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THE change in our image of the Japanese — the “unspeakable Jap” of the war years has become Professor MacArthur’s Prize Pupil — has, if anything, made the soul of Japan seem a still more baffling paradox. How can the former aggressiveness and fanaticism of the Japanese be reconciled with their docility and friendliness toward their conquerors? How do the monstrous excesses of Nanking and Bataan fit in with the delicate shading of a Utamaro print or the legendary punctiliousness of Japanese manners? Frank Gibney sets out to resolve these paradoxes in Five Gentlemen of Japan (Farrar, Straus & Young, $4.00); and he has turned in an admirable job — imaginatively planned and smoothly written, illuminating, and thoroughly absorbing.

Mr. Gibney is a young American who has spent several years in Japan — first as an officer in the Navy, later as a correspondent — and who writes with the advantage of knowing Japanese. His book is cast in the form of a “historical essay,” rather more than half of which is devoted to recent and current history. To give concreteness to his analysis of the Japanese character, Gibney has very effectively woven into his text the lives of five gentlemen of contemporary Japan — the Emperor; a veteran engineer, formerly a vice-admiral in ihe Japanese Navy; a farmer; a foreman in a steel mill; and a young Tokyo newspaperman.

To understand the Japanese, says Gibney, we must imagine a system in which the traditional absolute values of Western civilization have never existed. The morality of the Japanese is a social morality in which virtue is loyalty to one’s commitments— to the commitments prescribed by a strong clan system reinforced by Confucianism and the national religion of Shinto. Japanese society is a web (with the Emperor at its center) which binds the individual in all directions. Within the web, the Japanese is considerate and ruthlessly self-disciplined. But when, as in dealing with wartime enemies, he is freed from the contracts of the web society, he has no values that prevent his frustrations from finding outlet in brutality.

In Gibney’s view, the existence of the imperially centered web society is “the central fact of modern Japanese history.” He shows how it enabled the militarists to obtain total control of Japan in the thirties, and how after the war it predisposed the Japanese to coöperate loyally with their American conquerors. (There is an apocryphal story that an old Japanese farmer, when asked his opinion of MacArthur, replied: “The Emperor couldn’t have picked a better man.”)

The latter part, of Mr. Gibney’s book is an informative appraisal of the present situation in Japan. It examines the defeat of the local Communists; the formidable economic problems; the strong wish to trade with Bed China; the ticklish question of rearmament; the attitude of the Japanese toward the role of Communism in Asia and their ideas about democracy. Gibney concludes that the Japanese, by their location and their culture, are the “bridge people” who could serve as mediator between the Western Powers and the rising, undetermined forces in the East.

Prince of Players (Norton, $4.50) by Eleanor Ruggles, a Book-of-theMonth Club selection, is a fine biography of the great actor Edwin Booth. It is a colorful and dramatic story that Miss Ruggles has to tell, for Booth’s life was richly charged with triumph and tragedy, and he himself is a moving figure — a man of integrity, fortitude, and generous, tender spirit, whose loyalties ran deep and who was shiningly free from the customary vanity and egotism of the celebrated star.

Miss Ruggles gets off to a lively start with a sketch of Booth’s father, a famous British tragedian and a decidedly piquant character, who emigrated to America around 1820 with his mistress, a London flower girl. Young Booth scored his first stage successes in the boisterous San Francisco of the early eighteen-fifties. Starred in New York at twentyfour, he soon became — and remained throughout his career — the idol of American theatregoers; and while he fared less well in London, his appearances in Germany were rapturously acclaimed.

The actor’s personal life was haunted by tragedy. Booth père, in his later years, took to drink and was subject to fits of madness; and as a young boy, Edwin had the harrowing responsibility of being his father’s constant escort. The wife Booth loved with all his being died a few years after their marriage; his second wife proved mentally unstable and eventually lapsed into insanity; his brother, John Wilkes, was Lincoln’s assassin. Small wonder that his tragic performances bespoke a profound “acquaintance with grief.”

To conjure up the genius of an actor who died sixty years ago and whose voice survives only in two screechy, primitive recordings is a stiff challenge for a biographer. Miss Ruggles has utilized the descriptions of Booth’s contemporaries with a truly creative touch: the glimpses she gives us of Booth on stage add up to a vivid evocation of his somewhat old-fashioned style, with its grand delivery, its hint of strangeness, its extraordinarily poignant yet robust appeal. The Iago he played to the great. Irving’s Othello was so diabolic and yet so personally seductive that a young lady asked how Desdemona (Ellen Terry) could possibly have been left alone with him without a chaperone. And Julia Ward Howe, in a poem published by the Atlantic Monthly in 1859, described Booth’s Hamlet as". . . beautiful as dreams of maidenhood, That doubt defy.”

To the select company of readers who remain patrons of the essay I warmly commend two imports from England — The Singular Preference (Viking, $3.75) by Peter Quennell; and the late George Orwell’s Such, Such Were the Joys (Harcourt, Brace, $3.50).

Mr. Quennell, a stylish biographer, is also a writer of literary criticism that is both highly cultivated and highly readable, a rare conjunction nowadays. His latest book is a gallery of portraits, most of them literary; and its focus is on singularity — on the singular individual; the singular book; the singular aspects of a writer’s talent.

Some of Quennell’s subjects are well-known figures — Defoe, Dickens, Balzac, Swinburne, Kipling, H. G. Wells — but even in the compass of a few pages, Quennell usually manages to say something fresh and suggestive about them. Some are less familiar, though they have their niche in the literary histories: the dramatists Tourneur, Ford, and Massinger; the wildly eccentric poet, Gérard de Nerval, whose artistic powers were unimpaired by spells of madness; Choderlos de Laclos, the author of that amatory classic, Les Liaisons Dangereuses; the bluestocking Mrs. Thrale, Dr. Johnson’s “Thralia Dulcis,” who left behind a remarkable diary; the Victorian fantast, Edward Lear; and others — an intriguing collection. In a third or “miscellaneous” category, there are entertaining pieces about the ineffable Beau Brummel; the Victorian dilettante, Janus Weathercock, who turned poisoner; the Sanson clan whose members, from 1688 to 1847, served successive French governments as state torturer and executioner.

These are the sketches of a man of taste, intelligence, and wit, who wears his learning urbanely and writes with fluency and grace. The Singular Preference is a work of singular charm.

Such, Such Were the Joys is a second posthumous collection of essays not published in book form during George Orwell’s life. It takes its title from a long memoir of Orwell’s early school days — a wonderful account of the squalor and miseries of life in one of the “best” boarding schools for the small sons of English gentlemen. “Notes on Nationalism” is a trenchant analysis of the pathology of the nationalist and of the diverse forms that nationalism can assume. Out of a pre-war visit to Morocco comes “Marrakech,” a superb piece of descriptive writing, which makes its damning point about colonialism without sentimentalizing the underdog. In “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” Orwell, one of the first to expose the maneuvers of the Comintern in Spain, reminds us that Franco’s version of the war is a tissue of lies; that the Communists gave the Republicans little military aid and eventually sabotaged their cause; and that the real issue was the struggle of the Spanish common people for a decent life.

It is not just a pious tribute to say that Orwell’s death was an irreplaceable loss. His reputation in this country was made by two novels dramatizing the horrors of Communism, but he was much more than just another gifted anti-Communist writer. A liberal through and through, he was a forceful critic of the Right as well as of the totalitarian Left. With a keenly original intelligence and blazing honesty, he waged war on the manifold infections of his time: on power-worship, thought-control, nationalism, anti-Semitism, the sadism embedded in our mass culture, the debasement of the English language — on nastiness of all kinds. What disgusted him most savagely, perhaps, was intellectual dishonesty, any sort of humbug. Genuinely believing in freedom, he loathed “all the smelly little orthodoxies . . . now contending for our souls" and all sniffers after heresy. He was a first-rate writer with a first-rate mind, but the crucial thing about him was his extraordinary decency.

To me, the most dismal trail of the popular historical novel — aside from its repulsive length — is the halfbaked earnestness, the lack of humor, in its vision of the past. That history is replete with subtle comedy, grim farce, and piercing ironies is a notion which most of our best-selling historical novelists leave to such frivolous thinkers as Professor Toynbee, Aldous Huxley, or Reinhold Niebuhr. When they (the novelists) contemplate the past, they are thrilled, amazed, angered, horrified, chastened, uplifted — but, like Queen Victoria, they are not amused.

The Little Emperors (CowardMcCann, $3.00)—a historical novel by Alfred Duggan —is refreshingly different from the product just referred to. Mr. Duggan (Conscience of the King; Knight with Armour) is a compact writer with an awareness of the comedy in history and a quietly ironic touch. His novel describes, partly by guesswork, the little-known events which led to the withdrawal of the Roman garrison from Britain at the beginning of the fifth century.

In 406, barbarians poured into Gaul, and Britain was cut off from Italy, where Honorius was Emperor. The Army of Britain proclaimed as Emperor a certain Marcus, who soon was murdered, as was his successor, Gratianus. Shortly afterward, the third “little Emperor,” Constantius, took the Army of Britain to the continent in a bid—eventually defeated — to become master of the West.

Mr. Duggan’s novel is centered on Sempronius Felix, the highest civil servant in Britannia Prima. Felix’s young wife is the daughter of Gratianus, and her enjoyment of murder helps her father to the purple. But presently it costs them both their lives, and Felix has to take refuge among the barbarians. Duggan tells his story in an easy, natural tone, with a sardonic sense of humor. He has reconstructed an epoch seldom if ever visited by other historical novelists and has fashioned a book with a distinctly individual flavor.

A Brighter Sun (Viking, $3.00) — a first novel about Trinidad by a young East Indian, Samuel Selvon — also has a setting that is fresh and a sharply individual accent. Its hero is a 16-year-old East Indian who, after the traditional arranged marriage, goes to live with his teen-age bride in a mud hut in Barataria, near Port-of-Spain. These two children, Tiger and Urmilla, illiterate and wretchedly poor, try to learn to be grownups; they start a family; they struggle to get a living out of a leased patch of land and a cow. But Tiger aspires to something better. His efforts to push beyond the confines of his primitive world are the dramatic mainspring of A Brighter Sun.

Mr. Selvon’s novel does not, in the final analysis, quite match up to its original promise, and its tone tends to soften the harsh realities of Tiger’s life. But it is a touching story, full of charm. It blazes with local color. Its native characters are a delight. And its pages arc richly flavored with the droll, picturesque speech of Trinidad — “But, gul, life is a helluva thing, oui. But look how Ah take up meself and leave sweetman life in town and come here to live wid yuh in de bush. But life is a helluva thing, oui.”

Prince Bart (Farrar, Straus, & Young, $3.95) — a first novel by Jay Richard Kennedy — has as its theme what might be called The Great American Failure Story: the story of the man who has gone all-out for supersuccess and achieved it, only to find himself lonely, insecure, and insatiable. There are, to my mind, certain drawbacks to this theme. The first is that it is getting rather stale. The second is that the type of Success Maniac currently fashionable in fiction — the Hollywood or Madison Avenue Great One — is, in terms of human values, an unimportant person; and his efforts to soothe his psyche by fiercer fame-grubbing and more conspicuous consumption do not constitute a moving problem. The third catch is that the most tempting denouement — the switch from the gold-and-glitter standard to the love standard in the hero’s inner economy — is usually pretty unconvincing.

These liabilities are apparent in Mr. Kennedy’s novel. But in spite of them, in spite of manifold crudities, it has a remarkable momentum — a torrential sort of energy. Mr. Kennedy has not handled The Great American Failure Story with any distinction but he certainly has given it one hell of a workout.

Kennedy’s hero, Bart Blaine, who started life as the son of a penniless immigrant, is a 39-year-old movie idol — crude, arrogant, and unhappy. At the novel’s opening he is faced with a crisis in his career. The grosses on his last two pictures have dropped and the news that he has suffered a heart attack has hurt his reputation as the tough guy, he-man type of lover. The main strand of the plot has to do with Blaine’s frenzied battle to get on top again. At the climax of this battle, a reunion with his father frees him, we are asked to believe, from the furies that have hounded him. He realizes that his ambition has been a disease, an obsessive attempt to compensate for the bitterness of his childhood; and his bitterness dissolves as he understands that his father goaded him out of love — was trying to save his son from his own degrading poverty.

One of the furies that Blaine had been possessed by was an insatiable sexuality. It seems to me entirely possible that Blaine is the most sexually active hero in the annals of American fiction; and pure-minded readers are hereby advised that they will find his behavior very, very shocking.