The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Mrs Scott's Escapade
MRS SCOTT'S ESCAPADE
Escapade. By Evelyn Scott. 8vo. 286 pages. Thomas Seltzer. $3.
IN America where there are no Rebecca Wests, May Sinclairs, or Virginia Woolfs, one is forced to make a place for so able a writer as Evelyn Scott although this astringent author lacks the depth of passion and richness of texture of Miss West, the succinct ironic detachment of Miss Sinclair, and the vigorous culture of Mrs Woolf. Hers is an almost surgically incisive craftsmanship combined with an infinite capacity for defiance and a certain tense receptivity to the changing cadences of weather and scene. We have now to add to her two novels and her short book of poems a fragment of her autobiography.
Driven from a bourgeois group, decorously shuttered in conventional codes, she and her intrepid companion establish themselves in a remote part of Brazil where the days pass either in "a brightness of being that blankly illumines the hours" or else in barren misery. We are instructed in the pangs of childbirth, endure an ensuing obstetrical operation from which no details are spared, and are finally deposited with the two haggard lovers, their baby, an unfortunate relative named Nannette, and a black servant in a spot far more remote from comforts and companionship than the last spot which we had supposed the very most remote and uncomfortable in existence. The ensuing narrative is one which would melt the heart of even a Squire Shandy though so often emitted in a shrewish key. It is not our sympathies with the actual situation that are ever called in question. But we long for some observation either more simple or more profound. We weary of Evelyn Scott's reiterated allusions to the contours and habits of her body. This surely is not a sensitive young girl in her early twenties bewildered and artless who is writing of her distress, but a clever nervously alert sophisticated woman tilting at the wooden sentinels of prejudice with the vicious little rapier of her neatly turned epigrams; a young woman thoroughly au courant with modern authors from D. H. Lawrence to James Joyce and one who sees a fading experience, bitter though it undoubtedly was, through an acquired literary medium.
There is a curious lack of fusion which one comes to recognize as studied in Evelyn Scott's style. Miniature typhoons of staccato sentences are continually whirled up from the main stream of her story interrupting its continuity. "Frogs bark. Stark white moon. Eternal peace. Blind house. Earth gives up radiance." One can of course construct a picture from loose fragments of coloured glass, but at the same time one prefers to see them in an integrated harmony that demands no such artificial manipulation. It is often, too, in the midst of her most lyrical expressions that she uses this clipped phrasing so popular at the present time.
It is interesting to note that over and over again the author's similes revert to various metal substances almost as if she were attempting to rid herself of something hard and unyielding in her own breast, thrusting it recurrently away from her into the landscape only to have it reappear with a slight change of phrasing in each succeeding page. This is carried sometimes to a point of absurdity—"the blueness of a heaven that was angry like a stone," "trees go black with an iron slowness," "heavy metal sobs," "stiff wind like shredded iron." But one might continue indefinitely.
The adventure ends with a sudden fantastic episode, out of which, fighting against ennui, one struggles to construct a lucid meaning and fails. If the digression had been more amusing, its drift somewhat more boldly implied, the author could have afforded to laugh with cunning satisfaction over the perplexity of her critics. But such is obviously not the case.
In laying down this delightfully bound and printed book with its attractive yellow jacket one is gratified to know that, like black acid projected from a glittering white-blooded fish, Evelyn Scott's corroding hatred of stuffiness and injustice has been loosed in such a very stuffy and unjust world. Where love ceases to instruct, hate at least rouses to defence. But art is after all a matter somewhat outside these querulous and stormy considerations.