PRIDE AND INTEGRITY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 821, 22 April 1955, Page 13

PRIDE AND INTEGRITY

A PRIDE OF LIONS, by John Brooks; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. CRESS DELAHANTY, by Jessamyn West; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 12/6. MARK LAMBERT’S SUPPER, by Jj. I. M Stewart; Victor Gollancz, English price 10/6 RIDE-integrity-is the keynote to these three novels, since the first two deal with that quality, and the third reveals some lack of it. John Brook’s American novel, about decaying aristocracy in an eastern town, and Jessamyn West’s sprightly study of American adolescence, reveal pride of the indi-

vidual, while J. I. M. Stewart, in his much-publicised incursion into straight | fiction, shows technical pride only. Thus I should prefer to dismiss Mark Lambert’s Supper in few words, as a pretentious Jamesian pastiche in which character is wrapped in a cocoon of words, and plot reveals a crudity worthy of Mrs. Henry Wood or M. E. Braddon. Like these ladies, Mr. Stewart-Innes will probably convince his addicted readers that here is something worth reading; evidently I’m not addicted enough. % John Brooks’s A Pride of Lions is full of meat, albeit rather over-bled veal. Here the characters-the dying father, the waffling mother, all the fumbling relatives-are subtly drawn: they convince you that you ‘are among people. People whose pride will never release their old teeth from the carcasses they worry: people who do not have to be big in order to reveal the true grandeur of pathos. That the general impression is one of futility, is due to Mr. Brooks’s masterly writing: there is none in the conception. If you wish to be depressed by other aristocrats than New York socialites, read A Pride of Lions and see how they, like aristocrats everywhere, are fighting a force they can neither contain nor withstand. Cress Delahanty, which appeared segmented in the New Yorker, is a brighter "psychological" piece, so plumb full of surprises that one reader at least had lost all power of astonishment at the end of it. The hysterical note of adolescencé pervades everything that Cress does: and you foresee a bright future for her in Hysterica when, as a grown woman with young integrity lost, she is well on her way to becoming a Daughter of the Revolution. There are some pleasant bits of descriptive writing in which Miss West so far forgets herself as to write with limpid luciaity: but I found ‘the tone of the whole so forced, so weedy, like plants raised in central heating. that I finished the book more than ever depressed by contemplation of the current American scene.

Sarah

Campion