THE STONE LOVED ONE

The Unpossessed, by Moray McLaren. (Chapman and Hall, 7s. 6d.)
Reviewed by W. J. IGOE Reviewed by W. J. IGOE
IN the literary life of Mr. Moray McLaren there are three loves. They are in Edinburgh, in Scotland and Europe, that Scotland and Europe, that order. He is a cultivated writer. His manner evokes the atmosphere of the New Club on Princes Street at the hour after dinner, the large pious portraits of bourgeois gentlemen, the apparently laundered copy of The Times on the gleaming table-top, the solid. discreetly elegant, comfort and the bottle of wine. In his books, he impresses one as the good-humoured unmalicious raconteur of this hour. His work is more urbane than that of his fellow-citizen, Bruce Marshall, but Mr. Marshall is a better and
more serious writer. He lives in Paris and draws sustenance from his roots in Scotland; Mr. McLaren lives in Glasgow and seems to be entangled in his roots in Edinburgh. Yet T believe he is potentially an important writer; his style is that of a man fundamentally wise and he combines a love for his own country with that profound sense of the spiritual unity of Europe that is the mark of the best Catholic authors. One is sure that he has read and paid homage to Belloc. He has written two delightful volumes of travel and meditation on Scotland, one good novel that promised better, an interesting play and some fair short stories.
His new book is worse than disappointing. It is based on one of his own anecdotes about Robert Louis Stevenson; once in Edinburgh he met an old woman who claimed to have been a mistress of R.L.S. In an introductory note he tells the reader about this amorously conceited crone and then says that the novel that follows is not meant to reflect Stevenson and his circle. Is Mr. McLaren being disingenuous?
Inevitably, his main character will be identified with R.L.S. It is drawn so sketchily that only by reference to the model will it gain semblance of reality. It has been given many idiosyncratic points of similarity to R.L.S.; it bears the common mark of disease. It wore a velvet jacket, a truly significant detail. The Character marries an American; so did Stevenson. Mrs. Stevenson, whose comradeship with her husband is one of the most beautiful things in the history of our literature, a normal marriage between a sick man and a healthy woman to whom Henry James wrote, when news came to him of Stevenson's death in Vailima, " You are such a visible picture of desolation that I need to remind myself that courage. and patience and fortitude are also abundantly with you." is confused in these pages with the cliche conception of the provincial American foisted on Europeans by Mr. Sinclair Lewis, who has surely qualified for the epitaph—He Was Babbitt Articulate. Despite Mr. McLaren's pious disclaimer, Mrs. Stevenson is the butt of The Unpossessed.
Her husband fares not much
better, R.L.S., of whom James wrote in the same letter: "He lighted up one whole side of the globe and was in himself a whole provinc-e of one's imagination." is used as a frame-work upon which is erected a figure of fictional straw to provide an after-dinner story. Dubious senile gossip and romantic memories of a great man and a good artist are fashioned into the picture of a fool. It is cheep. Mr. McLaren's book is easy, in the circumstances. I believe, too easy to read. His aim, in which he fails, was to endow R.L.S. with the one true love that emerges from the novel, Mr. McLaren's dark, stone lady, Edinburgh. R.L.S. loved many things, people first of all, and he loved his native city. But it was not the aim& thanatogenos of his literary life.