[_25 Aug. '10_]
One of the moral advantages of not being a regular professional, labelled,
literary critic is that when one has been unable to read a book to the
end, one may admit the same cheerfully. It often happens to the
professional critic not to be able to finish a book, but of course he must
hide the weakness, for it is his business to get to the end of books
whether they weary him or not. It is as much his living to finish reading
a book as it is mine to finish writing a book. Twice lately I have got
ignominiously "stuck" in novels, and in each case I particularly regretted
the sad breakdown. Gabriele d'Annunzio's "Forse che si forse che no" has
been my undoing. I began it in the French version by Donatella Cross
(Calmann-Lévy, 3 fr. 50), and I began it with joy and hope. The
translation, by the way, is very good. Whatever mountebank tricks
d'Annunzio may play as a human being, he has undoubtedly written some very
great works. He is an intensely original artist. You may sometimes think
him silly, foppish, extravagant, or even caddish (as in "Il Fuoco"), but
you have to admit that the English notions of what constitutes
extravagance or caddishness are by no means universally held. And anyhow
you have to admit that here is a man who really holds an attitude towards
life, who is steeped in the sense of style, and who has a superb passion
for beauty. Some of d'Annunzio's novels were a revelation, dazzling. And
who that began even "Il Fuoco" could resist it? How adult, how subtle, how
(in the proper signification) refined, seems the sexuality of d'Annunzio
after the timid, gawky, infantile, barbaric sexuality of our "island
story"! People are not far wrong on the Continent when they say, as they
do say, that English novelists cannot deal with an Englishwoman--or could
not up till a few years ago. They never get into the same room with her.
They peep like schoolboys through the crack of the door. D'Annunzio can
deal with an Italian woman. He does so in the first part of "Forse che si
forse che no." She is only one sort of woman, but she _is_ one sort--and
that's something! He has not done many things better than the long scene
in the Mantuan palace. There is nothing to modern British taste positively
immoral in this first part, but it is tremendously sexual. It contains a
description of a kiss--just a kiss and nothing more--that is magnificent
and overwhelming. You may say that you don't want a magnificent and
overwhelming description of a kiss in your fiction. To that I reply that I
do want it. Unfortunately d'Annunzio leaves the old palace and goes out on
to the aviation ground, and, for me, gradually becomes unreadable. The
agonies that I suffered night after night fighting against the wild tedium
of d'Annunzio's airmanship, and determined that I would find out what he
was after or perish, and in the end perishing--in sleep! To this hour I
don't know for sure what he was driving at--what is the theme of the book!
But if his theme is what I dimly guess it to be, then the less said about
it the better in Britain.
* * * * *
The other book which has engaged me in a stand-up fight and floored me is
A.F. Wedgwood's "The Shadow of a Titan" (Duckworth, 6s.). For this I am
genuinely sorry; I had great hopes of it. I was seriously informed that
"The Shadow of a Titan" is a first-class thing, something to make one
quote Keats's "On First Reading Chapman's 'Homer.'" A most extraordinary
review of it appeared in the _Manchester_ _Guardian_, a newspaper not
given to facile enthusiasms about new writers, and a paper which, on the
whole, reviews fiction more capably and conscientiously than any other
daily in the kingdom. Well, I wouldn't care to say anything more strongly
in favour of "The Shadow of a Titan" than that it is clever. Clever it is,
especially in its style. The style has the vulgarly glittering cleverness
of, say, Professor Walter Raleigh. It is exhausting, and not a bit
beautiful. The author--whoever he may be; the name is quite unfamiliar to
me, but this is not the first time he has held a pen--chooses his material
without originality. Much of it is the common material of the library
novel, seen and handled in the common way. When I was floored I had just
got to a part which disclosed the epical influence of Mr. Joseph Conrad.
It had all the characteristics of Mr. Conrad save his deep sense of form
and his creative genius.... However, I couldn't proceed with it. In brief,
for me, it was dull. Probably the latter half was much better, but I
couldn't cut my way through to the latter half.