Reader's Choice

Mr. Kerouac’s thesis is that modern urban and suburban living does nobody any good. “. . . Take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the wards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You’ll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is ] soon going to be thinking the same way . . .” To ward off the intellectual and emotional ossification implicit in this horrid vision, Mr. | Kerouac’s characters try to live like Oriental sages, wandering in wild places, meditating in the moonlight, writing poetry, and sponging on their friends and kin. They are looking for dharma, the revelation of ultimate truth behind the appearance of things, or as one of them puts it, “There is no me, no airplane, no nose, no Princess, no nothing — for Krissakes do you want to go on being fooled every damn minute of your life?”

The young men principally engaged in not being fooled are a student of everything Oriental named Japhy Ryder and the narrator, Ray Smith, a bad poet. Ray’s poetry is unnerving in itself and also unsettling as an element in the story. It is fair enough to assume that Ray would be unaware that the stuff is hilariously awful, and since Ray tells the story, Mr. Kerouac cannot well intrude any critical opinion of his own. Still, it would be good to know his creator’s private estimate of Ray’s work, for as the book stands, it is never quite clear whether Zen Buddhism and mountain climbing benefit society or merely soothe the individual soul, nor is there any indication that enlightenment, when Ray finally achieves it, will deter him from verse.

Ray’s verse is bad, but his eye, being really Mr. Kerouac’s, is good. The Dharma Bums is full of sparkling descriptionsoflandscapeand weather, light falling through trees, the smell of snow, the motions of animals. The people are less successful, for Ray and Japhy are reminiscent of the garrulous comrades of On the Road, their friends are too often designed to prove a point, and the women are ornamental cartoons. What is successful is Mr. Kerouac’s evocation of a state of mind in these fellows, a humorous rebelliousness, a polite refusal to bother with trivialities, a genuine kindness toward the world they have repudiated. Their attitude is convincing when their actions are not, and goes far to persuade the reader that these selfelected bodhisattvas are not pursuing a contemptible ideal.

All the characters in VANCE BOURJAILY’S novel THE VIOLATED (Dial, $4.95) pursue contemptible ideals insofar as they pursue anything other than love affairs. This enormously long, soggily earnest book is the more exasperating because it contains enough brilliant flashes to keep the reader hoping for better things.

According to Mr. Bourjaily, his novel is about a group of people who are “violated . . . by their inability to communicate, to love, to comprehend, to create — violated by neurotic commitments to preposterous goals or, more tragically, to no goals at all.” This is a perfectly accurate description of the three men whose dreary careers are followed over some thirty years, and also of everyone connected with them, and this is the book’s weakness. Koko is funny, but if everyone in the cast plays Koko, monotony is bound to set in.

The first part of the book, in which the author introduces Tom the ineffectual genius, Eddie the worried ruffian, and Guy the joyless Don Juan, is much better than the second. The boys meet in prep school, and getting them into action involves considerable bustle with parents, girls, college, and the war. Eddie’s experiences in the army are admirably done, as are the excitement of school dances and Tom’s odd relationship with the friends of his older sister. The nervous, inquisitive rootlessness of late adolescence is well conveyed, but the disabilities that prevent these characters from attaching themselves to the world as they grow older are nebulous. The exception, on vague disabilities, is Guy, the Mexican, who dedicates his life to seducing girls because his feet were set upon the primrose path at the age of five or so by an Indian nursemaid. Nobody else has such an excuse. They seem to be people congenitally incapable of coming to grips with anything.

The second half of the book revolves around a production of Humlet staged in an empty house by Tom’s young niece. The symbolic significance of this affair is obliterated by the utter improbability that a fifteen-year-old girl could hold together a cast of her contemporaries, including a couple of oafishly amorous boys, long enough to get one scene on the boards, let alone most of the play. She acts the prince, too.

While it is possible to admire the skill with which Mr. Bourjaily writes, and respect his concern for the unhappy people he writes about, it is difficult to share his assumption that the plight of these unaccountable cripples is worth 599 pages.

THE INSOLENT CHARIOTS (Lippincott, S3.95) is aggravated assault on the American automobile, committed by JOHN KEATS, the iconoclastic author of Schools Without Scholars and The Crack in the Picture Window.

The book covers everything: expense, excess chromium, missing parts, concealed spark plugs, distorting windshields, gadgets, bad engineering, hideous design, shoddy materials, lack of head and leg space, inadequate road clearance, repair charges, fraudulent claims about performance, dishonest salesmanship, and the complacency of the Automobile Manufacturers Association.

The manufacturers are not the only victims, however. Mr. Keats has a good deal to say about the nincompoopcry of customers who persist in buying cars they cannot afford for reasons that would make a

Freudian analyst turn pale. Not that the manufacturers get off scot free on this count either, once Mr.

Keats starts brooding about motivational research. “No responsible person would give a knife to a man who expressed a desire to stab someone with it. Why then build powerful cars to satisfy the delusions of grandeur of some constitutional psychopaths who wish to relieve their aggressive impulses by whistling through a school zone at 80 miles an hour?”

Mr. Keats, for all his well-founded complaints, is pretty clearly a sentimental reactionary. His dream car is Ford’s indestructible Model T, churning along the unpredictable highways of the 1920s. It is a fine dream, but it leads him into the delusion that smaller, tougher, more sensible cars will go far toward ameliorating the agonies of modern motoring. They would help, cer, tainly, but until some method is devised for detecting those constitutional psychopaths before they get on the road, and national regulations are set up to keep them from operating cars, chaos and carnage will continue. Despite all the sins I rampant in Detroit, there’s no returning to the simple past. You just can’t git a horse any more.

ART AND REALITY (Harper, $3.00) is a discussion of the creative process by the late JOYCE CARY. The material originated as a series of lectures delivered at Oxford, and possibly for this reason the book tends to break into short, sharply illuminating essays on various aspects of art, with a good deal of attention to specific problems and the ways in which they have been solved.

Accepting Croce’s dictum that art is intuition, the comprehension of a new vision, Cary refuses to accept Croce’s assumption that intuition and expression are the same thing.

A fine novelist, trained as a painter, Cary knew better than most that the expression of a work of art “is work, and very hard work, too.” How to do this work interested him enormously, and his ideas on technique, changes of style from one period to another, the use of imagination, the relation of the audience to the work of art, and the morality of art are illustrated with a truly wonderful profusion and ingenuity.

The wit and lucidity of the writing are only to be expected from Cary. The critical insight is hardly surprising. What is unusual is the range of his taste and sympathy, which sweeps around east and west, past and present, with a shrewd enthusiasm that puts many a professional critic to shame.

STEPHEN SPENDER, an inveterate participant in cultural conferences and international literary seminars, has lost patience with his colleagues in these enterprises and nailed their hides to the barn door in a little book called ENGAGED IN WRITING (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, S3.75). It contains two short stories; the second is of no particular interest, but the first is a long account of a writers’ congress staged in Venice and described with a comic, deadpan fury quite unexpected in Mr. Spender’s work.

The writers splashing around the canals are familiar as a bad debt. There is the idealistic Italian who has instigated the thing and sees, with horror, that it is quite out of control. There are three Russians, tongue-tied because they have been deprived of their secret police adviser. A pair of Frenchmen continue the philosophical argument which has kept them busy in Paris for years, boring everyone stiff with indomitable brilliance. An English scientist and Communist sympathizer confuses every issue with unsuitable analogies. The conversation of these characters is so close to the real thing that it is often more painful than funny. It sometimes requires two readings to make certain that a speech is actively loony rather than a literal quotation of vintage scholastic flapdoodle.

TWO LOVERS IN ROME (Doubleday, $3.95) is made up of letters and journal entries which the nineteenthcentury art critic ETIENNE-JEANDELÉCLUZE sensibly deleted from his published papers. Edited by Louis Desternes and translated by Gerard Hopkins, these extracts reveal the romantic temperament in all its absurd glory.

Delécluze was in his forties when, in 1823, he went to Rome and fell in love with Amélie Cyvoct, a very young girl who was visiting there with her aunt, Madame Recamier. Poor, serious, high-minded gentleman, how he suffered. How he debated, and renounced, the joys of an unsuitable alliance which was also, although he didn’t know it, impossible. How astounded and indignant he was when his subjective raptures and miseries wore off and he was himself again. And how likable he is, through all this foolishness. For the truth was, Delécluze never loved Amélie at all. and finally admitted it, and they became good friends.

The hothouse atmosphere that makes so many sentimental confessions of this period — Hazlitt’s, for instance — uncomfortable reading rarely exists with Delécluze. Throughout his Amelian madness he was reveling in his first visit to Italy, and much of what he saw got into his journal. He had the double eye, too. Climbing Vesuvius with a silly lady, he enjoys imagining that this fashionable nitwit is Amélie and at the same time can see himself idiotically conducting his little game of make-believe. If he sighs for Delécluze, he chortles too, and the ultimate effect is closer to high comedy than to heartbreak.

It is hard to form any confident opinion of what is written in Communist countries on the basis of the material offered in translation here, for the choice of American publishers, however sensible, automatically narrows a field already narrowed by censorship. Two books from Poland, however, agree in presenting a picture of intelligent discontent. MAKER HLASKO’S novel, THE EIGHTH DAY OF THE WEEK (Dutton, $2.75), is a savage, melancholy study of people who are going nowhere and know it. Their troubles are lack of money, lack of hope, illness, boredom, and frustrated love; problems, in short, which do not necessarily stem from Communism and are not attributed to it by the author. What he seems to have in mind is that Communism is not helping these unfortunates. It is a good novel of its grim type, much closer to Western attitudes than to the stylized optimism of Russian fiction.

THE BROKEN MIRROR (Random House, S3.50), edited by PAWEL MAYEWSKI, is a collection of pieces published here and there in Poland during the recent relaxation of censorship. Two of the authors have since left the country for Western Europe, but all these selections are necessarily written from an ostensibly loyal, if some what exasperated, Communist stand. These lively Polish intellectuals are no party-line phonographs. Their concern is primarily for decency and rationality, and the extent to which they question Communist efforts in this direction is quite striking. An ambiguous, unactable, curiously impressive play about the execution of Socrates emphasizes the loneliness and dignity of the individual mind; a Kafkaish short story recounts the author’s futile search for a philosophy; a series of literary memoirs needles censors and bureaucrats and harps sourly on the impossibility of being both an artist and a propagandist. If these authors are typical of Polish thinking, Russian influence has accomplished very little there, but how typical they really are, the editor does not, probably cannot, say.

The author of BOY ON THE ROOFTOP (Atlantic Little, Brown, $3.75), whose name is not TAMAS SZABO, is at sixteen a refugee veteran of the Hungarian revolt of two years ago. Unlikc the Polish intellectuals, Tamas Szabo doesn’t seem to have thought much about Communism or Russians. He simply loathed them. He had no previous warning that a revolt was about to break out, but when it started, he contrived to stand in a queue and get a gun and in short order became a soldier.

His story is simply told and confined to his own adventures, which were dangerous, pitiful, and astonishing. The book makes no pretense of describing the revolt as a whole. It is confined to street fighting, scrounging ammunition, jokes and squabbles among the boys, confused escapes and pursuits, and, always, sudden death. All reactions are momentary — the author can shift from extreme fright to the glorious image of himself as one of the saviors of Hungary almost in a sentence. Everything is improvised, incongruous, held together by courage and the wild conviction that Hungary could win, that the Western powers would help.

Boy on the Rooftop is a sad book, and humiliating, when one realizes how many of these young people died for the unmeant half-promises of Radio Free Europe, but it is an exciting record of nerve and endurance.

DEAN BRELIS, a newspaperman who worked for the Office of Strategic Services behind the Japanese lines in Burma during World War II, has written a novel about an OSS man in Burma during World War II, which raises some doubt whether THE MISSION (Random House, $3.50) should be considered a true novel or reminiscence through a mask.

An American sergeant is parachuted into the Burmese hills along with his friend Pohm, the son of a local chief. Pohm has walked all the way out to Allied territory to report his tribe’s eagerness to fight the Japanese, bearing a well-cured Japanese head as evidence of sincerity. Pohm and the OSS man, who is instantly promoted to general by the Burmese, are to collect and train guerrillas, which they do despite mixed-up signals and long delays in getting equipment dropped. The occasional Japanese patrols are the least of their troubles. Eventually the little force is ordered to go out and ambush the enemy, and the book ends with a blaze of slam-bang action.

All this sounds like standard military adventure, but The Mission is 1 actually more than that. Mr. Brelis describes the beauties of Himalayan scenery vividly. Lie obviously loves the tough mountaineers who inhabit these hills, lie spends as much time on the Kachin tribesmen, a crew of delightful ruffians, as he docs on the campaign, in the long run making Pohm and his splendid old father the most important characters in the book and better soldiers than the American.

Regardless of the exact balance of fact and invention in The Mission, it is an unmistakably heartfelt tribute to a people for whom the author feels immense respect and affection.