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Novels and Novelists

A Landscape with Portraits

A Landscape with Portraits

Tamarisk Town — By Sheila Kaye-Smith

Were Miss Kaye-Smith a painter, we should be inclined to say that we do not feel she has yet made up her mind which it is that she wishes most to paint—whether landscape or portraits. Which is it to be? Landscape—the blocking-in of a big difficult scheme, the effort required to make it appear substantial and convincing, the opportunity it gives her for the bold, sweeping line—it is plain to see how strongly this attracts her. Portraits—there is a glamour upon the human beings she chooses which fascinates her, and which she cannot resist. Why should she not be equally at home with both? What is her new novel ‘Tamarisk Town’ but an attempt to see them in relation to each other? And yet, in retrospect, there is her town severely and even powerfully painted, and there are her portraits, on the same canvas, and yet so out of it, so separate that the onlooker's attention is persistently divided—it flies between the two, and is captured by neither.

Her theme is the development of a small Sussex town into a select seaside resort, patronized by the wealthy and aristocratic, not on account of its natural beauties alone, but because of the taste and judgment with which its reformation has been achieved. There is a time when it seems established in its enchanting prosperity for ever, but the hour of its triumph contains the seeds of its downfall. Very gradually, and then more swiftly, it is attacked page 74 by vulgarians, who are allowed to have their way, until at the end, wretched, shoddy, decayed little place that it is become, it is the scene of a brawl between drunken trippers. Sic transit gloria Marlingate.

It is, of course, absurd to imagine that Marlingate could grow, come to flower, blow to seed, without the aid of man, and yet at the moments when Miss Kaye-Smith is least conscious of the forces that govern it, she is at her happiest. Wandering at will in the Assembly Rooms, in the beautiful little Town Park, along the white, gleaming parade, in the woods at French Landing, her style is very natural and unforced, and, until the beginning of the disintegrating process, her touch is light. But, after all, this is only the landscape half. Let us examine the ‘portraits.’ The chief is Edward Monypenny, creator of Marlingate, who, at the age of twenty-eight, is in a position powerful enough to determine the future of the town. This curious young man, with his shock of white hair, coal-black eyes and black side whiskers, is, for all his cynical aloofness, in love with Marlingate; we are to believe that, until he meets with the little wild governess, he has never known what it was to feel for anything more responsive than a new block of houses or a bandstand. But she, Morgan, Morgan le fay, running out of the wood with dead leaves in her hair, very nearly makes havoc of his resolute ambition in the old, old way.

… She had crept towards him, drooping like a wild hyacinth in her blue gown. Then suddenly she flung her body straight, flung back her head, her arms were round him soft and strong as fox-glove stalks, and her hair, falling loose, trailed on his lips till it tasted sweet as syllabub.

But while she is still a woodland elf, his old love wins:

He turned back to Marlingate, as a man who has left his work to watch from the window an organ-grinder with a performing monkey turns to his desk again.

page 75

Years pass, and all his dreams are realized. Royalty has put its special blessing upon Marlingate, and Monypenny is Mayor, in cocked hat and black and crimson robes. And this is the hour chosen by the enchantress for her return—in scarlet. ‘Crimson and silky, a peony trailing its crinkled petals … it came.’

This time the long, slanting eyes eat him up with their spells, and she has her way with him.

Then she dropped her sunshade, which rolled in a whirl of scarlet down the slope, like a poppy falling, and stretching out her hands, took his white, struggle-worn face into their cool palms, drawing it down to her silent mouth.

It is a matter for wonder that, in spite of all the many pages describing the progress of their guilty love, in spite of the tremendous pains taken by the author to depict the agonies of Monypenny upon his discovering that sweet Morgan le fay holds in contempt, nay hates, his beloved Marlingate, and the other tremendous pains taken to show Morgan's despair upon realizing that Edward will not flee with her to foreign parts—we are never once moved by these two creatures. Marionettes they are, and marionettes they remain, jigging in a high fierce light that Miss Kaye-Smith would convince us is the fire of passion, until the last puppet-quarrel and the last glimpse of the heroine, ‘half under the water, half trailing on the rock … something which, from the top of the cliff, looked like a dead crimson leaf.’ This extreme measure is for love of Monypenny, who, at first, is properly grateful for his freedom. Again he is a man like a town walking, until one day he is filled with the idea that his first love is fattening upon the dead body of his second love, and that, after all, a woman is more to be desired than bricks and mortar. This starts working passion number three—he will kill that which killed her, and so have his revenge.

Here, to our thinking, the book ends. All that is going_ to happen has happened; we are at the top of the hill. page 76 Below us lies Marlingate, in its prosperity, ‘lying there licked by the sun’ and gazed upon by the man who has made it, and is about to unmake it. But the author is, if we may be pardoned the expression, as fresh as when she started. New characters appear—a wife for Monypenny, a little wooden son who has time to grow up and marry the daughter of Morgan le fay (so like, yet so unlike) and to live his father's history all over again before Marlingate is destroyed. And the years roll by, unbroken, heavy, like waves slapping against the promenade, the vulgar pier, before Miss Kaye-Smith is content to leave Marlingate to its fate.

How does it happen that a writer, obviously in love with writing, is yet not curious? This is the abiding impression left us by Miss Kaye-Smith; she is satisfied to put into the mouths and the hearts and minds of her characters the phrase, the emotion, the thought that ‘fits’ the situation, with the result that it does not seem to matter whether they speak, feel or think. Nothing is gained by it. They are just what they are. The plot's the thing—and having decided upon it she gets her team together and gives out the parts. There is but to speak them. And into the hand of Morgan le fay she thrusts a scarlet umbrella, she throws a cherry cloak about her and clothes her in a scarlet dress—and sets her going.

(September 12, 1919.)