BOOKS
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calls a silly, affected young girl his Beatrice Portinari. But the ancestral
couplings are forbidden to the imagination. The specifically sexual pas–
sages all deal with diseased prostitutes of the lowest order. Although they
are chronologically impossible, scenes are included of Edinburgh medical
schools ir11 the days of the body snatchers. Pennell wants to describe the
dissection of a young prostitute with whom the students had spent their
nights. Toward the end an apparently irrelevant chapter shows a pros–
titute, on the same night the hero is born, dying of infection from an
attempted abortion. A green tinge appears on her body precisely where
a mat of moss had grown on a statue of Venus in
a,
decaying garden
in the South, in the most romantic section of the book. Sex is fascinating
and repulsive; the political attitude has a genital archetype. On all levels
there is withdrawal, and compensating fantasies of disruption.
Because Pennell is a fantasist of considerable imagination, some of
the scenes, particularly the battle scenes, are very exciting. And he
achieves emotion, or the appearance of emotion, by methods remarkably
similar to the historic reconstruction in this novel. For in accomplished
and eclectic imitation Pennell has caught the rhythms, the manners, the
forms and phrases of the most significant writers of the last two decades,
but writers who are obviously dead for him so far as all meaning is con–
cerned. We recognize fragments of Joyce and Eliot and Pound, of Dos
Passos, Anderson, Hemingway, Josephine Herbst, the shadows without
the substance of most of those writers against whom official nationalist
criticism has so violently turned in a period of spiritual uncertainty and
withdrawal, a period of which this book is so characteristic an ex-
pression.
RoBERT GoRHAM DAvis
TIME MusT HAVE A STOP.
By
Aldous Huxley. Harper and Brothers.
$2.75.
A
FTER waiting through if not always wading through a number of his
novels in the hope that he might someday turn out something in line
with the bright if rather indeterminate charm of his earlier days, it is
pleasant to be able to report that with
Time Must Have a Stop
Aldous
Huxley has rejoined the ranks of promising novelists to which
Chrome
Yellow
first gave him entry.
As a matter of fact, the present work suggests a rewriting of the
first. The period is very much the same, the action takes place during
holidays on a never-never-land estate created for the purpose, this time
in Florence. And the precocious and beautiful young hero writes verse
and makes up phrases on all occasions. It is as if Huxley had taken
Crome Yellow
and said this is what was really going on then, this is
what those people really were only I was too young to know it.
If
one
laments the excellent light novelist that still cries like a lost child
through Huxley's windy rages, one will not prefer this solidification of
the soap bubble.
