A Plea for Less Entertainment

The Young Physician — By F. Brett Young

How do you write your novels? It is a question we are often on the point of putting to novelists, and then we remember that it is the question above all others that authors dislike answering. Why is this? They look into the void, they are, beyond words, vague. Would they have us believe that their books spring, fully bound, out of their heads, or that they are visited by angels? Yet we live in an age of experiment, when the next novel may be unlike any novel that has been published before; when writers are seeking after new forms in which to express something more subtle, more complex, ‘nearer’ the truth; when a few of them feel that perhaps after all prose is an almost undiscovered medium and that there are extraordinary, thrilling possibilities….

Never was there a moment when the question was more fascinating. How do you write your novels? Do you have a definite plan before you begin? Do you know exactly what is going to happen and would it be possible for anything else to happen instead? And do you think a plot is necessary? And do you really write all you know, or do you still hold back a little, just a little … and why?

It is that last question that we should like, with all respect, to put to Mr. Young. His new novel ‘The Young Physician’ is the life history of Edwin Ingelby from the age of about fifteen until he is ‘grown up.’ The early part is yet another description of life at a public school—the miserable arrival of the new boy, interview with the miserly, cynical Head, ragging in the ‘dorm.’ at night, secret biscuit eating, cricket matches, ‘footer,’ ‘meaty bits’ out of the Bible, discussion of the facts of life, discovery of impurity among the boys, and the whole school assembled before the irate Head—we know, we page 93 dreadfully know it all. Nor does the ‘spirit’ of Mr. Young's account differ from the ‘spirit’ of all those other accounts.

The next week was the most sensational that had ever shaken the placid life of St. Luke's. The fall of Griffin was no startling matter—deliberately he had been asking for it and the escapade of the fair in race week was no more than a crowning glory. Still it was an impressive affair. Immediately after breakfast … it was whispered that Griffin had been sent to the infectious ward of the sanatorium, which was always devoted, by reason of its size, rather than any conscious attempt at symbolism, to the isolation of moral leprosy….

Here is the peculiar note of enthusiasm—the ‘Boy's Own’ note with which we have become so familiar. Nevertheless St. Luke's is not all the world to Edwin; he arrives loving his mother, and his love for her, instead of changing as a normal boy's should into a love of cricket bats and ‘strawberry specials,’ grows and deepens into a childish adoration.

In his account of the relations between these two Mr. Young carries us far away from the public school world. Edwin at school, in spite of his love of literature, his passion for historical dreaming and the fact that he cares more for poetry than games, is no more individual than those other school heroes. He follows in their steps, indeed, is bullied like them, comes to his own like them, and is in and out of favour with now the masters, now the boys. But at home, we begin to see an extremely sensitive, loving, imaginative little boy. His mother is a little delicate creature living on dreams and the love of flowers and music, but she feels her hold on life is frail, and unconsciously, imagining that she is the protecting one, she turns to her only child to save her. No child should be made to bear the subtle, difficult, derided emotions of pitying love.

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‘Oh, Mother, why can't I carry you?’ he cries. He does carry her and she clings, telling him of her dreams and of how unhappy she has been and how he is her baby.

Then, with her death and burial, the chapters telling of their love seem to fall away as the school chapters did. They break, like the two halves of a bud and are shrivelled and forgotten before the open flower. What was the need of them? Have they helped us in the least to understand the boy who goes home to find his perfect little mother dying? No. Reading these chapters, we know all that has gone before; this Edwin is not different from the Edwin with his first tuck box, he is the same, but realized, seen, felt and given. It is at this moment that he comes to life, and it is not without a thrill of excitement that we read on. But with the very first words of the new chapter the thrill subsides:

From this emotional maelstrom the current of Edwin's life flowed into a strange peace.

‘Emotional maelstrom’—this is very cold water indeed for an author to fling at his little hero, and it does not take us long to discover that however refreshed he may be he is again, in the reader's eye, a trifle blurred. And though, in the latter half of the book, when he is studying to be a doctor, there are occasional, brilliant glimpses of that beautifully realized little boy, they are never prolonged and they are always followed by a fresh douche. Each time that Edwin feels deeply and is overcome, as youth is overcome, by the unimaginable mystery of life, the author, instead of telling us all he knows (and we feel that he does know), still holds back, or excuses, the emotional maelstrom. Added to this, he has a way of interrupting our vision of his hero by causing other characters to cross his path. We are not referring of course to those with whom he comes into real contact, to those who have something to give him that increases his knowledge of life, but to others—why are they there?—who pass in front of the camera, as it were, for the sake of passing. And finally page 95 there is his love affair with a frail delicate girl who awakens that tender protective love in him that he felt for his mother. Like his mother ‘she is little and perfect and beautiful’ and he must defend her, he must carry her away out of the ugly world. Almost, that early glow returns, but this time the douche is heavy and final. His love ends in a fight with an old enemy of his schooldays whom he knows to be diseased and whom he tracks down into Rosie's bedroom. And Mr. Young leaves him, having signed on as ship's doctor, facing the open seas….

Readable, yes, eminently readable—readable to a fault. If only Mr. Young could forget the impatient public and let himself be carried away into places where he thinks they do not care to follow!