Armed with a practical working knowledge of painting and a passion for rooting out obscure facts, CHARLES MERRILL MOUNT should be able to write a good biography of Claude Monet or any other artist. His MONET (Simon and Schuster, $10.00) is nevertheless a seriously unsatisfactory book because Mr. Mount is a clumsy writer whose illchosen modifiers sometimes defy rational interpretation and whose participial phrases drift like loose balloons upon the breeze. His style is further blemished by his habit of never using one word if three can be wedged in, and by a euphemistic prissiness better suited to the nineteenth century than the present day. Behind the thicket of awkward prose, Monet is still obscured by his biographer’s sentiments, which are strongly chivalrous and highly partisan. It is Mr. Mount’s considerable achievement to have recovered from oblivion the story of Monet’s first wife. She was a very pretty girl of very respectable family, who became Monet’s mistress at the age of eighteen and thereafter got a vile deal from everybody. Mr. Mount has fallen in love with this wistful ghost, and his admiration for Camille leads him to present Monet as a neglectful lover, an improvident husband, an avaricious leech, a whining beggar, and a painter who never covered a canvas in what Mr. Mount considers quite the proper way. That this dreary slob is not the man Mr. Mount intended to portray is apparent from his preface, which states that “it is quite possible Monet is among the really heroic figures in the history of painting,” and identifies him as “a sacred monster.”
In contrast to Mr. Mount, whose troubles are those of the permanently amateur writer, DYLAN THOMAS seems to have been born an old pro. His SELECTED LETTERS (New Directions, $8.50) begin when Thomas, according to Constantine FitzGibbon (whose editing and annotation of these letters are invaluable) was less than seventeen years old. The first letter concerns the youth’s utterly impractical, predictably abortive scheme to publish a literary magazine, but it reads as though he had been at the editorial trade for thirty years. Not that he was overoptimistic — it’s the tone of the mildly cynical, efficient, assured old hand that rings with alarming conviction. Thomas was acting — or writing — the editor in advance of becoming one, and this element of committed performance runs through all his correspondence. His idle gossip, anathemas on Welsh provincialism, confessions, rages, and rants are all intensely calculated creations, acts of conscious craftsmanship. I do not mean to imply that Thomas was an insincere correspondent, but rather that he brought to letter writing the skill with words, the explosive imagination, and something of the concentrated intention that went into his poetry. If a letter was written at all, it was designed to convey precise meaning and create definite effects, and in these objects Thomas always succeeded. At least, he succeeded on paper. For all his wily wordplay, he lost the courtship game with Pamela Hansford Johnson, who ultimately declined his hand but kept his letters. Like everything else in the collection, they are fascinating and painful. One knows all the time that this glittering torchlight parade is going to march off a cliff.
THE WISHING TREE (Random House, $3.95) is a fanciful story that WILLIAM FAULKNER wrote to amuse a little girl of his acquaintance. I hardly know what to report of it, except that it is no Alice in Wonderland. It has considerable charm of episode and a plot derived from the old folktales of misused wishes. There are bits of comic dialogue that dimly suggest the grown-up Faulkner, but neither Faulkner’s themes nor his style were ever suitable for reduction to the juvenile level, and he knew better than to force them in that direction. The Wishing Tree is a pretty gesture which just happened to be made by William Faulkner.
SALLIE BINGHAM’S THE TOUCHING HAND (Houghton Mifflin, $4.50) contains a novella and six short stories. They are elegantly written, involve a variety of settings and characters, and appear to involve a variety of themes. Actually, they all have a common basic pattern — the interdependence of people and their persistent resentment of it. More bias perhaps than formal theme, this notion is twisted seven ways in seven adroit stories. Miss Bingham is much too clever to suggest a cure for it anywhere.
THE FIRST MASOCHIST (Stein and Day, $6.95) is a biography by JAMES CLEUGH of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the well-bred historian-novelist who, to his own annoyance, bestowed his name on a sexual aberration almost as well known as sadism. The book proves to be a surprisingly humorous work, for the complications arising from a romantic desire to be horsewhipped by pretty ladies swathed in ermine are incongruously mundane. Ermine is expensive; horsewhipping is harder work than ladies care to undertake; and in Masoch’s closeknit world of Austrian gentry, promising anonymous correspondents had a tendency to reveal themselves as somebody’s mother. Despite disappointments, Masoch contrived to earn an international reputation with novels which were by no means devoid of merit, to support two wives and assorted children, and to avoid both jail and the lunatic asylum. Mr. Cleugh never bothers to explain the sources of his detailed conversations, which are presumably lifted indiscriminately from Masoch’s novels, letters, and the testy memoirs of his first wife. It doesn’t matter much. One gathers that neither Masoch nor his associates were ever too certain of the line between fact and fiction.