Books: Girl into Woman

GO SHE MUST—David Garnett—Knopf ($2.50). What shall befall the tall but beautiful, timid but intelligent daughter of a widowed vicar in a hamlet of the English fen country? Author T. F. Powys would surely bring her to harm through the primeval malice of some local lout. Sheila Kaye-Smith might supply her with a young gentleman and beset their true love with gossip and the father’s disapproval. H. G. Wells would find her at least a temporary career; Arnold Bennett would describe her shoelaces and thoughts on dusting the stairs. Hugh Walpole might make her a sweet minor character.

The young author of Lady into Fox, A Man in the Zoo and The Sailor’s Return does none of these things. In his matter-of-fact fashion, so quiet that it becomes mysterious, he makes her father a sort of pocket-borough St. Francis of Assisi. He fills her heart with restlessness and her head with innocent resolution, keeps her procrastinating over escape until her father’s mania for feeding birds is quite pronounced, until she has a friend and perhaps lover in the grocer’s son, until one more village Easter passes and the first nightingale has sung. Then go she does, Anne Dunnock of Dry Coulter, to equivocal Paris where the grocer’s son, an artist, turns out to be no lover at all but her means of meeting one, whom she marries and by whom all her perplexed misgivings about being lost in life are removed. There is nothing probable or improbable about the story. Author Garnett simply contrives to fill his pages with an imminence surpassing even the beauty of Anne’s straw-colored hair and the coming of spring to an English countryside.

Part of the overtone is homeliness: there is a prose poem on turning mattresses and tucking fresh sheets in an old house. Part is swiftness and grace: Mr. Dunnock, before his birds become his angels, skates on the fens like a big bird himself. Part is earthiness: angry yokels plow a furrow across the vicarage lawn, plow up the doorstep, with three chestnut horses steaming and gleaming on a snowy morning. Part is uneasy: a weathercock whines; people tell their dreams; once Mr. Dunnock stuffs his beard quickly into his mouth.

The Author. Son of Critic Edward Garnett and Constance Garnett, to whom the great Russians own their most perfect translations into English, and grandson of Author Richard Garnett (Twilight of the Gods), David Garnett nearly betrayed his literary birthright by studying science (gentle Botany). But in 1920, aged 27, he was claimed by books. He opened a bookshop and fell to writing. Lady into Fox appeared after two years. Lest he turn back to science, he was awarded a prize. His wife, who was Rachel Marshall, does woodcuts.