Jottings

Radio Record, Volume V, Issue 16, 30 October 1931, Unnumbered Page

Jottings

' ERY, numerous and diverse are the literary activities of Mr. Thomas Moult, he having proved his mettle as poet, critical essayist, biographer, and anthologist. In the field of fiction. "Snow Over Eldon" is well remembered, and now comes a novel,.in the method and manner of which -he is at one with the Victorian tradition, and: in our time that of the later work of Mr. J. B. Priestley and Mr. A. P.. Herbert. The aptly titled "Saturday Night’ is a chronicle, meticulous, far-ranging, and eminently companionable, of the doings: of Londoners of. many types, particularly of the working class and below: it; but the true protagonist is the great metropolis itself and the pu@iieus thereof, in their vitality, glamowur, sordidness, tragedy, and humour, described and rejoiced in by one familiar with every highway and .-byWay, and each gleam‘and sparkle of the refulgent lights of London. Day in, day out, the doings of the Poplar family are set before us, their toilings and moilings, bubbling optimism, and: irrepressible gaiete de coeur. There is the mother, own sister to Mrs. Nickleby, affectionate, lachrymose, and absurd, but putting up © gallantly stubborn fight to bring up five ,boys without aid from the attractive scamp she married, who speedily proved himself to be entirely undesirable in the role of a husband. In particular, sympathy goes ott to Mark, fifteen years old when the story begins, looking for work, eager to help to keep going the family menage, and with wistful memories. of.a time when that menage included the agreeable failure wvno was his father. Mark, his young face looking "as though the Creator had fashioned it out of a sunshiny morning," makes his debut in business world per medium of dusty, fusty law office, where he is white slave to an odd dozen clerks, and only. dares to steal fleeting glance at. the- lovely old trees in the grounds of’ Lincotn’s Inn, "their gossamer gold shedding into autumnal glades, bordered by silver fogs." Of the denizens of this office there are portraits limned with caustic wit and not without malice; from the: old soaker Hirst, whose violin was his refuge from mean standards of a world hésheld in sardonic contempt, to Kiddy Kay, bully and blusterer, who wields cheap and nasty authority over unfortunate underlings, As the years pass Mark’s fortunes improve, and he widens experience by rent-collecting in unsavoury streets and falling in love with ‘the gentle Lily. The. love affair of this shy. girl and boy, its beauty of youth and evanescent’ quality, are presented with an admirable and sympathetic restraint; and the description’ of a day at _ Happy

Hampstead, in company with the sophisticated: Matthew and his. inamorata, is: excellent. The end falls on a note of tragedy, the melodramatic murder of the scintillating Ninon not appearing’ entirely.

coherent with the ‘rest of the’ novel, which stands or falls by its panoramic presentment of the numerable types and facets, animate and- inanimate, which goto make up the microcosm of London,

T adds to the pleasure of a book like . "The Good Earth" to know something of.the life of its author. Mrs. Pearl Buck is a daughter of missionaries to China, and. except for,a spell" of university life in America’ has spent’ all her life there. She has taught at the University of Nanking and at the: Government University under the Empire and the Republic. She speaks Chinese with native fluency. Her novel has as hero a peasant of China, who begins with possession of a small parcel of land and, by frugality. and a passion for the good earth, makes himself a rich farmer. The beauty of her book comes. from her deep sympathy with the simplicity of the Chinese national character. Wang Ling is every Chinese; and the tale is set in "modern times, in him the ages' of ‘Chinese history survive. Labour, marriage, parenthood, love, loss, prosperity,:: grief and death dre the accidents of his story, as they are of ours, and it is through these, so simply and ‘movingly described, that we can enter into his very heart.’ "The Good Barth" is true as the Book of Ruth is true; by a deeply controlled tenderness it shows the individual as sharer in the common lot of humanity. It is a triumph to have made a2 man whose ways are altogether strange se unmistakably human to us. e * * ASSANDRA, daughter of the learned Dr. Fazakerley, losing her mother at:birth, has been brought up by her father as a vestal virgin devoted to the Temple of Learning, The professor has ideas.a hundred years in advance of his generation up to a certain point. Cassandra is proficient in all sorts of ’ologies and dead languages, but, as a gipsy woman tells her, she is as innocent as a babe unborn about worldly . matters, Into the quiet, cloistral life of this young girl bursts a riotous undergraduate of Cambridge, Douglas:Arlesey, and the inexperienced maiden falls an easy victim to the arrows of Cupid. Happily all the badness of Douglas is very much on the: surface. Underneath there is a sterling character which rises to do battle for Cassandra, now besieged by several suitors more or less acceptable to her father. But nothing will melt the adamant heart of the professor in regard to the one man his daughter desires to marry, not his rescue from a highwayman, nor from his burning laboratory, nor from bodily sickness and discomfort. Not, in fact, till his daughter shows. every symptom of dying, in exemplary fashion, of.a broken heart, does he relent, and in doing so finds his own happiness. Thus, couched in quaint, almost formal, language of. an age gone by, runs the story of Miss Aelfrida Tillyard’s "Haste to the Wedding," a dex lightful and amusing book, °: