BY PHOEBE ADAMS
RENOIR, MY FATHER (Little, Brown, $8.95) by the film producer JEAN RENOIR is a family memoir of such irresistible charm that it is a temptation to overlook the literary skill with which it is constructed. Renoir’s son rightly considers his father, who hated ugliness, machinery, and intellectual prattle about art, a great painter and also one of the most agreeable men who ever wielded a brush. In keeping with Renoir père’s dislike of pretentiousness, the book imitates family gossip. It leaps about in time, scoops up anecdotes that have nothing at all to do with the subject, follows tangents that lead to recipes, the affairs of remote cousins, and the limitations of nineteenth-century plumbing, but always circles back to the character of the painter. The book has the tone of unconsidered reminiscent conversation, full of affection and humor and sparkling with the unexpected detail that can be provided only by someone who was there and saw, with an artist’s eye, what happened. For Mr. Renoir, although not a painter, is an artist in visual and dramatic effects, and in the long run, every irrelevant joke and trivial fact proves to be a solid, functional piece in the reconstruction of his father’s life and world.
The facts about how many paintings Renoir did, who bought them and for how much, and other breadand-butter information with which Mr. Renoir does not trouble himself can be found in RENOIR, THE MAN AND HIS WORK (Prentice-Hall, $6.95) by FRANCOIS FOSCA, translated by Mary I. Martin. The book is a decent, workmanlike job reinforced with a large number of illustrations, the color plates varying inexplicably in quality but never falling below the level of usefulness.
JOHN UPDIKE’S new novel, THE CENTAUR (Knopf, $4.00), is clear proof that the old gods are not dead, but still up and about and capable of mischief. The Olympians have taken possession of Mr. Updike and compelled him to clutter a perfectly good short book about a hardpressed schoolmaster with a lot of mythological baggage. Caldwell, the unfortunate teacher, is identified with that noble pedagogue Chiron the centaur. His misadventures in this incarnation are described by the author in Victorian Homeric translator’s prose, and with a literal-mindedness leading to comic effects which Mr. Updike presumably does not quite appreciate. You cannot, after all, housebreak a horse. When Caldwell is not a centaur, his troubles are reported by his son in Mr. Updike’s normal manner, with a great deal of oppressively detailed factual background, not all of it accurate. The time of this novel is specifically 1947, but Caldwell’s son goes to see a movie called Young Man With a Horn, which was made in 1949. If this event occurred in the province of the gods, it might pass as a miracle, but it happens in the realistic half of the book and does nothing to encourage suspension of disbelief.
PAGE SMITH’S biography of JOHN ADAMS (Doubleday, two volumes, $14.50) has the advantage of being the first such book based on the complete collection of Adams papers. It is an impressive piece of work, Mr. Smith having reduced mountainous quantities of material to a lucid, coherent text. While the biography does not appreciably alter the established portrait of Adams, it does provide a great deal of lively and frequently witty quotation.
OCCASION FOR LOVING (Viking, $5.00) by NADINE GORDIMER is an intelligent, coldly convincing study of racial opposition in South Africa, cast in the form of a novel about a love affair between a white woman and an African painter. The two move on the periphery of an academic circle in which the principle of racial equality is conscientiously held and practiced. Nobody openly objects to their relationship; nobody informs the police. The affair nevertheless falls apart through the sheer practical difficulty of maintaining it. Miss Gordimer’s point is that political conditions in South Africa inevitably outweigh every other consideration, no matter how private. White privilege is “a silver spoon clamped between your jaws and you might choke on it for all the chance there was of dislodging it.” She makes this argument very successfully, but it must be admitted that in doing so she writes a novel that reads at times like a mathematical equation.