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Novels and Novelists

A Novel Without a Crisis

page 29

A Novel Without a Crisis

Heritage — By V. Sackville West

On page 3 of her novel Miss Sackville West makes an interesting comment:

I should like to explain here that those who look for facts and events as the central points of significance in a tale will be disappointed. On the other hand I may fall upon an audience which, like myself, contends that the vitality of human beings is to be judged less by their achievement than by their endeavour, by the force of their emotion rather than by their success.

These are not extraordinary words; but we are inclined to think they contain the reason for the author's failure to make important a book which has many admirable qualities.

If we are not to look for facts and events in a novel—and why should we?—we must be very sure of finding those central points of significance transferred to the endeavours and emotions of the human beings portrayed. For, having decided on the novel form, one cannot lightly throw one's story over the mill without replacing it with another story which is, in its way, obedient to the rules of that discarded one. There must be the same setting out upon a voyage of discovery (but through unknown seas instead of charted waters), the same difficulties and dangers must be encountered, and there must be an ever-increasing sense of the greatness of the adventure and an ever more passionate desire to possess and explore the mysterious country. There must be given the crisis when the great final attempt is made which succeeds—or does not succeed. Who shall say?

The crisis, then, is the chief of our ‘central points of significance’ and the endeavours and the emotions are stages on our journey towards or away from it. For page 30 without it, the form of the novel, as we see it, is lost. Without it, how are we to appreciate the importance of one ‘spiritual event’ rather than another? What is to prevent each being unrelated—complete in itself—if the gradual unfolding in growing, gaining light is not to be followed by one blazing moment?

We may look in vain for such a moment in ‘Heritage.’ It abounds in points of significance, but there is no central point. After an excellent first chapter—an excellent approach—we begin almost immediately to feel that the author, in dividing her story as she does between two tellers, has let it escape from her control. And as one reads on the feeling becomes more and more urgent: there is nobody in control. Her fine deliberate style is, as it were, wilfully abused by the two tellers; they use it to prove much that is irrelevant; they make it an excuse for lingering and turning aside when everything was to be gained by going forward—until finally, between them they break the book into pieces, not harshly or madly, but by a kind of delicate, persistent tugging, until there is a piece of Sussex, a fragment of Italy, some letters from the war, a long episode in Ephesus, fine, light, glowing pieces—each one, if we examine closely, a complete little design in itself.

The first teller is Malory, a wandering inconsistent man who loves to stand aside and see what people make of this dark business, life. Seated on a hillside in Italy, he relates to a half acquaintance, half friend, a strange experience he had while living in a farmer's household in Kent. His first vision of the Penniston family as he stands on the threshold watching them at meat, is beautifully conveyed; one shares his ‘thrill of excitement’ and his consciousness that there was something strange here—something that wasn't at all in keeping with sober English farm folk. Little by little he discovers what it is. That tiny aged great-grandmother, crouched over the fire, roasting chestnuts, wrapping herself in the warmth and the faint foreign smell of the burnt nuts was a Spanish dancer.

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The wild warm blood glows again in her great-granddaughter, Ruth, and in Ruth's cousin, Rawdon Westim-cott. In Rawdon it runs pure and dark, but there is that in Ruth which rebels; she appeals to Malory to save her—and feeling that Malory is her saviour she loves him, but he is blind until it is too late.

Thus Malory. And now the story is taken up by the man who listened. More than a year has passed; the war is raging. He is in England, discharged from hospital, and he decides to visit the Pennistons and see for himself what has happened. He goes, and realising the deep misery of Ruth in the clutches of her brutal husband, he longs for Westimcott's death and that Ruth should marry Malory. But there is a spoiled tragedy. Rawdon is not killed when his wife shoots him. He masters her again.

The third part of the book is a journal sent by Malory to his friend, giving an account of the next ten years; how he returned from the war and asked Ruth to leave her husband, how when she refused he went on an expedition to North Africa and then to Ephesus. At Ephesus an entirely new character appears, a man named MacPherson, who has nothing whatever to do with the story, and, except that he receives a yearly packet of flower seeds from Ruth, Malory's story becomes the story of his life with MacPherson. After the outsider's death Malory returns to London where Ruth finds him and—takes him home. She explains (or rather he explains for her) that her wild husband has turned coward and left her. He, the bully, has been through all those ten years gradually filling with fear of her, until, at last, he can bear no more.

What has she done to provoke that fear? Ah, that would be interesting to know, but the author does not tell us. It happened and it freed her; and with his going from her the devil goes from her, too, leaving her at peace and free to lead her other life with Malory.

These are bare outlines, richly filled in by the author, and yet we are not ‘carried away.’ She has another comment:

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Little of any moment occurs in my story, yet behind it all I am aware of tremendous forces at work which none have rightly understood, neither the actors nor the onlookers.

That is easily said. We have heard it so often of late that we are grown a little suspicious, and almost believe that these are dangerous words for a writer to use. They are a dark shield in his hand when he ought to carry a bright weapon.

(May 30, 1919.)