Reader's Choice

THE most satisfying novel I have come across so far this year is Back (Viking, $3.00) by the pseudonymous English writer Henry Green, the author of Loving and Nothing. Henry Green has, I believe, solved in his work three of the most challenging problems that confront the modern novelist. He has forged a refreshingly distinctive style which retains the concreteness of naturalism while banishing its flatness with a strong infusion of poetry. He has restored to the novel enchantment— overtones of fable and mystery — in terms completely acceptable to the hardheaded reader. And further, he gives an accounting of contemporary life that is ruthlessly clear-eyed, totally free from sentimentality and cant, and yet admits of solutions of the problem of happiness. He has found a stance that is both positive and persuasive: one that has enabled him to rescue the “happy ending” from the slums of literature, dress it up respectably and restore it to polite society.

In speaking of Green’s “stance” I do not mean an explicit system of values, a “philosophy,” but simply his immensely sane, infallibly mature response to life. While scrutinizing the changes, the disintegration, the pervasive anxiety of our time, Green conserves a sense of human proportion, a sense of beauty, an entranced sensuality, and a curious kind of tenderness which find in life a sufficient ration of value. He is a novelist who makes considerable demands on the reader, and some have found him too cold and too mannered for their liking. I am sure, at any rate, that Back will delight his present following and strengthen its numbers. I know of no novel about the war veteran’s homecoming which can compare with it.

Back is, undeniably, an outrageous tour de force, whose only justification is its complete success; if the reader were not seduced by Green’s exquisite artistry, he would rebel against the continual knock and echo of coincidence; against the hallucination which colors the entire landscape of the novel. When Charley Summers is

repatriated, minus a leg, after five years in a German prison camp, he is possessed by the memory of a girl called Rose, who died while he was at war. He lives in a daze, plodding numbly through his day’s work in an office; and in his shell-shocked mind, everything conspires to remind him of Rose. When one day he calls on a young war widow, Nancy Whitmore, Charley finds himself face to face with Rose herself—only the color of her hair has changed.

Charley is convinced that Nancy is his Rose, and he sees a sinister plot in everyone’s denials: a plot which reflects the puzzling, hostile ways of the civilian world, in which “everything [is] the same — and at the same time different.” And now we follow, at close range, the coming together of a split mind; the slow, incredulous acceptance of reality, and the rapturous rediscovery of love — a new rendering, immensely of our time, of the old fable of love’s victory over the evil spell. Back is, in the most literal sense, a beautiful book, glowingly suffused with the image and color of roses. It hardens my conviction that Henry Green is one of the most rewarding and important of contemporary novelists.

“He was more like the great Sir John Falstaff than any other human being I have known,” Richard Aldington once said of the late and legendary Ford Madox Ford. Immensely prolific, Ford wrote a great, many inconsequential books but he also wrote at least five novels — The Good Soldier and the Tietjens tetralogy— which, though rather neglected in their day, have since been very highly praised by some of the most demanding critics. Now the four Tietjens novels, published at intervals during the twenties, can be read as they were meant to be, in a single long volume: Parade’s End: The Tietjens Saga (Knopf, $5.00). Although it has dull stretches and is occasionally confusing in its abrupt changes of time and place, Parade’s End has a driving power and a richness of content which are seldom encountered in the novels of today.

Dominating Ford’s huge canvas, which spans the decade of the First World War, is the bulky, tormented, and sympathic figure of Christopher Tietjens, “The Last English Tory, genuinely omniscient, slightly contemptuous— and sentimental in his human contacts.“ This Tietjens is a splendid creation on the grand scale, and around him there is a cluster of masterly characterizations. His wife, Sylvia, a “rent beauty and an implacable destroyer. His eldest brother, the “indispensable“ high civil servant, with his undeviating code and his faultlessly discreet French housekeeper-mistress. The parvenu MacMaster, who creeps his sycophantic way along the bureaucratic path to knighthood. And many more.

On the surface, the story is the tragedy of a superior man undeservedly ruined by slander. The scurrilous rumors about Tietjens are originated by his wife, who finds his unfailing courtesy, balance, and moral steadfastness an intolerable reproach to her own instability. When she realizes how passionately he attracts her, she attacks him still more sadistically, even while (in the two middle volumes) he is in the trenches. Everyone believes her, and on all sides Tietjens becomes an object of hatred. What damns him, really, is his very excellence. His flawless manners, his high ideals, the whole of the gentlemanly tradition he embodies, are an offense to a world that has rejected them. Tietjens stoically allows himself to be discredited and disinherited, but eventually salvages a measure of personal happiness out of disaster.

As Robio Macauley points up in his very fine Introduction, the war is treated here as symptomatic of a general and anterior process of dissolution. Ford saw a profound connection between manners and morals, and to him the breakup of the Tory order and its code represented a farreaching collapse of human values. His saga’s underlying theme, made concrete in Tietjens’s experience, is tho crumbling of a whole phase of Western civilization.

It could easily be argued that Ford’s is a romantic view of the Tory order, and that the exit of the “Last Tory” is inadequate as an allegory of the general disintegration. As for Tietjens, he is so altogether the chevalier sans reprnche that one understands too readily why his wife runs amuck. His disdainful passivity in the face of persecution put me in mind of the French poet, crazed with romanticism, who scornfully remarked that living was a coarse affair which you left to your valet.

These considerations did not seriously interfere with my enjoyment since Ford has handsomely discharged the novelist’s essential duties. He has created a watertight and very real world of his own. He takes firm possession of the reader and he keeps him loyally and stirringly involved in the fate of Christopher Tietjens.

The theme of the Tictjens saga has also been one of the underlying motifs in Sir Osbert Sitwell‘s great autobiography— in contrast, to Tietjens of Groby, Sitwell of Renishaw has certainly not felt that noblesse oblige obliged him not to speak up for himself. Now, in the fifth and final volume of his memoirs, Noble Essences (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $4.50), he retraces his stops and seeks “to delineate the era and myself through the portraits of others, people of exceptional talent, wit or genius.”

Sir Osbert’s portraiture is very close indeed to painting. It makes relatively little difference to the result whether or not the subject is, by conventional standards, “good copy”; Sitwell’s artistry creates the interest.

His chief concern is not to explain character or to present the wellrounded view, but to recapture the living presence that ho knew; to make that presence, clothed in its distinetive aura and the aura of its time, live and breathe before the reader‘s eye.

Certainly Virginia Woolf‘s astringent essay on the eminent Sir Edmund Gosse is more telling, as evaluation, than Sir Osbert‘s mellow portrait. And Sitwell’s portrayal of D‘Annunzio is sheer adoration. But these “courteous,” self-revelatory revelations have their own kind of strength, a miraculous power of evocation: a miracle achieved by the astonishing concreteness of the author’s memory; the immense skill of his composition; and the beauty, the virtuosity of his prose.

Sir Osbert uses a minimum of biographical data. His method is to fasten on characteristic traits, mental and physical, brief incidents, anecdotes, the inflection of a voice, the décor of a room suggestive of its owner’s personality — to seek out, constantly, “the spirit of a moment that makes it live and sparkle.”

We see the lonely, fantastic Ronald Firbank— he looked like a kind of “decadent Red Indian”—joining an impecunious friend at the Café Royal, slipping him a pound to pay for their two lunches, and happily exclaiming, “How wonderful to be a guest!" We see the lady novelist, Ada Leverson, pouring a bottle of Chanel Numéro Cing over herself and her visitors, because, she explained, a really clever woman needed extra-strong support. We see W. H. Davies — the poet who had been a sailor, a hobo, a goldrusher— trying on his first good suit at a fashionable tailor‘s and disclosing that his underwear consisted entirely of newspapers pinned together. Sir Osbert offers us a host of witty sayings and witty anecdotes (and some, inevitably, which seem overvalued). Here, in sum, is a portrait gallery of writers and painters that is hung with near masterpieces.

At the beginning of Noble Essences, Sir Osbert reaffirms his conviction “that only by the magic of art, or of individuality, can men save themselves.” On the last page, he writes, “ Let it be said of me, as my apologia, that I have followed the lines I traced for myself in the right hand, rather than those inalterably incised in my left [by birth and tradition] . . . that I perceived in art the spirit made concrete and the flesh made eternal.” This faith in the saving grace of art has been the leitmotif of the entire autobiography, and it is nobly vindicated by the completed work — a triumph of coherence wrested From a chaotic era.

Ideas and Men (Prentice-Hall, $6.00) by Crane Brinton, Professor of Ancient and Modern History at Harvard, is a comprehensive “story of western thought” or “intellectual history” ranging from Anaximander to Linstein and Sartre, from Platonism to Positivism. Dr. Brinton’s study is focused on “how ideas work in the world“; he is concerned with a kind of knowledge — moral and political wisdom — which, in contrast to scientific knowledge, has not shown a pattern of steady growth through the centuries. Intellectual history, as Dr. Brinton points out, is a form of research which has a direct bearing on the largest of contemporary issues: the fact that man‘s power (applied scientific knowledge) has by far outstripped his understanding and control of human behavior, and now threatens him with catastrophe.

Presented as an introductory guidebook, Ideas and Men certainly enables the layman to follow Western civilization through its “adventure of ideas” with the irreducible minimum

of strain and a good deal of enjoyment. The style is brisk, the erudition vast, the exposition simple and systematic. I had the impression that Dr. Brinton tended to simplify rather more than the pressures of brevity made necessary, and that he overstrained, in general, to wear his brow low. Unquestionably, however. Ideas and Men is a popularized history of a high order.

No historian can help being swayed by certain guiding opinions; and Dr. Brinton‘s are, on the face of things, unobjectionable: he clearly believes that society has much to gain from a commonly held transcendental faith, and he is strongly attached to the democratic philosophy which exalts “the common man.” The latter attachment, though, has hazards for the intellectual historian at a time when one of his chief tasks is, in his own accounting, to investigate “the comparative failure” of the democratic promise. Dr. Brinton, it seems to me, is begging a central question when, as he often does in commenting on a system or society, he invokes our notion of democracy as a touchstone. He is somewhat cool to the achievement of Athens, to the contribution of the Humanists, and to the whole Renaissance, because in each case he discerns — and dislikes — the aristocratic spirit. Surely the intellectual historian should remain keenly alive to the possibility that we may have much to learn from the aristocratic spirit, or any other.

Another book of history designed to shed light on the contemporary situation is war and Cirilization (Oxford University Press, $2.50), a collection of nine papers extracted by Albert Vann Fowler from Arnold ,J. Toynbee‘s six-volume A Study of History. Most of this material, which deals with militarism and war, did not appear in the one-volume condensation of Toynbee‘s Study.

The militarist society and the ultimately suicidal outcome of militarism are examined through the history of Sparta and Assyria, and the career of Timur Lenk. The Roman Republic in the second century B.c. furnishes the text for a reading on what Toynbee calls “the intoxication of victory“— the complacency and degeneration that, set in after a great war has been won. One essay develops the thesis that progress in military technique is accompanied by a setback in civilization. Elsewhere, Toynbee discusses the defeats suf. fered by various societies through the “idolization of technique“ — the conviction that, possessing a superior military technique, they were invincible. The opening chapter is a concise Statement of Toynbee‘s famous argument that we are now in the acute phase of a “Time of Troubles.”

Professor Toynbee is, of course, always well worth reading, but the extracts which make up War and Civilization have not, to my mind, quite the immediacy or interest of the essays in Toynbee’s Civilization an Trial.

The latest novel by A.J. Cronin. The Spanish Gardener (Little, brown, $3.00), is a story about the paternal counterpart of Momism presumably Popism. It opens with the arrival of Harrington Brande and his nine-year-old son in the small Spanish town of San Jorge, where Brande is taking his post as American Consul. The Consul is one of those monstrously self-deluded men, blinded by colossal vanity, who imagine themselves vastly superior beings, unappreciated and ill-treated by the world. 11 is wife has left him; publishers have spurned the biography on which he has lavished so much labor; and, after fifteen years in the State Department, he linds himself relegated to a backwater. The truth is that Brande— I kept visualizing Clifton Webb in the role — is a stuffed shirt, a snob, and a petty tyrant, whose suave manners fail to conceal a deep streak of sadism.

The neurotic possessiveness which cost Braude his wife has become focused on his son, Nicholas, who is sickly from overcoddling and desperately lonely. He is utterly enchanted when the gardener, José, a friendly, athletic young man — the most dashing player on the local pelota team — invites him to help plant the seedlings. And now, for the first time, Nicholas finds a friend and a hero. The small boy‘s touching discovery of happiness; his father‘s jealous haired of José; the sinister intervention of a criminal butler and a shady psychiatrist— these become the main strands in a skillfully mounted drama that stirs anger and compassion.

There is nothing, I must add, in the fabric of this drama which I did not seem to have encountered before. The Spanish Gardener is a “wellmade” novel, not an exceptional one. I