Living with Books

...His affair with Rain Hunter is, for both of them, passionately romantic, but it is doomed, as both really know, for Mor cannot prevail against the claims and the wiles of his family...

...It is an account of British civilian life in the period after the landing in France, and a tribute to the fortitude with which the English endured the German onslaught from the air...

...The cool brilliance of the writing makes every page a pleasure, but in the end one realizes that brilliance is one of Miss Bedford's lesser virtues...

...As she proved in her first novel, Under the Net, she has an eye for bizarre characters and outrageous scenes, and her sense of the comic sweeps the reader along...

...But his comments are wise and his descriptions as always excellent, and he has introduced two effective, though essentially irrelevant, sea episodes...

...His amused, apprehensive, and yet deeply sympathetic attitude toward what is going on comes close to expressing what Miss Murdoch herself seems to feel...

...We learn how Julius von Felden, a dilettante of fifty-odd, married young Melanie Merz...

...Melanie died not long after bearing a daughter, but the Merz family continued to give a large allowance to Julius even after he had made a second marriage, this time to a young English woman, Caroline Trafford...

...A Legacy is a story of Europe and especially Germany before the First World War...

...Johannes revolted and eventually escaped, and his escape became an Imperial scandal...

...The material is fresh, the narrative technique artful, the style individual and mature...

...Most of its characters are members of two contrasting families—the Feldens, anti-Prussian, nominally Catholic aristocrats from the southern part of Germany...

...Today his writing seems a little formal, a little heavy, but there are pages of The Sea ant...

...The baron, an arrant individualist, uncharacteristically decided that Johannes was to enter the Army, and sent him to a Prussian cadet school...

...The story is told in the form of a loose memoir, with the narrator moving back and forth from what she has seen to what she has been told about, and turning with apparent artlessness from character to character, but the casual manner subtly conceals a firm and admirably designed structure...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks 'The Sandcastle,' 'The Legacy' and Two Other, Less Memorable Novels One of the brightest and certainly one of the most enjoyable of the younger British novelists is Iris Murdoch...

...His wife is neither a fool nor a virago, and it is not cynical to say that their marriage is as happy as most...

...The first, which involves a perilous episode on the part of Mor's son, is pure drama...

...Mor's daughter is wildly grotesque, and some of the teachers at Mor's school are on the bizarre side...

...The narrator is legally the product of this second marriage, though we infer that Julius was not in fact her father...

...Mor is not an abnormally shy and deeply frustrated man, like the schoolmaster in Brian Moore's The Feast of Lupercal...

...But by and large the people of the book are the kind of people we know, and it is from their familiarity that the story derives its pathos...

...He has not been one of the major figures of 20th-century British literature, but he has been the kind of writer it is always good to have, a careful craftsman, a thoughtful, scrupulously honest man...

...A way was found to take care of Johannes, but, many years later, a second and greater scandal developed...

...A decade after it was published, I was in a class whose instructor recommended The Sea and the Jungle as a model of descriptive writing...

...The strange relationship between Julius von Felden and the Merz family is one of the book's themes, but it is subordinated to the story of the apparently accidental destruction of the Feldens...

...She is portraying a group of people who were permitted, by virtue either of social position or of wealth, to indulge their inclinations...

...H. M. Tomlinson's The Trumpet Shall Sound (Random House, $3.50) assuredly does not belong on the same shelf as the other books I have been talking about, but I want to say something about it if only because he has announced that it is his last novel...

...Of the seriousness that enters into Miss Murdoch's most outrageously comic episodes there is not a suggestion, but the novel moves at a lively clip to an ingenious climax, and it is fun to read...

...Rain herself is slightly fey, though never so much so as to alienate our sympathy...

...William Mor, a schoolmaster, is a thoroughly if not happily married man with two children in their teens...

...But at the heart of the novel is her awareness of the way in which man's calculations, in any kind of society, can go astray, and that is why the book seems so close to us in spite of the remoteness of its setting...

...If it is bis swan song, it is a suitable one...

...and the Merzes, extremely wealthy Berlin Jews...

...In outline this is the story, familiar enough, of a middle-aged man who falls in love with a young girl...

...Thus three sons died as a result of the baron's bad judgment, and a shadow was cast on the life of the fourth, Julius...

...Miss Murdoch portrays Mor with great tenderness and yet with a strong sense of reality, and the measure of her success is the fact that the reader wishes things could turn out differently while he knows very well that they can't...

...The jacket of Sybille Bedford's A Legacy (Simon & Schuster, $3.50) tells us how highly the book has been praised in England but gives us no information about the author...

...Certainly The Trumpet Shall Sound is not much of a novel, and its virtues, which are real, are not those ordinarily associated with fiction...

...It involves the reader more deeply with its characters, and it rises to a much more moving climax...

...After that there is only the sadness of Mor's defeat...

...One of the fine characters in the book is Demoyte, the retired headmaster whose portrait Rain is painting...

...Tomlinson has reached a great age, and he can look back on a distinguished career as a journalist as well as on his successes as a writer of books...

...I do not think that Miss Bedford is trying to make a case for or against the old German aristocracy...

...The book expresses his love of England, which has been one of his abiding themes, and it suggests the fascination the sea has always had for him...

...If this is really Miss Bedford's first book, a remarkable talent has emerged full-fledged...

...To turn from Miss Bedford's novel and Miss Murdoch's lo Ralph Arnold's Spring List (Macmillan, $2.95) is lo drop several rungs on the ladder, and yet I must say that the book gave me a couple of hours' amusement...

...As the story develops, however, and as we yield ourselves more and fully to Mor's emotions, it becomes the most compelling of Miss Murdoch's books...

...In the course of the later scandal the ignominious role Gustavus had played in the earlier episode was exposed, and he committed suicide...

...It was in 1927 that he published his first novel, Gallions Reach, and three years later came All Our Yesterdays, a novel of the First World War that I found moving...

...Tomlinson published his first book, The Sea and the Jungle, in 1912, and he was then nearly 40...

...on the contrary, his life has been full enough so that he has not bothered to ask himself whether he is happy or not...

...He has an entertaining and of course knowledgeable account of an editorial session, and there are sonic neat thrusts at various publishing practices, most of which can be found on our side of the Atlantic as well as on his...

...Unlike its predecessors, which carry the reader from one extravagant episode to another, The Sandcastle is carefully and conventionally constructed, and at the outset it seems by comparison a little slow...

...The baron was prevailed upon to send him back to the school, a mistake that resulted not only in Johannes's mental collapse but also in the death of his brother Gabriel...

...There is a warmth in this book that is not felt in the others, and I finished it with the conviction that Miss Murdoch is an even more talented and promising novelist than I had supposed...

...I read it with admiration, and went on to read Old Junk, London River, Gifts of Fortune and other books in which Tomlinson had recorded his impressions of places he had visited and his reflections on many matters...

...its characters are merely sketched in, and Tomlinson relies heavily on interpretative comment...

...Baron von Felden had four sons—Julius, Johannes, Gustavus and Gabriel...

...Largely self-educated—he went to work when he was 12—he created a style of his own that was widely admired...

...The plot, which is highly ingenious, turns on the efforts of two publishers to lay hands, for reasons they believe to be good, on a not particularly desirable manuscript...

...Her newest book, The Sandcastle (Viking, $3.95), is different...

...Arnold, a director of a London firm of publishers, has written a comedy of manners with the publishing industry as background...

...Parts of it are extremely funny, but its chief quality is a delicate pathos...

...There are two climactic scenes, both magnificent...

...No one is more skillful or more plausible than Miss Murdoch in creating men and women who are highly unconventional if not a little mad, and there are such characters in The Sandcastle...

...The second begins as a comic account of a school dinner but takes a sharply dramatic turn when Mor's wife launches the stratagem by which she perfects her triumph...

...Her second novel, The Flight from the Enchanter, which I belatedly reviewed in The New Leader of January 14, has serious and even sinister overtones, but here again comedy predominates...

...He is not one of Miss Murdoch's bizarre persons, but he is an eccentric in the best English tradition, a man with a sturdy indifference to public opinion...

...The point is not that he leads a bad life but that he has a sudden vision of a better one...

...She can relish their idiosyncrasies as a display of human possibility, or she can employ them for comic effect, as she does so beautifully in her description of Julius and his monkeys on the train...

...I am sure—that have kept their magic, and there are pages in The Trumpet Shall Sound that have something of the old power...

...Arnold has a gift for light comedy, and the book is full of good dialogue and deftly managed scenes...

...Mor is, indeed, making a fool of himself, and Miss Murdoch ruthlessly exhibits the ridiculousness of his behavior, but she also and more compellingly communicates the emotions that are shaking him—his incredulous joy when he realizes that Rain loves him, his astonished awareness of unexpected possibilities within himself, above all his overwhelming urgency...

...Apparently, however, this is a first novel, though it is so accomplished that that is hard to believe...

...I suppose Tomlinson has always been an essayist rather than a novelist, though AU, Our Yesterdays achieves its own kind of success...

...the Jungle—and of other hooks, too...