714
JOHN
THOMPSON
that follow the thrashing propellers. . . . Perhaps it had rested,
floating in a sheltered cove, where the killer whale smote ... lying
aground knocked from side to side in an inch of water . . . or a
poor old tin can . . . or carried under a lonely salt-grey shack,
to drive a seine fisherman crazy all night with its faint plaintive
knocking ... brimming black tides . .. huge calm tides...." And
a girl found it. And years and years later, one day two people
are walking, "a man and a beautiful passionate-looking girl, both
bare-headed," the man tall, thick-set, bronzed, tattooed; "the
man paused every now and then to gaze into the lovely laughing
face of his girl. . . ." Over and over they tell the story to one
another. "It was a day just like this that I set the boat adrift."
Some of the stories are as finished as they ever could be; about
others, we must wonder. One of the refinements authors make
in
doing what they may call polishing is much more than revising
away the slips of off-center clauses and the little plagues of echoing
words, of wrong diction. They burn away their vanity and petti.
ness, their jealousy and boasting. "Tragedy of someone who got
out of England to put a few thousand miles of ocean between
himself and the non-creative bully boys and homosapient school–
masters of English literature only to find them so firmly entrenched
in even greater power within America ... dictatorship of opinion
. . . entirely a matter of cliques who have the auxiliary object of
nipping in the bud any competitive flowering
of
contemporary
and original genius. ... What! A person like myself (he is called
Martin Trumbaugh here, in this story) who discovered Kafka for
himself nearly 20 years ago, and Melville 25 years ago, when
about 15, and went to sea at 17. .. ." Maybe Lowry wanted all
that in. But though it happened, though the thoughts came and
were set down, and though they were part of the character, they
are not true really, he had a right to make himself better than
this. Surely he must have made himself better on his good pages,
.and for many pages together in the good stories here. The man
who wrote these pages sounds as if he knew all about himself and
was fighting for his life, fighting in an old-fashioned way, deter–
mined to hold to what he took for the laws of "chivalry." These
pages seem to come, many of them, out of true despair, like the
pages of
Under the -Volcano)
and they sound also as if they were
