Reader's Choice

Aldous Huxley is a moralist whose sardonic sense of humor finds pleasure in using the infinitely squalid as a sounding board for the sublime, and who is usually very entertaining in the process. In his new book. The Devils of Loudun (Harper, $4.00), Mr. Huxley lias chronicled — with unmistakable relish — the “prolonged psychological orgy” which took place in the French town of Loudun in the first years of the 1630s; and within this framework he carries forward — with passionate earnestness—his exposition of the teaching of the mystics, the “perennial philosophy.”

From the writing of participants and observers, Huxley has reconstructed the happenings at Loudun with a startling fullness of detail. In 1617, Loudun acquired a new priest, young Father Urbain Grandier, whose flashing good looks had a devastating effect on his female parishioners. He proceeded to take a succession of mistresses; and he also took delight in making enemies. To these was presently added the new 25-year-old Prioress of the Ursuline nuns, who longed for the handsome priest to become the Convent’s confessor and was maddened with disappointment when he declined. She began to tell the nuns of shocking dreams, in which Grandier plied her with insolent caresses. And at this point chance — in the form of a ghoulish Halloween prank — touched off a chain reaction of hysteria among the Ursulines.

The cabal intent on Grandier’s ruin spread rumors that the nuns were possessed by demons who proclaimed Grandier their master. When priests were dispatched to the Convent to conduct exorcisms, the sisters threw fits, rolled obscenely on the floor, and told of frightful lubricities committed with infernal visitants. Grandier was tried for sorcery, hideously tortured, and then burned alive. But scenes of indescribable squalor continued to be enacted at the Convent. It was only when the exorcists finally abandoned their efforts that the good sisters quickly reverted to normalcy and Loudun’s long orgy came to an end.

After these weird events, there comes a sequel which furnishes a counterpoint. It is the story of Father Surin, one of the exorcists, in whose later career Huxley sees a journey toward genuine spirituality.

In Huxley’s chronicle, with its many discursive passages, a multiplicity of eyes are at work: the eyes of an erudite historian, a sardonic humorist, and a student of abnormal psychology, as well as those of a twentieth-century mystic. The only serious criticisms that can be brought against the book are the familiar criticisms of Huxley’s mystical outlook. The reader who, like myself, does not share Huxley’s boundless disgust with the human condition who does not feel that to be “one’s sweating self” is necessarily “damnation,” and can indeed at times be moderately agreeable — may occasionally find common sense whispering impolite remarks into his ear; and he may wish that Huxley had not devoted quite so much space to the transcendental “message.” But such considerations remain secondary, for Huxley has handled his subject with consummate artistry, and it has provided him with rich scope for the exercise of his intellectual gifts. The Devils of Loudun is Huxley in fine form — a work as distinguished as, and in part much livelier than, his Grey Eminence.

The seasonal crop of autobiographical items is not, I am assured by a statistician at the New York Times, appreciably larger than usual; but I seem to have run into an exceptional number of titles in this category which I have wanted to read. There were three in last month’s report; there will be five in this; and there remain a couple more which I hope to catch up with in December.

Chiaroscuro (Pellegrini & Cudahy, $5.00) brings together in book form the “fragments of autobiography” written for Cyril Connolly’s Horizon by the flamboyant dean of English painters, Augustus John. This is a robustly outward-looking memoir; but though the author leaves the back rooms of his psyche unvisited, it is quite clear that he has seldom been grievously distempered by repressions, guilt, despondency, or philosophic doubt. He has lived as he pleased, and he writes about the world and himself without a trace of solemnity or humbug. His Chiaroscuro is the kind of exhilarating personal history that nowadays is rare: the recollections of a happy titan who has found immense enjoyment in the here and now — in wine, women, and work; in art and travel; in talk and congenial companions.

The scenes range from the Café Royal in its Bohemian heyday at the turn of the century to the homes of great patrons of the arts; from Whistler’s studio to night life in Berlin, Paris, and Harlem; from gypsy encampments in Wales, France, and Spain — where John, who speaks a dialect of Romani, was an honored guest — to the manor of Massachusetts Governor Fuller, whose portrait John painted shortly after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.

In the course of his long and immensely productive career, Augustus John has known scores of the famous and the great; and he presents them with the freshness and individuality of the painter’s eye. He says of Sir Gerald du Maurier, the leading actor: “The dear man never ceased to act and always with that consummate art which just avoids concealment.” Of Oscar Wilde: “An easy-going sort of genius, with an enormous sense of fun, infallible bad taste, and a romantic apprehension of the Devil. A great man of inaction. . . .”

John’s preface forewarns us that he has not bothered much with chronology or continuity. His book is, literally, a succession of fragments — people and places swiftly sketched; incidents and anecdotes swiftly told. But though fragmentary, it seemed to me delightful: an unpretentious memoir written with great charm, abounding vitality, and with no end of wit.

Conrad Aiken’sUshant (Duell, Sloan & Pearce-Little, Brown, $4.50) — “an autobiographical narrative” written in the third person — is a remarkable experiment in intensive self-revelation by a poet whose work has long shown a deep interest in psychoanalysis.

The writer who accepts, as Mr. Aiken does, the challenge of the new psychology must virtually invent a new approach to autobiography. He must find ways and means of showing the submerged forces continually at work in his life, and of preventing those forces, so far as is possible, from distorting his revelations. (For all his cult of sincerity, Rousseau let false coloring get into his Confessions; and Gide’s staunchest friend, Roger Martin Du Gard, has said that his self-portrait in the Journals, however unflattering, presents him as he wished to appear to posterity.) Mr. Aiken has, I believe, dealt fairly effectively with these problems by combining the methods of the psychoanalyst and the poet. He appears to have worked from an undirected stream of memories, dreams, and associations; and to have “processed” this raw material — given it coherence and pattern — with the intuitive logic of the poet rather than the logic of chronology and of the conscious mind.

The result is a difficult, original book, written with a superb command of language and a beautifully cadenced momentum. The difficulty is that it is exceedingly hard to find and keep one’s bearings when the author’s mind is darting around wherever his associations lead him. I see no reason why some dates and a few other signposts could not have been used. But by and large the difficulty is inherent in the attempt to add a new dimension to autobiography. And this is an attempt which — despite the wails that it is a waste of talent on the Freudian wasteland — will assuredly continue to be made.

Aiken has presented the particular experience of his narrator, D. — the Demarest of Blue Voyage — with a continuously generalized insight into a universal cycle of experience: the transformation of son into father. The narrator, in his boyhood, lost father and mother in an appalling tragedy; and their place was symbolically taken by two countries — the land of his forebears and England. When D., as a questing young man, cut loose from his roots, he fell in love with England, and throughout his life has been continually drawn back to it. Now, just after the war, he is returning to the house he loves in Saltinge — but this time, perhaps, to return permanently from it to his new home in America.

The interior Odyssey that has brought him to the edge of a new beginning crowds past his mind’s eye while he is crossing the ocean. It tells of love recurringly betrayed — of the three “Loreleis" he married and the “Loreleibchens” in between (and offers up a sublime pun about the man of many loves: “You cannot rest on your Laureleis”). It tells of literary friendships, and shows, with no trace of self-pity, the price paid by a writer whose integrity has rejected all compromise. It speaks of days when insanity seemed close and of an attempt at suicide. But there is none of the clinical aroma so poisonous to art. And there is much humor, vivid description, and a pervasive sense of kindness. There is a continuous sense, too, of D.’s movement toward a goal, Ushant and what it stands for: the beacon which lights up the treacherous approaches to the most rewarding of landfalls: the “poetic comprehension of man’s position in the universe.”

Ushant is, I repeat, a difficult book. But the reader in sympathy with Aiken’s intent, and prepared to make a full commitment of his faculties, will find here a penetrating and poetic rendering of “the precarious gait we call experience.”

Thanks to Tom Lea, Burnaby Conrad, and before them Ernest Hemingway, thousands of Americans are bullfight fans without ever having seen blood spilled in the bull ring. To them — speaking as one who, having been to three corridas, fancies himself a veteran aficionado — I commend with a rousing Olé! Sidney Franklin’s autobiography, Bullfighter from Brooklyn (Prentice-Hall, $3.75). In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway said of Franklin: “[He] is brave with a cold, serene, and intelligent valor . . . one of the most skillful, graceful, and slow manipulators of a cape fighting today. . . . His life is better than any picaresque novel you ever read. . . . He has truly lived three lives, one Mexican, one Spanish, and one American, in a way that is unbelievable.” I do not know whether the hand that manipulated the cape has itself tapped the typewriter, but what matters is that the fantastic story of the one and only great American bullfighter has been told simply, swiftly, and vividly.

His father’s hot temper caused Franklin to take off at seventeen for Mexico, where he quickly set up a successful silk-screen poster business. The poster business brought him into contact with bullfighting, and he grew exasperated by Mexican taunts that no Yankee had guts enough to be a matador. He decided to learn enough of the routines to join in amateur shows put on for charity; and through miraculous good fortune, the great Gaona, who had competed with Belmonte, became his teacher. After his first practice workout with bulls, he was horrified to find himself shanghaied by a manager into making a formal debut.

The descriptions of Franklin’s fights are remarkably well done. He gives you a real taste of what goes on down in the bull ring; and the story outside of the ring is full of entertaining episodes — Franklin’s sojourn with a jungle tribe which treated him like a king and asked nothing in return except some pale-skinned children; the romance with a beautiful fan from Texas who moved herself into his suite with almost fatal consequences; the hysterical demonstrations staged by aficionados; the meeting with an unkempt stranger who called himself Hemingway, and whom Franklin, no bookworm, added to his entourage as just another fan in need of a handout. It is all extremely good fun, and just about as exciting as an afternoon at the corrida.

When last I was in Italy, I encountered three sorts of American pilgrims — those who had come to Rome to get the Pope’s blessing; those who were on their way to Harry’s Bar in Venice to drink a Montgomery at Hemingway’s table; and those who hoped for an audience with Bernard Berenson at his famous villa, I Tatti, just outside Florence. Several of Berenson’s postwar American visitors have reported that what impressed them most about the great connoisseur, now in his middle eighties, was the amazing freshness of his mind — his prodigious intellectual curiosity. It is this quality which sets its stamp on Berenson’s Rumor and Reflection (Simon & Schuster, $6.00) and gives sustained vitality and charm to this discursive journal, which Berenson kept during the war years, first at I Tatti and then in hiding from the Nazis and Fascists.

Rumor and Reflection is introduced by its author as a book of “Gossip” — gossip in the sense intended by his friend William James, who used to say: “Come, let us gossip about the Universe.” The Rumor refers to that public gossip — reports of events and states of mind about events — which is history as it presents itself to the living: history before it has been sifted and geometrized by the historian. The Reflection is what Berenson was stimulated to write by the day’s conversation, his reading, and his musings: it is private gossip of the highest order.

As a war journal, Rumor and Reflection is an interesting picture of day-to-day vicissitudes and anxieties, not a chronicle of high drama (the most amazing part of the story is that his fabulous art collection was saved from the Germans and from bombardment). But while there is little or nothing in this book that could properly be called spectacular, there is a great deal in it that is notable; the author’s reflections about his Jewish heritage and the position of the Jews; his discussion of the German problem, in which he brings out the significant truths in both the “dangerous nation” view and the attitude whose accent is on the “good Germans”; his penetrating understanding of the Italians, the people whom he loves “most on earth” but sees with unblinking realism; his remarkable prescience (except on one or two points) about the war’s aftermath; and a good deal of amusing anecdotage.

Paul Valéry said of himself, “Stupidity is not my strong point”; and the remark fits Berenson well. He abhors fanaticism; he has no patience with the prejudices of nationalism; and here and there he punctures the facile optimism of the doctrinaire progressive. He is, genuinely, what so many are in name only — a liberal conservative. His journal admits us to the company of a restless, alert, enormously civilized mind. And it is written with an informal elegance which makes the going extremely pleasant.

The Skin (Houghton Mifflin, $3.50) by Curzio Malaparte — a big best-seller in Europe — purports to be a slightly fictionalized account of his experiences in and around Naples in the months after its capture by the Allies, to whom he became attached as a liaison officer. Malaparte — referred to in Berenson’s book as a “political atheist ”— had been briefly confined to an island by the Fascist regime; but his standing under Fascism had been good enough for him to be accredited as an Italian war correspondent, and for him to be the welcome guest of some of the Nazi bigwigs. I mention this because Malaparte’s fixed pose of high-mindedness and his other self-righteous posturings, coming as they do from a notorious adventurer, seem to me peculiarly disgusting. They strike me as the work of a show-off and a brazen opportunist, who goes all out to exploit the sensational possibilities of squalor and eroticism while pretending to be pained and scandalized.

In his attitude toward the Americans, Malaparte alternates between an enormous condescension and a worshipful pseudo humility which is possibly even more irritating. Yet, undeniably, Malaparte has brilliant literary gifts of a theatrical order. He has a flair for the atrociously bizarre, and he depicts it with a bravura which makes some of his pages unforgettable.

His dual theme in The Skin is the abasement and suffering of the Neapolitans, and the failure of the wellmeaning but naïve liberators to understand that war has left these people with nothing to live for but their skin. The book is a succession of episodes in which — apart from a few dealing with the combat lines — the accent is on the sordid and the fantastic. Malaparte writes about the female dwarfs of Pendino di Santa Barbara; erotic rites celebrated by homosexuals; the flourishing traffic in Negro soldiers, whom street urchins would latch on to with promises of pleasure and “sell” to the highest bidder to be plundered; a dinner party at which, when the huge fish that was the pièce de résistance arrived, it looked appallingly like the body of a little girl.

Malaparte’s emotional tone is consistently inflated. And all in all, it might be said that he has a genius for creating disbelief. But while one can seldom accept his reporting as literal truth, it is often highly arresting in a nightmarish way and it makes one original and worth-while contribution. Malaparte’s is surrealistic reportage which projects the extreme awfulness of certain wartime horrors and abnormalities with a greater graphic intensity than could be achieved, I think, by strictly factual documentation. The Skin is not as interesting a book as Kaputt, but it has the same element of nightmarish truth and some of the same shock effect.

When looking through the new novels, I am often reminded of the statement (I forget where I saw it) that there is no such thing as bad art: there is simply art and non-art. What personally I care most about in a novel is that it should really be a novel — that is, something newly created, a product of talent — and not a piece of fiction built by literary carpentry, a product of know-how. The genuine article is distinguished by a quality which is tidily summed up in Flaubert’s phrase — “a personal way of seeing and feeling”; and it almost invariably makes a book, however deeply flawed, in some way interesting. The four titles glanced at below all have this quality. They all, in very different ways, gave me a good deal of enjoyment.

In Hemlock and After (Viking, $3.00), Angus Wilson lives up to the deadly promise of his two collections of short stories. With a coldly devastating eye, he describes the interplay of relationships between a group of characters in whom is lodged a lush assortment of failings and depravities. The central figure is a celebrated British novelist who has persuaded the government to finance a home for young writers. This Bernard Sands is a married man whose strong moral sense has had to capitulate to his homosexuality; and eventually there is a crisis in which his conscience takes command, though not with particularly cheering consequences.

Wilson is a brilliant and vastly amusing portraitist of human imperfection. Occasionally, he mars his farcical effects by carrying things too far — the raffish Madam and the fiasco at the opening of the writers’ home are overdone; and his destructive talent has an almost unavoidable limitation — one is not apt to care much what happens to his victims. But the exposure of human shams and pretensions, conducted with such virtuosity as Wilson’s, seems to me a sufficiently rewarding enterprise in itself. Though his methods bear no resemblance to those of the early Huxley or to Waugh’s, he is operating within the same tradition and he is the brightest of their successors.

Isabel Bolton is a weaver of verbal enchantment, which communicates — glowingly and with exquisite precision — the vibrations of the human heart and the texture of the physical world in all its nuances. In Many Mansions (Scribner’s, $3.00), a woman over eighty, living alone in a hotel room, rescues from a drawer and reads a manuscript in which she once told her life story. It is the story — unfolding in Philadelphia, Florence, and New York — of an upperclass American whose life was irrevocably shaped by the disastrous outcome of her first, youthful love affair. The plot resorts to a stock twist of the Gothic romance, and from the over-all perspective it is terribly flimsy. But the writing has a poetic vividness, a truth of feeling that make the book memorable. I find Miss Bolton’s prose style completely spellbinding. If novels were still read aloud, I am sure she would gain a large following.

The Last September (Knopf, $3.50) is an early novel, long out of print, by Elizabeth Bowen, who says of it: “This, of all my work, is nearest to my heart.” Like Lois, the heroine, Miss Bowen was a young girl in Ireland during the 1920 “Troubles.” The house in the novel is Miss Bowen’s own home; and her family — landowning Anglo-Irish Protestants — were in the ambiguous, heartbreaking position of Lois’s uncle and aunt. The story takes its pitch from the month which gives the novel its title. Lois, in transition from adolescence, is enjoying tennis parties and discovering love, almost oblivious to the grim happenings beyond the gates. And suddenly they bring desolation.

In October Island (Little, Brown, $3.00), William March — whose Company K was one of the fine novels of the First World War — has come up with a fresh and engaging treatment of a hackneyed theme: the story of the ignoble missionary who descends, preaching the idea of Sin, on the noble savages of a Pacific island-paradise. Tales of this kind have usually had the rather naïve purpose of showing that homme au naturel lives infinitely more sensibly than the victims of civilization. But March’s intent is more subtle, and October Island is full of delightful inventions and fruitful uses of anthropology.

The story focuses on the missionary’s virgin wife, who, through an extraordinary chain of circumstances, is taken by the natives for the Virgin Goddess they have been awaiting, and who finds this just what she has wanted all her life. The point, I think, is that man, civilized or uncivilized, is ultimately governed by the irrational. But there are other meanings, too, in this clever, mellow, and entertaining fantasy.

The author of With Malice Toward Some now subjects the American business society to the verbal equivalent of a saturation raid with atom bombs. Her thesis is that the American conscience and the ethos of American business have a mutually hostile set of values; and that there is a catastrophic clash between American business and the American family. The child is taught truthfulness, coöperation, and giving; the adult, from nine o’clock to five, is expected to be aggressively competitive, cynical, and grabbing in the pursuit of money; and he cannot but take some of this spirit home into the family, where the opposite traits are needed. The result is a deep split within the individual — “ We’re all in . . . the S. S. Schizophrenia.” The split is further accentuated by the fact that the American has to switch continually from the realities of his life as he knows them to the “fiction of his life” presented by the media of mass communication.

The gist of Miss Halsey’s book, in effect, is that the business of America can only continue to be business at the cost of “chronic unhappiness.” All this, she recognizes, has already been said; and she states it somewhat repetitively. Her case, though, is certainly presented with telling wit and with tremendous spirit.

Mr. Riess chronicles the life of Berlin — he calls it, not unjustifiably, “living surrealism” — from the entry of the Russians up until February, 1952. He appears to have worked rather harder on the human than on the political side of the story. His handling of the latter is sometimes unimpressive, especially in respect to the political battle behind the blockade. He has, however, collected an enormous quantity of interesting material showing how the Berliners have lived. His book has a dramatic and fascinating story to tell, and makes of it absorbing reading.

Georges Simenon is a born storyteller, a magnificent creator of character and atmosphere; and this is the best novel of his that I have read to date (but not a book for anyone who is likely to be disturbed by the blunt and unsparing treatment of sex).

It is cast in the form of a letter written from a French prison by a man who wants one person at least to understand why he killed the being he loved most on earth — “in full consciousness of my act,” and not, as the jury concluded, while mentally deranged. The letter-writer unfolds the story of a country doctor, twice married, who had had no sense of life until he met a pathetic girl called Marline; and who discovered with her — as she did with him — an immensely satisfying love, only to be haunted by the phantom of “the other Marti ne’ who had given herself to other men.

This capsule description may suggest banality, but that is far from being the case. The book has a sharply individual flavor, and it achieves a reality so intense that I feel I have seen the wdiole story actually pass before my eyes.

This novel by the well-known family doctor of Rutherford, Xew Jersey, who is one of America’s best poets chronicles—against a background of steadily increasing prosperity — the life of an immigrant’s family in a small town in New Jersey through the first two decades of the cent ury.

The principal protagonists are Joe Steelier, a German-born printer, who retains his Old World caution about money and his old-fashioned ideas about family life; Joe’s Norwegian wife, Gurlie, who struggles successfully for a place in the town’s best society and then sets about livening up the town’s social life; and the Stechers’ two pretty daughters, with whose marriages the novel ends.

The social picture has the stamp of reality, as recorded by a warmhearted and warmly interested observer. But the story is a bit commonplace and somewhat lacking in point. It seemed to me to get nowhere in particular.

The British sense of humor, says A. P. Herbert in his introduction, is not radically different from the American: it is the difference in scene — in topical context and associations — which often makes the point of a British joke seem feeble or nonexistent to Americans, and vice versa.

The editors of this handsomely produced collection are both Americans, and they have selected 250 cartoons w’hose humor, they felt, requires no decoding. As far as I am concerned, the majority are delightful: a few fall flat; and quite a number are tremendously funny. A good many of these cartoons are also notable for their original and engaging draftsmanship, especially those of a wacky genius called Emett, whose masterpieces are in themselves a handsome return for the price of admission.

SECRET TIBETby Fosco Maraini. Viking, $6.50.

Fosco Maraini went to Tibet in the thirties, attached to an Italian scientific expedition and equipped with humane sympathies, enormous curiosity, enthusiasm, wit, and a mind equally capable of observation and reflection. He also carried a camera. The book resulting from these qualifications ranges from details of daily life through sharp studies of Tibetan character and on into a history of art and religion. Every page is alive with the author’s determination to make Tibetan civilization comprehensible to Western readers. His success is remarkable. He is equally lucid in dealing with the gaudy grimness of religious symbolism and the subtleties of negotiating with an old lama who, abysmally ignorant by Western standards, is nevertheless a sensitive and intelligent man. Almost anybody can grind out a book about picturesque scenery and quaint barbarians, but the ability to describe an alien world in solidly human terms without drifting into condescension or losing the charm of strangeness is very rare. Secret Tibet ranks high on the list of genuine magic carpets.