Kinsmen and Kissing Cousins:

...Unfortunately, everything embarrassing sticks out more in a short story...

...and though he thought he had at last found and cleared for himself something of identity, a particle of answer in the face of the world, had he set anything at peace, answered any speechless question, atoned for the blind failing, the outrage and the pain on the fact of his blood kindred...

...and would mark his own face longer than the stamp of any stranger's honor that would change nothing...

...But, despite a warp of strikes, Luddites, Oastlerites, Chartists, Home Rule and consequences without which there'd be no woof at all to the plots, the result is about as illuminating as a standard college dictionary on the same material...

...In this collection they have to reappear too often too soon for their inadequate disguises, once even masquerading as Hamlet and his family...

...B) • "But few people know the circumstances of his coming to power and wealth...

...After hundreds of pages of it one can rarely notice that the old diction is no longer appropriate...

...They are not, however, the inventions of their authors...

...Otherwise, they have no resemblance to persons who live and die...

...In her novels, local political and technological progress precipitates one economic, cultural or amorous crisis after another, each of which Miss Bentley mentions, interrupts and laminates in rapid and regular succession...

...I quote as typical the last paragraph of the title story, The Faces of Blood Kindred: "But the look upon Jame's face that moment that night in a strange city where the cousin had come to passing recognition and had found a transient homage, bore the haunting question of ancestry...

...Lacking the constant variety and profusion of her novels' suspended outlines of incidents, Miss Bentley's short stories can't reproduce a comparable illusion of credibility...

...B) But, if Goyen's take-off, characters and plot seem to me nearly as personal as a regional accent, there is that about his writing which I'm sure is made up out of his own head and had best speak for itself...

...That is the tale to be told.' (G) • "The story moves on now another dozen years...

...Nevertheless, it's hard not to feel a certain respect for Miss Bentley's total endeavor and for what has become an outmoded concern with the effect property and power have on loving relations...

...Miss Bentley's reputation is based on her 17 Yorkshire textile industry novels which generally follow the intertwined fortunes of an old-established textile family and mill-hand family for three generations...

...Compare these random samples: • "The reason lay here, if one could but penetrate it...

...In addition, she is limited to seven basic "characters," lay figures who from book to book change little more than their names...

...So it's odd how frequently his short stories start off sounding curiously like Miss Bentley's...

...For, although, even in juxtaposition, Miss Bentley and Goyen appear to have nothing in common at first reading, the "characters" of both books soon seem strangely closer to each other than kissing cousins and finally are identified as unquestionably kinsmen descended from the same moroccobound set of family fiction...

...B) • "Sometimes several sudden events will happen together so as to make you believe they have a single meaning if twould but come clear...

...Goyen's stories are more à la mode, loaded with lyricism and significances which rise like a bump whenever one of his kin-types trips over a memory...

...Reviewed by May Natalie Tabak Author, "But Not For Love," "A Fish Is Not A Pet" The relatives produced by Phyllis Bentley and William Goyen can't stand each other...

...G) • "How often do we not discover that a series of mystifying events has a simple but astounding explanation, concealed perhaps for a lifetime, in the hearts of those concerned...

...The book is full of passages just as good...

...as if his elegancies and her dated speech were also more related than not...

...Miss Bentley has a touching faith in the efficacy of allusions to Marxist or Freudian theories as substitutes for descriptive development of a situation or character...

...Or better...

...Beginning one of these chronicles, the reader can accept Miss Bentley's rhetoric as 1810 period décor...

...That glance, struck like a blow against ancestral countenance, had left a scar of resemblance, ancient and unchanging through the generations, on the faces of the grandmother, of the aunts, the cousins, his own father and his father's father...