The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 7

THE OBSERVER, SUNDAY; JAJTCTARY 1, 1950 UIITrHTMSOrM REFLECTIONS By HAROLD NICOLSON The Best Novels of 1949 SOME PERSONAL CHOICES A great story you must read HAM MOM G5 DMKIGS THE WHITE SOUTH "The adventure story of the year." Warner has created a new and impressive poetic world, based ori a vision of power, destruction, sacrifice and love. My -one criticism: it seems cut oft too. abruptly 1 wanted another ten pages at the end. Alan -Moorehead Head of St. John, from "A Century of French 1406-1 job," by GreteRing, a beautifully produced volume which illustrates a rich but little known period of French art (Phaidon 3 js.) 1 A GREAT AMERICAN The Life 0 Ralph Waldo Emerson.

By Ralph L. Lusk. (Scrtbners. 30s.) By D. W.

BROGAN of that timidity in action which THE other evening, as was drawing to its end, I read through a' list of all the books I have reviewed upon this page during the course of 1949. It was a curious experience. There before me was a tped sheet, giving the titles of the li.ioks, the names of their authors, and the dates upon which the review appeared. It seemed but an inert and lifeless catalogue. Yet every book has a vitality of its own, and as I read the catalogue it began to move and wriggle like a bag of ferrets.

This liveliness was not, I noticed, evenly distributed; some of the titles on my list made a violent jerk in my memory, others stirred but sluggishly; and there were some which, although motionless, suggested images of light and beauty, of suffering and fear. 1 asked myself whether, when I wrote these reviews, I had any definite audience in my mind. Did I visualise a given individual, or did 1 conceive of a corporate audience those men and women of exquisite taste, wide erudition and profound ethical principles, who, on Sunday mornings, read the literary pages of The Observer I came to the conclusion that I did both. On the one hand there was the ordinary reader, who was willing to receive suggestions as to which books he or she should purchase, borrow or otherwise acquire. On the other hand there was the individual author, to whom I addressed myself secretly and in a tone of clandestine intimacy.

The only person for whom I do not write and shall not write is the person who seeks to obtain from a review suffi cient information to enable him or her to talk about a book without having read it. Having this dual audience in mind, the impersonal and the per sonal, it is evidently a waste of space to' review worthless books. The reviewer knows that it is far easier to write with brilliance and acumen' if he sets out to abuse a book than if he seeks to praise it. He should succumb to this temptation only on those rare occasions when a given book is manifestly fraudulent and is liable to capture the affections of the inattentive by spurious charm. His main fun.

ion should be to 'mention books which people will enjoy reading, and if possible to enhance that enjoyment by analysing or indicating special He should also strive, whenever possible, to assist the young. On reading my list, I find that I have managed fairly well to preserve the balance between the serious and the entertaining, be between Yeats The Man and the Masks. By site uoioen ntgnnngaie. assays tween the instructive and the diverting. The general level of the works reviewed has been: a high level.

Competent they have been, and accurate and often enlightening; their composition has been studious enough, their grammar and spelling often excellent, theiri edges neat. Some of them, such Iris Origo's "The Last Attach ment" have added materially to our knowledge: others, such as Peter Quennell's "John Ruskin," can serve as models for efficient, biography. Yet when I read again the list of books which I have reviewed during the year I am conscious of a slightly tinny taste. Some inner savour seems to be' lacking. Is it the savour of novelty, the savour of adventure, the savour of fantasy or just the savour of inspiration? 1 may have been 'unfortunate1 in my selection; 1 may have missed the works of genius; admittedly I missed "Olivia." Yet I have a feeling that the art of writing today is becoming rather mechanical.

The old fervour of inspiration, the old passionate desire to communicate some new idea or some fresh angle of observation, seems to have faded. Writers seem to me to have lost for the moment their accustomed enterprise; they have become prim and tidy; I seek in vain for dash and splash. Only, one book which I have encountered during the year appears to me to possess creative imagination. That was George Orwell's 1984." Yet that book, in that it failed somehow to create a suspension of disbelief, missed lire. The others (and I hate to say it) had no fire at all.

Consider the young. Mr. John Guest's Broken Images was sensitive and intellieent; I shall look forward to his next book with great curiosity. Mr. Graham Hough is certainly a critic who takes his calling seriously.

And Mr. Kenneth Harris in his Travelling Tongues displayed-that energy of interest which his contemporaries, in their gentility, appear to lack. The romantic age, with all its movement and colour, is, I suppose, passing through another decline. I find our neoclassicism somewhat uncompanionable. I am told that I should read poetry now, not prose.

1 am told that if I find our present books a trifle bourgeois, a little Council School; rather Keble. it is because I dosscss a vestigial affection for the eigh teen-nineties. I deny that reproach. I detest the eighteen-nineties. But I wish sometimes that our modern writers were a little less cautious; a little less inclined to privacy; a tittle more reckless in conveying to posterity the agonies and triumphs of their fine whitp souls.

the lines Richard Ellmann. (Macmlllan. on Home principles oj Poetry in that he did not use these to throw more new light on Yeats's life, instead of pursuing his psychological analysis of Yeats character. And the analysis, which has a great deal to say of Yeats's failure to solve his prob lems I including, it seems, his sexual problem), merely explains on one level a life which was lived on another. To Yeats life was not something which he had to sit down to solve, as if it were-a mathematical problem, but something which had to be lived.

After reading this book one feels indeed that Yeats and his biographer exist in two quite ditfercnt worlds Mr. Stauffer is not analytical but lyrical; he has no qualms about Yeats's failures; and his sustained, pleasant, light baritone Hallelujah, though sometimes monotonous, and sometimes slightly out of tune, is a genuine tribute to a great poet. The book has the faults of most books which grow out of a series of lectures: every statement, instead of being made as precise as possible, is watered down. When Yeats says, Poetry belongs to that element in every race which is most strong," a definite contestable statement, Mr. Stauffer dilutes it into Poetry, as an act of creation, is an affirmation of life." which is commonplace and perhaps more acceptable for that reason to an audience of novices, but certainly not more comprehensible.

Yet. as he is himself a poet. Mr. Stauffer sometimes strikes out a fine phrase, as when he speaks of Yeats's purposive ambiguity." MATTHEW ARNOLD, long ago pointed out, a propos of Chateaubriand, that an author could be highly useful and important to his own countrymen, without being either to the outside world. And to-day, it must be admitted, Emerson is still a great figure in American letters and rather a shadowy one in world literature.

It was not always so. Professor Lusk points out that Emerson, was appreciated in France almost as soon as in England, and rather sooner than in America. He was not only launched by Carlyle, he was admired by Arnold and many more, young Englishmen seeking self-realisation and He had his disciples in Germany, the most-important being ho. than Friedrich Nietzsche. But while he will alwavs have some, readers out side America, he will never again know the world fame and accept ance that tie had in bis old aze.

Inside America, Emerson is still more than the shadow of a great name. He is usetul as a symDoi, a symbol of the liberation of the New England mind from' the stifling constrictions of orthodox Calvinism and the even more deadly bonds of orthodox Unitarianism. So. for America, Professor Lusk's massive life is a literary event of importance. No one is likely again to know so much of the materials for a life of Emerson or to use them so well to illustrate the intellectual history of a century, ago.

Of course, the reader must have an appetite for brute fact that not all possess in these degenerate days. Obviouslv. Professor. Lusk' could annotate the daily life of Emerson as completely as Mr. Witmarth Lewis can annotate the daily life of Horace Walpole.

Yet the effect of the piling up of detail is illuminating. Few authors have had their finances more completely exposed. Emerson had known in his youth the dreadful poverty of the diclassi intellectual He climbed out of that gulf, and some STAR "I read every word with spellbound interest." -ELIZABETH BOWEN "A superbly told adventure novel." SUNDAY GRAPHIC BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE DAILY MAIL "CHOICE 6d. Begin your New Year's reading with two outstanding novels out tomorrow NOEL STC2EATFEILD MOTHERING SUNDAY is. 61 CLAUDE HOUGHTON BIRTHMARK id.

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R. INGE DIARY of a DEAN "The divine portrait of a scholar and 1 HAROLD NICOLSON Everyone will want to read it Church Times 21- The Rt. Hon. MARGARET BOND FIELD A LIFE'S WORK "Informative and impressive offers the student much valuable material HAROLD NICOLSON 20- THOMAS ROWLANDSON HIS LIFE AND ART by BERNARD FALK Generously illustrated and gives us the artist in all his moods sra ALFRED MUNNINGS 63- NOVELS FRANK SwTNNERTON THE DOCTOR'S WIFE COMES TO STAY 106 DENNIS WHEATLEY THE RISING STORM 126 NAOMI JACOB MARY OF DELIGHT 126 H. de VERE STACPOOJJE THE MAN IN ARMOUR 96 H.

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tne uyrici oj vrunam tsuiier ay uonava a. stauffer. (Macmlllan. 22s. 6d.) By EDWIN MUIR John Betjeman On a Da Night, by Anthony West (Eyre 1 and Spottis-woode), is an.

easy" first, though lonely arid alarming. This tourney 'into, a purgatory peopled by contemporary lunatics had an unworldly, poetics-horror. It seemed to" be tnithSb'elow the surface" and: was obviously' writ-. ten by someone who7 loved using-the English language. The Margin, by J.

D. Scott (Pilot.1 Press), contained some finely drawn (middle, and higher ranks) 'and, a repulsive career girl climbing to pro-. motion." Bridle. Stecn, by Anne Crohe (Heinemann), was the first picture of- Roman Catholic and Protestant life in a border county of Ireland which was affectionate to, both sides. Cyril Connolly 'THREE- first novels which have deeply moved me are all contemporary by.

their vitality, lucidity and fortitude. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. (Wingate), aL though a third too long, is the best in war books fat, the, most profound and "indignant assessment of the effect of war on people. A. magnificent fresco.

Paul, Bowles The Sheltering Sky (Lehrnarin) is a philosophic novel which reads an- adventure study in disintegration and desertion which illumines i and exhilarates, TheBody, by. William Sansbm "(Hogarth a Poet's where the two Americans say no and describes the most grotesque of storms jealousy in the most delicious of teacups, a summer-haunted London suburb! Daphne du Maurier 'THREE novels I -shall re mem- uer: me jacaranaa iree, by H. E. Bates (Michael Joseph); because it was toloV with force, and beauty, and compassion. Not easily forgotten is that crashed car in the Burmese valley, with the vultures tapping at the windows.

"Nor the. dazed elderly woman, shielding her dying companion from the sun, Nevil Shute more technical. But suspense was Would break into two over the Atlantic, or would it not a pas- with blanketing Newfouddland, I read on with trepidation. For sheer excitement; and. for terror too, The South, by Hammond Trines (Collins)," will be hard to beat." I can Still bear the roar of the ice as the great bergs close in upon, those stranded men of the whaling fleet, caught in the Antarctic.

Lionel Hale CONFINING strictly to the novels I had the pleasure of; reviewing in these columns, choose (for various reasons) these three. First, Miss Anne Crone's novel' of religious bigotry in Ireland, Bridie Sleen (Heinemann); Next, though there is no order of preference here, Elio Vittorini's haunting Conversation In Sidly (Drummond arid; David) with all; its sense of Europe's patbbs arid And then Constantino FitzGibbon's The Arabian Bird' (Cassell), a modern study i of remarkable implications. 1 Rosamond Lehmann "yiTH some, difficulty. I pick out these three- novels: The Heat of the Day, by Elizabeth Bowen (Cape). To my "mind a great tragic love story, memorable in these days" when pity or guilt or violence or all three have taken, precedence I over love as a subject.

Some critics appeared to find the 1 lovers shadowy figures. For me they lived with overwhelming human and poetic" intensity. -Mariana, by -Ennio Flaiano (Lehmann). A novel I think of as "touching sublimity at eoints" to adapt a phrase of lardy's. The dramatic suspense of the narrative, the sinister impact of the Abyssinian scene combine to haunt the and the inner drama of crime and punishment' is on, a noble humanitarian scale.

Men of Stones, by Rex Warner (The "Bqdley Head). What' can some critics mean by treating this novel as if it was a repetition or re-hash of The To my mind Mr. 93 80 80 OCO 5 OO 0'08 OOO AN IRISH NOVEL WITH A LONDON BACKGROUND Walter 3Maehen98 I AM ALONE The second novel, just published at 9s. by a young Irish writer who is making his mark with fiction which is "fresh, uncondescend-ing, natural He possesses a human, humorous, good-natured realism and there -is nothing spurious about him." C. P.

Snow (Sunday Times). 1 0 1 MACMLLAN LTD. DON'T say these are the best novels I read btit I enjoyed them Georges. Simenon's The 'Murderer (published by Routledge and Ke'gan Paul together with "A Wife at. Wonderful logic and speed with which he takes a little South of France thiig from the original crime to his solemn conviction for a- murder "he never committed.

Reads like a reflection of Koestler's Darkness at Noon. De Maupassant's Bel-Ami (translated by Eric Sutton and published, by Hamish Hamilton) has the'fsame. directness. Villain is damned- from the start but- fascinating to watch his course. Brilliant sardonic touch at.

the end when he emerges from his wedding thinking not of his bride but' his mistress. Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate (Hamish Hamilton). The Evelyn Waugh gaiety. Nearly ruined by two precious very unfunny children but the rest beautifully done. The art of witty without being malicious.

George Orwell 9 'THE Naked and the Dead, by i Norman Mailer (Wingate). only war novel of any 'distinction, to appear hitherto. Tne Oasis, by Mary MacCarthy (Horizon). An extremely well short novel with unfamiliar but interesting subject matter. The Impossible Shore, by Robert Kee (Eyre and Spot-tiswbode).

Rapportage rather than a novel, but very con-, vincing and' in places William Sansom HENRY GREEN'S Conclnd-t HT ll. by. far. Lyrical, magical, this book sings as flutefully as the, white, dresses and the azaleas of -its ladies. Beneath flow fabulous undercurrents, in which you swim you know not and does H.G.

know? where. Beautifully written, with attention paid to every word. No slop. Conversation In Sicily, by Elio Vittorini (Drummond and Fresh, a good sense of pagan mystery in modern dress. I was interested in dialogue devices new to me.

Again the prose, as translated, is poetically moving. Dark Avennes, by Ivan Bun in (Leh- mann). Simple, tender, adult, subtle 4t is wonderful to find such stories possible to-day. Rebecca West QURELY George Orwell's 1984 (Seeker and WarburgN was a remarkable book, because it succeeded in depicting not only, a complex set of circumstances, but how characters would have reacted to them and those circumstances were so different, from those that exist at present that this was a superb effort of the imagination. I must bracket Elizabeth Taylor's A Wreath of Roses (Peter Davies) and H.

Newby's The Snow Pasture (Jonathan Cape) as only scoring half -each in my mind but coming in my final list because they seem to me writers of real idiosyncrasy and infinite promise; As for. Anthony West's On a Dark Night (Eyre and Spottiswoode) I may be partial. But I think, it has real creative vigour. Francis Wyndham f)F. the new novels that I read in 1949 the throe, that made the deepest impression, on me are The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles (Lehmann), Two Worlds and their Ways; by I.

Comp-ton-Bumett (Gollancz), and Olivia, by Olivia (Hogarth Press). The first is a powerful and story about (iracinis Americans in Africa; it is absorbing to read, and makes a fascinating subject for discussion. 1 Miss Compton-Burnett'is, anyhow, "one of rhy favourite novelists, and her latest' book shows this wise and witty writer at her best. As' to Olivia" it has already established itself as a mjnor classic, combining the freshness and sincerity of innocence with the taste and understanding of experience. For Your Book tokens Alanc Jacob SCENES FROM A BOURGEOIS LIFE (...

Edward SachviUe-West INCLINATIONS 1 2s. 6d. Walter Duranty STALIN CO. I2s. 6d.

Geoffrey H. Bourne HOW YOUR BODY WORKS (Published by SIGMA BOOKS I I2s. 6d. SECKER WARBURG The Scarlet Marquess Oscar Wilde and the Black Douglas. By the Marquss of Queensberry and Percy Colt on.

(Hutchinson. 20s.) By CHRISTOPHER SYKES Thoreau mocked may have come from' tus memory of years nearly as harassing as those of Dickens's boyhood; But the u'midityi the was deeper than can be explained 1 by financial caution. Almost as much1 as Cezanne, Emerson hated les grappins," the hooks that too deep love or friendship enables Fate and others Lto. throw -into Except for his child bride and bis son both dying so young, he never seems to have given hinself toLaoyone. He" noticed it, he regretted it, burthat was his it flowered, in' his of his dislike; of all formal organisation of the inner life.

He. would have asserted (against Lir; that every man is an island and that to realise-and accept this is the beginning ot wisdom. This austerity" gave rather a comic' navour to nis preactung or tne virtues of the common, -touch. He1 might praise the.ra'cy livirig, speech of smithy and tavern; out he was not at all at home-in-either; he loved the common man as an abstraction (which is' the way most "preachers of his virtues love Only honce did" he enter into, a great -that" over slavery. and he does not'snow to much advantage.

But by the time Emerson was indulging in political his work was done. Nothing! he wrote', after fifty is Probably he knew that, and he continued xo write and lecture, partly because heneeded or (bought he needed partly out of habit. By the of the Civil War. he was a national, in deed international, oracle" and.Mike all official oracles, vague and -cautious. In his mild old age was' very, like' his friend Bronson Alco'ttexcept that he was solvent.

But fie chad been a great' orce. A small butlyaluable collection, of or two eo'od as well as' some incredibly bad poems are current still; and in English Traits he wrote one of the best books on how to understand America. 1 i who ruined Wilde, and his own son, had- had singularly bad luck in marriage, tits, wife, being a stupid and priggish person with nigh-brow pre-; tensions who despised him for his sporting-tastes, and cruelly estranged his children from him. But admitting the excuses, no one can feel much sympathy for the low-minded; crank whose most natural of expression was in: obscene letters telegrams (usually sent to his daughter-in-law), who was not above ridiculing his second son Percy for' a physical weakness which made him wear irons" as a chifd; and who spat at that same son from his deathbed when he came to be reconciled. He was a' very black Douglas-indeed.

This book will be a prized possession of those who are by the Oscar Wilde affair. It, would be niore prized if it was more skilfully constructed, contained full "indications of. what material is new, and if it was without, some naive defamations of the age, and spirit; but, in spile of many faults, it ij in a sense distinguished because it contains fair and judgments on human beings who suffered in that ever-moving calamity. Edmund Vale rerkws some topographical books on page 8. New Books Malp and Female.

By Margaret Mead. (Gollancz. 18s.) By, Andie Simon. (Burke. 15s.) Van Meeoeren's FaiSed Vermeers and de Hoochs.

By Dr. P. Coremans (Cassell. 25s.) Profitable Wonders. By E.

C. Grant Watson. (Country Life. 15s.) CHILDRENS AUTHORS WEEK Mon. Enid Blyton 2.30 p.m.

Tues. Margaret Tempest 3 m. Wed.AnthonyC. Wilson 3p.m. Thurs.

Alison Uttley 3p.m. Fri Noel Streatfelld 3p.m. Authors will meet children and autograph copies of chair books. Autogrtphed copies mty be ordered by post. Toy Department, First Ffoor Jan.

2nd 6th HARRODS LTD LONDON SWI JLTR. ELLMANN'S study of Yeats is a good example of what seems to me a bad convention of biography, which is becoming more and more popular. Fifty years ago the biographer was content to tell the story of a life, and let it rest' on its own intrinsic interest Now we demand not only a biographical account of our great men, but also must have them explained. The discoveries of psycho-analysis have made the explanation of a life (once never thought ofl now quite, easy and almost obligatory. The most fruitful psychological theory for the biographer thus far has proved to be that of compensation.

This in simplified terms means that whatever a man may do he does it because he has failed to do something else which he should have done instead. Unaware of the workings of this law he may imagine that he is freely pursuing his aims: but in reality he is completely conditioned, without free will, choice, aptitude tt- the' self-deluded victim of his own complexes, which become known only after the biographer has performed his post mortem upon him. If he has written poetry, his biographer, too wary to be deceived by the lines, reads between them instead, until we are persuaded that poetry is written in lines merely because the spaces between them are so packed with significance. Mr. Ellmann's book is an unusually good example of this kind of biography honest, painstaking, intelligent.

Yet in setting out to explain Yeats instead of presenting him, he was bound to fall short; first, because any adequate explanation of a human life is unattainable, and any other kind must be disappointing; and secondly, because he has no choice but (o formulate in abstract and general terms which is alive, contradictory and individual Mr. Ellmann has gone to the labour of consulting 50,000 pages of unpub- hshed manuscripts. It is a great pit II rr i(uie('ei 111c iick Year brings, lt brings 1 nothing new We intend to belie the words if not the meaning of the poet durine We have new books in produc tion which would be noteworthy in anv company books like ILL BY MOONLIGHT (banned by the War Office since SPORT IN ENGLAND. a history by Norman Wymer and ARABIAN JOURNEY by Gerald de fa Gaury, who again gives evidence of his immense, intimate knowledge of con-P temporary Arabia, And for those ho cry Je nc plus je rehs 1 there arc mam reprints in hand Despise It As I May By WALTER DE LA MARE Despise it as I may, This old demoded heart will have its way; Like a belated bee it still must flit From shutting flower to flower, and find them sweet; And even in shadow of a world in woe Like some frayed butterfly on an idle stone, Once warmed by noonday's sun, Poise, lost, alone; And. though it soon must into darkness go, Praise that sun's Heaven for his last afterglow.

Af ANDRE GIDE has described this book as by far the most important one yet written on the Wilde tragedy, lt is certainly not that, and among recent productions cannot be compared to Mr. Hesketh Pearson's biography, but it is the only book on the -subject to give a reasoned and detailed account of the' part played in the story by Lord Alfred Douglas's father, "the screaming scarlet Marquess," as Wilde and "Bosie" used to call him. We are given an opportunity to judge him1 afresh from numerous letters by him to his family which are here published for the first time. The present Lord Queensberry has nothing to say for his uncle Bosie" who, when every allowance has been made, docs appear to have been practically insane, but he puts up a spirited defence of his grandfather. In' this generous undertaking he succeeds only partially.

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