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PARTISAN REV IEW
which] seemed catacombs of a hell assigned to the subdued regret of
those who had lacked in life the income to which they felt themselves
entitled," to "a sea of countenances stamped like the skin of Renoir's
women with that curiously pink, silky surface that seems to come from
prolonged sitting about in Ritz hotels." It colors equally the varied char–
acters of the novel, from familiar ones of the series like Sillery and
Uncle Giles, Widmerpool and Stringham, to the figures developed for
this novel to represent the rise of Marxist ideas in the period, of whom
perhaps the most fascinating is the German Marxist dramatist Guggen–
buh!. He seems impressive in an awful way when he lectures a party
on the drama. "Moscow Art Theatre is just to tolerate," he says, "but
what of biomechanics, of
Trummer-Kunst,
has it? ... The modem
ethico-social play I think you do not like ... it is workers untouched by
middle class that will make spontaneous." But when he stops, a girl
remarks, "I can't think why we don't have a revolution here and start
something of that sort," and then he seems only sad.
Mr. Powell's world looks very like what Nicholas sees from the car
window the night he and Jean become lovers:
On either side of the highway, grotesque buildings, which in day–
time resembled the temples of some shoddy, utterly unsympathetic At–
lantis, now assumed the appearance of an Arctic city's frontier forts.
Veiled in snow, these hideous monuments of a lost world bordered a
broad river of black, foaming slush, across the surface of which the car
skimmed and jolted with a harsh crackling sound, as if the liquid be–
neath were scalding hot.
This is the acceptance world, where Mr. Powell, like one of his char–
acters, gazes "thoughtfully round the room, as if contemplating the
deterioration of a landscape, known from youth, once famed for its
natural beauty, now ruined beyond recal!."
Mr. Hartley's novel is not so good a one as Mr. Powell's and in–
ferior to his own previous novel,
The Go-Between .
Nonetheless it is a
novel, fully realized and almost too well contrived.
It
is the story of a
middle class couple, the Eastwoods. They become acquainted with a
novelist who gets interested in an Austrian girl employed by the local
pub. Both the novelist and the Austrian girl have lovers in the back–
ground. As a consequence of one of Mr. Hartley's almost mathematically
exact plots, Harold Eastwood becomes entangled with the Austrian bar–
maid and Isabel Eastwood with the novelist; the novelist's long-time
mistress gets hold of the Austrian barmaid's young man and tells him
what she mistakenly deduces from the novelist's latest work, that the
