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 experi-
