Such scenes have the authentic ring, and it is because of them as much as through our curiosity that we take in so much else which is palpably romantic. The easy inflow of money and the effortless success of both artists are no more explicable than the deceit of young Oliver or the theatricality of characters like Eivia, Maeve, and Captain Judas. It seems to me that the closer you come to these people the clearer it is that they are obeying stage directions rather than the compulsion of life.
The romance covers much ground, and its procession of incidents lags only in the middle. Emotionalism and fortuitous effects here take the place of that unsparing realism which we have been accustomed to since the war.
