Books: A Woof of Joy

GENTIAN HILL (402 pp.) — Elizabeth Goudge—Coward-McCann ($3.50).

In a cottage near the sea at Marldon, Devonshire, lives a little spinster named Elizabeth Goudge. Pottering about her garden or taking tea with friends, she could pass for a spiritual D.P. from the Mid-Victorian Age whose most violent activity is the occasional pressing of a rosebud in a volume of Lamb’s Essays of Elia.

At second glance this impression seems false. Little Miss Goudge (rhymes with Scrooge) is one of the most prolific and popular novelists now wielding a pen; with the help of the Literary Guild, her Green Dolphin Street (1944) and Pilgrim’s Inn (1948) sold more than a million copies each. Yet in a deeper sense Novelist Goudge is just what she seems: a middle-aged Victorian lady with genteel literary inclinations.

Take a Type. It is a minor literary phenomenon of the mid-20th Century that novels in the style of the mid-19th should still be hugely popular. And it is plainly uncanny that such a writer as Novelist Goudge, with almost nothing to say, and small style to say it with, should be the one to write them. What is the secret of Author Goudge’s success? Gentian Hill, her latest novel and the Literary Guild’s first offer of the new year, can be studied as a casebook of her method.

Novelist Goudge’s first concern is to stake out a field of action on some safe old ground, and stock it with standard breeds of characters. First she introduces Mr. Midshipman Anthony Louis Mary O’Connell of the British navy around 1800, a lad with “delicate lips and flaring nostrils . . . of a startled horse.” Anthony deserts ship after being spread-eagled in the rigging for two hours. Ashore he meets Stella Sprigg, a girl whose “swift graceful movements were those of … a faun or gazelle . . .” They fall in love, but Anthony, flaring his nostrils, rejoins the navy to redeem his honor. Until Jack comes home again, Stella and the story are left for the most part to vegetate in Devonshire. But all ends well and weddingly at last.

Add Magic Herbs. This hollow old stump of a plot might be enough for many a bestseller, but Novelist Goudge crams it with something more. She adores animals; so the book becomes an ark of cats, dogs, horses and oxen which almost outnumber the human population. She has a fondness for the supernatural; so the book is aclog with fairies, a white witch, magic herbs, and vervain brews. She cannot resist a legend, so several of them weave and wind in a fine confusion through the novel.

Author Goudge’s aim, through all this, is to show that everything is a “carefully woven pattern where every tightly stretched warp thread of pain [lays] the foundation for a woof thread of joy”—which is a fair example of how the sonorous Victorian style sounds in Miss Goudge’s version. However it sounds, Miss Goudge’s simple optimism, her invariable happy endings and her soufflé of fairies and folklore always pull her through. Gentian Hill should do it again.