The Facts of Fiction

by Norman Collins

  “You are a one for being round about,” says the lady.

  “Well you’re not so plain you know.”

  “Not plain?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t mean to say that I’m round about?”

  “No. I mean to say—though-” Pause.

  “Well? ”

  “You’re not a bit plain—you’re” (his voice jumps up to a squeak) “pretty, see? ”

  “Oh, get out! ” Her voice lifts also—with pleasure.

  She strikes him with her glove.

  That is about thirty seconds of Kipps’s private minute. No one can read of it without realising that those sharp, sure sentences were written by a man whose mind strips every scene down to its bare bones. No one, that is, who is in the least interested in the mechanics of authorship.

  Mr. Wells’s books, indeed, are full of vivid, urgent writing in which the idea moves forward with splendid insistency. Even in short passages such as this from The War of the Worlds we can feel the quick impulse of the energetic mind of a vigorous man:

  It was sweeping round swiftly and steadily, this flaming death, this invisible, inevitable sword of heat. I perceived it coming towards me by the flashing bushes it touched, and was too astounded and stupefied to stir. I heard the crackle of fire in the sand-pits and the sudden squeal of a horse that was as suddenly stilled. Then it was as if an invisible yet intensely heated finger were drawn through the heather between me and the Martians, and all along a curving line beyond the sand-pits the dark ground smoked and crackled.

  No two pieces of writing could be more unlike. But together they are very like Mr. Wells. For Mr. Wells lived two lives. One a poor shabby, miserable little life between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. And another from fifteen onwards, during which his busy brain has been buzzing all the time like a dynamo. During those two early years he served behind a counter in a draper’s shop. And the manner of a shop-assistant bringing down box upon box of things to sell—even though they should happen to be theories of education and pacifist treatises and not cottons and tapes—has never entirely left him.

  Neither has he altogether lost the manner he acquired at the Royal College of Science in the ’eighties. He has remained ever since the educated, almost over-educated, student in the vanguard of scientific progress; the young man with an eye on creation.

  His scientific romances of the kind of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds are really fairy-tales designed to satisfy the modern credulity. They are the product of the alert, scholarship-winning brain of a B.Sc. Lond., and of the dreamy, roaming mind of a small draper’s apprentice who would sneak off for a quiet thought or two; a combination of a trained intelligence and a natural imagination.

  If Mr. Wells had not written anything but these works we should still have reason to congratulate ourselves on the scholarship system. But it is those novels of the type of Love and Mr. Lewisham, Kipps and Mr. Polly which are our main concern. These works are romances of success; pilgrimages from the Third-Class in life to the First. And it is the inevitable cosmic progress of nature towards perfection that Mr. Wells is showing us as it manifests itself in the social betterment of an awkward little tradesman.

  It is such closely observed, and humorously imagined, and patiently recorded novels as these and Ann Veronica that are really self-supporting in the world of fiction. The others of the kind of The World of William Clissold and Meanwhile are the work of a man who is a journalist before he is a novelist, a man whose thoughts present themselves with the ephemeral emphasis of headlines.

  If Mr. Wells had been just a little less perfect as a thinking machine he would have appeared a far larger figure in fiction. Books have poured out from him by the bushel; and somewhere beneath that bushel his light of fiction has become hidden.

  * * *

  It is a strange thing that if one were to attempt a portrait of Mr. Galsworthy the dramatist, one would have to draw one man, and if one were to attempt the portrait of Mr. Galsworthy the novelist, one would have to draw a totally different man.

  The first portrait would be that of a humanitarian who is so humane that he is almost a humaniac; a man with a wet handkerchief on his blotting pad. The second would be that of a country gentleman of culture; a man with a spaniel in the library. Of the two, the first is possibly the more interesting figure, the man who takes the part of the fox against the hounds, of the prisoner against the gaoler, of the rabbit against the sportsman, and of the prostitute against the policeman. It is the more interesting because it is the more startling.

  At Mr. Galsworthy’s cradle one might with no more than averagely good luck have been able to take a shot at the future and predict that this son of a barrister and a company director would one day become an elegant, respectable author. And if one remembers him as the author only of The Forsyte Saga and A Modern Comedy, the most magnificent social history of our time, one would have been perfectly right.

  But there is always the other Mr. Galsworthy, the gentleman gone rogue, and gone rogue in a gentlemanly angelic fashion. There is something at once savage and benign about this other Mr. Galsworthy. He is the sort of man who might walk out of Tattersall’s Ring and give his tail-coat to a beggar. It is because he is this St. Francis with an Oxford accent that he is so puzzling to us. A creature has got only to be hurt or be hunted to have Mr. Galsworthy on its side for ever.

  Actually this common sympathy for all things occasionally almost destroys his common sense for some things. Thus, one of his later plays, Escape, is not only mawkish but muddled. The play opens with one of those persuasive, eloquent, clergyman’s-daughter type of prostitute who might be first cousin to Clare in The Fugitive, sitting on a seat in Hyde Park on the look-out for a customer. She sees a possible client, one of those easy, chatting, manicured Galsworthian males, and speaks to him. After a light exchange of persiflage about the oldest profession and the horrors of a life of vice, the impatient male manages to break away, and a plain-clothes man quite naturally arrests the woman for accosting. At once the elegant male returns, tells a thin story about an evening chat, advises the prostitute to run away, hits the detective on the jaw and kills him, and then stands up in the spotlight for us to admire him as the defender of the weak against the bully; of Woman against her oppressor, Man; of the victim of stupid legislation against persecuting Justice.

  We are uncomfortably aware that it is less than half the truth that Mr. Galsworthy is showing us. The prostitute is a lurking spider, with envenomed blood waiting for the innocent male fly to destroy him. The plain-clothes man is there courageously performing his distasteful and apparently dangerous work of preserving the fly from the spider. He dies a martyr to service, and to a public school code of manners that cannot distinguish between a damsel in distress and a danger in the streets.

  I am not pretending that all men who cross Hyde Park by night are innocent, or that all plain-clothes men are gentle philanthropic creatures supported through their doubts and difficulties by the beautiful thought of male chastity. But I am suggesting that it is at least as near the truth as Mr. Galsworthy’s view.

  That sort of hæmorrhage of the compassionate heart dries up outside the plays. The novels are sentimental as well as sensitive; but they deal with hearts and not with causes. They never become propaganda in the cause of convincing God that he has been behaving like the very Devil. The only sacrifice on the altar of compassion in the whole extent of the Forsyte tapestry is Miss Collins’s selling her sense of shame to save her unemployed husband and consenting to be painted in the nude.

  Mr. Galsworthy as a writer of any sort was unfortunate in the accident of his birth. Harrow and New College are all wrong for a novelist. Hoxton Elementary School and the Free Library are immeasurably to be preferred. The shortcomings of understanding that resulted from Mr. Galsworthy’s education are to be seen in the instant he leaves the silver spoon and clockwise port atmosphere of the Forsytes for the poor. Then he is like Thackeray imagining a new race
with expressions like those of the figures on an illustrated charity appeal.

  The Forsyte Saga is the book that we might have expected Mr. Galsworthy to write. It is the novel of Success that begins a generation after the Kipps period in the family has closed. It is the unique record of a world whose members are usually mute, the most accurate account in our national fiction of respectable English acquisitiveness.

  Mr. Galsworthy’s singular genius for capturing the forms and expressions of thought of a class that are loved by none so much as they love themselves—the upper middle class that moves in the limbo between tenant and title—has led to a great injustice having been paid to him. Mr. Galsworthy has been represented as a Deity in a college blazer telling the world that so long as it plays a straight bat, is courteous to women, and produces he-ancients of the calibre of Normal McKinnell all will be well.

  In reality this is not a representation but a misrepresentation. The whole business of showing Mr. Galsworthy as an articulate prisoner in one little social cell has been absurdly overdone. A man has to be outside a thing before he can draw it. A complete prisoner, like a life-sentence man, or the Pope, would be a poor sort of person to draw an elevation of Wormwood Scrubs or the Vatican. And the Forsytes are the most perfect elevation in our literature of a family who are interesting not only because of what they are but because of what they happen to be. The inevitable accident of their birth is as fascinating and important as the avoidable accidents of their lives.

  But The Forsyte Saga is a great deal more than an account of property and of the changes in the values than mankind has placed upon different kinds of it. Otherwise it wquld be no more interesting than an estate-agent’s ledger. The characters that appear in the passing pageant of the Forsyte generations are really actors in a Morality play. And it is a new Morality that they represent. It is a Morality in which Divorce is a deliverance and not a damnation. Soames and Irene break apart not as two sinners in defiance of divine law but as an electric magnet and its keeper when the essential current is turned off. “The very simple truth that underlies the whole story,” the author has uncompromisingly declared, “is that where sex attraction is utterly and definitely lacking in one partner to a union, no amount of pity, or reason, or duty, or what not, can overcome a repulsion implicit in Nature.” That Soames remarries for the Forsytish reason that he wants an heir is really not so important as that he remarries for the ordinary male reason that he meets an unusually pretty girl.

  Mr. Galsworthy created Soames in the shape of a Malvolio who is perpetually wondering why the world does not love him more than it does; and he conceived Irene in the shape of Olivia equally puzzled as to why Soames should imagine that she loves him at all. There is no more hopeless tragedy in life than the breakdown of relationship and the break-up of a home when two mature, intelligent people, both in the right and both fully aware of it, simply sicken of each other. And there is nothing harder to describe than the collapse of conjugality, without making one party appear a monster and the other a martyr.

  The measure of Mr. Galsworthy’s honesty of purpose and open-eyed sincerity of vision may be gauged from the way in which he exhibits Soames as being “unlovable without quite thick enough skin to be thoroughly unconscious of the fact,” and not only within his rights but absolutely right in asking Irene for what she is not prepared to give; and shows us also Irene “a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world,” out to save her soul by saving herself from Soames.

  What has earned Mr. Galsworthy a reputation for sentiment as a novelist is his habit of looking at life as it recedes from him. He is like a lonely man on a crowded platform who watches a departing train. An uninvited, SFundismissible, irrational sadness invades the mind. There are many passages in The Forsyte Saga written in the mood that hangs over the lonely man before the porter comes along to clear the platform:

  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.

  The New Battle of the Books

  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 an
d 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.