FICTION: Red Sky

RED SKY AT MORNING—Margaret Kennedy—Doubleday, Page ($2.50).

The Story. The twin children of Norman Crowne are William and Emily, whereas the children of Charles Frobisher are their cousins, Trevor and Charlotte. All of them are brought up together; but almost immediately, in William and Emily, appears the wild and enticing madness that had made their father a great poet and, as many people thought even after he had been acquitted in his notorious trial, a murderer. Trevor and Charlotte are clever but a little disagreeable. They take after their father, Charles Frobisher, one of the solemn critics whom Norman Crowne despised.

The Crownes soon get used to hearing people speak as if some hereditary tragedy were certain to overtake them. After the war they live together in London where they are regarded as twin comets of disaster. Their charm is sufficient to make everybody want to know them, sufficient also to make everyone want to be in at the death of their airy and desperate career. Trevor describes them: “‘Their career is as romantic as a soap bubble, and that’s the most romantic thing I can think of. … You see it drifting into all sorts of dangers and just missing them, till it seems an absolute marvel it can last so long. The whole romance of it is that you know it must come to grief.’ ” The Crownes begin to come to grief when Tilli Van Tuyl persuades Norman to produce his play The Seven Dawns,

Suddenly, too acutely aware that half London’s delight in them is simply its eagerness to be present at another “Crowne show,” like Norman’s disaster, Emily asks Philip Luttrell to marry her; Philip Luttrell, a country parson who has developed in his middle age a tardy adolescent adoration for her, covers his surprise with delight. Restraining a last minute eagerness to run away from the country wedding, Emily waits until she reaches London on the first night of her honeymoon to dodge Philip and go back to her brother. But at the house in Edwardes Square she finds Tilli whom William has married in his loneliness. So Emily goes back to Philip.

William and Tilli go down to Monk’s Hall, where Trevor at his cousin’s expense has organized an asylum for greedy and communistic artists. Tilli’s purpose has a great deal to do with Trevor, whose casual desertion of her in London has moved her to the effort of retaliation. Monk’s Hall is swept by the draughts of a thousand petty enmities, jealousies, hungers, hatreds. When William finds Trevor in his wife’s bedroom he does the natural thing, the thing that was expected of him. He takes a shotgun and follows him into the woods that surround Monk’s Hall.

The Significance. The parents of genius usually invite more speculation than its children. But its children have supplied Author Kennedy with the material for two novels. Just as in The Constant Nymph she studied reflections of the erratic musician Sanger, as they appeared in his children, she now unfolds the more tragic influences of Norman Crowne as they animate his son and daughter. As these two are more tragic, they are more spectacular. Their bright uneven beauty sometimes begins to be a little unreal. But the construction of her theme, the way in which their mercurial doings are played against the less irregular pattern of the Frobishers outweighs and hides their unreality. The glow of “red sky at morning, shepherds’ warning,” pervades the pages of the book, rising to a sultry heat at noon, and sinking to the destined thunderstorm at the end of the short astonishing day. Never attaining the complete objectivity that is the property of most great writing, Author Kennedy balances her characters against each other, slanting her satire at each through the minds of the others. Her work has not yet reached independence of period or place; the praise which it demands and receives must be qualified with some such phrase as, “the best book of the year,” “the most brilliant novel of its kind written in a decade.” But this perhaps is partly due to the caution of critics who are afraid to have their discoveries forgotten. Author Kennedy is reaching high; more noticeable than ever is her sure and satisfying command of form. This is a finer novel than The Constant Nymph.

The Author began her list of works with A Century of Revolution, which is not at all like either herself or her later writings, and in which nobody who reads her novels takes more than a studious interest. The Ladies of Lyndon, her first fiction, made small stir; but with The Constant Nymph there was a great roar of approval from critics and gentle readers. At that time Author Kennedy was not long out of Somerville College, Oxford, where she sang in Sir Hugh Allen’s famed Oxford Bach Choir. Author Kennedy dislikes games & most violent exercise, likes swimming, dancing (hornpipes or foxtrots), mountain climbing. Her husband is David Davies, onetime secretary to famed Herbert H. Asquith.