SOCIAL UPSTARTS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 476, 6 August 1948, Page 20

SOCIAL UPSTARTS

THE RJSE OF SILAS LAPHAM. By William "Dean Howells. THE REAL CHARLOTTE. By E. Somerville and Martin Ross. Oxford University Press (Geoffrey Cumberlege). R. CUMBERLEGE must have dug deep into his bookcase to produce these two minor classics of the Victorian era, but what a delight it is to read them to-day in their new World’s Classics format. Silas Lapham is set in Boston in the years after the Civil War, and it describes the attempts of a plain man. who has risen in the world by luck and hard work to adjust himself to high society. Silas is vulgar and commonplace, he smells of the paint that brought him success, and Beacon Hill was apparently as blue-blooded then as it appears to-day in the novels of John P. Marquand. But he has a potential greatness about him (for instance, he feels it is morally wrong to descend to sharp financial practices) that makes his struggles with the perplexities of social etiquette inspiring as well as amusing. The stature of Howells alone makes the book a-good purchase, for he dominated American letters for a generation after 1870, and in his 40 novels and his critical writings was their first exponent of realism. He was also the friend of Henry James, and there are similarities in their work-the same air of elegance, the same finely drawn portrait of genteel society, and the same concern for the higher moral codes. But I find Howells the more readable of the two, for his style is forceful, polished, and clear. There is little high passion or tragedy in the book, for like his hero, Howells was matter-of-fact and kindly; he believed "the more smiling aspects of life were the more American ones." The first result of the collaboration between those two young Anglo-Irish ladies, Edith Somerville and Violet Martin, was The Real Charlotte; the second was Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. Those who have read and enjoyed the Irish R.M. stories (they were available here in a Penguin edition during the war) should enjoy this reprint of their first book almost as much, It has all the atmosphere of Irish county society, with its horsiness, its worries over the Land Act, and its petty inter-House feuds. The plot revolves about the loves and hates of Charlotte Mullen (a wide-mouthed, money-lend-ing owner of slum property whose wit and intelligence make her socially acceptable to the upper strata), her Dublin niece Francis, and handsome Roddy Lambert. The narrative rattles along at a fast gallop; the speech of the Irish peasants and the haughty manners of the English-born land-owners are reproduced with delightful humour; but beneath it all runs a hint of tragedy that gives solid depth to the novel’s

sparkling surface. ~

P.J.

W.