Reader's Choice

UTOPIA, like so many pleasant places, is not the place it used to be. The old Utopias—from Plato’s to Sir Thomas More’s; from Bacon’s New Atlantis to Edward Bellamy’s new Boston, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, and William Morris’s Nowhere — were earnest blueprints of an earthly paradise in which every prospect pleased and man was never vile. Our contemporaries, presumably convinced that man is irremediably imperfect, have taken to debunking Utopias. Aldous Huxley, back in the thirties, conjured up an uninviting vision of mass-produced happiness (a “ death-without-tears ) in a scientific and industrialized Utopia. Now Robert Graves describes an idyllic society of the distant future, and ends up by, so to speak, deUtopianizing it. And Marghanita Laski shows that the dream slate of Evelyn Waugh, the Tatter, and the clubmen at Boodles — the Tory 1 topia has nightmare possibilities even for a true-blue Tory. Both Miss Laski’s novel and Mr. Graves’s are, each in its highly distinctive way, sparkling performances.

Watch the Northwind Rise (Creative Age, $3.00) is in a sense a sequel to Robert Graves’s last book, The White Goddess, an investigation into the origins of “pure poetry.”It was Graves’s thesis, in that dazzling compendium of erudition and hocus-pocus, that the ancient cult of the White Goddess and its attendant myths are the very substance of poetry, the White Goddess being the triple deity of Birth, Love, and Death. It was further argued that civilization has damned itself by transferring its allegiance lo the masculine (anti-poetic) deities: the gods of “wealth . . . science . . . and thieves.” The civilization portrayed in Graves’s present novel is one in which the cult of the White Goddess reigns supreme. It might therefore seem to be the poet’s Utopia.

In the “New Crete” there are no mechanical contrivances; no product or process is acceptable “unless love had a part in it.” Clocks have been abolished (the schools ring a bell when the first three pupils have arrived); so have money (“it misbehaved”), statistics, and newspapers (the barbers have replaced them). Paper, too, has been abolished — for fear of bureaucratic excesses: the poets use slates and are given twenty small silver plates on which to record their lifework. The occasional friendly “wars” between villages are like a game of American football, only much less rough.

The New Crete has a rigid caste system consisting of live estates: captains, recorders, commons, servants, and magicians. All creative thinking and legislation is done by the magicians, who are also the poets and who commune directly with the Goddess.

A poet of our era, Edward VennThomas, is summoned to the New Crete by the incantations of a witch called Sally, who resembles Marlene Dietrich. Although the New Crete seems to answer most of the poet’s strong objections to his own world, Venn-Thomas finds life there distinctly disconcerting. The New Cretans are strangely humorless; the meatless table d’hote in the magicians’ hostel sets up a yearning for roast beef: and, amazingly, the state of poetry is lamentable. The “Good Life,” it seems, has made the New Cretans “practically half-witted. What they need, Venn-Thomas concludes, is a spot of serious trouble. He soon discovers that the Goddess intends him to be the troublemaker.

Like everything else in this Utopia, the course of love, sacred and profane, is wondrously unruffled — but not for visitors. Plalonically mated to Sapphire, the beauteous Nymphof-the-Month, Venn-Thomas is lustfully coveted by the witch Sally and haunted by an old flame, Erica. This amorous imbroglio, in which magic plays a dire hand, becomes the highpressure area from which the whirlwind is unleashed on Arcady.

Mr. Graves has dexterously wrapped his serious ideas in witty burlesque and spirited narration. The debunking leaves untouched the author’s central ideas about the cult of the White Goddess — there is something of the crank in Graves with his fetish for the archaic and his vested interest in magic. Still, one is disarmed and delighted by the impression that much of the time Graves is spooling himself. It is quite clear he had a grand time writing this satiric fantasy, and his enjoyment is thoroughly contagious.

The British upper classes—beggared by income tax, bullied by socialism, unrevered by the lower orders, who no longer know their place—would hardly seem big game for the contemporary satirist, even if they had not already been satirized to death. But Marghanila Laski. niece of the erudite and censorious Harold, has succeeded in giving the old British caste system a new lease on life, fictionally speaking.

It was an inspired idea to create a Tory Utopia in order to administer, with exquisite gentility, the coup de grâce to Toryism; and Miss Laski has executed that idea with singular charm. Toasted English (Houghton Mifflin, $2.50) is an exhilarating story whose blandly devastating satire will especially regale those well versed in the mores of Miss Laski’s natives. There is less sense of the fantastic here than in the early Waugh books —the inventions are clothed in an aura of normalcy; and the satire is innocent of Waugh’s inhumanily. (Which is not to say that Miss Laski has Waugh’s talent.)

Five Britishers, marooned on a desert island after fleeing from Singapore, are repatriated to an England in which the “bloody Socialists’ have been forcibly displaced by a caucus of “retrogressive Conservatives.” The quintet consists of James Leigh-Smith, the hero, a young man of good family and no means; Ughtred, an elderly and penurious civil servant belonging to the great Thicknesse family of Thorpnesse-in-Holdernesse; a scientist. Martin Weatherall; the daughter of an impoverished peer, and an expensive demimondaine. The three who are well-born now find themselves among the blessed few in a land of stately homes; of deer parks with gamekeepers in brown corduroy s “each as winsome as any Lady Chatterly could wish”; of hansom cabs, Jeevesian butlers, and discreet hotels where the “amenities” for gentlemen include the cherry-cheeked maid.

Miss Laski’s new England, like Mr. Graves’s New Crete, has five classes. The A’s (they carry gold identification tags) are supported in the style that befits them by the Ministry of Social Security; you can usually tell them by their “attitude of easy superiority.” The B’s (silver tags) are the great middle class. C (tags of solid English oak) is the retainer class, the “chaps [who] like serving Sahibs.’ The D’s (bronze disks) are the Trade Unionists; they work exceedingly long hours for exceedingly low wages and are not allowed to strike — only employers’ lookouts are legal. Intellectuals, along with streetwalkers and other “odds and sods,”belong to Class E; all jobs are barred to them. Martin, when he tells the grading official he likes Picasso, instantly is graded E.

The vote is now confined to men of property and “safe C’s.”Elections are contested by the Opposition, the Whigs, “for the fun of it.” “It’s just what anyone would expect,” an A explains to dames. “There’s nothing artificial anywhere.” That, in effect , is the beauty of Miss Laski’s Utopia: it represents with perfect logic the flowering ad absurdum of the old caste system. To James, who chooses a career which the Ministry is only too anxious to encourage he elects to be a Man About Town Ughtred decides to be a Clubman) — the new England seems to be the earthly paradise.

But James, like Mr. Graves’s hero, gradually learns that his Utopia has its price. A visit to his family provides six-course reminders of the horrors of good old English cooking. His parents, who once had middleclass friends, live in mortal terror of being called up for de-grading — the new butler is obviously a police spy. James has twinges of discomfort on discovering the abominable condition of the lower classes. Worst of all, he finds his most cherished plans frustrated because, in the Tory heaven, even among A’s not all men are created equal. Ughlred, too, has made an awful discovery: his favoriteweekly has been suppressed! The original quintet is brought together in a startling climax. Entirely by indirection, and with unfailing wit, Miss Laski has fashioned a scorching indictment of a hierarchical society.

Two years ago, Isabel Bolton’s first novel, Do I Wake or Sleep, received superlative reviews from several of the most exacting critics. Miss Bolton, who is in her sixties, has now written a second novel of notable distinction, The Christmas Tree (Scribner’s, $2.75). It leaves me convinced she is among the three or four most talented of women fiction writers in this country.

The subject of The Christinas Tree is one of the most overworked in contemporary fiction — homosexuality. But Miss Bolton brings to it that new seeing which makes any subject entirely fresh. There is in her writing the same ambitious — virtually unattainable — aim as in Elizabeth Bowen’s: to maintain a two-way traflic between private and public tensions, between the psychological states of individuals and the moral quality of the surrounding climate; to show a correspondence between the two and wrest from it the crucial insights. Her melhod of unfolding her story, which spans three generations, reduces to a minimum the sense of time. The novel’s eye takes in past tense and present tension — Larry Danforth’s antecedents, the circumstances he grew up in, his present condition and its consequences —as nearly simultaneously as the novel form allows. The resulting effect is not, as in many novels dealing with neurotic problems, that of following a clinical case history through to a final “diagnosis.”Miss Bolton does not diagnose, she re-creates — in no more than two hundred firmly ordered pages the full context of experience in which the problem exists.

The story’s focal point is Mrs. Danforth’s New York apartment, where her grandson is staying for Christ mas. The child’s father— Mrs. Danforth’s “brilliant,” half-homosexual son, Larry — has telegraphed from Washington to announce a visit, though he knows that his ex-wife, Anne, is expected from Ueno with her new husband. The story is centered, in turn, on Larry, Anne, and their obnoxious child. Meanwhile, the past keeps stealing in, telling of Mrs. Danforth’s glittering childhood and loveless marriage, and of how, when robbed of the security of marriage, untrained to face the world, she found comfort in a devouring attachment to her son.

The final scene is melodrama: the characters meet around the Christmas tree and clash — and here the author falters. Her climax, with its hint that there are larger meanings to the private drama, overreaches itself. Even so, the book is truly a fine one. Miss Bolton’s prose, which owes a debt to James and Proust, is (excepting for rare lapses) exquisitely good — precise and packed with feeling, marvelously evocative, faultlessly accented in its elaborate rhythms.

It has been said of several noted novelists that they have spent their lives rewriting the same book. The unkind cut has point in reference to James Farrell. As a relatively young man, Mr. Farrell earned himself a chapter in the literary textbooks with the Studs Lonigan-Danny O’Neill series — it was really one long novel. He has since been giving us new versions of it, each seemingly designed to prove the truth of Scott Fitzgerald’s sad remark, “There are no second acts in American lives.”The latest version, The Road Between (Vanguard, $3.50), is, for a writer of Farrell’s reputation, a pedestrian performance.

It must be said, to Mr. Farrell’s credit, that the failings of his recent work are not the usual ones of a topdrawer U.S. novelist slipping below his par. There is no sign in The Road Between of sliekness or slackness; no conversion to the popular ethos, no intrusion of cant and flag-waving; in short, no weakening of integrity and energy. The trouble is simply that Farrell has never outgrown the thirties (I refer, of course, to his outlook, not his subject matter). He has remained petrified in the attitudes and obsessions which made him a representative voice — an eloquent and important one — of that decade. And being “dated" is something he can ill afford to be, for his prose is devoid of grace, humor, or poetry, and is littered with clichés.

The youthful hero of The Road Between has fled from Chicago to New York with his young wife to escape his squalid family and bourgeois in-laws, and to write novels which, he is certain, will assure him a permanent place in American literature. He is ill-used by moneyminded publishers and shabbily reviewed by most of the eritics. Hating bourgeois-capitalist society, he drifts into the Communist milieu; repelled by its tyranny over artists, he eventually drifts out of it. We leave him planning to go to Baris on the money of a Loewenthal Fellowship, which he has not been awarded but is confident of getting.

There are some good tilings in the book — especially the perceptive study of a very youthful marriage in which tenderness, almost insensibly, gets the better of occasional regrets and disenchantment. But the dominant impression is of a novel one read and reread years ago; of immature thinking and of pages drenched in self-righteous indignation. Even the copious documentation of New York Stalinism, which is certainly in line with contemporary fashion, is not particularly interesting — so much of it is commonplace.

Here, written with ponderous literal-mindedness and amazing naïveté, is a stereotyped drama of the genius neglected by the wicked world, the “true artist” struggling against a generation of Babbitts and vipers; and, too, of the bitter and bewildered young leftist in capitalist society. All of Farrell’s familiar crotchets—about publishers, “literary politics,” the bourgeois life—gel an exhaustive and exhausting workout; and he deafens us with bald assertions that his fictional alter ego is a genius. The Road Between sounds as though it were yet another brief in the interminable lawsuit, Farrell vs. America, which was tried in the thirties, not settled to the plaintiff’s satisfaction, and is being repeatedly, passionately, appealed.

A recent biographer of Stalin summed him up as the supreme example of the man who has succeeded in inventing himself. Stalin’s supremacy on this count is challenged by Bernard Shaw, who has said of G.B.S., “One of the most successful of my fictions.” The two latest additions to the Shavian legend are Shaw’s own Sixteen Self Sketches (Dodd, Mead, $3.50) and Days with Bernard Shaw (Vanguard, $3.75), a record of Shaw’s conversations, over a period of years, with his neighbor Stephen Winsten. The sketches display Shaw in fine fettle; the conversations leave one with 1 he impression that he has talked loo long and too much for his own good.

Sixteen Self Sketches is not formal autobiography. “I am not at all interesting biographically,” Shaw writes. “Things have not happened to me: on the contrary it is I who have happened to them. . . . The autobiographical fragments which pad this volume tell you most what has been overlooked and misunderstood.”

From the outset Shaw emphasizes how greatly he was conditioned by having been “a Downstart,” the son of a penurious gentleman and by upbringing “a penniless snob.” His enrollment, for a short period, in a school for tradesmen’s sons filled him with “a shame which was more or less a psychosis”; the experience was “so repugnant to me that for 80 years I never mentioned it to any mortal creature.”

Shaw’s father was a dipsomaniac, and caused the family to be ostracized. His mother found salvation in music, and it became her son’s “daily food.” At fifteen Shaw went to work as a clerk. Five years later he followed his mother to London, where he concluded that, as a shabbygenteel Irishman, he would have to “change London’s mind to gain any sort of acceptance.”

For nine years he wrote unpublished novels—his total earnings were $30. His first success was with a music column that was “a mixture of tomfoolery with genuine criticism.”

Meanwhile Marx had made him a Socialist, and Socialism had vitalized his playwriting: his early attempts at the drama “ for Art’s sake” had broken down. At forty-two he married a well-to-do wife and devoted himself to playwriting and to being a Genius happily ever after.

Shaw’s account of his forty years as a Downstnrt sheds a good deal of light on the ideas and attitudes which have made G.B.S. seem paradox personified. Shaw’s hatred of poverty and of his snubbers found an answer in Marx’s genius for denouncing the bourgeoisie, and in Socialist economics (he still champions equality of income while protesting his income tax). On the other hand, snobbery created a hunger for social acceptance, an admiration of the top dog, which explains Shaw’s enthusiasm for Mussolini, his applause of Stalin’s purges and kind word for Hitler; the glorifying of saints and supermen in his theater; his obsession with money (“his favorite subject,”says Mr. Winston); his contempt for the chronic underdog and a good many other things about him flagrantly at odds with his Socialism.

The Self Sketches and conversations both suggest that the driving impulse in the proverbially unconventional Shaw has been profoundly conventional: a deep sense of ihe importance of material success and the position that goes with it.

All this is no reflection on Shaw’s dramatic genius and incomparable “gift of the gab.” But the effect of both new books is to reinforce the conclusion reached some years ago by Edmund Wilson: “It used to be said of Shaw that he was primarily not an artist, but a promulgator of certain ideas. The truth is, I thhik, that he is a considerable artist, but that his ideas — that is, his social philosophy proper have — always been confused and uncertain.”

In Days with Bernard Shaw some of the talk is extremely good, but some of it is decidedly tiresome. Shaw has exploited paradox, contradiction, and vainglory so exhaustively that now he often lapses into silliness. The vanity and egotism have grown rather disagreeable —“It is a pity I have refused honors and degrees, for I would look well in academic robes. I am Bernard Shaw, and this is the highest order of Merit.”

One of the peculiarities of the reading habits of Americans is the lively demand for nonfiction books about themselves regional studies, studies of the American character, “reports” on America, and so on. The U.S. reader has been eager, even, to hear what the foreign observer has to say about the U.S.A., and he has often had cause to regret his curiosity.

For some time past, however, the reports on America by foreign hands have been more often than not informed, perceptive, and judicious in their criticism. (Graham Hutton’s Midwest at Noon, for instance, is probably the best up-to-date survey of that area.) American Themes (Harper, $3.50) by D. W. Brogan, a Cambridge don who studied at Harvard, arrives with the warm endorsement of a connoisseur of Americana, Bernard DeVoto, who says of it: “A book by a foreigner who frequently sees what the native American misses and who frequently finds a perspective that even the best informed American will Sind useful.”

American Themes is a collection of essays written during the past two decades and ranging over a wide field: the American Constitution and the American language; the American rich and the WPA guidebooks; Rhodes Scholars and Boston; Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln; Coolidge and F.D.R. Mr. Brogan is an urbane writer with a pleasant turn of phrase, such as — this in reference to the superiority of American whodunits— “the American authors realize that murder, if not serious in itself, often leads to open breaches of decorum and morality.”

Mr. Brogan is far too kind to the trash out of Hollywood (why are Europeans so susceptible to U.S. movies?), but tartly challenges Mencken’s objections to England’s use of the term “public servant.” Mencken’s preference, “office-holder,”he says, is truly descriptive of an American official, “because he has had to grab the office and to hold it.” Brogan never loses sight of the “agonizing contrast between American affirmation and American reality.” But he has expressed, too, throughout his book — and with none of the cant of our professional super-patriots — the national quality of hope typified by the GI with his efficient bulldozer.

This Was America (Harvard Univ. Press, $6.00) is an anthology of European reports on America since 1753. The early part of the book contains a freshly worded reminder of the basic American principles; later one is struck by the increasing questioning of the American Dream. Oscar Handlin has avoided drawing heavily from authors readily available, and has assembled some remarkable out-of-the-way material. Among the well-known names are Tocqueville, Felix von Luckner, and André Maurois (whose contribution could well have been omitted).

The first item is by an unknown Hollander who lived for twenty years among the Indians. Most of the early travelers dwell wonderingly on the absence of religious discrimination, the possession of political rights by “the humblest citizen,” and the unbounded economic opportunities. The laborer’s advantages are slressed throughout most of the book; he “begins to feel himself a man because he is treated as such, he counts for something.” It’s amusing to note that as far back as 1790, Europeans were commenting on the long legs of American girls and the rowdiness of American children. Tocqueville makes ihe shrewd observation: “As the American participates in all that is done in his country, he thinks himself obligated to defend whatever may be censured in it.”

By the eighteen-fifties the criticism has become more insistent. A German immigrant complains of being “despised.” An Italian is shocked to discover widespread anti-Semitism. A Rumanian is incensed by the girls’ dexterity in engineering breach-ofpromise suits. The almosphere in The cities is found to be one of intense rivalry. Many speak of the worship of Mammon and woman, of the latter’s privileged position and her “incapacity to love.”

Mr. Handlin has prefaced and organized his selections in such a way that they read as an informal social history of America.