Reader's Choice

FOR the man of antiquity the past was a touchstone, a generalization that could cope with novelty; for us the past is a museum containing curiosa. We are beginning to look back, however, and that is better than no glance at all at the past. Looking back doesn’t help us in the way it did the man of antiquity: we are living in a terrible and brilliant interregnum, and the past has refused to yield its immediate relevancies. But looking back does help us to know ourselves, if only in small ways.

Perhaps the foregoing is entirely loo tendentious for the, on the whole, rather light book that set it. off. I have in mind The Aspirin Age (Simon and Schuster, $3.95), edited by Isabel Leighton, a collection of pieces by twenty-two writers dealing with the “significant” events of American life between the two World Wars. According to Miss Leighton in her preface — a charming but thoroughly inadequate one — between Versailles and Pearl Harbor, Americans “fluctuated between headaches,”and in their search for cure-alls came no closer to them than the aspirin bottle.

One may well wonder whether today we arc any closer to a cure than our fathers were in their day. I would doubt that there has recently been a falling off in the sale of aspirin. At any rate, in terms of a cure— that is to say, in terms of a satisfactory comprehension of our immediate past — The Aspirin Age, though an excellent notion, hardly outranks an aspirin. Perhaps because of the kind of book it is, a unifying or clarifying grasp of the age is not to be found in it. But perhaps, and again because of the kind of book it is, this is precisely what the editor’s preface should have attempted. The reader would need to know not only the shape and texture and atmosphere of the considered time, but something about the time it issued from, and the time to which it gave way, and the relationships between the particular events and the whole period.

Yet the book, though fading to satisfy the deeper needs, does satisfy on a number of counts. The events dealt with are various and fascinating, the writing is of the highest journalistic excellence, and the choice of writerto-subject is, with very few exceptions, intelligent and even spritely.

The volume opens with Harry Hansen’s leisurely and earnest account of Versailles and closes with Jonathan Daniels’s vigorous account of Pearl Harbor Sunday. Tucked between are Wallace Stegner on Father Coughlin, Carey McWilliams on Aimee Semple McPherson, Charles Jackson on “The Night the Martians Came,”Thurman Arnold on “The Crash,” and others of equal virtue.

As relief from these, or as still other significant facets of that time, Miss Leighton has included “The Mysterious Death of Starr Faithfull.”by Morris Markey, and “ My Fights with Jack Dempsey,” by Gene Tunney. Mr. Markey does a neat, detached job of reporting the pertinent facts that surrounded the beautiful Starr. Yet his conclusion is perverse: Mr. Markey insists that the lady was killed, in spite of her suicide letters. He insists because she failed to follow out her letters to the dotted i. But anyone who knows the case as well as Mr. Markey, ought to know, too, that the lady could change her mind.

As for Mr. Tunney, he tries nobly — but he cannot avoid embarrassing conclusions. He writes that Jack Dempsey was possibly the greatest lighter that ever entered a ring. But who did Mr. Dempsey in — not. once, but twice? Why, Mr. Tunney himself. And one hastens from the piece, if he has any admiration for Mr. Dempsey, muttering cynical syllogisms.

Current events make history. One would be hard pressed to find a more history-making American phenomenon than the United Auto Workers and its tough, smart, progressive leader, Walter Reuther. The fascinating account of both the organization and the man, of their trials and tribulations, their stand-up picket lines and their sit-down stratagems, their spectacular rise in power, is to be found in The UAW and Walter Reather (Random House, $3.00), by Irving Howe and B. J. Widick.

The book itself has an excellent logic: its authors begin with a brief, compact sociological history of Detroit, which amounts to a setting of the stage: the drama is then produced and the reader witnesses a series of significant actions — the struggles against Chrysler and Ford, the internecine war, the role (a vanguard one among trade-unions) of the UAW during the war; there then follows a portrait of Reuther that I think will strike the reader as scrupulous and discerning. The accumulation of all this carries the authors into considering the problems that confront the union and its leadership.

Mr. Howe and Mr. Widick are partisan: they write in their prelace, “We support unions, believe in their necessity and rejoice in their victories.” Within this perhaps necessary delimitation of position, they achieve a remarkable objectivity (it is visible in their style, which is direct and lucid). They not only rejoice at the victory of the union, they rejoice at the downfall of the Communist fraction of the union; and yet if the reader, because of this, is led to anticipate a eulogy of what is, he will be pleasurably disappointed. The authors do not give up their critical independence in order to gild their lily. They criticize Reuther, they point out his shortcomings (in a deft, brush-stroke comparison between the auto union leader and Gene Debs), though, on the whole, they approve. Given pro-labor orientation, who can not? Mr. Reuther is energetic, enterprising, and, so far, democratic.

This is a unique book. As the authors conceived it and wrote it, the UAW is transformed into a momentous microcosm, in which nothing less than democracy is at stake. I found, for example, disproportionate excitement and pleasure in learning that Emil Mazey, one of Reuther’s most able leaders, is a member of the Socialist Party. But in analyzing my feelings, I discerned the cause of them — it was simply that the UAW is apparently proving it can discard the Communists (“colonial agents of Russian totalitarianism”) and yet keep in responsible positions the democratic liberals. This, I think, is relevant today. The book itself is relevant not only to pro-trnde-imionists and anti-trade-unionists, but to all of us who are concerned with the state of the union.

Moving in one’s mind from the restrained and impeccant account, of the Messrs. Howe and Widick to the impassioned and sinful chronicle of John O’Hara in A Rage to Live (Random House, $3.95), a novel about the life — both secular and sexual — of an extraordinary woman named Grace Caldwell, is something of a shock. First off, let it be said that Mr. O’Hara has written a truly imperfect novel: it is flawed, disproportionate, and obsessively erotic. But let it immediately thereafter be said that Mr. O’Hara has written a tumultuous, powerful, and in parts deeply moving novel.

The Caldwell family holds the same position in Fort Penn (an upand-rising city in Pennsylvania) that, the Cabots held Ln Boston. Mrs. Caldwell broods about her beautiful daughter Grace, who, though possessing all the graces, possesses in addition a highly charged libidinous instinct. Mrs. Caldwell schemes in a most natural way to marry her daughter off—with the sound end in view of protecting Grace from herself. Wonder of wonders: the man Mrs. Caldwell selects is an angel, and an angel very much in love, and not at all the orthodox monster that novelistic mothers choose for their unwilling daughters. Unfortunately, tragically, Grace (Mrs. Sidney Tate), at a time when she is a happily married woman and the mother of three children, succumbs to the daring, even shocking, advances of a crude, goodlooking, and thoroughly odious man. It is a sustained “love" affair, abandoned and carelessly public, and comes to Sidney Tate’s attention.

The break between husband and wife is one of the best things Mr. O’Hara has ever done. It is powerful and absolutely right. It is tragic and inexorable. It ensnares the reader, making him desperately wish that things might be other than they are, and making him know that this is the way the world ends (not with a bang, and not with a whimper): quietly, perhaps desperately, but in a principled stand.

Sidney Tate is a most satisfying characterization in recent fiction, and certainly the most interesting of Mr. O’Hara’s gallery. He is subdued, attractive, intelligent, almost an “intellectual"; and though he exhibits human frailties, he has a latent flower that Mr. O’Hara magically awakens in him at the proper time. In Mr. O’Hara’s world, perhaps in spite of Mr. O’Hara, he steals the show from its protagonist, his wife. Perhaps that is why when, somewhere after the middle of the novel, Sidney Tate dies, and Mr. O’Hara continues to chronicle Mrs. Tate’s life, he is fighting a losing fight. The novel flags, becomes repetitious, feels its own lack (the absence of its true hero), creates a new hero who comes to nothing at all (and who could just as well have been the start of a new novel).

One marvels at the sense of tumultuous life that Mr. O’Hara creates, both within the individual and within the various strata of the city. Intermittently one also marvels at his ear, at the rightness of the speech. One marvels at his fearlessness: the novel is ambitious in scope and vastness and weight and, given the proper trims and disciplines, it would very nearly come off. And finally, one marvels at a peculiar kind of rawness in his people: they have inconsistencies, for example, that you never are sure are unintended — that make them as near to real living people as you’d care to have. This fact gives the novel power, and entangles the reader with what happens to Sidney and Grace Tate; it forces one into a nearly real world that is involving and lacerating.

Which leads to the counterstatement : the novel is lacking in that total art that creates form, and form is order. After reading Mr. O’Hara’s novel, one feels that Aristotle was right: a successful work of art doesn’t lacerate; it purges and cleanses.

In writing about an English novel last month Charles J. Rolo observed: “It’s becoming quite apparent that there’ll always be a Tory England.” Luckily, he did not intend his insight to exclude other kinds of Englands. At hand are three English novels as different each to each as breast of guinea hen is to chitlings, and not a Tory England in the lot. As a matter of fact, Nigel Dennis’s A Sea Change (Houghton Mifflin, $3.50) doesn’t touch England at all. It does touch America (the liberal periodical segment of it) quite brilliantly, and Poland (at its heady edges just before the Nazis takeover) most capably.

Mr. Dennis has an excellent idea — that of a hapless, footless, and feckless epileptic boy (the son of a moneyed publisher of a liberal weekly) who attaches himself to a famous liberal writer on his way to Poland because he somehow believes he will suffer “a sea change.” He does get to Poland, and he does get his change (a difficult thing to write about, and Mr. Dennis accomplishes it expertly); but there is another change, unanticipated by the changee — that of the liberal, who deteriorates at a rapid and frightful rate. Or perhaps he reverts to his true self — capitalist, industrialist, virulent, and prejudiced. But, to be fair, Mr. Dennis does give him some pertinent things to say, all the while that he disintegrates, about the unwholesome state of official liberalism.

If the prospective reader is a liberal of the “academy,”then caveat emptor! If the shoe fits only a little, A Sea Change will be a bitter brew. The book is satire on a most serious level, and most skillfully executed. The American scenes are amusing, incisive, and intelligent; the Polish ones, in a different key, are somnambulistic and queer, a little, perhaps, like a muted Walpurgisnacht. The writing is crisp, the wit is fresh and original and delivered in absolute deadpan. Mr. Dennis’s all-around performance is, I think, a stunningly good one.

I wonder just what one could call Many Dimensions (Pellegrini and Cudahy, $3.00), Charles Williams’s third novel to come here. (The first two were All Hallows’ Eve and Descent into Hell.) A metaphysical novel, perhaps; or, better still, a mathematical one of the Einsteinian variety. The tiling that Mr. Williams employs in order to give play to his time-space shenanigans is a stone, an ancient Persian stone, whose properties enable the possessor of it to fly through space and time. Ii is also capable of splitting itself or reproducing itself without losing its original intactness. One may easily imagine the complications—not only is the Persian nation concerned, and the British Ministry; so are divers persons and sundry vested interests, such as an evil scientist, an airplane titan, and a transport workers union — but it is not so easy to imagine Mr. Williams’s sleight of hand in manipulating the scientific speculation and the flights of fancy.

The author’s Lord Arglay, who is the Chief Justice, is a man of justice, and wins out much in the same way as any first-rate private eye in a whodunit. He is an admirable man: intelligent, modest, intransigent, speculative, and very brave. He copes not only with difficult people, but with many recalcitrant dimensions. In a special way this is an amusing book. And in spite of the supersonics and abstractions, I, for one, ended by feeling quite warm about old Lord Arglay, and contented in his philosophic omniscience.

William Sansom, an obscure name for Americans but a fairly wellknown one (as a short-story writer) for Britons, makes a spectacular debut with a short novel, The Body (Harcourt, Brace, $2,75). Stripped bare, it is the story of a comfortable, reticent man, .contentedly married and entering amicably into middle age, who overnight becomes devoured by suspicion of his wife. As a study in jealousy it has no contemporary peer: the events that fan Henry Bishop’s fire are morbidly conclusive for him, but for the reader they are brilliantly ambiguous (and, if tipped at all, on the side of innocence), so that the render breathlessly follows not only the “incidents” but Bishop’s frightful interpretations of them.

Given Bishop’s “trap,” his warped conclusions are as logical as a Euclid theorem. His jealousy mounts, swells, multiplies, fills every crevice of Bishop’s town, threatens to blow up the world of the book and the book itself. Mr. Sansom intercedes in the nick of time — it would be hard to lake much more of it — and brings the blowup off with masterful aplomb. I do not know who Mr. Sansom’s masters are, if any, but The Body struck me as being a less amusing, a more intense, an equally sardonic offshoot of Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband,

Along the way, Mr. Sansom reveals a wonderful social perceptiveness of a certain middle-class, somewhat uprooted, life. His dialogue is superb, and his descriptions have an unstrained originality without being fancy. Here is one example:

“I think what I saw approach was another creature — not the Madge I saw ordinarily, not the Madge of affectionate usage—but instead a confection made up only of certain features I had always held especially dear. The round baby-like face, its two deepset dimples, its suddenly small pointed chin; the wide open eyes, naïve and silly as lazy blue daisies; the excited trot of her walk — though nowadays a certain solidity like compressed rubber seemed to weigh her waist and flanks.”

It is all written like that — a serious, psychological novel, with sociological overtones and thriller undertones, by a man with superb control of his material and with a language and style that is simplicity itself.