Reader's Choice

THANKS to the high level of scientific detachment and technical precision that prevails today in poetic criticism, it is quite possible to read a fifty-page essay in which Mr. X, critic, tells everything about the works of Mr. Y, poet, except whether he likes them. The emphasis is all on the poet’s methods; what they achieve is regarded as very nearly irrelevant. In The Crowning Privilege (Doubleday, $5.00), Robert Graves, himself a poet of stature, has abandoned this system, and his shameless reversion to the antique fashion of judging a poet by the pleasure to be had from reading his work comes with all the shock of novelty.

Mr. Graves is a scandalous reactionary, disrespectful, cantankerous, witty, wily, and fascinating. “It was naughty of Johnson,” he observes, while discussing Lycidas with aversion, “to pretend that ‘the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, the numbers unpleasing’: the sound of the poem is magnificent; only the sense is deficient.” The complaint would be fair enough if Mr. Graves had not previously demolished Wordsworth by studiously quoting from his worst poems without mentioning a line of his best. This is naughty of Mr. Graves, but what fun it is to watch him lay about among the poets without fear, favor, or consistency.

The first half of The Crowning Privilege is occupied by six lectures which Mr. Graves delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge. They cover the nature of the poet’s gift, the proper attitude toward it, the history of poetry, the origin of English metres, what a poet is entitled to expect of his audience, and the current state of the art. Readers who recall that strange and wonderful book, The White Goddess, will not be surprised by Mr. Graves’s opinions; others had better brace themselves for a voice from another world.

Mr. Graves believes in the goddess, the Muse, the angel-devil-mistress for whom all true poets sing, as literally as ever Homer did; he regards poetic ability as a divine gift which only a churl would try to convert into money; he defines the poet’s duty as a continual polishing of the technique of his art in order to set down as clearly as possible what the goddess chooses to confide to him. At first glance, this mystical position seems to give every poet a free hand, since who is to deny that the Muse told him exactly what he says she did? In practice, Mr. Graves has no hesitation in belaboring his colleagues for garbling the message or, worse yet, pretending to acquaintance with a Muse that knows them not.

Once his stand is made clear, Mr. Graves’s judgments are logical, if sometimes unexpected, “A poet’s public consists of those who happen to be close enough to him, in education and environment and imaginative vision, to be able to catch both the overtones and the undertones of his poetic statements. And unless he despises his fellow men, he will not deny them the pleasure of reading what he has written while inspired by the Muse. . .” It follows that Mr. Graves has small patience with such whimsical obscurities as Ezra Pound’s fragments of Chinese or the unique spiritualist cosmography of William Butler Yeats. A Vision, Yeats’s final explanation of the universal myth revealed to him through his wife’s automatic writing, has been reissued, and the crossword-puzzle refinements of this private symbolic system, necessarily devoid of any emotional connotations for the reader, form a striking contrast to Mr. Graves’s insistence on lucidity and direct emotional effect.

Agree with him or not, Mr. Graves is always interesting. he covers a number of things besides poetry in the second half of the book, rambling through history, anthropology, and comparative religion; reconstructing the original meaning of nonsense rhymes; and discoursing on the asphodel, a sadly neglected plant until it caught his eye. Immensely learned, subscribing to no school of poetry or criticism, Mr. Graves is a lone wolf; but many readers will be comforted by his stand. He once asked a student what poems she enjoyed most, and “she answered with dignity: ‘Poems are not meant to be enjoyed: they are meant to be analysed.’ I hope you do not think that I subscribe to this heresy.”

By “the public arts” Gilbert Seldes means those entertainments enjoyed by an audience so large, heterogeneous, and uncritical that the entertainments acquire a general influence out of all proportion to their merit. The main targets of his study, The Public Arts (Simon and Schuster, $3.95), are, naturally, radio and television, which he believes have such power today over the public that “they impose on us the positive obligation to control and direct them,” and his conclusion is that something must be done soon if we are not to become a nation of panhandlers with no ambition beyond appearing on “The $64,000 Question” and winning a chromium station wagon for ignorance.

The book begins with some chapters on the movies, but they seem to have been included because Mr. Seldes loves movies and loves to write about them. His memories of Garbo and Chaplin make the heart yearn for the days of silent films, but when he moves on to taking pictures, he is just as happy with cowboys and John Huston. Mr. Seldes is a movie buff. He’d like to see more good pictures, but no picture, however bad, can weaken his love for the medium.

His affection for radio and television is more restrained. After discussing his favorite performers and castigating (mildly, for he is a kindly man) his major dislikes, Mr. Seldes settles down to consider what should be done to improve and expand both types of entertainment. He argues that broadcasting stations, licensed to operate over the air, which is certainly public property, are obligated to serve the public in a way that the press, operating with privately owned machinery and selling its product cash down, has never been. This is a good point, and Mr. Seldes’s ideas of what public service involves are sound.

He wants better programs, of course, but also more varied programs, more educational programs, more experimentation, and more channels in use. It sounds fine. Unhappily, Mr. Seldes knows only too well the reasons why these wants are not supplied, and they all boil down to money. He would never put the matter so crudely, but his voluminous details about internetwork raids and lobbying with the FCC speak for themselves. Everybody concerned with broadcasting is out, first, to make money for himself and, second, to prevent his rivals from making any at all. The object is not to provide what the public wants or needs, but to persuade the public to accept what the broadcaster is in a position to provide cheaply or safely or both.

The dismal situation is presented clearly. As to what should be done about it, Mr. Seldes is disappointingly vague. He suggests a “pooling of interests” and mentions “the rich foundations” and “the managers of all our cultural institutions,” evidently having in mind a campaign of moral pressure. It would be pleasant to believe in the success of such a campaign, but it’s difficult. Big business has never been susceptible to moral pressure without legal pressure behind it. And the public arts are very big business indeed.

Beasts and Men (Atlantic—Little, Brown, $3.50) is a collection of stories translated from the French, for which Pierre Gascar, the author, received both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix de Critiques. The enthusiasm of the French critics is perfectly understandable. Mr. Gascar writes brilliantly, balancing details which suggest, in their precision and plausibility, literal reporting, with images and metaphors that have the unexpected, shocking rightness of poetry. He has in addition hit upon a virtually new way of telling a story.

The beasts and men of Mr. Gascar’s stories move in their separate, circumscribed ways (all the humans and most of the animals are under some species of involuntary restraint) and the collision of these mutually uncomprehending worlds throws sparks that illuminate, obliquely, the themes of fear, violence, and death. In “The Horses” a nervous corporal, simultaneously frightened and bored almost to insanity, drives the animals in his care to the anarchic defiance of authority of which he is not capable, and which the horses cannot appreciate. The Russian prisoners in “The Animals" are reduced to the level of the menagerie quartered near them, competing with the sad bear and the mangy tiger for food. “The Dogs” is a subtle study of the effects of danger and violence, both real and imaginary, through the actions of soldiers engaged in training dogs for war service.

In these three stories it is the action of the beasts that reveals the minds of the men. “Gaston,” a longer story, is more orthodox. It begins as an exciting, sourly funny account of an inefficient municipality trying to cope with an invasion of rats and giving way to panicky anthropomorphism when the rats prove irrepressible. This bizarre tale presently reveals itself as a spine-chilling political allegory, powerful and perfectly direct.

The last item in the collection is a novelette, “The Season of the Dead,”and it has nothing to do with animals at all. Some French prisoners of war at a German camp in the Ukraine are permitted to make and maintain a cemetery for the camp dead. With nothing else to amuse it, the cemetery crew develops a mild cult of death, decorating the graves elaborately and coming to view the whole operation as a pleasant formality, a distraction from the miseries of confinement. When the Germans round up the local Jews for execution and the crowded freight cars clank by the camp and later come back empty, death becomes a real and terrible enemy.

As Mr. Gascar develops his sidelights and subplots, new meanings keep appearing like facets of an irregular crystal, and the reader must decide for himself which, if any, is to be taken as final. One thing is decidedly clear, however, in all these fine, grim stories. The force behind them is not murky neurotic sensibility, but indomitable clearheadedness. Hammock reading

Patrick Dennis, author of that amusing nonsense, Auntie Mame, has now produced a piece of hammock reading called Guestward Ho! (Vanguard, $3.50) on behalf of Barbara Hooton. Mrs. Hooton, the reluctant proprietress of a dude ranch, told Mr. Dennis all about her troubles. He has worked like a horse to make the story funny. Because of Mr. Dennis’s liveliness, parts of Guestward Ho! are funny. The calamitous procession of servants, all with light fingers and heavy thirsts, has been well worn, but he gets surprising mileage out of it. The gilded Jaguar in the swimming pool is a beguiling touch, and he manages a savagely comic sketch of a group of professional refugees. These episodes are hardly enough for a book, though. Guestward Ho! is about 75 per cent padding.

Some time ago Nancy Milford, wit, novelist, biographer of Madame Pompadour, and daughter of an earl, published a piece on the English aristocracy in which she alternately kissed and cuffed the peerage. The English still love their lords, or at least love discussing them, and Miss Mitford stirred up a neat little civil war. Noblesse Oblige (Harper, $3.00) is a partial report on the hostilities to date, containing Miss Mitford’s opening barrage plus various replies, footnotes, and the illustrations of Osbert Lancaster.

What set off the Donnybrook was not Miss Milford’s disrespectful analysis of English character, her unloving sketch of the Fortinbras family, or even her claim that the English aristocracy is not half as poor as it pretends. It was simply U, which Miss Milford didn’t even invent. She borrowed this useful term from a language scholar, Alan Ross, who in publishing his findings on certain British speech habits used U for upper class and non-U for anything else. Professor Ross’s paper follows Miss Mitford’s essay, enlarging on what she has already mentioned in passing.

Dinner: U-speakers eat luncheon in the middle of the day and dinner in the evening. Non-U speakers (also U-children and U-dogs) have their dinner in the middle of the day.

Greens is non-U for U vegetables.

Home: non-U — “they have a lovely home"; U — “they’ve a very nice house.” Mental: non-U for U mad.

Wealthy: non-U for U rich.

There are many more of these delicate distinctions which, while of small practical value here in the colonies, make diverting reading.

Miss Milford’s countrymen, enormously excited by these revelations, have rushed in with amplification, explanation, and outrage. Evelyn Waugh, sounding a bit testy, carries the examination of U-behavior far beyond Miss Mitford’s generalities, creating a whole cast of U-eccentrics operating by inherited or adopted rales peculiar to themselves but unknown to their peers, because “You might find almost anyone in a ducal castle — convalescents, penurious cousins, advisory experts, sycophants, gigolos and plain blackmailers. The one thing you could be sure of not finding was a concourse of other dukes.”

While Mr. Waugh undermines the universal U-concept, “Strix” and Christopher Sykes add examples in related fields. Mr. Sykes on the use of the U-umbrella is sheer joy. Unfortunately, the joke is carried on a trifle too long, and there is an undercurrent of bad temper in all these pieces, bar Professor Ross’s, which was written before the storm broke. Noblesse Oblige is never half as amusing as the issue Punch devoted to the question under the title of, inevitably, Snoblesse Oblige.

In Mona Lisa (Dial, $12.50), Tiffany Thayer has written what he claims is the longest novel ever concocted by anybody, the three boxed volumes currently available being merely the first installment of what will probably go down in history as Tiffany Thayer’s live-foot shelf.

Back in the thirties Mr. Thayer wrote a number of successful books which were, in their treatment of sex, close kin to the stage performances of Mae West. Miss West is tougher, though, for Mr. Thayer retains that first fine careless rapture and goes at the subject in the spirit of a small boy smoking stolen cigarettes behind the woodshed.

Some fifteen years ago, Mr. Thayer decided to write a novel about Mona Lisa, and discovered history. He also discovered that romantic historical novels rarely tell the truth. So he began what must have been, for all his flippant references to it, a monumental and completely serious piece of research. Unfortunately, the research got the better of him. He forgot that while it’s the historian’s business to know his field thoroughly, it’s the historical novelist’s duty to know it adequately and then leave out 80 per cent of his knowledge. Mr. Thayer, possessed by the demon of unaccustomed scholarship, has put in everything, and at the end of volume three his alleged heroine has not yet been born.

A great deal else has happened, though. A cast of thousands wars and wenches around fifteenth-century Naples while the young Prince of Taranto tries to wrest control of the kingdom from his nymphomaniac aunt. Battles and beds crop up on every page, politics and banditry (the terms are synonymous) riot uncontrolled, and it would take the patience of a saint to read through this disorganized and incomprehensible uproar.

Mr. Thayer is capable of fine work with a simple brawl involving no more than two or three hundred people, and he has moments of wild burlesque that prove he has studied Rabelais to some purpose. These occasional merits are no compensation for the monotonous persistence of confusion, triviality, and an affectedly naughty style.