Reader's Choice

BY WILLIAM BARRETT

With each new work J. D. SALINGER continues to stretch the medium of fiction to fit his own personal obsessions. In RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS and SEYMOUR — AN INTRODUCTION (Little, Brown, $4.00), the stretching has gone so far that the author feels called upon to reassure the reader: “I believe I essentially remain what I have always been — a narrator, but one with extremely pressing personal needs.” A narrator he certainly is, and a wonderful one when he chooses to be; but here, particularly in the second of these two stories, he is so busy exorcising private ghosts that he gets in the way of his own characters.

Mr. Salinger’s obsessions continue to be Zen Buddhism, Oriental philosophy, and generally the pursuit of some ecstatic and beatific perception that will redeem a stale and ugly world. The protagonist in this search for beatitude is Seymour Glass, oldest son and spiritual leader of his numerous and eccentric family. Seymour, who has already committed suicide as a young man, now definitely emerges as someone who could not possibly have grown old. In quest of the ecstatic vision, his mind has been fixed upon the purity and innocence of the very young. Imitating his example, the whole Glass family remains curiously childlike. Mr. Salinger’s persistent theme has been the contrast between the wonderful and magical world of children and the crass materialism of adults. In playing off one against the other he often gives us moments of rare beauty; but this counterpoint also has its limitations. It seems to require that the adult world always be seen from the outside. They, the adults, are the others, the enemy.

“Seymour — An Introduction” almost abandons the story form altogether. In a series of rambling notes and ruminations Mr. Salinger tries to give us a deeper appreciation of this character who has possessed his imagination for many years. Seymour does emerge larger than life from these pages, but unfortunately also vaguer; as he becomes more Ghristlike and elect, he seems more archetypal than personal, less a character in fiction than a private symbol of salvation for the author.

The other story, a more traditional and successful narrative, deals with Seymour’s wedding day, when the bridegroom is very conspicuous by his absence. The narrator, the younger brother, Buddy Glass, is trapped with some disgruntled guests in a ride up Madison Avenue. One guest is a ferocious young matron of honor, a hefty specimen not many years away from the athletic field of some women’s college, who holds her bouquet of gardenias in her lap “as though it were a deflated volleyball" and delivers blast after blast against the irresponsible Seymour. As always, Mr. Salinger’s touch is as sharp as a cat’s claw when he is dealing with the other side; and usually his worst materialists are women. Buddy invites the group to a small hideaway apartment he has shared in the past with his brother. While the guests proceed to drink themselves silly, he repairs to another room, happens upon a diary of Seymour’s, and reads it. Here, in the diary’s ecstatic prose, the jilting groom is thoroughly exonerated. How could he, who is not of this world, be expected to take part in the mundane business of a wedding with vulgar adults like that matron?

Though the essays by ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR., in THE POLITICS OF HOPE (Houghton Mifflin, $5.00) were all written before the Kennedy Administration came to power, they will probably be read by many people (perhaps misread by some) in the light of his present official position as a special assistant to the President. Such a reading may seem e: post facto, but there can be no denying that Mr. Schlesinger’s book would strike an entirely different note now if the 1960 election had gone the other way.

For one thing, his powers as a historical prophet would have been left in sore disrepute. His prophecy was based upon a theory originally elaborated by his father (a distinguished historian at Harvard), to the effect that American political history progresses in cycles — periods of consolidation and relative inertia being followed by waves of activity and innovation. After the strenuous challenges faced during the Depression, the New Deal, the Second World War, and the Korean War, the American people were ready for a breather during the eight years of the Eisenhower Administration. But at the end of that period the cyclical theory predicted that it was time for a change; and Mr. Kennedy, who had read Mr. Schlesinger on the subject, accordingly based his 1960 campaign on the slogan “Let’s get America moving again.”The Schlesingers were confirmed by one of the narrowest squeaks in our electoral history,

Mr. Schlcsinger is a very able writer, lively and persuasive in style, and his book altogether is an excellent introduction to the politics of the coming decade. Many of these essays, written in the middle years of the Eisenhower Administration, betray the author’s obvious impatience at what he regarded as the lassitude and drift of the 1950s. Yet his own positive proposals now seem hardly bold or radical by contrast. Indeed, the positions he takes are usually so moderate and cautiously reasonable that it is hard to seE why he should have been singled out by some political foes as a dangerously radical presence in Washington. If he is at all radical, it is not in the style of Marx but of Emerson, who distinguished between the party of hope, which looks to the future, and the party of conservatism, which looks to the past. Of course, Mr. Schlesinger does believe, among other things, that we are a rich enough nation to afford a better educational system and possibly even a decent postal service — views so extreme that, to those on the far right, they must undoubtedly appear to threaten the republic itself.

Three of the most valuable pieces in this book are intellectual profiles of Walter Lippmann, Bernard De Voto, and Reinhold Niebuhr. All of these men at times espoused political positions contrary to Mr. Schlesinger’s own brand of liberalism: Lippmann for a while opposed Roosevelt and the New Deal; De Voto often spoke from the independent right; and for a while during the 1930s Niebuhr was a Marxist, thoroughly disenchanted with the possibilities of democratic politics. Yet each of the three, in the evolution of his own thought, is an admirable example of the free play of intelligence upon politics; and in treating them with understanding and sympathy Mr. Schlesinger goes a long way toward broadening the scope of his own liberalism.

It is a paradox of democratic government that, while ultimate authority resides in the people, democracy has never been able to work without vigorous leaders. Mr. Schlesinger devotes two essays to this problem of leadership, but leaves matters on a pretty theoretical level. It has remained for JAMES MAcGREGOR BURNS, professor of political science at Williams, to bring the problem very much down to earth in THE DEADLOCK OF DEMOCRACY (Prentice-Hall, $5.95), one of the most significant political tracts of recent years.

Mr. Burns’s central contention is that ours has become a four-party system made up of presidential and congressional Democrats on the one hand, and presidential and congressional Republicans on the other. This split was dramatically clear during the President’s recent difficulties in getting his program through Congress; but it has also bedeviled other Presidents throughout our history in their struggles with Congress. The result is that the federal government has often had to move sluggishly on vital social problems where prompt action was called for. Mr. Burns goes so far as to say that the American people in a certain sense have lost control of their own government. In the battle over medical care for the aged, the most reliable polls indicated that the great majority of voters were for the Administration’s program, yet the bill could not get through Congress.

Mr. Burns locates the source of this party division in two different concepts of government that have dominated our history from the very beginning: Madison’s cautious system of checks and balances, and Jefferson’s insistence upon strong presidential leadership for a country whose frontiers were still expanding. Madison’s view reflected the fears of a people who felt they had just escaped tyranny and wanted above all to curb federal power. It was, moreover, a style of government not too violently unsuited to the slow pace of events in a rural nation. But in today’s rapidly changing world, where social evils fester if they are not promptly attended to, this system of stalemate and compromise is a deadly encumbrance of the past.

Is there any way out of the stalemate? Mr. Burns holds that the change can come only through a strong President, Democratic or Republican, who manages to unify the congressional and presidential factions within his own party. If this could be accomplished, we would eventually have a single party in power, charged with administering the country, and a single party in responsible opposition. Without any amendment to the Constitution, we would have in effect moved close to the parliamentary form of government. Mr. Burns does not say, though I am sure he knows, that for this latter change to take place there would have to be a drastic shaking up of some of our most deeply embedded habits of thought as a nation.

No less an authority than Edmund Wilson has recently declared that MORLEY CALLAGHAN is “the most unjustly neglected novelist in the English language.” While THAT SUMMER IN PARIS (Coward-McCann, $5.00) is not a novel, it shows so many deft and subtle touches of the accomplished novelist that it is bound to send many readers after the other books of this remarkable writer to check up on Mr. Wilson’s judgment,

Mr. Callaghan tells here about the summer of 1929 in Paris, when he was a close friend of Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s. The book is very deceptive at first; there seem to be no startling anecdotes, and Mr. Callaghan’s art, which is simplicity itself, plods slowly along with the commonplace. But gradually, from what had appeared at first as a merely easygoing and agreeable chronicle, there emerge extremely subtle portraits of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald, as well as a highly dramatic account of their uneasy friendship.

Callaghan and Hemingway first met when they were young reporters on the Toronto Star. Hemingway, five years older than Callaghan, had seen a good deal of the world and sought to take the younger man in tow. Even then, Callaghan observes, Hemingway was the kind of man around whom legends easily formed. After Hemingway returned to Paris, the two kept in touch with one another; and some years later, when Callaghan himself went abroad, the friendship was renewed. Much of the pathos and comedy of this narrative turns on the sparring matches that the pair indulged in. Hemingway had a great reputation for fistic prowess (he was supposed to have knocked out the middleweight champion of France with one punch); and Callaghan was astonished to learn that this, too, was one of the Hemingway legends. In the ring Ernest was rather slow and awkward, and Callaghan had no trouble outboxing him. For the most part, Hemingway hid his annoyance; but on the one occasion when Fitzgerald came to watch, Hemingway happened to get knocked down. While Fitzgerald, a victim of the Hemingway legend, could not believe his eyes, Ernest got up and stalked off in a rage. Reflecting on the incident now, Callaghan observes, “Ernest just had to be champion.”

In this intricate three-way friendship, Morley Callaghan emerges as the steadiest and most reasonable pivot. Perhaps after all these years he may be working off a little pique against his two more famous friends. Yet such is the compelling simplicity of his art that he convinces us that the way he is telling it is exactly the way it must have been.

The real hero of CALDER WILLINGHAM’S ETERNAL FIRE (Vanguard, $6.95) appears to be the fiery power of the summer sun itself as it provokes people to passion, violence, and killing in the sleepy little Georgian town of Carthage Hill. In due course Mr. Willingham draws out nearly all the stops in Southern Gothic fiction: lots of lurid sex, incest, blackmail, a rigged trial, a prostitute mother, a feebleminded dwarf, and several killings. Yet he is a born storyteller, and even the most sensational of his material is handled with such cool narrative skill that it seems credible at least during the moment of reading.

That a seduction is good for many pages of suspense was originally proved by Richardson in Clarissa and more recently confirmed by Herman Wouk in Marjorie Morningstar. Mr. Willingham ties a new knot of suspense by making the seduction not merely pour le sport but part of a plot by a thieving judge to protect his own hide. Judge Ball, guardian of young Randy Shepherdson, has been misappropriating the latter’s inheritance for years. Now Randy is about to marry Laurie Mae, and the judge sees his peculations about to be discovered and his meal ticket lost. He therefore hires Harry Diadem, a handsome and demoniacally sexy young man, to seduce Laurie Mae in order to break up the marriage. Harry goes to work like a bat out of hell, but is unable to make more than a small dent upon the tenacious virtue of Laurie Mae. Finally, after many pages and some surprising switches, he does succeed; but in the classic pattern of the seduction story, even as he succeeds he fails: Randy and Laurie Mae are to be married notwithstanding. And diabolical Harry gets his just deserts at the hands of the dwarf, who has always worshiped Laurie Mae from afar and cannot bear to see her wronged.

In the house of the novel there are many mansions. Richardson wrote Clarissa deliberately to titillate, and the work would not now remain a classic if it did not have much the same effect upon modern readers. Mr. Willingham is far more flagrantly clinical in his methods, and his story is for the most part cleverly contrived tripe; yet such is the mysterious art of storytelling that he manages to hold the reader’s interest through nearly seven hundred pages.

JOHN A. WILLIAMS is a young Negro writer whose first novel, Night Song, showed promise, but whose second, SISSIE (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy $4.50), we are happy to note, already marks the arrival of a mature and serious talent. To be sure, the book is uneven and there are tedious passages that suggest that Mr. Williams is still wrestling with material he has not yet assimilated. But these faults are minor beside the solid strength of his accomplishment; he has managed to write a convincing novel, not about the Negro question, but about real people with real personal problems.

Since Ralph Joplin and his sister Iris have “made it big" — he as a young playwright, she as a singer in Europe — their success permits them the leisure to search after their own souls. As the story moves back into the past, we are made to understand how Ralph and Iris got to be where they are and what self-doubts and struggles they had on the way up. Inevitably the burrowing into the past leads back to their mother, the matriarchal Sissie, a strong and passionate woman who ruled her roost and drove her children forward into life, but over whose past hangs a pall of bitterness and misunderstanding. When Ralph and Iris come at last to understand and forgive their mother as she is dying, they take the last step in growing up. By this time, too, Mr. Williams has managed to give us a glimpse of the depth and complexity of family life that is not peculiarly Negro but universally human.

LUDWIG BEMELMANS was so prolific an author, and his many books were so unfailingly entertaining, that perhaps we had all begun to take him a little too much for granted. Now that he is gone it is a jolt to realize what a fine and resourceful artist, underneath all his carefree motley, we have lost. THE STREET WHERE THE HEART LIES (World, $3.95) is a last and lovely valentine to the world which he loved and to which he added so much marvelous buffoonery.

The scene is Paris, in a quarter near Notre Dame, and the characters a set of odd and wonderful waifs that only Bemelmans could assemble. A rich young American, Jeb Clayborn, gives up his wealth to live the life of a tramp under one of the Paris bridges. He meets and falls in love with Gala, the beautiful and virginal stripteaser at a little local firetrap theater called the RelaxezVous. Gala’s specialty is to undress to a recitation of the poems of Baudelaire. She is also being pursued by two other suitors — a fabulously wealthy and henpecked sheikh who is in Paris to get away from all those nasty females in his harem, and Vittorio Vivanti, a Milanese movie director bursting with pasta and selfimportance. But love triumphs; Jeb and Gala are married in Notre Dame, the Republican Guard stands by in full dress, and in the wedding party, held on a little barge on the Seine, all the implausible characters are packed like sardines below and above decks.

It is all, of course, a bit sentimental, as valentines ought to be. But Bemelmans was never one to let sentimentality becloud his cool and candid eye; and in Signor Vivanti he mercilessly impales a particularly egregious specimen of the dolce vita.