Praise and prejudice

GEORGE DANGERFIELD

Mr. Maugham on Spain, style, and himself—Mrs. Lindbergh as a writer—The Gentlemen—Books to avoid and otherwise

THE VALUE OF STYLE.—In my opinion and (I think) his own, Somerset Maugham is one of the most interesting of contemporary stylists. For this reason and one or two others, the publication of Don Fernando (Doubleday, Doran. $2.50) remains the outstanding event of this passing summer. Stylists are becoming rarer; they are positively unfashionable: for today we much prefer the expansive to the exact, and perhaps we are right.

But when we are confronted with the careful simplicities of a book like Don Fernando, we have to pause. What is the value of really good writing? Men like Dreiser and Wolfe don't write well, and yet both of them—or Wolfe at any rate— have written great books. Somerset Maugham writes extremely well, but he has never written what remotely resembles a great book—unless it is Cakes and Ale. And yet you find yourself reading Don Fernando from page to page with a most flattering preoccupation.

Don Fernando is a book about Spain— art, food, morals, literature, scenery, and, above all, that amazing sixteenth century, the Golden Age of the Spanish don. But it is not Spain which keeps one's eyes glued to Don Fernando; it is the fact that Maugham is really writing about style, that the whole book is an example of style as he thinks style should be—that is, of his own style.

Has style anything to do with good writing? Mr. Maugham seems to think so. The essentials of good writing, he declares, are "lucidity, euphony, and simplicity." I doubt if this is true of Cicero, Thomas Browne, or Lytton Strachey; but it is true of Maugham. It is also true of the Code Napoleon, of many paragraphs in the Wall Street Journal, and of lots of liquor advertising. But it omits the only important thing about writing, which is—who does it?

■ THE VALUE OF SPITE.—What, after all, really gives Maugham's writing its peculiar fascination? Not, I venture to suggest, its lucidity, euphony, and simplicity; nor its conversational qualities; nor its likeness to Addison and George Moore; nor yet its tendency to fall into the worst kind of cliches. The fascinating thing about it is Maugham's genius for spite, for which it is an excellent vehicle. Spite with Maugham becomes something rich and human and permanent. I remember that not long after Arnold Bennett's death there appeared, in one of our literary weeklies, an article which explained (1) that Bennett was common in his youth, (2) that in his maturity he was never quite a gentleman. It was written by Maugham. It conveyed—somehow or other—a great deal of envy, admiration, and affection. That is spite for you—something which is very sensitive to values and very apt to laugh at the owner of them. It is an extremely civilised, an almost exquisite expression of the Bronx cheer. It is nearly as precious as beauty and love, and generally twice as readable.

This element of spite enters into Mr. Maugham's Jove and admiration for Spain, lending them a certain subdued mockery. It makes his descriptions of food more real than his digressions on mysticism; it makes his account of El Greco more valid than his re-creation of St. Ignatius Loyola, Fray Luis de Leon, and St. Teresa. The truth is that he turns these people into Englishmen, just as the Elizabethan dramatists did; but whereas El Greco becomes a fantastic of the '90s, with an incongruous greatness, who might have found his way into one of Maugham's novels, the others remain so many exciting dead English people in disguise. Tourneur might have done them, in an off moment.

■ ANNE LINDBERGH'S PROSE.—Of the amateur writer Maugham says, "if his character is engaging . . . his inexperience may allowr him to reveal it so unaffectedly that his work has a quality of delight." This may be the secret of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's North to the Orient. It is an account of her 1931 flight with her husband from Long Island along the frozen Great Circle route, until, with the assistance of the British aircraft carrier Hermes, their plane -was wrecked in the yellow Yangtse. You will find few thrills here. The Colonel's aversion to publicity seems to have communicated itself to the strange atmospheres, the mists, the tall cold mountains, the dangerous seas. For the most part, they refrained from worrying him. But what you will find is, chapter by chapter, the delicate, sensitive, and charming personality of Mrs. Lindbergh. Her work undoubtedly has a quality of delight, but whether she is an amateur writer is another thing. Read her last paragraph but one, andI think you will agree that she knows quite a lot about the art of prose. But read the whole book: in its quiet way, it is quite extraordinary. (Harcourt Brace. $2.50.)

So, too, is MacKinlay Cantor's The Voice of Bugle Ann (Coward, McCann. $1.25). It is one of those long-short-stories which, as Goodbye, Mr. Chips! proved, are very marketable in book form. It is all about the death and apparent resurrection of a Missouri foxhound, and it has certain qualities of writing which should appeal to about everybody. I wish I could say the same of another little book—They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Horace McCoy (Simon & Schuster. $2.00). This tells of the unfortunate proximity, as partners in a dance marathon, of a young man and a girl who (for excellent reasons, I must say) constantly wishes she was dead. She should have died on page 1, and then there would have been no book. Mr. McCoy conveys the atmosphere of a dance marathon well enough; but any decent newspaper reporter could have done as much, in a thousand words or so, and you could have bought his work for two cents, unsigned. From which I deduce that much money has been wasted on They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

■ GENTLEMEN.—Then there are two books which ought to be mentioned together:— Cosmo Hamilton's novel Fulfilment (Dodd, Mead. $2.50) and Henry Dwight Sedgwick's essay In Praise of Gentlemen (Little, Brown. $2.00). Mr. Hamilton's tale is based almost entirely on a regret for the vanishing gentlemen of the vintage 1912. There is also something in it about eugenic babies. Mr. Sedgwick confines himself purely to gentlemen, whose disappearance he laments in scholarly prose. The argument in either case is an old one, about as old as the Fall of Man, and I don't agree with it; but of the two books I much prefer Mr. Sedgwick's. You get the feeling that he would go to the guillotine or the gallows or before the firing squad with rather more conviction than would Mr. Hamilton.

■ RECOMMENDED READING.— (In order of importance.) Fiction. Fly Falcon, by Pamela Frankau (Houghton, Mifflin. $2.50) and Under England, by Joseph O'Neill (Simon and Schuster. $2.00). Saturday Island, by Hugh Brooke (Doubleday, Doran. $2.50). The House of Four Winds, by John Buchan (Houghton, Mifflin. $2.50). The Turf-cutter's Donkey, by Patricia Lynch (Dutton. $2.50). Non-fiction. Asylum, by William Seabrook (Harcourt Brace. $2.50).