Reader's Choice
BY WILLIAM BARRETT
The writing of autobiography seems to be a tradition in EVELYN WAUGH’S family. Both his father and his brother Alec wrote theirs; now in A LITTLE LEARNING (Little, Brown, $5.00) Evelyn gives us the first installment of his; and not only is he superior to his two kinsmen as a writer but the autobiographical form seems to fit his temperament better. Since he detests today’s world as tawdry and vulgar, the writing of an autobiography permits him to return to an earlier and more gracious period. Consequently, the tone is more kindly and mellow than we have come to expect from his recent writings.
It is no diminution of the merits of this delightful book that its virtues arc altogether to be expected. Mr. Waugh is one of the finest stylists of contemporary letters, and his prose here is still a well of English pure and undefiled. He manages at once to be elegant and simple, like the very best Chippendale. However one may judge his other conservative attitudes, his efforts to preserve English prose against its contemporary deterioration must be applauded as heroic.
As a child he grew up surrounded by books, a literary father and loving mother, many relatives and clergymen. There is nothing in this affectionate family circle — at least as he now recalls it — to account for the acidity of his later satire. At thirteen he was sent to a dreary boarding school, but even there he managed, after a while, to adjust and enjoy himself. Later at Oxford he devoted himself almost entirely to the pursuit of pleasure to the neglect of his studies. Indeed, throughout these pages there are very few encounters with life that would have embittered him.
At Oxford he belonged to a rather remarkable literary class that included Graham Greene and Anthony Powell, with whom he was friendly but not very close. Most of his anecdotes concern lesser-known cronies, who were drinking companions. At one point there is a touch of the rapier that could come from one of his early novels when he says of a dean: “He was tall, almost loutish, with the face of a petulant baby. He smoked a pipe which was usually attached to his blubber-lips by a thread of slime. As he removed the stem, waving it to emphasize his indistinct speech, this glittering connection extended until finally it broke leaving a dribble on his chin.” Otherwise, however — at least now, in the glow of memory -Oxford was a very pleasant place.
This first installment carries us through his graduation from Oxford, a short stint as teacher at a Welsh prep school (deliciously recorded in his first novel, Decline and Fall), and his first unhappy love affair. How many later volumes he intends, we do not know; but Mr. Waugh as an autobiographer is a pure pleasure, and, for my money, he can go on indefinitely.
SATAN OR SAINT?
There seems to be no middle of the road in the public’s reaction to JEAN GENET. Because he deals with degrading and criminal subjects, some pillars of society have wanted his books to be banned. The literary avant-garde, on the other hand, as if to overcompensate for the official attitude, has been conducting a crusade (promoted originally by Jean-Paul Sartre) to canonize him.
In THE THIEF’S JOURNAL (Grove, $6.00), which is a good example of his confusing and confused qualities, Genet himself seems to take a more sober view of his literary merits.
Time and again he tells us these pages are merely “notes,” written in haste to snatch something from total disorder, and yet they have been praised as a finished masterpiece. Though there are flashes of genius in horribly vivid images and scenes, the narrative as a whole is a jumble of fragments without sequence or structure.
An orphan. Genet was indentured to a peasant family. The child, innocently pilfering, was caught, branded a thief, and sent to a reformatory. Thereafter, he deliberately became a thief, as if to live up to the name that others had given him.
The present narrative deals with the period of the 1930s, when he lived amid incredible poverty and vice in a Barcelona slum, supporting himself as a thief and homosexual prostitute. Genet does not spare us any detail in this account of his degraded past.
Moreover, the evil of his acts is further compounded by his deliberately adopted attitude of satanism. His three theological virtues — as opposed to the orthodox faith, hope, and charity — were homosexuality, theft, and treachery. Yet at the same time he was haunted by religious longings. As St. Vincent de Paul wanted to take on himself the sufferings of the convict condemned to the gallows, so Genet wanted to take on himself the criminal’s acts as well.
There is an old truism that any attitude pushed to its extreme turns into its opposite; and this, I suppose, is the ground on which it is argued that Genet’s satanism turns into saintliness. I disagree. The pose of satanism as concocted by the Romantics was a form of childish narcissism, and Genet’s fares no better. Only in his plays, where the ritual of the theater and the requirements of dramatic structure compel him to escape from his narcissism, has Genet been able to give fullest expression to his remarkable talent in works of almost classical form.
A LONG LIFE’S DYING
NICCOLò TUGGI has a taste for bizarre and baroque themes, which he can adorn with a great deal of opulence. His first novel, Before My Time, was long, involuted, and imposing. UNFINISHED FUNERAL (Simon and Schuster, $3.95), his second, is short, but almost as imposing and dragging in its effect. Mr. Tucci treats a somber story with an irony that is almost hearselike in its solemnity.
Hearses, indeed, play quite a part in this tale. Ermelinda, Duchess of Gombon de Triton, has elected to dominate her family by turning herself into an invalid forever on the point of expiring. Whenever she feels a heart attack coming on, she has her hearse stand by the door, drawn by two black Arab horses caparisoned in mourning. When she recovers, as she always does, the hearse retires to wait for the next seizure. By this means she keeps her husband, her son, and her daughter entirely subject to her will.
The setting for this eerie dance of death is supposed to be twentiethcentury Spain, but it could properly be located in an eighteenth-century Gothic castle, or in some nevernever land even more remote. Mr.
Tucci has dealt before with the tyrannical matriarch, and by this time he clearly has a practiced hand at it. No other recent writer that I can recall has given us a woman so fiendishly selfish as this duchess. But though there is no doubt about his surpassing ability to accomplish what he sets out to do, there is some question about whether it is worth doing. Not only the duchess, but his other characters as well, though to a lesser degree, are monstrous egotists, and fascinating ones: but there is a certain point beyond which monsters become bores.
VISIONARY TALES
Tolstoy claimed that the novelist should write in a style of such universal simplicity that as little as possible would be lost in translation. ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER writes in Yiddish but supervises the English translations of his work. Even it he didn’t, his stories would read as it they were written directly in English, for the quality of universality is there, SHOUT FRIDAY (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $4.95), a collection of tales by this master storyteller, is one more bit of evidence tor what many of us have already come to believe; namely, that Mr. Singer, regardless of language, is one of the best writers of fiction now in America.
Mr. Singer has been in this country since 1935, but his material is Jewish village life in Poland, more often than not located in the past. These Polish villagers are far from the urban sophisticates dealt with by our younger American Jewish writers; the world of Singer’s characters belongs to the Middle Ages, peopled with demons, witches, and angels, and all the events of daily life have possible supernatural implications. Even when the rare setting is Miami, as in the story “Alone,” the weird unfolding of events seems to be the work of hidden powers. A Brooklyn marriage feast ("A Wedding in Brownsville”) turns into a ghost story in which the past and present meet in a world of the imagination that is both Poland and New York and yet neither.
At present we have many shortstory writers in this country, but few tellers of tales. This distinction is cardinal in understanding Mr. Singer’s unusual qualities. Because his work is rooted in a people, he is a superior kind of folk artist who brings narrative back to the original meaning a story had: a tale passed on by word of mouth from one person to another. His style — spare, energetic, and lyrical — has the rhythm of spoken language. Moreover, his people, whatever their troubles, are not alienated from their community (though this community was cut off from the larger society around them); nor are they estranged from a deep religious view that gives meaning to life. These are formidable advantages for a writer, however remote the places and times he deals with may seem.
PLACES AND PICTURES
The premature death of BRENDAN BEHAN meant a loss to the drama of the one man who seemed capable of filling the place of Sean O’Casey, In rereading, his plays The Quare Fellow and The Hostage stand up well; indeed, as a straightforward realistic play, The Hostage is the best written by any Irishman since O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars.
The production of these two plays, both on and off Broadway, brought Behan frequently as a visitor to New York. He fell in love with the city, and the record of that romance is BRENDAN BEHAN’s NEW VORK (Bernard Geis, $5.95), embellished by many wonderfully perceptive drawings by Paul Hogarth.
In his last years Behan’s health seems to have been too poor for him to attempt any ambitious work (unless some posthumous manuscript is about to be unveiled). His account of his experiences in New York is rambling and casual, yet, slight as it is. it has all the warmth and humanity of the man himself. Behan found a heart in the city whose unrelenting pace terrifies others. He loved a good story, but unlike many raconteurs, he was also ready to listen; and with a good ear, he picked up a great deal of New York speech. He was also a very intelligent man, though he liked to play it down, and his judgments of people and places in the Empire City have a penetration that the laborious siftings of local observers often miss. Maybe there is a little too much euphoria in his mood; but, God knows, he had had a hard life, and he was entitled to all the joy he could find before the end.
The Spanish pavilion was one of the few bright spots in the confused honky-tonk of last year’s World’s Fair. The simplicity of its architecture and the delicacy of its decor seemed to suggest that some kind of cultural resurgence must now be going on in Spain. I had hoped that these intimations might be confirmed by JAMES MORRIS’ THE PRESENCE OF SPAIN (Harcourt, Brace & World, $15.00), with photographs by Evelyn Hofer, but I was disappointed. Spain is just about what it always was, he tells us, and he proceeds to show us vividly the same age-old proud, austere, and ravaged face of a people who in a curious way do not altogether belong to Europe.
This is not one of those run-of-themill books of bland text and casual photographs that are becoming more common as photography becomes more facile. Mr. Morris’ text could stand as an independent essay on the Spanish character. He has traveled diligently about Spain, observed and talked with all manner of people, but he does not give way to the random and inconsequential anecdotes that form the substance of so many travelers’ reports. Instead, he has buttressed his observations of the present by a careful analysis of history in order to come to some understanding of this complex people.
A special word must be said about Evelyn Hofer’s superb photographs, which complement the text very well. Here, in beautiful focus, are landscapes, towns, people, works of art, all in intimate counterpoint — in fact, the whole gaunt splendid visage of this strange country. Whatever its political failings, Spain is still one of the most spectacular visual experiences on earth.
The complexity of the Spanish character, according to Mr. Morris, is rooted in the complex racial strains that make up the people. Phoenicians, Romans, Visigoths, Moors, Jews, Gypsies — all have had a hand in forming Spain. It is no wonder the Spanish temperament should be one of glaring extremes: sol y sombra, sun and shade. On the one hand, there is insistence on the dignity and style of the individual; on the other hand, the Spaniard hankers after authority, whether it be in his church or state.
At the end Mr. Morris poses a teasing question that applies to many other developing countries around the globe. What would happen if this medieval country were to join the march of progress and modernize itself? Then Spain as we know it, with all its absurd fascination, he says, would simply disappear. And he leaves no doubt that he would regret the loss.
The grinding wheels of progress receive a very unappreciative salute in A VANISHING AMERICA: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE SMALL TOWN (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $9.95), edited by Thomas C. Wheeler, with contributions from twelve distinguished Americans, including Wallace Stegner, Hodding Carter, Justice William O. Douglas, A. B. Guthrie, Oscar Lewis, Conrad Richter, and Winfield Townley Scott.
Collections of prominent names are often perfunctory performances, but here the subject obviously engaged the emotions of the writers, and I think it is a just summation of the book’s worth to say that the level of each contribution lives up to the distinction of its contributor.
Each author was assigned to describe the life and times of a small town he knows personally both in its past and present. Twelve towns are dealt with, representing every region of the country: New England, the South, the Midwest, the Mountain States, and the Far West. The small town, after all, was not a peculiarly regional, but a national, institution. Some of the contributions are merely documentary in tone; others are more fiercely rebellious against the brutal extermination of what was once a way of life in America. But the book as a whole, as Wallace Stegner says in his eloquent introduction, is really an unabashed invitation to nostalgia.
After contrasting the lovely past of Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, when there were “individualists under the shade trees,” with its glaring and featureless present, Conrad Richter asks the searching question: Is man really like a horse with blinders driven by progress with a small
“p”?
But it is Wallace Stegner who rises to the highest pitch of indignation, so that his introduction reads like a manifesto, screaming against the “sanitized, pre-shrunk, prefabricated, machine-tooled life that the industrial and electronic and other revolutions have made for us.” This book could be read merely as a lovely and touching album; but Mr. Stegner is right in insisting that it raises some very troubling questions about the homogenized society toward which we now seem destined.
SANE, IF YOU THINK SANE
Journalism is writing for a specific occasion; and with most journalism, its contents are immediately consumed and the container discarded. When a journalist writes something that can bear reprinting, it is already a feat. RUSSELL RAKER is a seven-day wonder who accomplishes this feat almost three times every seven days in his column for the New York Times. NO CAUSE FOR PANIC (Lippincott, $4.95) is a compilation of some of his funniest pieces, and can be reread many times.
On what meat, then, doth this our Baker feed? Well, practically all Americana. He can range from politics to pop art, Washington to Cocoa Beach, from teen-agers to astronauts, not only making us laugh at these dubious subjects but making us think as well. For beneath Mr. Baker’s satire there is always a bedrock sanity and an implacable logic.
Take as an example his discussion of numerophrema gravis, the neurosis we are threatened with because our life now is ruled by so many numbers. Imagine a character, J.B., who has to make a call to Baltimore from a booth on the Jersey Turnpike. He has to dial 0 (for Operator), recite his credit card number (021-7219B18), the Baltimore code (301), and the number of the phone he wants rung (964-7385), a sequence of twenty digits and one letter. J.B. goes through fourteen digits, then memory snaps and he begins to recite his social security number. On the second try he blurts out his driver’s permit number. And so forth.
We need not follow the intricate stages of J.B.’s ensuing battle with the digits. Each step in the process is perfectly plausible, and may happen every day; Mr. Baker simply pushes the facts to their logical conclusion.
Bernard Shaw once observed that a sane man will always seem to his neighbors to be saying perfectly preposterous things because real sanity is the exception. The world is out of joint, in Mr. Baker’s view, but very funny if you can bear it. There is no cause for panic, his title implies, because the situation is really under control — if you can keep sane.