W

III

NORMAN DOUGLAS

HEN I last dared to give voice to my personal tastes in modern fiction, I was taken to task by many correspondents for having omitted to mention the favourites of others. In many cases they certainly coincided with mine: my excuse for not having publicly proclaimed my affection for these was simply due to lack of space. There are so many novelists writing to-day whose works I infinitely prefer either to those of Thackeray or Dickens that it would be impossible in the length of one essay to maintain my separate reasons for them all. I tried last time to show what my favourite authors had in common: this time I propose rather to let each one manifest his good qualities individually, no longer as members of a school, but as a fresh delineator of life, relying on no precedent, following in the footsteps of no greater contemporary. First among these is Mr Norman Douglas, who in South Wind has produced a book totally unlike any other that I have ever read, inimitably humorous, packed full of philosophy, rich with irony, and interesting throughout. That it completely mystified the critic of The Daily Mail, who self-complacently asserted that he could not understand what it was all about, may be in itself a recommendation. After all, what is it all about? An island, called Nepenthe, famous for its lobsters, girls, and sirocco, which last plays quaint tricks on the temperaments of all who visit

it or live there, is the setting. The characters are all eccentric in so far as they do not conform to the common standards of life.

The book opens with a description of the landing thereon of a sea-sick colonial bishop and a philandering priest. We are then invited to follow a delicious biography of the local patron saint, Dodekanus, so called, perhaps, because he met his death by being sawn asunder into twelve separate pieces while bound between two flat boards of palmwood: another current legend has it that he owed his name to a missive containing the two words Do dekanus; give us a deacon. The grammar is faulty because of the natives' rudimentary knowledge of Latin: they had only learnt the first person singular and the nominative case. A certain Mr Ernest Eames was at that time making it his life-mission to bring up to date a full history of the island and its legends. Of him we learn that "it was not true to say that he fled from England to Nepenthe because he forged his mother's will, because he was arrested while picking the pockets of a lady at Tottenham Court Road Station, because he refused to pay for the upkeep of his seven illegitimate children, because he was involved in a flamboyant scandal of unmentionable nature and unprecedented dimensions, because he was detected while trying to poison the rhinoceros at the Zoo with an arsenical bun, because he strangled his mistress, because he addressed an almost disrespectful letter to the Primate of England, beginning My good Owl' for any such like reason; and that he now remained on the island only because nobody was fool enough to lend him ten pounds requisite for a ticket back again."

6

I can picture the face of The Daily Mail critic,

fed on a constant diet of Guy Thorne and William le Queux, worrying over this passage, vainly searching for a plot. The colonial bishop fresh from converting Bitongos (who had taken to the Gospel like ducks to water, wearing top-hats at Easter) and M'Tezo (who filed their teeth, ate their superfluous female relations, swopped wives every new moon, and never wore a stitch of clothes) fell quickly in love with Nepenthe. He indulged in arguments over educational reform with Mr Keith, who advocated the introduction of sociology and jurisprudence into the school curriculum, and the abolition of practically all the existing subjects; he revelled in the endless colour-schemes with which the island provided him, houses of red volcanic tufa, windows aflame with cacti and carnations, slumberous oranges glowing in courtyards, roadways of lava-pitch-black, skies of impenetrable blue. He met Freddy Parker, the Napoleonic President of the local club, who swindled every one right and left; Count Caloveglia, who had "faked" an antique, the Locri Faun, that he sold for thirty-five thousand francs; the Duchess, who was not a duchess at all; Miss Wilberforce, invariably clad in black, who indulged immoderately in strong drink and denuded herself of her clothes on frequent occasions; Denis and Marten, young rivals for the love of Angelina, who was as pretty as she was sexual. . . . Each and all of these chatter at random as the mood takes them, sometimes satirically about our national vices of the deification of strenuousness, our failure to elevate the mind, our ridiculous struggle with the elements, and incessant bother about the soul.

Denis and Marten on the subject of chastity ("a man needn't handle everything dirty in order to be

doubly sure about it ") or Ruskin (“Good God! he's not a man: he's an emetic ") make glorious reading. The conflict between the idealist and the brutalitarian is superbly told.

One delicious trait of Norman Douglas is his habit of returning to a subject when he thinks that it can still amuse us. For instance, we learn later in the book with regard to Mr Eames that “it was not true to say of him that he lived on Nepenthe because he was wanted by the London police for something that happened in Richmond Park; that his real name was not Eames at all, but Daniels; that he was the local representative of an international gang of white-slave traffickers; that he was not a man at all, but an old boarding-house keeper who had very good reasons for assuming the male disguise; that he was a morphinomaniac, a disfrocked Baptist Minister, a pawnbroker out of work, a fire-worshipper, a Transylvanian, a bank clerk who had had a fall, a decayed jockey who disgraced himself at a subsequent period in connexion with some East-End Mission for reforming the boys of Bermondsey, and then, after pawning his mother's jewellery, writing anonymous threatening letters to society ladies about their husbands and vice versa, trying to blackmail Cabinet Ministers, and tricking poor servant-girls out of their hard-earned wages by the sale of sham Bibles, was luckily run to earth in Piccadilly Circus, after an exciting chase, with a forty-pound salmon under his arm, which he had been seen to lift from the window of a Bond Street fishmonger. All these things, and a good many more, had been said. Eames knew it. Kind friends had seen to that."

This conscientious historian had had a lapse from giace in his earlier days on the island, and that was

to fall in love after the fashion of a pure-minded gallant gentleman with an exuberant, gluttonous dame with volcanic eyes, heavy golden bracelets, the soupçon of a moustache, and arms as thick as other people's thighs. She was known as the ballon captif. She had nearly seduced Mr Eames into marrying her when her husband turned up, and Mr Eames luckily was saved.

Of a love theme there is but little in the book. One of Mr Marten's many escapades in this direction may be taken as typical.

66 ego te amare tantum ! Nemo sapit nihil. Duchessa in barca aquatica cum magna compania. Redibit tardissimo. Niente timor. Amare multissimo! Ego morire sine morire sine te. Morire. Moriturus. Capito? Non capire? Oh, capire be blowed," Denis heard him murmur, "tremolo agitato, con molto sentimento" to Angelina in the Cave of Mercury. There is more about drink than love in this Rabelaisian medley. The picture of Miss Wilberforce singing to the night-wind, "Oh, Billy had a letter for to go on board a ship," unlacing and unbuttoning the while, sticks in the memory more forcibly. There is shrewd philosophy strewn hither and thither for those who patiently allow the author to pursue his own path and do not hurry him.

"Do not swim with the crowd. They who are all things to their neighbours, cease to be anything to themselves. Even a diamond can have too many facets. Avoid the attrition of vulgar minds, keep your edges intact. A man can protect himself with fists or sword, but his best weapon is his intellect. A weapon must be forged in the fire. The fire, in our case, is Tribulation. It must also be kept untarnished. If the mind is clean, the body can take