HOLLYWOOD AND THE STATUS QUO

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 165, 21 August 1942, Page 3

HOLLYWOOD AND THE STATUS QUO

Sir-The flanking movement in "G.M.’s" very effective offensive (Listener, July 10), contains a reminder that definitions are irzportant. One of the three who discussed the modern novel, challenged the other two "to name one memorable novel which was not written in a spirit of disillusionment." But what is a "memorable modern novel"? In some quarters (I don’t include these particular disputants), a memorable novel is a novel of sordidness, frustration and misery. Better a consumptive, or perhaps more artistic still, a syphilitic, dying in a slum, than a happy man breasting a hill on a fine spring morning. If I say The Good Companions is a memorable novel, no doubt I shall be received with barks of derision, but I do. Curious, isn’t it, that "realism" should have come to connote what is drab, ugly, vicious, and miser‘able? Are not laughter, happiness an beauty just as real? However, enough of this. "G.M." is right. We do escape by doors into fairyland, only the fairyland is palatial country houses, with butlers, footmen, and late dinners. The percentage of English fiction and drama that deals with folk who dress for dinner is enormous. Pinero did a real service in the renaissance of the English drama, but I don’t know that there is a play of his that hasn’t a dress suit on the stage or in the background. The West End theatre stands on a dress suit. Nearly every detective story has a butler, Novelists and dramatists know their public. We like holidaying in this company. I do myself. But a few years ago, a discerning librarian put me on to a book called Three Fevers, by Leo Walmsley. It was a story about a Yorkshire fishing village. The only love interest in it was the affection between a young fisherman and his wife, and I regret to say the tale was so distressingly bourgeois that they remained in love, and there was no third party. I liked this book so much that I have looked out, and not without profit, for other things Walmsley has written. "G.M." will remember the film version of Three Fevers, an excellent piece of work. There wasn’t a dress suit on the landscape, which shows what can be done. A section of the dress-clothes school of novelists and playwrights is the group who deal in non-moral or vicious wastrels, men and women who slink round between bedtime and dawn. These gyrating shadows have an astonishing vogue in proportion to their numbers and importance. Are they more than 005 per cent of the population? One of Mr. Priestley’s services to literature is that he has brought into it a wholesome

wind from the provinces, a part of England that many of us are apt to overlook. I would rather have created Jess Oakroyd, the Yorkshire artisan hero of The Good Companions, than the whole gallery of Aldous Huxley’s rootless sophisticates, St. John Ervine once invited Noel Coward to go and see how people lived in the industrial north, but I don’t think Mr. Coward will ever accept. He would be too far from home.

A.

M.

(Wellington).