FICTION CHRONICLE
in
All Hallow's Eve:
the best thing in it is Williams' brilliance in imagin–
ing how the dead feel. His heroines, Lester and Evelyn, are wandering
about London after having been killed by an airplane.
It is not very difficult for supernatural fiction to make us accept
the dead, because we usually brush aside that trick and look upon the
active ghosts as if they were alive. In Williams the opposite is true; it is
the fact that the girls are dead, their hopeless condition, that
is
most
painfully vivid. We participate in their state with an awful shudder
because it is not described in windy, otherworld language, but in the
plain, factual manner of two mediocre girls lost in the city.
"Shall we go to our place?"
"No, no. I won't see Mother. I hate Mother."
Lester shrugged. One way or another, they did seem to be
rather vagrants, helpless creatures, with no purpose and no use.
She said, "Well ... let's go."
I suppose it is a turn like "rather vagrants" for two young women
smashed to pieces by an airplane that identifies Williams' quality.
At the center of the book there is quite a lot of machinery about
a villain called Simon the Clerk, who conceives of himself as the true
Messiah. None of this is very compelling because the hypnosis and
faith healings move us into a world of cranks and freaks which is in–
adequate to express the solemn evil Williams had in mind. Altogether,
Williams is only moderately interesting about the living.
I don't see how anyone could be surprised or annoyed that Plievier's
Stalingrad
has sold over a million copies in Europe. The utilitarian title
is an apt representation of the book. It is a solid, intense, horrifying
document on the destruction of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad.
Publishers are unforgivably pigheaded in comparing all current
war fiction to
War and Peace
and thereby creating enormous resent–
ment in the mind of anyone who has read Tolstoy. It is all one can do
to get past the cheeky blurbs and enter the humble pages of the books
themselves. Plievier's book, no
War and Peace
indeed, is only a superior
kind of journalism, but because of its overwhelming concentration upon
the terrible details of the trapped, desperate men, the diseased, frozen
German soldiers who have been abandoned like superfluous beasts by the
powers in Berlin, the novel has a seriousness and responsibility not
achieved by the other war fiction around, which depends solely upon a
doughy, progressivist imagination.
Stalingrad
is worth reading as a docu–
ment and also because one recognizes a humane, cultivated, grave mind
at work on the brutal material.
Elizabeth Hardwick
1353
