The Facts of Fiction (31 page)

Opening the drawer he took from the sachet a handkerchief, and the framed photograph of Fleur. When he looked at it a little he slipped it down, and there was that other one—that old one of Irene. An owl hooted while he stood in the window gazing at it. The owl hooted, the red climbing roses seemed to deepen in colour, there came a scent of lime-blossom. God! That had been a difficult thing. Passion—Memory! Dust!

We seem almost to hear the melancholy train whistle. It was the same even when Soames was merely burying the dog. And it was the same, only better expressed, when Soames sat on Highgate Hill:

The waters of change were foaming in, carrying the promise of new forms only when their destructive flood should have passed its full. He sat there, subconscious of them, but with his thoughts resolutely set on the past—as a man might ride into a wild night with his face to the tail of his galloping horse. Athwart the Victorian dykes the waters were rolling on property, manners, and morals, on melody and the old forms of art—waters bringing to his mouth a salt taste as of blood, lapping to the foot of this Highgate Hill where Victorianism lay buried. And sitting there, high up on its most individual spot, Soames—like a figure of Investment—refused their restless sounds. Instinctively he would not fight them—there was in him too much
primeval wisdom, of Man the possessive animal. They would quiet down when they had fulfilled their tidal fever of dispossessing and destroying; when the creations and the properties of others were sufficiently broken and dejected—they would lapse and ebb, and fresh forms would rise based on an instinct older than the fever of change—the instinct of Home.

Mr. Galsworthy seems very like Soames in all that. He is the same elderly Englishman, standing apart, sedate, superior, a little supercilious. And just a little anxious about himself.

When a survey of this kind reaches the present day the expression of the writer can usually be seen to change from that of a trained observer grandly watching a race from a distance to that of a nervous man on the course anxiously trying to spot the winner. Fiction becomes merely a list of names, all promising and all as well picked with a pin as with the mind.

It would be tempting, for instance, to write expansively of how Mr. Priestley has restored to the Novel the old elements of robust good-humour and concrete exactness of description, and has produced novels of a kind that are compared with Dickens, only because the eighteenth century which is their real origin has been forgotten; of how Mr. Hugh Walpole has lately neglected the sensitive part of his brain that produced works like
Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill
—a marvellously exact and subtle description of the wearing frictions that spring up when people are driven into as close company as monks—and has chosen to expend himself on the Herries series in which he is the biggest painter at the largest canvas with the wettest brush now working; of Mr. Aldous Huxley whose
Point Counter Point
is what the French call “the voice of the modern consciousness,” disillusioned, a little strident and educated to the teeth; of Mr. Arlen, with all the brightness and some of the brains of Disraeli, casting his amused, Armenian eyes around the artificial English scene; of Miss Delafield and Miss Rose Macaulay and Miss Margaret Kennedy and Miss Theodora Benson and the author of
Elizabeth,
women who can be relied upon
to supply all the wit that can be needed to balance the heaviness of much modern male talent; of the impudent genius of Mr. David Garnett and Mr. John Collier; and of an endless succession of writers of distinguished talent. And though by that method the chapters would become as full and fat as a store's catalogue, by next year it would be as out of date as the store's catalogue of last year. To postpone the task for thirty years would be the only way of performing it in true perspective.

I propose, therefore, to leave the great men of the present, the Walpoles and Priestleys and thé Mottrams, and describe one of the historic attacks on the continuity of English fiction, an attack that has begun a New Battle of the Books.

The offensive was launched in 1922 by Mr. James Joyce with
Ulysses
and has been supported in fierce little sallies, which the critics have tended to treat as Aunt-Sallies, with
Anna Livia Plurabelle
and
Haveth Childers Everywhere
which are portions of the author's “Work in Progress.”

The extent of the influence of Mr. James Joyce is uncertain. Arnold Bennett, for example, praised him extravagantly but continued to write like Mr. Bennett and not like Mr. Joyce. Nevertheless there are hints and echoes and acknowledgments of Mr. Joyce in the work of a score of the younger writers who are uncertain of their aim but are determined that it shall be into the future.

Mr. Joyce is the best example of himself that can be found. His disciples are mostly timid with the timidity of half-conviction. This is not surprising, because Mr. Joyce is not only a courageous prophet but an outrageous punster; and the reader never knows for certain whether he has missed the message or merely missed the joke.

What Mr. Joyce has been endeavouring to do is to
present the impressions of the outside world, not as they exist crystallised and mature, within the minds of his characters but as they enter the mind one by one. In this he is like a man at a beehive who is not interested in extracting the honey, but who sits contentedly plucking out the separate bees as they reach the end of their little tunnel. An unprejudiced observer may be forgiven for thinking that if he went farther he would fare better.

Ulysses
proceeds in prose such as this:

First night when I saw her at Mat Dillon's in Terenure. Yellow, black lace she wore. Musical chairs. We two the last. After her. Fate. Round and round slow. Quick round. We too. All looked. Halt. Down she sat. All ousted round. Lips laughing. Yellow knees.

Then there are passages in which the author sits down to enjoy himself with words; passages in which the literary critic should give place to the musical critic. And quite nice music many of them would be too—to a man who did not know English. For example:

He rests. He has travelled.

With?

Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Mindbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.

That is melodious enough; a variation on a well-known theme. It is a victory for sound at the expense of sense. It
is to writing simply what humming is to conversation. Indeed, the Duchess's advice in
Alice in Wonderland,
“Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves” is more truly in line with the orthodox theory of literature. And it is worthy of note that when the characters are drunk Mr. James Joyce's straying sentences are most suitable for their purpose.

Ulysses
would be a simpler piece of work if it were by a man who were no more than a joker. But the author is for ever obstinately giving us proofs that he is a scholar also; or at least a man who has gone into the library, and the dictionary, at A and come out again at Z, having remembered all the names he met with on the way. Thus we come upon such passages as this:

the natural grammatical transition by inversion involving no alteration of sense of an aorist preterite proposition (parsed as masculine subject, monosyllabic, onomatopoeic transitive verb with direct feminine object) from the active voice into its correlative aorist preterite proposition (parsed as feminine subject, auxiliary verb and quasimono-syllabic onomatopoeic past participle with complementary masculine agent) in the passive voice …

which leaves us wondering whether the mind that wrote it is profound, funny or simply fuddled.

As we proceed we find ourselves following up long passages of archaic or technical prose, and identifying more obscure references, Greek and Gaelic, topical and obscene, than it seems fair of any writer to impose on his readers. If it were not that Mr. Stuart Gilbert in his wonderfully patient
James Joyce's “Ulysses ”: A Study
has made an elaborate tracing-paper which, when laid over the original, explains the allusions, many of them would
be lost to the reader who has not read where Mr. Joyce's spirit has listed.

Even more common than the classical references are the sexual references. And it is possible to have a great respect for the experimentalist with words who wrote
Ulysses
and still wonder whether the intellectual proportions of the novel are not a little gawkish, and whether Life really takes its business of reproduction so seriously that it can never forget about it.

The novel is comprised of descriptions of one long, lecherous day in a Dubliner's life with the heady drums of sex continuously sounding. It was for the frankness of the language of some of the scenes, notably the one set in the brothel, and of the long monologue of the nymphomaniac woman lying in bed that led to the banning of
Ulysses.
Actually there was not the slightest need for the censor to act. No one who could derive the slightest harm from
Ulysses
could ever have struggled through it as far as to arrive at the regions of danger.

It may be wondered how it is that Mr. Joyce has exercised any influence at all. And it may be due to the fact that he remains a fascinating figure no matter whether he is regarded as a valiant pioneer leaving his footprints startlingly distinct across the virgin snows of the mind—which is a perfectly just view—or merely as a man industriously and conscientiously commiting literary suicide. For Mr. James Joyce is either an Evangelist of a new literary faith or a man who has contrived on the strength of earlier works to be admitted to the home and has then committed
hara-kiri
on the best carpet.

In his earlier novel,
Portrait of the Artist as a young Man,
Mr. Joyce revealed himself as a writer whose prose was as vivid as vermilion yet as plain as paint. And occasionally in
Ulysses
such an adjective as “crucified,”
when applied to a shirt hanging on a line, sets us wondering whether any writer has ever used isolated words with so much effect before.

In
Haveth Childers Everywhere,
however, one is set wondering whether any writer has ever used them to less:

Amtsadam, sir, to you! Eternest cittas, heil! Here we are again. I am bubub brought up her under a camel act of dynasties long out of print, the first of Shitric Shinkanbeard (or is it Owllaugh MacAuscullpth the Thord?), but, in pontofacts massimust, I am known throughout the world wherever my good Allengliches Angleslachen is spoken by Sall and Will from August-anus to Ergastulus, as this is, whether in Farnum's rath or Condra's ridge or the meadows of Dalkin or Monkish tunshep, by saints and sinners eyeye alike as a clean-living man and, as a matter of fict, by my half-wife, I think how our public at large appreciates it most highly from me that I am as cleanliving as could be and that my game was a fair average since I perpetually kept my ouija ouija wicket up.

In experiment Mr. Joyce has taught the lesson and set the fashion. Novels in which the only action is that which exists between mind and mind, and consciousness and consciousness, or takes place within the sphere of one consciousness, are now common. From Mr. Faulkner to Miss Sylva Norman the younger writers have shown that they have learnt the lesson and are in the fashion.

Mrs. Virginia Woolf, in
To the Lighthouse
and
Jacob's Room
and most remarkably in
The Waves,
has shown what an exquisitely graceful and orderly mind, educated in the tradition, can make of a disorderly modern method. In
Orlando,
a story in which neither Time nor Sex is as constant as it is in life, there is again to be seen that restless
impatience with what have hitherto been regarded as the invariables, that is at the back of the modern mind.

That the novel at its most orthodox is still paying a handsome dividend of attention is indisputable. There is, however, an apparent discontent with orthodoxy. In reality this means very little more than that men have discovered the novel to be the medium in which any sort of thought can most easily be expressed. Thus so abstract and mystical a mind as that of Mr. Charles Williams, which in any other age would have turned, as Donne's turned, to poetry, brings its Platonics and symbols to fiction, and encases them in
The Place of the Lion
in the form of a “thriller ” that is as formally correct as a sonnet, yet as exciting as its modern shape suggests.

One has only to remember
The Good Companions,
strong with the inherited strength of the huge family of picturesque, picaresque English novels that have gone before it, healthy, humorous and supremely honest about its intention of being purely a good story and not an essay in psychology, normal or otherwise and, say, the most recent of Mrs. Woolf, and Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover
and Mr. Tomlinson's
Gallion's Reach,
and Mr. Evelyn Waugh's
Vile Bodies
—to plot no more than a few points on the map of fiction of 1931—to see what an area of the human mind the novel covers to-day; and why as fast as definitions of the Novel are devised a new novel comes along to destroy it.

If one can make any generalisation about the modern novel it is that it is always strenuously endeavouring to do something else. The novel has become, like the sonnet, an exercise in ingenuity as well as a statement of life. Mr. Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury,
for example, begins by being told by a congenital idiot, whose mental development is infantile, who has no sense of the passage of time
and whose brain hands him out thoughts upside down and in the wrong order. For some reason—possibly a sense of fatigue, possibly a sense of failure—Mr. Faulkner, however, finally turns to a rational mind to complete the narration.