Fiction in Paperbacks

...Not now, any more...

...Wendover...

...Laura Wing, Selina's sister, occupies the anguished middle ground between the two...

...Hamsun's ironies go one step further, however...

...Compass Books has published Saul Bellow's The Victim ($1.25), that brilliant, brooding account of a little man's terror in a high Manhattan walk-up, of the complex interaction of prejudice on the lives of two of its victims, and of the simple anguish of survival in New York...

...Professor Tindall's book, Forces in Modern British Literature, 1885-1956 (Vintage, 1.95), traces modern literature's evolution from French symbolist and naturalist works down through today's myth-haunted and existential ones...

...A man changes...

...All of these novels have that quality which will allow them to survive their times: They allow man an insight into himself, a glimpse—however grim—of reality...

...Man, James felt, will give up fiction "only when life itself too thoroughly disagrees with him...

...Superficially the story of an outdoors-man's love for a beautiful girl of a northern forest village, the novel quickly reveals that appearances are far from reality...

...a remarkable British novelist two of whose works have recently been made available in beautifully printed paperback editions by Noonday Press...

...Joyce, turning life into art, created in this novel, in the words of William York Tindall, "by far the greatest English novel of adolescence...

...as a matter of fact, almost entirely concerned with those whom James knew personally...

...Criticizing his story as he writes it ("How plausible all that is," "How false all that rings"), he brings it round at last to chaos itself ("The night is strewn with absurd . . . lights, the stars, the beacons, the buoys, the lights of earth...

...James enriches his stock situation, however, by presenting in this novel three Americans who represent various stages of enlightenment...

...Though the novel is only one of the forms with which Professor Tindall deals, his book is —perhaps for that reason—one of the best studies of its complex development in our time...

...Because he sees it as only one aspect of a larger intellectual and artistic pattern, he does not overvalue it as a form...

...Selina Berrington, on the other hand, has been longest abroad, has lost both innocence and honesty in following a "fast" set, and is at the point of leaving her amoral English husband for a dashing young lover and the pleasures of depraved Continental society...

...His object, it seems to me...

...How very well James managed to discuss the "living stuff" he wrote and admired without killing it in the precess is brilliantly demonstrated in two paperback collections of his essays, both edited by Leon Edel...

...is to give us the literary personality first of an author and then of his book...

...In both collections...

...Anchor has reissued Lionel Trilling's thoughtful account of an ex-Communist's effort to reorient his life, The Middle of the journey ($.95), a novel which—perhaps because our guiltridden world has changed less than we think or merely perhaps because the book is so well written—seems, if possible, more pertinent now than when it was first published ten years ago...

...The critic who over the close texture, of a finished work shall pretend to trace a geography of items will mark some frontiers as artificial, I fear, as any that have been known to history...

...Unlike Machado, who manages to be both extremely funny and extremely bitter, Knut Hamsun in his early novel Pan (Noonday, $1.25) is concerned primarily with the pathos of irrational, destructive man, who, given this lovely world for his home, suceeds only in creating disorder in the midst of nature's ordered beauty...

...A powerful, difficult, ugly novel, it ultimately makes meaninglessness seem meaningful...

...A year ago she knew nothing, and now she knew almost everything...

...The first and most public of James Joyce's three great novels, it is an effort, according to its hero, Stephen Dedalus, "to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning...

...Beckett's novel, quite as static as anything in Joyce, has for its subject matter the meaningless-ness of life, for its set a bed in the middle of a drab room, and for its hero an old bedridden man who "passes time" by writing an account of his life: "I was time, I devoured the world...

...In recognizing it for what it is, he is able to account for its accomplishments...

...Even then, indeed, may fiction not find a second wind, or a fiftieth, in the very portrayal of that collapse...

...As he gets on...

...All of them make entertaining, often difficult and always exciting reading...

...Though he does not avoid judgment, his main concern is with the presentation of that which is unique in the author he examines rather than with that which makes his author good or bad...

...More important still, he sees it as a form of art rather than a form of history...

...Epitaph of a Small Winner ($1.25) has, for its entire 136th chapter, the sentence: "And, if I am not greatly mistaken, I have just written an utterly unnecessary chapter...

...for, by the end of the novel, one realizes that the false-outdoorsman does have a real insight into nature, a kind of communion with it, and the spoiled girl has still within her a mysterious innocence she is able neither to control nor to understand...

...I had no progeny," reports his Small Winner...

...His plot is more straightforward than Beckett's, but his point of view is quite as gloomy...

...The outdoorsman had never been north before (though he impresses both himself and the villagers with his nature lore) ; the unspoiled girl is far more sophisticated (and sadistically cruel) than any city coquette...

...In Malone Dies (Evergreen, $1.25) Samuel Beckett, whom Grove Press is gradually making available to American readers, combines his friend Joyce's concept of the static novel with a point of view suggested vears before by Henry James...

...He is morally good and incredibly innocent...

...Exactly this technique is also employed by Machado de Assis...

...The Future of the Novel (Vintage, $.95), from which the passage quoted above was taken, includes, in addition to the title essay, extracts from prefaces and essays on such major Continental novelists as Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and Turgenev...

...Wen-dover, recently arrived in England, is "solemn," a man of "high respectability," a person who emanates an American "tension...

...Her efforts to construct a code for herself to live by in a world which has abandoned codes creates the novel...

...A London Life I Evergreen, $1.25 I, originally published in 1889 and now handsomely reissued as a paperback by Grove Press, gives us a minor sample of one of James's major themes: the innocent American baffled by the complex moral structure of upper-class English society...

...But Beckett's hero changes very little...

...Even his decay is slow...

...A novel is a living thing," said Henry James, "all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts...

...Though such prose seems at first glance merely queer, Machado manages to construct from it powerful portraits of men trapped, like Beckett's men, in a mysterious universe in which two and two add up to almost anything but four...

...Laurence Sterne used it two centuries before...

...If A London Life is a minor work of a great writer, A Portrait oj the Artist As a Young Man (Compass Books, $.95) is a major one...

...She has been in England a year...

...But, needless to say, these are only a very small sampling of the enormous output in this area...

...I transmitted to no one the legacy of our misery...

...James's interest is in a celebration of accomplishment rather than an analysis of technique...

...Grove Press, in addition to publishing the Beckett and James novels mentioned above, has reissued Berton Roueche's compelling study of an innocent accused man's psychological deterioration, The Last Enemy (Evergreen, $1.25...

...The American Essays of Henry James (Vintage, $.95) is, as the title implies, primarily concerned with American writers and...

...She is torn between loyalty to her sister, whose motives she tries to understand, and sympathy for pure Mr...

...This is, of course, no new device...

...These, it seems to me, are among the most interesting of the recent novels and books about novels printed by the paperback houses...

...Because so many elements go into fiction—plot, character, setting, imagery, theme—and because those elements function well only when they are knit together in a compound tougher than the analytical powers of criticism, and because, finally, the form is simply so very big as to defy any really close reading of the text, critics find it next to impossible to get at the heart of the thing, to say what exactly makes it tick...

...Dom Casmurro ($1.25), for instance, is interrupted toward the end by the comment: "Right here should be the middle point of my book, but inexperience has made me lag behind my pen, and I arrive almost at the end of my supply of paper, with the best of the story yet to tell...

...Part of Beckett's success is his ability to let his storyteller both tell the story and pause to comment on it...