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Novels and Novelists

Control and Enthusiasm

Control and Enthusiasm

True Love — By Allan Monkhouse
Children of No Man's Land — By G. B. Stern

Mr. Monkhouse is an author who drives a pen well under control. It is, we feel, a trained obedient pen, warranted neither to idle nor to run away, but to keep up a good round pace from the first moment of the journey until the last. While it has long since been broken of any inclination to shy at an occasional accidental object it is by no means wholly devoid of playfulness. This playfulness serves to illustrate how nice is the author's control in that he can afford not only to tolerate, but even to encourage it, while maintaining an easy equable measure. There is a moment when Geoffrey Arden, the hero, dismissing the reasons for his confidence in the success of his new play, exclaims to his sister, ‘I'm a bit of a pro. at this game, Mary.’ And that, with all respect to Mr. Monkhouse, is the abiding impression he leaves on us. He is a professional novelist, quietly confident, carefully ironical, and choosing always, at a crisis, to underrate the seriousness of the situation rather than to stress it unduly. Admirable as this temper undoubtedly is, it nevertheless leaves the reader a great deal cooler than he would wish. He is interested, stimulated, and even, towards the latter half of the book, moved, yet with what reservations! There is a title which the amateur novelist shares (but how differently!) with the true artist: it is that of experimentalist. However deep the knowledge a writer page 115 has of his characters, however finely he may convey that knowledge to us, it is only when he passes beyond it, when he begins to break new ground, to discover for himself, to experiment, that we are enthralled. The ‘false’ writer begins as an experimentalist; the true artist ends as one; but between these two there are a small number of writers of unquestionable honesty and sincerity who do not feel the impulsion toward unknown issues. It follows that in novels of this kind there is room for most delicate distinctions, but high excitements are out of place; all is, as it were, at second-hand, and while we are not expected to share the experience with the author, he would seem, by the care he takes never to make an unguarded statement, to expect of us a kind of intellectual running commentary.

‘True Love’ is an extremely good example of this peculiar kind of novel. We are conscious throughout of the author's attitude, of his vein of irony which gives an edge to what might otherwise appear a trifle ‘simple,’ and of his generous appreciation of all the possibilities of a man like Arden. His scene is Manchester, its journalistic circles and its small theatrical world. The time is before the war and during it. Geoffrey Arden, a young man of thirty, on the staff of the Herald, is one of those divided souls whose mind is in literature (he is the author of several novels and two plays), but whose heart is in life. Neither satisfies him. When he gives way to one the other calls; when he answers the other, again he is beckoned away. He is like all men in such case, deeply interested in himself and in what is going to happen to him. But this interest is not in the least abnormal or morbid; it is the interest of the looker-on, almost one might say of the Geoffrey Arden that was to be, tolerant, amused and wise.

In the months before the war he comes to know and, slowly, to love, an actress who takes the principal part in his play. In her he sees perhaps the delicate spirit who will bring him into harmony with Life. But the war page 116 breaks out, and when he asks her to marry him she tells him she is a German.

‘German father, German mother. Born in Germany.’

‘I love you.’

‘Your impulses are beautiful, and yet you're thinking all the time.’

And she was right. If his heart triumphed it was for the briefest instant. And then his mind is attacked by the most curious mixture of doubt, suspicion and criticism. Here is the old battle again in a new guise, and perhaps his heart would have lost if Sybil Drew had allowed him to fight it alone. She loves him; she cannot let him go, and cleverly in her desperation she makes her appeal to his heart through his mind, with her ‘wonderful idea.’

‘Listen! It's this. We cannot agree. We must not agree…. You shall be English. And I am partly English too. But I am German. Listen with sympathy. You shall champion your nation, I mine. We must be generous with one another and help one another…. That means that you must help me…. You must think of things that I ought to say…. Cannot we be chivalrous enemies and lovers too?’

This, then, is the task they set themselves—to love and to be loyal. But Geoffrey goes to the war and is killed while they are still trying, and she, left in England, dies in childbed, hunted to death by the anti-Germans. There is nothing left of them but—two men talking their tragedy over in a teashop…. Would their lives have been splendid? Would Arden have found his abiding place in the heart of Sybil? We are left uncertain, but Mr. Monkhouse, in choosing so brave a title for his book, would seem to believe that all would have been well; it rings like his profession de foi.

It would be hard to find a style more unlike that so consciously practised by Mr. Monkhouse, than that (shall page 117 we say?) so recklessly enjoyed by the author of ‘Children of No Man's Land.’ Miss Stern flings her net wide; she brings it in teeming, and which are the important fish, which are to be thrown back into the sea, if those funny monsters are fish at all, or alive, or good for anything—it takes the reader a long book to discover. London is her ocean—Jewish London, Bohemian London, the London of strange boarding-houses and strange foreigners. Her knowledge of it is almost mystifyingly complete, and it is poured out for us with a queer mixture of enthusiasm, love of human beings and cunning understanding of them. Her central figure, the solid little rock above and about which all this beats and froths and bubbles, is Richard Marcus, a typically English boy of German parents, who does not discover until the war that he is legally a German—a child of no man's land. It does not matter that he has spent all his life in England, that he hates the Germans, hates everything about them, and loves England and the English. He is not asked what his own feelings are, but a set of alien horrible false feelings are provided for him by those same English, and, far from letting him fight for them, they only wait until he is of age to send him to an internment camp. The story of this little fifteen-year-old boy's gradual coming to consciousness through this, of his struggle first to be allowed to be English, and then to escape from the English whom he loves, of his nightmare journey across no man's land with the English hunting him down, and then on the last day of his freedom, his eighteenth birthday, his strange revelation that nothing that man can do to you really matters … is the chief story of the book. All the others, intricate and many-coloured, and some of them bewildering in their strangeness, are variations upon the same theme. They seem to depart so far from the noble childish simplicity of Richard that at times they are well-nigh lost. The character of Deborah, for instance (who is perhaps the most convincing ‘modern’ girl we have ever encountered in fiction or in life), becomes so involved page 118 and difficult that we are on the very point of thinking her gone when the theme of Richard returns, and she is explained and, as it were, made whole.

It is a strange world, a bewildering world, but there is no doubt that Miss Stern makes it absolutely convincing.

(November 28, 1919.)