English Literary Horizon

THE BLAZE OF NOON--Rayner Hep-pens-tall--Alliance ($2.50).

Very quiet and seldom widely advertised are the deep changes of popular mood and imagination by which literature grows. A great war may hasten such changes even when it obscures them from public view. Thus obscurely in the years from 1914 to 1918 James Joyce labored in Trieste and Zurich over Ulysses, Marcel Proust labored in Paris over Remembrance of Things Past--two mighty realizations of European life which the next generation of writers and readers tried to absorb.

So far as English literature still belongs to the English, little could be seen or said of such changes in the first winter of World War II, aside from the purely geographical facts that Novelists Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood emigrated to Hollywood, Poets Wystan Hugh Auden and Louis MacNeice to New York (TIME, Oct. 30). But this spring, a couple of portents appeared, one of them described as such by a writer well qualified to discern it. In a foreword to The Blaze of Noon, Novelist Elizabeth Bowen declared : "This novel, by knocking away devices, by moving beyond the known terms of reference, looks like--and I think is--the beginning of something new. Unlike most English novels, it is unprovincial: coming now, it may come a little in advance of its time--it is more like a novel one might imagine being written ten, or even 20 years hence. We may all be more European by then. If personal experience is to survive and have any value, and continue to be communicated by art, it must be cleansed of the twilight of vague romanticized feeling and of the received idea. ... I believe The Blaze of Noon to be an early sign of the change." The narrator is a blind masseur named Louis Duncan, who tells what happened in the Cornish household of his client, Mrs. Nance, after she had called him down from London to give her treatments. In 15 years of blindness, Duncan has learned to use his other senses with extraordinary acuteness, has even learned to repress his visual fantasies, thinking in terms of touch, hearing, smell. Handshakes and voices inform him of individuals he meets, except for Mrs. Nance's niece, Sophie Madron, who intrigues him by not shaking hands. He deduces that she is a more passionate as well as a more fastidious person than the others, and soon finds evidence that he is right.

The vivid work of the senses by which Duncan explores the house, the April countryside and the consciousnesses around him is one of this novel's claims to distinction. But its serious drive is in a love affair between Duncan and Sophie--an affair begun by Sophie's perverse need and boredom, matured by Duncan's perception, patience and intelligence. The story suggests not only the particular value of the erotic experience for the blind man but the civilized human sanity of his conduct. And--since Author Heppenstall does not cheat, or barely does at the happy end--the particular hell through which this love affair has to pass arises precisely from Duncan's psychology of blindness.

Humorless, superficially "abnormal," The Blaze of Noon is not a great novel nor one that a wide public will at once admire. But it is a work of art with more than one dimension. As a parable, for example, it offers food for thought to those who have sight but waste it. As a tract it is a severe corrective to the mindlessness of the D. H. Lawrence preachings on sex. As Elizabeth Bowen says, "the disabusedness, and the absence of conflict, make this un-English writing"; as she does not say, they make it something like French writing. And this un-Englishness may be the book's most obvious aspect as a portent of things to come, if the war in Europe should (improbably) lead to a genuine interpenetration of English and French cultures.

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