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Novels and Novelists

A ‘Real’ Book and an Unreal One

A ‘Real’ Book and an Unreal One

All these Young Men — By Romer Wilson
Living Alone — By Stella Benson

Whereas Miss Stella Benson declares that hers is not a real book—it does not deal with real people nor should it be read by them—we feel that Miss Romer Wilson would say the exact opposite of her novel, ‘If All these Young Men.’ Both are about the war. We suppose it will be long and long before the novelist, looking about him for a little wood wherewith to light his fire, does not turn instinctively to that immense beach strewn with wreckage. page 104 But Miss Stella Benson gives us the impression of having found herself there by chance, and being there she has picked up her charming broomstick, Harold; while Miss Romer Wilson, unable to keep away, has discovered a magnifying glass which, while enlarging her characters to a great deal more than life size, has a trick of making them appear incredibly small.

Miss Wilson's theme is the effect the war has upon the minds and hearts of a number of highly modern young persons living in England during the terribly critical months of 1918. There is no plot, but there is a principal character, Josephine Miller, the ‘star’ of the company, who, at a word from here, a wave from there, and a glance at the scenery, gathers the scattered emotions of the moment into her bosom and pours them forth in song. If the reader can accept Josephine, can believe in her equipment of thoughts, feelings, emotions and dreams—the rest is easy. Then, everybody else and everything will doubtless appear quite possible, quite probable. He will have accepted, as it were, the magnifying glass, and such phrases as ‘butterflies of waste paper fluttered in the streets,’ ‘the lanes were full of lovers as they could hold,’ ‘the green ribbon of intellectual intolerance,’ will not shake him. Let us put this faith to the test a moment. Josephine is discovered walking up and down her small white room brooding over the war, the tide of battle, the continuity of resistance, the danger to England, annihilation and … so on.

Suddenly darkness clapped down over everything, and receding an immeasurable distance into space she saw the blaze of war smoulder upon the earth's surface like soot sparks in a chimney grate, and then go out. Instantaneously she passed through a sensation of the paradox of human greatness, and found herself again in her own home, returned to her common senses….

One might imagine that this last experience, which might be compared to a mental conflict with the old woman of page 105 the bathing machine, would be enough to give any young woman pause. But it is nothing to Josephine; it is a commonplace, little eleven o'clock in the morning experience, a mean little flight—passons! In a moment she is higher, deeper, further—until it is time to go out to lunch. Or, let us watch her for one moment returning from the office, passing between the people ‘like God in Hades.’

‘If I could only fight,’ and her spirit flew up. She heard the bayonet go in; phantasmagorically she enacted the utmost brutalities of war, then phantasmagorically she went through the pantomime of conversion to human sanity. Finally, she emerged cleansed, and reinstated herself in the dull monotony of endurance….

We are not given to understand that the young woman is in any degree remarkable. She is typical of her generation—the voice crying for many. True, her friends dislike her at times because she will insist on talking about the war, but that is only because her greater honesty and truthfulness puts them to shame. She belongs to a set—‘detestable intellectual snobs’ she calls them in a moment of pessimism—whose lives are spent in and out of each other's houses, in and out of Soho restaurants, in and out of the country, the opera, the craze of the hour, love. Through her magnifying glass the author sees them as creatures full of the finest feelings, who are prevented from contributing to the gaiety and the beauty of life by a monster which, just when the fun is fastest, sets up an ugly roar. Why should they be plagued with it? What have they done to deserve it? It is so out of the picture—so terribly, terribly remote from what she calls ‘Sohoism,’ and cherry and gold coloured chairs on a shining black floor, and spring pictures. Josephine Miller could dream perfectly well without its aid. Lying in bed

she found herself in Europe and saw all its small life at a glance, enacted simultaneously, in the colour and page 106 detail of its times and the emotions of its tendencies. … All Rome fell out of Heaven rich with the noon-day rape of Sabine wives….

Does this mean anything? Breathes there the reader who is at home in this country of the mind? Who can believe in the suffering and the potential greatness of little people whose distaste for life was typified ‘in the recurring demands of the toilet’? Here the magnifying glass has turned diminishing glass with a vengeance, and though Miss Romer Wilson may move a mountain she cannot reconcile us to these two equally distorted visions.

The heroine of Miss Stella Benson's novel is as subject to flights as Josephine, but she has her justification. She is a witch. She has also her broomstick, Harold, a very faithful, helpful creature. ‘Witches,’ according to Miss Benson, ‘are people who are born for the first time…. Remembering nothing, they know nothing and are not bored…. Magic people … are never subtle, and though they are new they are never Modern.’ Their common behaviour is, in fact, like that of people who are in love for the first time and for ever.

This little alien book describes the adventures of Angela and the adventures of those with whom she comes in contact while she is caretaker of a small general shop which is also part convent and monastery, part nursing home and college, and wholly a house for those who wish to live alone. She is an out-and-out, thorough witch, a trifle defiant, poor, always hungry, intolerant of cleverness and—radiant. It is her radiance above all which pervades everything, chasing over the pages like sunlight. For the minority who are magically inclined it is impossible to resist, and, since she has expressly told the real people that they are not invited to her party, what does it matter if they pass the lighted windows with a curl of the lip? We have said that ‘Living Alone’ is a book about the war. There is an Air Raid described, from below and from above, together with a frightful encounter which page 107 Harold has with a German broomstick, and one of the inmates of the house of Living Alone is Peony, a London girl who is drawing her weekly money as a soldier's wife—unmarried. The story that Peony tells her fellow-lodger Sarah Brown of how she found the everlasting boy is perhaps the high-water mark of Miss Benson's book. It is full of most exquisite feeling and tenderness. We hardly dare to use the thumb-marked phrase, a ‘born writer’; but if it means anything Miss Stella Benson is one. She seems to write without ease, without effort; she is like a child gathering flowers. And like a child, there are moments when she picks the flowers which are at hand just because they are so easy to gather, but which are not real flowers at all, and forgets to throw them away. This is a little pity, but exuberant fancy is rare, love of life is rare, and a writer who is not ashamed of happiness rarer than both.

(November 14, 1919.)