BOOKS
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existence might permit of emotions other than disgust and depression:
Wilson's subject matter resembles Proust's, but in Proust there is from
beginning to end a sense of nobility, a conviction that human beings
might be otherwise than they are, which is almost utterly absent from
Hemlock and After.
To read a first novel by an unknown author which, sentence by
sentence and page by page, makes one say: he can't keep going at this
pitch, the intensity is bound to break down, the perfection of tone can't
be sustained-is to rejoice in an experience of pleasure and astonishment.
Patrick O'Brian's
T estimonies
makes one think of a great ballad or a
Biblical story. At first one thinks the book's emotional power is chiefly
a triumph of style; and indeed the book is remarkable enough for a
beauty and exactness of phrasing and rhythm which can only be
characterized by quotation:
It was September when I first came into the valley: the top of it was
hidden in fine rain, and the enclosing ridges on either side merged into a
gray, formless cloud. There was no hint of the two peaks that were
shown on the map, high and steep on each side of the valley's head. This
I saw from the windows of the station cab as it brought me up the
mountainous road from the plains, a road so narrow that in places the
car could barely run between the stone walls. All the way I had been
leaning forward in my seat, excited and eager to be impressed: at an–
other time the precipices that appeared so frequently on the left hand
would have made me uneasy, but now they were proofs of a strange
and wilder land, and I was exhilarated.
. . . There may be things more absurd than a middle-aged man in
the grip of a high-flung romantic passion: a boy can behave more
foolishly, but at least in him it is natural.
I kept away. I read Burton and walked the mountains. We had a
spell of idyllic weather, and the soft loving wind was a torment to me.
I would not pass those days again. I knew I was a ludicrous figure,
and it hurt all the more. I did not cat. I could not read, I could not
sleep. I walked and walked, and when one day I broke a tooth on a
fruit stone I welcomed the pain.
Long before I had engaged to help with the yearly gathering of the
sheep for the shearing, and now the time came round. The boy came
up to ask if I would meet Emyr on the quarry road early the next morn–
ing. I wondered how I should face him, but there was nothing for it
and I said I should be very glad.
But the reader soon forgets the style as such-a forgetting which is
the greatest accomplishment of prose-in the enchantment and vividness
of the story. John Aubrey Pugh, an Oxford don who has given up his
teaching post and come to live in a secluded Welsh valley, falls in love
with Bronwen Vaughn, the wife of the young farmer who is his neighbor.
