Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Novels and Novelists

Ask No Questions

Ask No Questions

The Romantic — By May Sinclair
The Last Fortnight — By Mary Agnes Hamilton
The Headland — By C. A. Dawson-Scott
The Passionate Spectator — By Jane Burr

It is not possible to doubt the sincerity of Miss Sinclair's intentions. She is a devoted writer of established reputation. What we do deplore is that she has allowed her love of writing to suffer the eclipse of psycho-analysis. To try to explain—for the author to stand to one side and point out the real difficulties—is that what she sees as her task? But all these four novels might be called studies in explanation. We do not know if the reader will find them as profoundly disconcerting as we have done, but in any case we trust he will not take it amiss if we offer that page 275 ‘little advice’ which, as they say, hurts no one. To begin with—in order to read these novels at all it is absolutely essential that the reader should make his mind a perfect blank. If he starts remembering other books he has read, murmuring over great names, recalling scenes that were brighter, freer, words that were longer even—he may count his time lost. If he looks up to wonder whether people are like this, he may never look down again. If the meaning of what he reads is as plain as the nose upon his face, that is not the moment to feel impatience; it is the moment to attend humbly and patiently to the psycho-analytical explanation of that meaning or that nose. But to our muttons.

‘The Romantic’ is a study of a coward. John Con-way falls in love with Charlotte Redhead:

‘Would you like to live with me, Charlotte….’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean—live with me without that.’

He explains:

‘Because—you don't understand, Charlotte—if I know a woman wants me, it makes me loathe her.’

‘It wouldn't, if you wanted her.’

‘That would be worse. I should hate her then if she made me go to her.’

Now Charlotte has already experienced physical love. She is just free of her ‘immense unique passion’ for Gibson Herbert.

Even then there was always something beyond it, something you looked for and missed, something you thought would come that never came. There was something he did. She couldn't remember…. She saw his thick fingers at dessert, peeling the peaches.

This being so, she is content to share life with John ‘without that.’ But even before the war breaks out her suspicions are being awakened by his curious behaviour page 276 when a cow is calving, and again when they are all but run down by a motor-car. Also she has three dreams about him. They are on a farm together; he likes farming.

Wounding the earth to sow in it and make it feed you…. Seeing the steel blade shine, and the long wounds coming in rows; hundreds of wounds wet and shining.

Then the war came with its larger opportunities, which he straightway embraces. Charlotte and John go out to Belgium—he in charge of motor ambulances, she as a chauffeur. And there it is gradually revealed to her that he is a coward, a bully, a brute. Gradually—but Dr. McClane, commandant of the McClane Corps, which shared their mess, had spotted John as a degenerate from the first moment. It was his business so to do; he was a psychotherapist. And every fresh proof of John's brutality is only what he expected. When the coward is shot in the back and dead, and Sutton, another member of the Corps, proposes marriage to Charlotte and she tries to explain that it is impossible because of the war, he (Sutton) believes it is the dead man between them and asks Charlotte to get McClane to explain John's soul. McClane does. He explains how John was forced to behave like that to readjust his power, as the psychoanalysts say. He explains how Charlotte's dreams were her ‘kicking against’ John. How John's ‘not wanting that’ was because ‘he suffered from some physical disability.’ He was afraid of women. In fact, he analyses John for Charlotte so that her mind may stop ‘the fight going on in it between your feeling … and your knowledge of him.’ When he has finished:

Then what she had loved was not John Conway, what she had hated was not he. He was this Something, tremendous and necessary, that escaped her judgment. You couldn't hate it with your loving or hating or your ceasing to love and hate….

page 277

But before we leave ‘The Romantic,’ we should point out Charlotte's obsession by her sexual experiences. First she wondered what the guests at the inn would think if they ‘knew.’ Then she ‘had to tell’ Gwinnie. Then she ‘had to tell’ John. Then she ‘had to tell’ Sutton. But why? That is another little problem for Dr. McClane.

Reader, do you remember a pianoforte solo which was extremely popular fifteen years ago? It was called ‘La Faute de la Pluie.’ Mingled with the dark bass there was a most pitiful treble and a recurring ‘cry,’ which we took at the time for a chime of bells, but which in the light of Mrs. Hamilton's novel we are inclined to think was the voice of a lost kitten. Mrs. Hamilton as good as tells us that if the weather had not been so dreadful—if it had stopped raining—if her heroine had been less drenched, sopping, wringing wet—if there had been no kitten—her tragedy might never have happened. Here is the story.

A mother and son, deeply attached to each other, combine to ruin the life of the son's wife. The conspirators are slightly common; the wife is exquisitely bred. It is therefore necessary—as the psycho-analysts would say—that to readjust their power they should torture her. So she is bullied, insulted, stormed at, scorned, and doors are slammed in her face. If this were not enougli—when the poor creature rescues from death a lame white kitten which, she even goes so far as to explain, is not so much a kitten to her as a symbol of her own misery, they fling it into the water-butt. Whereupon, haunted by its cries, Pauline flings herself after—but into ‘the canals.’ And there is Peace. If the reader's mind were a shade less blank, he might feel a mild surprise at the husband's going to bed in a room which he shares with his wife and not noticing that she is not in her bed. True, Mrs. Hamilton has been at pains to let slip that the beds were not side by side—but even so. Nay, more, he wakes, gets up in the morning, and does not notice that—either her bed has not been slept page 278 in or Susan has been in and made it! A trifle careless, surely, even for a heartless man.

Let us turn to Mrs. Dawson-Scott and the Red Pen-dragons, that ancient Cornish family that had, ‘like an apple, a spreading brown patch, a patch of decay.’ But we must let the quotations speak for themselves. There are no hard words in this novel, and there are an immense number of dots; they are so many and so frequent that we believe they must mean more than we have understood.

Cornwall. Old Mrs. Pendragon is dead.

‘It was the suddenness …’

‘You must of course believe …’

‘You would, but perhaps not at once.’

‘To sketch her dead face would help. Yes …’

Thus Roma Lennox, who had been the old lady's companion.

Cornwall. Roma sees the ploughman, Tavis Hawke, ‘the man who brought the bread into being …’

Cornwall. Richbell Hawke in her kitchen.

When baby came!

… If baby were to come to-day … to-morrow, she need not worry. Plenty of food in the house … from snout to tail, pig's meat was good.

Reader, pray, your attention here! Baby has come!

Her gesture—bent head, curving body, smile—was ineffable. Eve, mother of all living, had looked like that when the Lord God, still walking—though it was no longer Eden—in the cool of the evening, had lifted the tent flap and asked to see her first-born.

Was it—could it have been the same evening?

But about that spot. Hendre Pendragon, the son, knew it was there.

Like splashes of red-hot paint on a midnight background, the deeds he had done…. Done them secretly, in corners, in holes. Such a dull existence…

page 279

To readjust his power—as the psycho-analysts would say—he decides to marry Roma, who consents, until she realizes she loves the ploughman and belongs to him.

Wonderful! And so simple. No argument needed or possible. A plain duty which spelt happiness. Such utter bliss….

But Hendre Pendragon? Happily for her, ‘man and dog went down together into the raging sea.’ Just in time!

Miss Jane Burr is out to explain love—‘the glow of passion.’ ‘I want to tell if I can how that glow was awakened in me.’ She wants to tell her sorrowing sisters that if an attractive gentleman gives them a bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley or ‘a five-pound box of Shaw & Page candy,’ there is no reason why they should not thank him just as adequately as he and they may wish. Why not? Her heroine guarantees there is no feeling of guilt next morning. And it is a thousand to one their husbands are doing just the same.

But Miss Jane Burr and her explanation disgust us.

(October 22, 1920.)