TWO LOOKS AT INDIA
Hart, Henry C.
Two Looks at India As I See India, by Robert Trumbull. William Sloane Associates. 256 pp. $4. At Home in India, by Cynthia Bowles. Harcourt, Brace. 180 pp. with 16 pp. of photographs....
...You cannot find a more just summary of India's point of view about foreign policy than in As I See India...
...427 pp...
...There is a wondrous will in these people to live and love...
...Martinson has enjoyed a full and exciting life, some years of which are told in the autobiographical novel The Road (Rey-nal...
...Many Irishmen, whether green, orange, or black, have been rebels with and without cause...
...He went along when Nehru tried vainly to conciliate the aborigines on India's Burma border...
...Here is a mystic communion with life seen realistically and un-fearfully, and a testament of faith for all who neither conform nor go under...
...and of the urge to wander and the many wanderings of thousands of tramps along the roads early in the century...
...Recent Fiction HARRY MARTINSON, one of Sweden's greatest contemporary writers, knows that "it is the many who decide what reality is and how it shall be, and the minority has to conform or go under...
...While the drama is a monotone, lacking the rich chords and harmonies of his other plays, it is forceful and effective because of the intensity of its grief...
...Nelson Hayes...
...Some months ago I wrote a not very flattering review of Simone de Beau-voir's All Men Are Mortal...
...Trumbull is equally accurate, but not an eye-witness, when he describes Vinobha Bhave's land-gift crusade, caste, or village life in general...
...as a novel it is poor indeed, not even deserving of publication...
...Since most Americans are something of both, there is a lot to be said for reading these two books together...
...5.95), the original draft of Remembrance of Things Past...
...He was lucky enough during Gandhi's last year to talk with him three times...
...244 pp...
...The result is a witty and entertaining satire on both Victorian England and Western society today...
...O'Connor has explained Skeffington as both human being and political power, as well as painted a brilliantly colored portrait of the Boston which is Irish—its extravagances, its sudden tears and sodden laughter, its political corruption...
...And for anyone depressed by the nay-sayers of this time, I particularly recommend "Come to the Fair," an invitation to live by that will and spirit and energy which characterize all of O'Casey's writing...
...744 pp...
...The New York Times sent Robert Trumbull to New Delhi in 1947...
...610 pp...
...276 pp...
...4.00) is Boston today...
...3.95) by that arch individualist Sean O'Casey...
...As a study of how a novelist works it is interesting and enlightening...
...He visited the Nizam of Hyderabad and other princes...
...And in so doing he has left us a bright memory, if not a commendable one...
...Edwin O'Connor's richly humorous and warmly human novel, The Last Hurrah (Little, Brown...
...We can get from him the story of the exciting, often dreadful, interlude between independence and constitutional order...
...He saw the little war start in Kashmir, too...
...Nelson Algren has also been something of a tramp, a migrant, a man living in strange places with odd companions...
...303 pp...
...They also puzzle and disturb many Indians...
...I suspect most American readers will finish the chapter on her summer's after-school work in the children's ward of a Delhi hospital with a glow of admiration or of pride that we have high school girls like Cynthia Bowles...
...4.50) is about the people he knew on Perdido Street, New Orleans, in the '30s...
...Both help fill the big gap that separates scholarship from travelogue...
...O'Connor has created Mayor Skeffington in the image of a Bostonian who was once both political leader and tribal chief-tan but from whom in 1956 there are only a few golden-throated words on banquet occasions...
...A much less important book is Jean Santeuil of Marcel Proust (Simon and Schuster...
...Her book is full of the Indians she knew well: girls her own age from Punjab to Bengal, and their families headed by doctors, ministers of state, foremen, butlers, sweepers...
...3.50), the true story of Henry James Prince, founder of a new religion and possessor of one legal and sundry extra-curricular wives...
...A Walk on the Wild Side (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
...Reviewed by Henry C. Hart NONE of the thousand or two Americans who are going to India this year, or their friends who will try to understand their letters, ought to miss either of these two books...
...Now I'll have to eat at least a crow's wing, for her latest, The Mandarins (World...
...Geoffrey Wagner has written a savage indictment of psychiatry in The Dispossessed (Devin-Adair...
...My final judgment is quite otherwise...
...they have the innocence of the dispossessed whose sins are minor and whose virtues are great—a topsy-turvy world...
...Compared to what legislature, I thought, is India's parliament, which seldom gets off the subject and never filibusters, "garrulous...
...346 pp...
...Yet another facet of the Irish is given in The Green Crow (Braziller...
...Contrariwise, it would be possible to jump to the conclusion that Cynthia Bowles was too fond of her "other home" to see its faults...
...It is a tragedy of people who cannot be blamed because their pasts have made them what they are...
...3.50), in which a British war veteran, mistakenly diagnosed as a case of "constitutional inferiority," is broken by the selfishness and insensitivity of a supposedly sane society which can give no place to those who have been "cured" by the mumbo-jumbo of a modern witch doctor...
...of the lonely and often embittered people of the countryside, and their dreams of a paradise to be gained in the United States...
...If you are going to India to be a competent professional, Trumbull will help you...
...He covered the remarkable general election of 1951-52, when a largely illiterate nation voted intelligently...
...Cynthia Bowles luckily felt under no compulsion to give a teen-ager's account of the famous people she met as an ambassador's daughter in India during 1951-53...
...Each has its own attractiveness and use...
...O'Neill's play might be anywhere, anytime...
...A drug-addicted mother, a bon-vivant actor father, and a drunken brother—these were the family of young Gene, here named Edmund...
...And the stoutest, and least useful American stereotype of all—that India is on the verge of Communist subversion—gets debunked in Trumbull's hard-headed chapter on India's irresolute and frustrated Communist Party...
...But though she does not clutter up a personal narrative with ill-considered diagnosis, she is far too honest and well-integrated an American not to leave quiet evidence that some things puzzled or disturbed her...
...Algren's fiction is wild, exhilarating in its shifts from the ludicrous to the sublime...
...3.50...
...Through the humble yet dignified character and the picaresque adventures of the cigar-maker Bolle, he writes nostalgically of his own experience as a tramp —of the lovely woods and lakes and fields of Sweden...
...To the neat and sterile world of the Victorian middle class may seem a long jump, but Aubrey Menen somewhat abbreviates it for us in The Abode of Love (Scribner...
...Of the last tint was Eugene O'Neill, and Long Day's Journey into Night (Yale...
...if you are going as a sympathetic amateur, you can learn a lot from Cynthia Bowles...
...She moves with astonishing ease among the difficulties of these materials, shifting scene and mood and meaning with true mastery...
...Incidentally and oddly, the novel is dedicated to Nelson Algren...
...Wagner can write extremely well, but his anger too often spoils his aesthetic judgment...
...Well, for such characters as the ones in these three novels, there is today the healing skill of the psychiatrist...
...In it she creates and develops in all their dimensions scores of characters and a complex of themes and variations to define the intellectual and moral dilemmas of postwar France...
...176 pp...
...Extravagant expenditures made Prince and his menagerie respectable in an age that worshipped thirty and more pieces of silver...
...Or is there...
...Usually she feels obligated to add whatever general facts about Indian society and its progress each intimate personal experience illustrates...
...His story of the butchering of the Moslem businessman in the next compartment brings that tragic episode about as close as words can bring it to a reader's armchair...
...During the worst of the Hindu-Sikh-Moslem killings that accompanied the carving out of Pakistan, he deliberately rode a refugee train carrying Moslems toward the Pakistan frontier from Delhi...
...And she has with the highest degree of success translated into terms of dramatically alive people the paradox of the shadow which falls between conception and creation, between emotion and response, between existence and essence, to paraphase T. S. Eliot...
...In this collection of drama criticism, informal essays, and four short stories, the pieces on Shaw are especially informative, and those on Noel Coward precisely what he deserves...
...214 pp...
...3.75) is a "tale of old sorrow," the story of his youth in a house as fated by human weakness as that of Oedipus or Atreus...
...6), is a major novel...
...Having, I confess, some emotional ties to India, I thought at first I caught just two or three signals of American provincialism in Robert Trumbull's asides...
Vol. 20 • June 1956 • No. 6
