Reader's Choice

BY WILLIAM BARRETT

Great art, we have been told, conceals itself; and in the same spirit, the profoundest scholarship seeks to become limpid and unobtrusive. SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON in THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE (Oxford University Press, $12.50) is so secure in the mastery of his materials that his vast narrative moves along as smoothly as a river in a clear channel. The fruit of his forty years’ teaching at Harvard, and more than that number probing the American past and present, this history is surely the monument to an already imposing career and a legacy to his fellow citizens, whose gratitude he has certainly earned.

Not only is the range in time astounding — from the earliest primitive remains on this continent to the assassination of John F. Kennedy — but the variety of matters treated within this span is so great that it seems to come out of an almost inexhaustible learning. Here are accounts of explorations, military campaigns, diplomatic intrigues; but we are also told how the people lived, what they ate, how they dressed, what kind of entertainments they attended, and what songs they sang. No facet of life— political, economic, or cultural —is slighted. Yet this learning is always worn lightly, and the reader’s eye is pulled smoothly and irresistibly through more than 1100 pages as if the book were only half that length.

Part of Admiral Morison’s secret lies in his style — perspicuous and simple, without mannerisms but nevertheless personal in tone; above all, letting the fact or event speak for itself. The American Revolution, for example, is brought close to us in the very words and deeds of the men involved as vividly and clearly as if the whole affair were only yesterday. His other great gift is an unusual sense of the relevant and essential that gives his narrative a fine power of compression. The last chapter, for example, which deals with the Kennedy Administration, covers the 1960 campaign, the TV debates, the various struggles and achievements of the young President, and the stunned mood of the nation toward the events of November 22, 1963 —all in about fifteen pages! Yet the author distills the essence of those Kennedy years better, I think, than all the tons of newspaper memorials that have been poured out since the assassination.

For the general reader, who wants a comprehensive and authoritative account of the whole American adventure, this history now becomes the indispensable work.

What would you think of the fictional possibilities of a heroine who is a lonely spinster, absolutely cut off from the world, spending her time hoarding money, denying herself every pleasure, doing her own housework, and who in the end dies alone and unnoticed in her gloomy house that has been unvisited for years? Not very promising possibilities, you would think. Yet in THE WOMAN FROM SARAJEVO (Knopf, $5.95) IVO ANDRIC has taken this very material and turned it into a stark and intense novella, a haunting and powerful portrait of a pinched and absurd human destiny.

When she was a young girl, Miss Raika had been told by her dying father that people would be decent and conscientious toward her only if she had the means to be independent. His words have burned themselves into the young girl’s mind, and so she sets about living her life in accordance with them. As a moneylender she parlays a small insurance legacy into a small fortune. But whatever her wealth at any time, she will spend none of it on herself. For this singleminded greed for money she puts everything else out of her life — love, friendship, concern for other people. Though we cannot like her, the author strangely makes us feel pity, and even awe, before this miserable creature who lives in everlasting financial fear and trembling.

Raika also speculates in currencies during the tumultuous years of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the uncertain emergence of the new Yugoslav state. A good deal of the power of Mr. Andric’s tale comes through the depiction of this seething historical background, in whose torrent the wretched Raika’s life is washed along like a piece of flotsam.

Since he won the Nobel Prize in 1961, we have had four of Mr. Andric’s books published in English, and it is now clear that the prize was no fluke of literary-political logrolling. Though he is not a splashy writer and his stories are slow in gaining momentum, he is an author of splendid and somber gifts, enigmatic as the sphinx in his judgments on human nature.

Among critics, EDMUND WILSON is one of the few surviving members of a now almost defunct species of humanists who once took all life and letters as their province. He has traveled nearly as much among the places of the earth as among the realms of books, reporting on the literature and nation of Italy, Greece, Israel, Russia, the Iroquois in upper New York State; and now, in o CANADA (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $6.00), he has turned his graceful and probing pen toward exploring our unknown neighbor to the north.

Most of us in this country grow up blandly taking Canada for granted as a steady and reliable friend across that famous unguarded frontier. The facts that Canada is torn by dissensions of its own and that its attitude toward the United States is ambivalent in the extreme come as a shock to Americans who have thought of their neighbor only under the clichés of the Mountie and the unchanging Far North. It is safe to say that most of the Canadian writers whom Mr. Wilson examines are probably unknown here, although they look interesting enough to command considerable attention.

The most imposing case Mr. Wilson makes is for that fine but neglected writer Morley Callaghan. Yet Canadians have hardly exhibited a receptive attitude toward their own author. After Mr. Wilson’s sensitive and laudatory essay first appeared, they were not pleased but irritated: this was, they said, just another instance of Yankee imperialism muscling in and usurping a judgment that was theirs to make. They, after all. had assigned Callaghan his proper place — good as a short-story writer but not as a novelist — and that verdict must stick.

The last part of the book is one of the best examinations of French Quebec and its separatist movement that I have seen. Independence for the Quebec province would almost certainly not improve the lot of the people socially or economically, for as a new state it would be on very shaky legs indeed. Yet Mr. Wilson sympathizes with the motives of the separatists as typical of the nationalist revolts against the centralizations of power going on everywhere in the world today. With independence Quebec might become poorer than it is now and be torn by internal dissensions, but the Québecois would at least have a sense of identity that they currently feel is denied them.

If SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR did not exist, it would be necessary to invent her. The perfect bluestocking, an adventurous schoolmarm, bourgeois to the marrow yet a pious Marxist, impregnable in her own opinions yet feverish in the pursuit of experience. Mile. de Beauvoir embodies as many contradictions as are usually associated with a psychological archetype. Only a woman who took herself with such solemn seriousness could pour out an enormous third volume of an autobiography, FORCE OF CIRCUMSTANCE (Putnam, $10.00). Yet I found it absolutely fascinating reading and a significant revelation of the life and times, at least in one restricted intellectual stratum, of the twentieth century.

French literati lead a life more inbred, more given to cliques and programs, thrusts and counterthrusts than writers elsewhere. At its worst, this setup gives the impression that all the writers in France are merely taking in each other’s washing; at its best, however, it engenders an excitement, vitality, and critical selfconsciousness that cannot be matched by any other nation. Mile, de Beauvoir has been steeped in that milieu, and it is this degree of involvement that makes her narrative both absorbing and revealing. Here are all the polemics and counterpolemics, movements and countermovements that have bubbled fiercely in the cultural caldron of Paris from 1945 to the present.

As a political analyst, however, Mlle. de Beauvoir is a little bit too starry-eyed to be reliable. She was born of a good bourgeois family, and her political opinions, as the whole autobiography reveals, are an act of penance for her privileged origins. Both she and her companion, Sartre, came to Communism late (unlike their former friend Camus, who had been in the Party as a young man), and they knew it only through ideas and books, not from within. On purely intellectual grounds Sartre became convinced that Marxism was the movement of history in our time, and though neither he nor Mlle. de Beauvoir joined the Party, they have been eager fellow travelers. When they went to China or the Soviet Union, they never seemed to look at the reality behind all the banquets and toasts with which they were greeted. And despite several visits to this country, Mlle. de Beauvoir never saw the United States at all; she was looking at an intellectual abstraction called Capitalism.

The present installment concludes with Mlle. de Beauvoir gazing at the mirror, lamenting old age and frightened by death, and judging that the one successful thing in her very active life has been her relationship with Sartre, which has lasted thirty years. Certainly they have been more stable toward each other than many a married couple. A mutual friend observed that whenever Sartre or De Beauvoir talked, the other would listen with absolute attention — something that doesn’t often happen in a marriage. Perhaps, though, a real wife might have helped Sartre more by not always being so respectfully attentive.

Coming out of the same world, JEAN-PAUL SARTRE’S collection of essays, SITUATIONS (Braziller, $5.95), which provides a good sample of his critical and polemical brilliance, complements Mlle. de Beauvoir’s autobiography neatly, each book shedding considerable light on the other.

The most interesting piece is the “Reply to Albert Camus,” which officially terminated their friendship and thus made public the most dramatic clash of personalities in French literary life during the fifties. Camus had written The Rebel, which denounced modern ideologies with their totalitarian claims and recommended a return to the classical Greek ideal of moderation and measure. The book received a scathing review in Sartre’s magazine, Les Temps Modernes, and Camus wrote a letter protesting not so much the review as the magazine’s continued line of bypassing injustice in the Soviet Union while denouncing the injustices of the West. Sartre replied by accusing Camus of turning “bourgeois,” a word with murky and diabolical connotations within the Sartrian circle.

The fact is, as Mlle. de Beauvoir reveals, that the quarrel was long in the making, and the hostile review merely set a match to the powder. Though they had been friends in the Resistance and afterward, when they loomed as the two principal spokesmen for their generation, Camus and Sartre were too different temperamentally to get along forever. Their political differences were only coincidental with two fundamentally different philosophical views. A North African, a man of the Mediterranean, Camus was too stubbornly earthbound for the urban intellectual Sartre.

However, seven years later, in 1960, on the occasion of Camus’s death, Sartre was able to write a warm and admiring tribute that is printed in the book immediately after his caustic letter. The two pieces give a measure of the mind and of the man. The mind may be an incredible mixture of brilliance and foolishness, but whatever one may think of his ideas, one has to admire the generosity of the man. It is a rare person who is above bearing a grudge.

Readers who have been won over by ANTHONY PowELL’s Dance to the Music of Time as one of the larger and more interesting fictional works in progress will be delighted by a chance to dip into his earlier and lesser known novels. VENUSBERG (1932) and AGENTS AND PATIENTS (1936), which have now been printed in one volume (Little, Brown, $4.75), arc among the best of these works, in the vein of zany comedy that recalls the early Evelyn Waugh, and surpassed only by Waugh himself — which is saying a great deal.

In Venusberg, Lushington, an aspiring young journalist, is accredited to a Baltic country — Latvia or Lithuania, though the actual name is never mentioned. He has broken of with the girl he loves at home; abroad he has a brief affair with a foreign lady; presently he returns and takes up again with the girl he left behind. The plot, obviously, is the merest trifle, but it provides Mr. Powell with a framework within which he can spring before us a host of odd and funny foreigners: bogus Russian counts, semi-aristocratic Slavic ladies, German officers, and an early type of the ugly American abroad. The comedy is based on a doubly ironic twist: from the British point of view the foreigner is inevitably odd and funny, but for Mr. Powell the British mind is equally ridiculous.

Agents and Patients makes use of one of the oldest situations in comedy — the innocent who is bilked by knaves; but Mr. Powell invests the action with wonderful freshness and hilarity. Blore-Smith, an affluent but very dreary young man, falls into the clutches of the two adventurers Maltravers and Chipchase, who proceed to relieve him of as much of his money as they can get their hands on. Chipchase becomes his psychoanalyst, and suggests a trip to Paris to break down inhibitions; and of course as doctor he must accompany his patient. Maltravers tries to obtain financial backing for an art film, part of which will be shot in Germany; and we have a delightful excursion to a pre-Hitler Berlin film company, with the modest Teutonic title Niebelheimnazionalkunstfilmgesellschaft.

Poor Blore-Smith’s life is lapsing into chaos until he runs away from the two benefactors who were supposed to open the doors of experience to him. For the moment, Maltravers and Chipchase are down, but you can bet they are not out. Bumble as they may into trouble, they will not be submerged by it; and this irrepressible quality makes them, despite their awful seediness, rather endearing.

Growing up as a boy in Georgia, ERSKINE CAIDWELL had as his closest friend a young Negro named Bisco, from whom he was eventually separated by the pressures of segregation. The recent unrest in the South made Mr. Caldwell wonder what had happened to his former friend, and IN SEARCH OF BISCO (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $4.95) tells about his fruitless efforts to find the grown man who had been the playmate of his past.

Mostly this is a record of voices talking: people met on the road telling about themselves, the Negro, the South, and the prospects of the future. Mr. Caldwell’s recent fiction has left much to be desired, but he is still a first-rate reporter with an unusual talent for getting close to Southern folk and persuading them to talk. Whether these talks were tape-recorded or taken, down by shorthand, or whether Mr. Caldwell relied solely on his ear, they ring remarkably and, in a good many cases, frighteningly true. The core of prejudice in some Southern whites here seems too tough to be cracked.

New York is a hard town to create in fiction because the neighborhoods are always changing. There was a section uptown on the West Side that used to be inhabited mostly by the Jewish middle class and was known as the Golden Ghetto. With the influx of Middle European refugees, who had far less money, the neighborhood fell off, and gradually Puerto Ricans appeared, until the area became known as San Juan on the Danube. Nowadays the neighborhood is so conglomerate—in its way a triumphant if humble example of integration — that no title may do, though its whole slaphappy atmosphere is caught remarkably well in ROY BONGARTZ’S TWELVE CHASES ON WEST 99TH STREET (Houghton Mifflin, $4.95).

When the first of these stories appeared in the New Yorker, I had the shock of recognition: here was the real feel of people and neighborhood as they truly are. The present collection confirms me in the belief that Mr. Bongartz is an unusual and promising talent with an altogether unique sense of comedy. The chases revolve around Benny, a parkinglot operator who is in pursuit of his girl, Flo, a waitress, high-strung and unpredictable, always chasing some unknown will-o’-the-wisp of her own. Benny is good-hearted but has a knack for saying the wrong thing, especially just when it seems he might be able to make it with Flo. They, and the others here, are as real as the people you see sitting around a New York automat — anonymous but pungently individual. In the end Benny has not quite caught up with Flo, but meanwhile, dozens of other characters — Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, sharpies, and zombies — have led a merry chase through Benny’s tiny apartment, all involved in a game of friendly misunderstanding.