Reviews

ENGLISH

Disobedience: by Alberto Moravia. (Secker & Warburg, London) 7s.7d.

My first knowledge of Signor Alberto Moravia, the Italian author, was through his novel. Wheel of Fortune, an English translation of which Messrs. Cassell published in January 1938, exactly thirteen years ago. In one’s youth it was tremendously exciting to come across a wholesale shattering of the conventional ideas of mankind and its morals; Signor Moravia was thirty years old then and he provided the excitement to its fullest measure in his novel. In the course of decade, The Fancy Dress Party, Agostino, The Women of Rome, have been his other productions in fiction; but the growing years do not seem to have sobered him to any sort of synthesis. His deep awareness of essential psychology propels him to revelations akin to volcanic eruptions, darkly, desperately pessimistic. He has been compared with Dostoievesky which, largely, is not incorrect.

Disobedience is Signor Moravia’s latest. It is a study of a school-boy, Luca by name, dealing with the critical period of his adolescence: his total loss of interest in his lessons, his sense of sickening ennui, his violent outbursts of rage, his repudiation of life not by thoughts of suicide but “by an intense contemplation of the idea of death.” His first sexual awakening comes through contact with his cousin’s young governess who dies suddenly, which throws him into black despair and eventually into a serious illness. A middle-aged nurse, ownner of a tender understanding heart, who is engaged by his parents to attend on him, brings him to health; his recovery, both physical, and psychological, is complete when she finally initiates him into to passionate intimacies of sex. “He had the precise feeling that she was taking him by the hand and introducing him, a reverent novice into a mysterious cave, dedicated to a religious rite. This, he thought was the life he had formerly invoked, and little did it matter if it presented itself to him in the garb of autumn.” Exact and exacting, convincing and conclusive, but Signor Moravia never states the norm; a fundamental coldness makes him impervious to the mellowness of sympathy, and this his study of an adolescent schoolboy fails to achieve the glow and magical throb of life.

Neapolitan Gold: by Guiseppe Marotta (The Hogarth Press, London) 8s. 6d. net.

From Alberto Moravia to Guiseppe Marotta the change is from the abnormal to the normal, from the deliberate to the casual, from the chill miasmal vapours to a companionable warmth and light. Neapolitan Gold is dedicated to the Comic Spirit. Meredith would have hailed it with extreme delight. “It introduces”–the publisher’s blurb runs–“a new humorist to English readers. Guiseppe Marotta, himself a Neapolitan by birth and upbringing, presents a portrait of his native city alive with colour and vivacity, the warmth, brio, and violence which endear the Italian temperament to the English heart.” A tear behind the smile–that is what one finds in the twenty-two vignettes brought together here–delicate sketches of character, not as types but as individuals, the spice of variety–all human interest stories, miniatures illuminated with the author’s special gifts of irony and paradox. To Signor Marotta a knife-slash on the loved one’s face is merely “an endearing sort of madness, something like a red ink signature to a love-letter.” A consummate artist whose melancholy is compounded of sweetness and light.

Cherry: The Story of My Little Friend: by Gabriel Chevalliar (Secker & Warburg, London) 8s. 6d. net.

Among the novelists well known outside France Gabriel Chevallier is one and perhaps the most popular. In his fifties now M. Chevallier has been in turn a draftsman, a commercial traveller, and a journalist. He admits to “a certain penchant for beautiful women, good wines, automobiles, and independence.” A magnificent story-teller, M. Chevallier’s qualities are various: wry wit, Rabelaisian exuberance of humour, fecund invention, lyrical expressiveness. He is a Master-hand in depicting bourgeois life as lived in the French provincial towns; readers of his novels–Clochmerle, Sainte Colline, The Euffe Inheritance–and that delightful volume of four long-short stories Mascarade–neednot be told about his technical virtuosity, his brilliant and perspicacious assessment of human nature in all its strength and weaknesses.

In Cherry, one sees a new Chevallier, a sentimental Chevallier and quite unabashed at that. His rhetorical splendours are: held in complete abeyance here; this record of recollections of a little girl who was entrusted to his care by her parents is enchanting in its simplicity, its sense of delicious fun and joy. Cherry was an exacting child but M. Chevallier in his role as her second father could not help succumbing to her infant wiles and charms. “To watch a child passing through the stages of human progression,” M. Chevallier remarks, “to observe the gradual growth of feelings, to note the part they play and to what ends they are adapted, is to work along the lines of a biologist, one who studies in the animal kingdom the principles of the evolution of the species. M. Chevallier does the biologist’s job with matchless skill and thoroughness, watching Cherry grow from childhood to youth, at which point he takes leave of her. It is an absorbing narrative which may be welcomed not only for its straightforwardness and lucidity but for its philosophy which caresses an angel’s wings.

Saturday Night at the Greyhound: by John Hampson (Eyre & Spottis-woode. London) 6s.

Issue Number Sixteen in the Eyre & Spottiswoode Century Library which is “designed to do for the best English fiction of the twentieth century what Everyman has done for the classics as a whole.” Saturday Night at the Greyhound achieved a first-class reputation when it was first published in England by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their famous Hogarth Press during the Spring of 1931. It is the tale of a pub among the bleak Derbyshire Hills, unfolding an intense drama of life: the pub is kept by Fred and his wife Ivy; Fred drinks too much and is unfaithful to the loving and devoted Ivy, but there is Tom, Ivy’s brother who is loyal to her and helps her out of her troubles. The brother-and-sister relationship is wonderfully told; it is the one streak of light, warm and golden, that relieves the greyness of the story. Mr. Hampson betrays character by swift strokes of phrasing; his style is simple, supple, vigorous; he is in the direct tradition of Daniel Defoe. He is the author of several other novels–Strip Jack Naked, Family Curse, 0 Providence, Care of The Grand.

The present edition of Saturday Night at the Greyhound carries a brilliant introduction by William Plomer. It is about the best appraisal of Mr. Hampson’s merits as a writer. “The general flavour of his work,” says Mr. Plomer, “is what may be called very English–because of its subject-matter, its sobriety and directness and its discovery of deep and unsentimental tenderness: it is also very personal, not because of any intrusiveness on the part of the author, but because nobody has written about the same themes in the same way.” Mr. Hampson is also master of the art-form of the short story; some of these have India for their cloth.

–MANJERI S. ISVARAN

Passion and Philosophy: Selected Sonnets: by Radhakrishnamurty, Challa. Price Rs. 3.

This slim volume of twenty four sonnets is already the fourth book of poems brought out by the young Andhra poet in English, the first being Thorns and Flowers in 1948, the second Poems in Europe in 1949, and the third Buds of Red Blood in 1950. The steady endeavour and fertility of imagination indicated by the regular output are alike commendable in the atmosphere of studied neglect, if not active hostility, which unfortunately prevails in the country at present, especially in Andhra, towards the cultivation of any high standard of attainment in English, or at any rate, towards any attempt at literary work in the so-called ‘foreign language’.

The wind blows where it lists and the muse flows along the course it chooses for itself and for a considerable proportion of our English-educated population the real medium of expression, whether natural or not, whether We like it or not, is and will be, for some time to come, the English language. A forced attempt to divert all utterance into the mother-tongue will result in obvious artificiality and insincerity or a drying up of the inspiration altogether.

But as Dr. K. Srinivasa Iyyengar justly observes, ‘Indo-Anglian poetry, to be justified at all, must give us something which neither English poetry nor any of our own regional literatures can give. It must learn to effect a true marriage of Indian processes of poetic experience with English formulae of verse expression.’ The true test of the validity of the use of a particular language for poetic composition is the sincerity of the utterance and the experience at the basis of the utterance. The sincerity of this rising poet in his Passion as well as his Philosophy is unquestionable and the facility with which he handles the ‘foreign’ language and its rhythm and metre, remarkable. We wish the young author, Mr. Radhakrishnamurty, many years of fruitful endeavour in the pastures of the Muse.

The Nature of Creative Art: by K. S. Venkataramani (With a foreword by Sir C. P. Ramaswltmi Aiyar.) Svetaranya Ashrama, Kaveri-poompattinam P.O., Tanjore District, S. India Price Re. 1.

Poet, Essayist, Short-story writer, Novelist in English, who earned for himself the title of ‘Tagore of South India’ by his versatile talent and rare achievement in several fields of the literary art and the encomiums of even the most fastidious of English critics for his graceful and correct style; caught in the tide of the National Movement and turned an earnest constructive worker actively interested in rural reconstruction, education, and social uplift; keen and vigorous thinker, brooding upon life, its nature and its problems, and seeking a solution for himself, of all the ills of his country and of humanity, his art always reflecting his views, ideals and personality only too clearly; the ‘river in floods’ that is Venkataramani finds at last its sea and is tranquilized, in the aesthetic philosophy he builds up in this small book-let on the Nature of Creative Art, in which he sets forth the nature and mutual relationship of Life, Art, criticism and their significance and goal.

And he finds, as he says in his preface, that his wide acquaintance with the creative and critical literature in English, his own experience of creative work of rare quality and considerable quantity, his long and earnest brooding upon the nature of Life, Art and Language–all brought him round to an aesthetic philosophy the central idea of which had been clearly formulated in a single verse by an illustrious countryman of his, the ‘poet- philosoper-statesman’ Neelakantha Dikshitar, centuries ago. ‘The river has found the sea’ in more than one sense. Mr. Venkataramani has truly succeeded perhaps in capturing the spirit of our ancients.

For the Indian students of English literature and literary criticism and aesthetic philosophy in English, and even for the English and European students of literature and aesthetic philosophy, this small booklet is bound to prove a great book of profound significance. They will find in it an attempt at the construction of a philosophy of the literary art by an Indian with an Indian outlooK and ground but on the basis of western criticism and with frequent references to, and original interpretations and examination of the adequacy of several well-known dicta of great critics like Coleridge, Flaubert Arnold, Pater, Raleigh, Murry etc.

The main thesis is, in the words of Sir C. P. Ramaswamy Aiyar, whose brilliant foreword is another great attraction in the book ‘the need for Swa-anubhava by which the creative artist expresses a decisive emotion and embodies his conception of reality and of his search which is a search after the abiding relations of life. Creative art is a kind of Yoga Sadhana, by which alone the instinctive longings of man’s mind and soul can be translated into significance. This Yoga can eliminate the barriers and limitations of existence and can enable one to see unity in diversity.

The only complaint which one can make is against the extreme brevity of the treatment. Such  powerful interpretation and criticism of important critical canons such original explanation and reconciliation is all packed into twenty-six pages without being developed in detail and fullness into a regular and rounded thesis.

Even as it is the book is invaluable for every student of the philosophy of literary art.

HINDI

Hamari Adim Jatiya (Our Primitive Tribes): Bhagavandas Kela and Akhil Vinay, M.R.A.S.-Published by Bharativa Granthamala, Daraganj, Prayag. Pp. 356. Rs. 3-8-0.

This book is a valuab1e addition to the opinion of National Integrity taking root in a practical way in the present times, viz., after the attainment of Indian Independence. Very few books have so far been written on the lines on which the book under review has been done about the twenty five millions of our Primitive tribes scattered all over India, mostly in mountains and forests.

The book is divided into five sections with four appendices. The first section gives a general outline of these Primitive tribes in ten chapters and treats of the following points: – (1) the population of the various tribes according to the 1941 census; (1) the reasons for choosing the name of Adimjati (Primitive tribe) in preference to other names of Adi Basi, Vana Vasi, etc.. denying them for the political or other stigma which they suggest; (3) the primitive civilisation as the root of the present one; (4) the importance of the languages of these tribes and their literatures chiefly comprising of song and tale; (5) the dance systems of the several tribes; (6) their religious notions and festivals; (7) systems of marriage; (8) a historical sketch of the part played by these tribes in the freedom movement of India from the times of Maha Rana Pratap.

The second section gives in some detail information about the various tribes, viz., Santhals, Gonds, Bhils, Nagas, Koyas, Todas, Bihari, Bengalee, Assamese and Orissa Tribes, Southern, Western and Northern tribes. etc.

The third section mentions about the two angles of vision namely that of a pure anthropologist and that of creating awakening in the tribes and bringing them up to the level of Indian citizenship to which by constitution, India is pledged. Several useful and practical hints have been given for the uplift of these tribes with special reference to the financial, educational, and health conditions of these tribes.

The fourth section deals with “reformation” with reference to the Special Provisions in our Constitution and the lines along which the several State Governments are moving for implementing the Constitutional provisions.

The fifth section gives in detail a historical sketch of the ameliorative measures of various associations and bodies. It does not fail to make mention of the services rendered by the Christian Missionaries for the reformation of these tribes and describes at length the services of the various associations and unions of workers, no less than a score in number, in addition to the philanthropic activities of religious bodies such as the Ramakrishna Mission. Next a brief note about each of the chief workers in the field is given of whom (the late) Thakkar Bapa tops the list deservedly and to whom the book has been rightly dedicated.

The four appendices give the following information: (1) samples of folk-songs; (2) results of anthropological and other scientific analysis made on these tribes; (3) population and statistical lists; and (4) bibliography.

The book is written in good Hindi. Illustrations of some chief workers have been given. As so much useful knowledge is given in this book, we recommend that the book, may be translated into the several regional languages for the benefit of the non Hindi-knowing people.

The authors, as they say, feel highly encouraged and amply rewarded if the book inspires mainly the spirit of ameliorative service and secondarily any interest in anthropological and sociological studies as Sri Viyogi Hari, a veteran worker and Hindi scholar has written in his thought-provoking introduction.
–K. SUNDARA RAMA SARMA