First Person Singular

THERE are three speeds of reading. A novel like Gone With the Wind you read in high speed, Don Juan and The Pickwick Papers in second speed; Shakespeare, the fine essayists, and novelists like Conrad, James, and Virginia Woolf you must read in low speed if you are to get the most out of them.

In The Death of the Moth (Harcourt, Brace, $3.00) we have what may be the last volume of essays by Virginia Woolf. She worked on the collection up to the time of her death, and we know that in some cases there were eight or nine revisions before she sent the essay to press. This fastidiousness, this placing of the perfect word in the smoothest context, is part, though not the most important part, of Mrs. Woolf’s art. Prose needs more than precision and balance if it is to live. Mrs. Woolf’s sentences are luminous; they are alight with feeling, with eager curiosity, and with that sensitive identification which enables her to speak of Gibbon and Walpole and Shelley as if she had lived next door to them when she was a girl. Her writing is a fabric of detail. When the detail is perceptive and plentiful, as it is in the essay which establishes the mood and title of this new book, writing is transcendental. When the detail is skimpy, as in her essay on “The Art of Biography” or too admonitory, as in her “Letter to a Young Poet,” the result is less successful. Thus we find her at her best and second best in this farewell volume: there are the lovely descriptive papers like “The Three Pictures” and “Street Haunting,” kindling prose portraits of literary neighbors, and feminine outbursts like “Middlebrow” and “Professions for Women,” over which one lingers for a friendly final converse with Virginia Woolf.

In My Heart for Hostage (Random House, $2.50) Robert Hillyer has written a novel of Paris in the spring after the First World War. Here is the story of a young American army officer, detached, lonely, and fastidious to the point of disdain, who falls in love with a charming (and willing) French girl. Their love is tempestuous, partly because Germaine must Use artifice in holding the foreigner, and partly because Edward Reynolds, with his innate Puritanism, can never bring himself to trust either the girl or their happiness together. The situation is a poignant one and, I am sure, finds its parallel today in Ulster, in Australia, and in London. But a love story must be judged not only by the nostalgia but also by the fresh emotion which it invokes. For me, as much as I see of Germaine is attractive. I wish I saw more. I wish I had a clearer idea of what she looked like and of her tenderness. I like her spirit, I like her effect on other men, and I am most taken when she is plaintively honest. What keeps me at arm’s length is her quicksilver temperament — that and her affection for a man who seems to me rather petty. I wish Mr. Hillyer had made young Reynolds more likable: Edward’s distrust and his inhibitions cool off the romance too early, and incidentally cool off our sympathy. The exceptional quality of tins book is to be found in individual scenes, in the swiftness with which it translates the feminine moods of Paris and Germaine, and in phrases well polished.

With quiet, uncompromising skill Conrad Richter is carving out a niche for himself in American letters. The short novel is his love. Like Conrad, he would rather work within the limits of 60,000 words than write a thousand-page romance. In The Sea of Grass, his first book. Mr. Richter caught the sweep of the biggest state in the Union. In his second, The Trees, he moved north to those huge, silent forests which once lay west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio. In both of those stories he was blending his knowledge of American character and his all-absorbing interest in our frontier. In his new book, Tacey Cromwell (Knopf, $2.00), Mr. Richter has saturated himself in the atmosphere of a mining town in the Southwest, and lie has chosen for his people a professional gambler, a fancy woman and the orphans she adopts, and a little runaway boy, through whose eyes and with whose emphasis we see the town of Bisbce and what goes on behind its doors. Nugget Oldaker is a good kid who covers up his loneliness behind a poker face. The theme of loneliness sounds through this novel from start to finish. Tacey never gets through to her lover Gaye, the gambler. And the good ladies of Bisbee keep her away from the youngsters she took in so gladly. This then is the story of the eager heart rejected. It is the story of a rough town in which there are more poker faces and less of that human kindliness and humor than seem to me characteristic of most American communities.