In the Book and Literary World

The Camberwell Beauty. By Louis Golding. 312 pp. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. $2.50.

Mr. Golding’s imagination shows sign of temporary exhaustion. In order to put together his latest novel he has been forced to employ a curious agglomerate of material which not even his experience and craftsmanship have been able to master. His story starts in London, in the home of Mr. Peveril, a gentle soul who has retired from law practice to indulge his passion for butterflies and his paternal interest in the servants of his friends. So far so good. Peveril is essentially one of those creations whereby Mr. Golding has earned comparison with Dickens. Instead of advancing into the affairs of the Chiswick Green servants’ quarters, however, we are snapped to far-off Sicily.

It seems that one of the girls who once frequented Mr. Peveril’s backstairs salons married a young man of good family and went to Syracuse on her honeymoon. There her husband became interested in black magic and spiritualism, and the couple went to live in the Collegium Artium Mysticarum, run by one Machatan. Dire events apparently followed. The young man died under suspicious circumstances, and the girl, after finding some trouble in escaping, hurried back to appeal to the paternal Mr. Peveril to avenge her husband, if indeed he had been murdered.

Mr. Peveril, who is of course unable to resist such an appeal, assembles a fantastic group of assistant to sleuths to take with him to Sicily. There is the refined young Leslie, an Oxford undergraduate who knew the dead man; there is brawny Alf Tarleton, the kennelman; there is frail old Mrs. Granton, who collected china since her husband’s death, and Lizzie, her maid. The adventurers arrive in Syracuse and soon uncover a hot trail of black magic; but before they can follow down their clues, Alf and Leslie are kidnaped by the Mafia. It seems that Mussolini’s attempt to stamp out secret societies stirred Mr. Golding, especially in the final phases of a semi-military campaign against the mountain nests. He has the Mafia kidnap our two heroes not for profit, but as a gesture against Mussolini.

So here we have a plot compounded of black magic, butterfly collecting, the adventures of the Mafia, and international politics. Mr. Golding is very learned indeed in his references, but it would be far better all around if he kept his scholarly researches out of his novels. The London, especially the Jewish inhabitants of London, handled so well by him in the past is certainly far more fertile soil for him than the schemes of Machatan (who turns out to be a thrifty cockney skilled only in draining full purses of idle American females) or the Mafia.

In Recent months there has not been a novel so unanimously and freely praised by the critics as “Tortilla Flat.” John Steinbeck’s work has been known to the critics for some time, but only now does he appear to have hit his stride. He is a rare phenomenon—a born writer who with the fewest of strikes, lightly and delicately, can produce from his pen charming, glowing utterly real and yet utterly impossible characters. It is hard to analyze the unique charm of this book. It is filled with laughter and tears and music and warmth and a Gargantuan drinking of wine.

It is the story of Danny and of Danny’s friends and of Dann’s house. Danny was a paisano, that is, a native of California whose ancestry includes most Mediterranean and some American Indian strains and whose means of support are all invisible. The paisanos work very hard indeed in order to avoid working at all. They will put in days of labor to steal a jug of wine, when they could much more easily have earned it honestly; they sleep under bushes, their few garments seem to drop from the sky, and they never manage actually to starve. As for a woman’s smile, well, God made the women of Monterey complaisant—especially if one had a jug of cooled win under one’s arm.

Danny, unburdened with possessions, inherits two houses. This made him a great man in Tortilla Flat, the shantytown of Monterey. But the worry and fret of his property becomes Danny’s undoing. He tries to palm off one house on his friend Pilon, but Pilon insists on owing him rent—another worry. It is a great day when the first house burns to the ground. Pilon moves with Danny into the second. They gather to them two more paisanos. I cannot begin to suggest the strange adventures, the mystic experiences, the romantic adventures and in the end, the gentle sorrow which come to the quartet. And to do so would be to spoil the freshness and uniqueness of Mr. Steinbeck’s book.