Evening star., 1937-11-06
By Mary.Carfer Roberts.
THE RAINS CAME. BY Louis Brom-


KR. LOUIS BROMFIELD is a
M curious sort of novelist He
wi Is one of those very bright
a young men of the 20s, who
because they had set their faces with
praiseworthy determination against
mediocrity of any kind, agreed among
themselves that they were all geniuses
and furiously wrote, and reviewed a
great many novels, holding the tone
Of all their literary conversation on
that difficult key with the utmost
tenacity. Now many of those very
bright young men are forgotten, some
more are recognized to have been
interesting flashes in the pan, and
a handful keeps on writing, but to
their works in these Indifferent 30s
the term genius" is not very much
applied. Mr.. Bromfield belongs to
that postwar family-yes. But it Is
hard to fit him into any of the cate
gories that so easily take care of the
other members of it.
His work has heretofore been dis
tinguished by fine urbane surface
texture and by deep sententiousness
of utterance, so that he easily con-
vinced all but the shrewdest critics
that he was profound thinker and an
accomplished artist. Actually his nov
els have been no more than we'll
planned stories, conceived in the spirit
OF the day and written in carefully
polished prose. Some of them, to be
sure, have been amazingly lifelike.
But it has been with the synthetic,
easily managed life created by the
ambitious craftsman and not the diff
f1cult twisting obstinate vitality of in
spiration.
Now, however, it would seem that
Mr.. Bromfield has hit vein of genuine
creativeness. And lo-all his long
acquired habits of plausibility, deftness
and high polish have risen up to
plague him. The reviewer has not
in long time read book that bore
palmer signs of a struggle with con-
fusion than does The Rains Came"
One feels, as one reads it, that Mr.
Bromfield struggled with his material
as deep-sea diver might with an
octopus. He trumphs, TO be sure, in
the end. But by the time the end
Is reached he has done some severe
and arbitrary looping and carving
It is as if his characters, intended
to march neatly to appointed ends,
good puppets, had turned to men and
women under his hands and argued
with him about their destinations. To
get them to proceed he has had to
use drill sergeant methods. But he
has persevered and his novel comes
out with well-planned finish, even
though some of the characters, ap-
preaching that finish, reach it with
the gait of men wearing straitjackets.
The novel is set in India. 1t is one
of those things wherein group of
people are presented, each member OF
the group being faced with personal
problems of a seemingly unsurmount-
able difficulty, after which presentment
natural disaster is made to occur,
bringing with it the cleansing SIM
plicity which comes Gn novels, at
least) from a primitive struggle to
keep alive. In The Rains Came" the
disaster is an earthquake which is fol-
lowed by a flood. MIR. Bromfields as
sorted neurotics (for of course his
group, being of modern people, is COM
posed chiefly of queer types-he re-
mains fashionable, you see, apparently
from uncomfortable habit find them
selves transported from badly bored
dinner conversation to rooftops sur
rounded by raging waters. The per-
sonal problems which seemed so un-
manageable recede before the necessity
of acting resourcefully and decisively.
When the waters have likewise receded
plague and pestilence break out and
the white men are forced to forget
their own troubles for bit longer in
order to assume their well-known bur-
den-they have to serve" getting pro-
visions, setting up hospitals, burying
the dead and all the like. When that
Is finally over, they find, as so often
has happened in fiction, that their
private problems have taken care of
themselves and they begin life reborn
with (as it were} new light of pur-
posefulness in their shining eyes.
Well, that, of course, is pretty con-
ventional, and it is within justice to
suspect that when MIR. Bromfield
planned it he intended it to be just one
more of his indubitably accomplished
novels. But something got in his way,
something apparently called India,
and this India has badly impeded the
nice otherwise practicable forward
movement of the nice predictable story.
ny ic Al os hot
Rains Came" Mr.. Bromfleld has at
tempted to present a picture of typical
conditions in an Indian province, and
then has discovered that the great
characteristic of India in his own mind
Is its refusal to be typical. And so
the reader finds his treatment of In
dia-as something quite separate from
the men and women of the story
perpetually intruding, writhing into the
course Of the story as unmanageable
and horrifying as an obstinate python
coming to a dinner party, vast, con-
fused, defiant of any possible classify
Ing. Mr.. Bromfield wrestles with this
monster valiantly. 1t is a creature of
his own creation Of course, but one
cannot help feeling that it exceeds his
strength. 1t in no way harmonizes
with the nice little story of how selfish
and dissipated men and women were
converted into forward-looking Boy
Scouts with light of service burning
in their eyes. The effect is that of
two books in one, bearing precious little
relationship between them
NotwithStanding. "The Rains Cameu
is worth reading. 1t has one absolutely
superb passage in it which would JUS
tify much worse book, and that is
the description of the coming of the
earthquake and high water. Here, with
startling suddenness, Mr.. Bromfleld
beems to forget that he is fashionable
politico-sociologist. and decides that
he is a plain working novelist. He
abandons foggy speculations on what
4 the matter with the world, he leaves
the well-worn paths of the glandular
4, a. IL 49,. Ii.