BOOKS:

...Significantly, each one was extremely generous in helping the other in his career, a welcome contrast to much of the pettiness and viciousness that too often characterizes the literary profession...

...And Chance the gardener in the satiric Being There is at once the victim and hero of the electronic age...

...After an obligatory period of mild decline, the Old Man wins back his old lady with the help of a horse-and-carriage escort home in a perverse scene that places the sexual ethos of this novel squarely in the prePamela 18th century...

...Evasive actions for would-be writers of relevant novels...

...We have his word, though that children of the kingdom must be "wise as serpents"-outdo the technocrats at their own game...

...Think of us, Lehmann's prosperous American audience...

...and characters like the brainy-lunatic Brundage periodically take center stage to play major thematic roles-in his case through an incredibly frustrated affair in which he misses a longed-for tryst after forgetting his girlfriend's address, and literally drives himself crazy...

...Is it innate...

...Witness: the publication in English this year not only of this major retrospective Five Decades: A Selection as well as his most important book Residence on Earth but also, of Vallejo's primal poetic scream Trilce and his brief volume about the Spanish Civil War, Spain, Take This Cup from Me...

...He laments the "bleak rationality" of an age which denies the importance of death and disallows bereaved individuals the healing dignity of acts of mourning...

...Other authors, whose novels come to even more conventional ends, hardly approach Grossbach's feel for organic narrative...

...This is most assuredly the case-but why...

...In spite of its sometimes irritating derivative bluff, it's basically an unpretentious tale about a naif in a morally skewed grown-up world, and about how that world's momentous chicanery dissolves innocence while absolving guilt...

...Partly inspired by his sense of orphanhood on going home after his mother's death, the desperate nostalgia of Trilce is matched by the desperate hope in Spain, Take This Cup from Me which was literally written in the press of defeat and printed on soldier's shirts...

...Here is more than one pound of flesh Vallejo saws from his own flanks with a serrated blade...

...Hemingway's morality of style," we are told, is "positively Victorian, for "it derives from the Victorian Underground...

...In such writing the author glories in all that is "excessive, frivolous, or exhibitionistic...

...22, 1944) You have done me much good, you have stirred me to work, to thought, to hope,-that I should like to be able to do something for you...

...Cockpit JERZY KOSINSKI Houghton Mifflin, $8.95 IVAN SANDERS Jerzy Kosinski frightens a lot of people...

...Impulse is understood in ordinary usage as an impelling or driving forward, an incitement to action which may arise from a "state of mind" or an external catalyst...

...Kosinski's matter-of-fact articulation of the unspeakable, as well as his singular appreciation of the more elegant forms of physical and mental tortures, suggest to many an obviously anti-humanist sensibility...

...Then, in 1944, while Fowlie was teaching French literature at Yale, Miller arrived in New Haven and expressed a desire to stay with Fowlie...

...Lehmann, on the other hand, leaves my bleeding heart hanging, patiently waiting the totter and fall of oppressive power...

...It is this spiritual side of Miller that comes through in his long correspondence with Fowlie...

...And the explanation for this tragic Great Refusal...

...On the one hand, Wallace Fowlie-academic, intellectually disciplined literary critic, serious Catholic, bachelor, a bit of an ascetic...

...On the home front we watch the F24BZ as it engages the motley crew of Auerbach men, from A himself and the upper echelon, down through the ranks, even to an ex-employee who lives secretly in one of the Labs' men's "The glue," whispered Steinberg, half choking...

...There is, however, a capacity of human beings to think about themselves and their world, to act from motivations and principles, and, in the process, to shape the nature and meaning of that world.ty of human beings to think about themselves and their world, to act from motivations and principles, and, in the process, to shape the nature and meaning of that world...

...The strong point of his analysis is his insistent comprehension -often lost sight of by contemporary social scientists-that an individual's structure of meaning is imbedded in social relationships which are, in turn, integrally tied to a certain way of life...

...But essentially Grossbach's novels aren't all that much like any of these other works...

...Neither narrative credibility nor the characters really matter here, of course...

...Conscious or unconscious...

...Manliness...

...In this sense Tarden, the hero of Kosinski's latest novel, Cockpit, is a composite of all his previous characters...

...Scattered throughout the book are words like "stress, manage, reintegrate, adapt, respond, threaten, disturb, frustrate, react, confuse, tensions, incoherence, instability...

...Feb...

...13 ("Every person must submit to the supreme authorities...

...Of course these episodes could also be viewed as outlandish daydreams, wish-fulfillments, paranoid visions- lucky safety-valves for a perverted imagination...

...Actually, he had the unique ability to retract his organ and keep it hidden with the aid of a plastic-tipped metal clamp...

...and, at the distant remove at which the young now stand from "the generation of 1914," the best help they can be given towards appropriating the world of Pound and Eliot and Joyce and Wyndham Lews is to be told to rely on Kenner's books as their chief Baedeker...

...Jan...

...In Steps we witness an individual's responses first to a harshly repressive, then to a chaotically permissive society...

...his prose is as precise and controlled as his hero...

...Maybe the bizarre insensibility of Gone Away can be explained best by a glib hint that Harper's drops on the book's jacket...

...By forever testing the outer limits of his (and others') endurance, he learns to manipulate not only his actions and thoughts, but his reflexes, his very instincts as well...

...His hero may remain in the driver's seat, the cockpit (Kosinski no doubt appreciates the varied connotations of the term), but his precautions and elaborate strategies become, after a while, pointless exertions...

...Beneath the frequently Hel-lerish narrative pitch, which annoys at times because here it sounds banal, Grossbach discloses a stoic undertone that, combined with his broadly social point-of-view, reminds me more of a novelist like Harvey Swados, who began writing out of and against the normality of the '40s and '50s in his own realistic manner, than of the ab-surdo-realist masters who were growing through fiction at about the same time...

...Almost subliminally then, Buchfarer perceived the tiny black clouds of exploding anti-aircraft shells, quiet, deadly pffs seen in watery slow motion off to one side...

...A Homemade World he says, he cannot imagine ever having been handwritten, for the words on her pages "are little regular blocks, set apart by spaces, and referrable less to the voice than to the click of the keys and the ratcheting of the carriage...

...Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, argued that paradigms, or controlling concepts and theories, authoritatively indicate the solutions to scientific problems as well as the kinds of problems requiring solutions...

...Marris' understanding of scientific predictability (abstracting regularity from unique events) is rather remarkable given his later appreciative discussion of Thomas Kuhn's concept of a scientific paradigm...

...The important thing is that we feel and participate in the same aesthetic values and the same sense of tragedy...

...Unfortunately, Marris wants to do more than etch instances of human loss and change in sensitive prose...

...Yet what is most enduring in this epistolary exchange between a distinguished critic and translator of French literature and an irreverent, iconoclastic novelist is the intensity and drama of their personal friendship, so eloquently and frankly revealed...

...The scientist, argues Kuhn, does not look out at the world, isolate congeries of "particular events," and then go on to abstract an underlying law- quite the opposite...

...Especially in Easy and Hard Ways Out, where he traces the implicated lives of the Lab characters and the mindless regimentation of their works and days, Grossbach appears less interested in the idiosyncrasies of his lead character or in black-comic narrative extremes than he is in a sort of modest quotidian absurdity: the trivial reality of the societies his characters shape and/or serve, the cultural modes that designate their relationships and roles, and the way they exist (often barely and by zany means) within or without these terms...

...There are no "facts"-there is only the fact that man, every man, every man everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination...

...Among them Grossbach focuses most often on Harvey Brank, a chronically disaffected worker who's gone through a dozen jobs, struggles as an Auerbach engineer to perfect the Yig, and finally tries to blow the whistle on it...

...Tarden's unremitting self-control makes him, necessarily, a cold and brutal man, though unexpectedly tender responses reestablish his humanity...

...As in Steps, questions of motivation and credibility are beside the point...

...Where his books begin to sound like Catch-22 they usually lack Heller's honed maniacal edge...

...Finally, the model of Jesus silent before Pilate's political obtuseness will not do...

...He is, however, a critic whose wont it is to brighten up and make new whatever he touches, and of this his latest book makes a fine example, for on page after page after page things are said that haven't been said before, and in a way that clears our view of some of the great books and writers of the age...

...it's the episodes themselves that are important, the preternaturally sharp images, which intimate darker secrets than they reveal...

...Rather than being propelled ineluctably to his articulation of scientific "laws," Marris' assumptions about individuals and societies lead him to seek out and to label in a particular way those phenomena which will most convincingly make his case...

...After reading some of the grosser passages, one has the awful feeling he is losing his capacity to be shocked, and then realizes with some annoyance that he has put up with shameless self-indulgence, the kind Philip Roth talks about in his recent collection of essays...

...How does one set about "managing" change...

...And Berger's quest for an American stance ("America can be most significant to the Third World by being itself) assumes that overseas economic problems can be handled without a major overhaul in our own economy...

...But most importantly, Tarden, like Kosin-ski's other characters, aims for total self-control...

...On the other hand, we already have many translations of Neruda and if Five Decades is a retrospective showcase for the poet, which it clearly and delightfully is, it is also one for the translator...

...In Easy and Hard Ways Out, ease can be purchased, but only at the cost of one's conscience or one's life...

...As they set about minting a new language that would be adequate to the circumstances of their time, they kept a lively awareness of the international avant-garde, but, as Kenner maintains, they found their themes and "hammered out" their poetic amidst "the American weather"- and thus they created "a homemade world...

...They sense impenetrable evil and an equivocal authorial attitude behind his invitingly simple fictions...

...Yet that is precisely what transpired for more than 30 years, beginning in 1943...

...when he terrifies supermarket-shoppers by injecting a chemical into cartons of food...

...It might be naive to treat Tarden as a conventional, realistically conceived character...

...A futile rallying cry, of Guernica-like lyricism, the book's effect might be replicated by a writer of identical intensity but a more-or-less strict translation leaves you feeling that you've read a sheaf of emotional documents, not a volume of poems...

...Grossbach's characters, major and many of the minor, are men nurtured on above-average expectations whom the machines of normality-family, school, job, new family, and the quest for a good lay-have turned into average failures...

...What for Marris serves as evidence of a "universal impulse" becomes for a theorist devoted to social reconstruction an indication of the manner in which individuals actively seek to make sense of their lives as they confront personal loss, bureaucratic disdain, or the destruction of their history and tradition...

...Our attention is focused on the incidents: the graphic, disturbingly credible details, the mounting suspense, the devastating final revelation...

...The glue that holds the spheres onto the rods," gasped Steinberg...

...Marris states: Just as, in the prediction of physical events, mastery of the environment rests on abstracting regularities from unique events, so social survival rests on holding to laws of human behaviour which a man or woman may apply wherever they find themselves...

...said another, we need more translations of Vallejo so that the scrupulously strict, like this one, may breath more fully in the plurality of renderings...

...That may well be so, but so far as I understand the scholarly state of the question on this issue, the evidence to support such complacency is not yet all in...

...Predictably, much of the discussion in this correspondence is about literature and literary matters, and as such, it is fascinating...

...David H. Brooks is one of these...

...The answer, of course, is prediction-uncovering the laws which presumably govern human society so that one can predict individual behavior and chart the ''course of events...

...Brank, like Grossbach's first protagonist, Schectman, isn't as histrionic as a Portnoy, Yossarian, or a Stern...

...It was his fault...

...Here, for example, is a never-quoted passage from Tropic of Capricorn that best characterizes the Miller of these letters: One can't make a new heaven and earth with "facts...

...Inside the metal container that held the electronic countermeas-ures gear, inside a separate aluminum chassis, a microscopic polished black sphere, having fallen off its mounting rod, rolled freely in a small stainless steel cavity...

...The deployment of the term to cover human behavior implies action without conscious thought...

...It lets Brooks mask the shallowness and rhythmic flaws of his storytelling with the boy's narrative peccadilloes...

...Kosinski's hero is hungry for all forms of stimulation, but his fear of excessive involvement turns him invariably into a voyeur...

...sounds in fact like Gross-bach, the Bronx native who became an engineer and lives now with wife and son, as Harper's gratuitously tells us, "in a house with a panelled den and many cesspool problems...

...Insisting on absolute freedom for himself, the ex-spy nevertheless needs people if only to validate his freedom...

...March 30, 1944) I said I would write you about the life of Jesus after the resurrection -the period of forty days, was it, between the resurrection and the ascension...

...of what...

...Here there is none of the blatant politicism Neruda sometimes wrote- although the notorious poem on the United Fruit Company is included- and here there is relatively little of the beautiful obscurity of Residence on Earth...

...Berger's venture into political ethics contains sharp critiques of both capitalist and socialist-revolutionary models for Third World development, and then proceeds to offer sage advice to both for a pragmatic method of arriving at policy-judgments under the "postulate of ignorance...

...That is why so much critical writing, some of it good, has been generated around American literature, as though evoked by the novels and poems themselves...

...When Tarden, as a child, sends scores of people on a wild-goose chase with phony telephone messages...

...when he has three derelicts gang up on a disloyal girlfriend, it becomes almost irrelevant that he is driven by a distorted sense of justice...

...Using the younger son as narrator is certainly a masterstroke...

...Truth" or "falsity" is not the issue as one confronts social theories...

...But, though one might naturally have wished that Kenner would turn his hand to such a project, it is surely an astonishment that even he should have been able to put together so large a body of fresh commentary on writers whose achievement has been as thoroughly mined as that of the leading American modernists...

...He invented a new kind of fiction...

...He's trying to fix it...

...It was on the New Haven Line of the Penn Central Railroad," a note duly tells us, "that Mr...

...Easy and Hard Ways Out ROBERT GROSSBACH Harper's Magazine Press, $7.95 Gone Away DAVID H. BROOKS Harper's Magazine Press, $7.95 JOHN DRUSKA John Grossbach's first novel, Someone Great, brought notices comparing it to Portnoy's Complaint and Stern...

...And he does fall back on simple expedients, on man's "natural weapons": his eyes, his memory, though ironically, in his new novel he also suggests the futility of unrelenting vigilance...

...That's why I like Easy and Hard Ways Out...

...Does it act more as a drive or a motivation...

...Now a selection of their letters is available, along with an introduction by Wallace Fowlie, as well as an essay by him about the French writers who have influenced Miller...

...The problem, an old one in both religion and politics, is to keep alive the promise of the revolutionary spirit, to provide channels by which, in the face of new challenges, each generation may become creator-founders of a novus ordo saeculorum...

...ronald christ is editor of Review, published by the Center for Inter-American Relations...

...Lehmann re-examines the transfiguring politics of Jesus and in this light the transfigured significance of contemporary revolutions (from Marx and Mao to Frantz Fanon and the Black Panthers...

...Five Deeu&ess A Selection (Poem* 1925.1970) PABLO NERUDA Trans, by Ben Belitt Grove, $12,50, paper $3.95 Trilce CESAR VALLEJO Trans, by David Smith Grossman, $20, paper $5.95 Spain, Take Tnis Cup From Me CESAR VALLEJO Trans, by Clayton Eshleman & Josi Rubia Barcia Grove, $10, paper $2.95 RONALD CHRIST What Neruda wrote in his poem "Yesterday"-"those who were lately nerudarized are beginning to vallejo-late"-is even truer today than when he wrote it...

...Yet in fact they know so very little, all these self-confident prophets of doom and salvation...

...But even the youth's hip monologue is hard to sustain at times, as when the older brother faces "Greaser," a fearsome union-goon, and the younger brother quotes himself asking the Old Man a rather outre question: "Why forsake him now...

...Stevens, he says, "took the dissolution of a Christianity inculcated in Reading, Pa., for the summons to a new humanism, a life's work...

...But the cases Marris cites speak to us as they do because Marris begins with a set of assumptions-a perspective which allows him to focus on certain processes and events and to underplay or ignore others...

...The point is I can visualize both hard-nosed capitalists and hard-revolutionaries being guided in their strategy-sessions by Berger's parables and analyses of the scope of developmental issues...

...Marris' reductionistic scheme of things disallows for the possibility of the transformative power of concepts and ideas...

...Loss and Change PETER MARRIS Pantheon, $7.95 JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN Peter Marris is at his best when he is least self-consciously "scientific...

...This impulse, which has as its aim the defense of "the predictability of life" is a "fundamental and universal principle of human psychology...

...So it was not at all surprising for me to hear in a small conference three years ago a young scholar express the hope that Hugh Kenner might eventually produce precisely the sort of book he has just now published-on those Americans (Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Stevens, Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore) who came to the fore in the years between the two world wars...

...Tarden's final recollection is of an old disabled tank whose "corroded gun defiantly trains on trenches and machine-gun nests, long buried in the sands of a deserted beach...

...We traveled the streets and plateaus, among battles and boulders and sorrows together...

...Yet, his heroes are above all rugged individualists who cope with hostile reality by trying to understand, control, possess experience-verbally, visually, if not always physically...

...That's silly...

...He empathizes with the predicament of uprooted Nigerian villagers thrust into alien urban social environments...

...I have felt all that, too, but am unable to express it as movingly as you do...

...Looks in fact like Schectman of Someone Great...

...The two men were contemporaries but the Peruvian died exiled in Paris in 1938 after a calamitously miserable life while the Chilean went on to earn the greatest fame only to die in exile as well-in his own country...

...The power of Jesus' "presence" in and over human affairs, he argues, will on the one hand save revolution from subverting its own passion for humaniza-tion, and on the other, saves the Christian mentality from its addiction to legitimating the status quo...

...He's the engineer on it...

...In a similar vein, here are some selections from Miller's correspondence with Fowlie: Vision is the thing...

...A couple of weeks later when Miller left, he took with him Martha Lepska, a graduate student in philosophy at Yale, who became his second wife and the mother of two of his children...

...10, 1946) And in a more personal way, penned upon leaving Fowlie's apartment in New Haven after his stay there: Vous me donnez le courage de croire et d aimer, (original in French) (Oct...

...Kinny, did you actuate your break-lock...

...A correspondence ensued...

...As long as the clamp remained in place, I felt a bit of pain, but the sense of harnessed power made orgasm crude by comparison...

...His people are fearful creatures driven to seek "release" for the frustrations which emerge when social boundaries are not clearly drawn...

...People are propelled to control their social world which is, at best, a threatening place, fraught with the danger of disorientation...

...A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers HUGH KENNER Knopf, $8.95 NATHAN A. SCOTT, JR...

...but with Neruda there is so much, one can afford to be prodigal...

...Ben Belitt has been working Neruda's texts for many years now and if he doesn't satisfy every reader of the original-what translator ever does...

...As Arendt points out, the irony of established revolutions, even when they don't devour their children like the bloodthirsty Quetzalcoatl, is "that nothing threatens the achievements of revolution more dangerously and acutely than the spirit which brought them about...

...And so this time through the vast and varied poetry of Neruda I have been most pleased by poems like "Piano," "Elephant," "Horses," and 'To the Foot from its Child"-all poems which are truly about those vital, organic things and not, as in so much modern poetry, about the poet's ability to make images from things...

...but the density of anecdote and textual analysis wherewith it is fleshed out give the book its special distinction and make it the most interesting account of its material in recent criticism...

...Like the protagonist of Steps, he is a rootless foreigner who recalls a youth spent in an oppressive Eastern European environment...

...How he widened his gaze for my sake: a bag-of-bones blazing...

...It might have profited from some rewriting on the subway...

...It is necessary to cultivate the quiet art of disbelief...

...With another poet it would be an ignorant disservice to single out such an apparently simple strain in his work...

...To speak of people acting from impulse is to largely omit human intentions, motivations, and purposes from one's analysis...

...Unwilling to ponder the ambiguities, they charge the author with complicity instead...

...Ultimately we are made to contemplate not the perversity of a single individual but a world in which systematic intimidation and subversion can be accomplished neatly, tracelessly...

...Brooks's narrative manner is just as forgettable...

...These tensions, in turn, reflect "confusions of purpose" and "incoherence...

...That's a stupid problem," said Ardway...

...God, it really is warm in here, Mr...

...Now that they are both dead, the better known, from the platform of his established and deserved fame, still mourns the lesser known who is, however, rapidly becoming a recognized voice and powerful stimulus to poets in this country: in his poem "V.," Neruda writes: I mourn a dead friend like myself a good carpenter...

...By creating the reality of a coherently daffy everyday world and by letting his story naturally reach its ironic matter-of-fact ending (Brank in limbo after an aborted revolt, Auerbach Labs awarded with a "two-million-dollar follow-on contract...

...Feb...

...He mentions "injustice, inequality, exploitation" in passing so that he can go on to argue that critics of unjust societies are not "necessarily" impelled "to seek radical changes...

...There is no room in Marris' concept of human nature for critical thought, for action motivated by political or moral ends, for the possibility of collective efforts aimed at shared social goals...

...Fowlie had just published an essay on the theme of Narcissus for the surrealist magazine View...

...This is clearly a book whose author wants so much to attach metaphoric clout to his characters' actions that he can't afford to have any human beings get in the way...

...They all tell us so confidently where it's at today and where, if only they have their way, it will be tomorrow...

...Moral self-righteousness is evenly distributed throughout the political spectrum...

...His discussions of the human loss and bereavement surrounding death, the severe social disruption of slum clearance, or the destruction of traditional tribal ways of life are sensitive and convincing...

...So the book ends: "Click...

...He's less concerned with the supra-normal character or the character in supra-normal circumstances than he is with the everyday demands and offhand compromises men face...

...The interests Miller and Fowlie shared were far greater than the differences that seemed to separate them...

...What would be necessary...

...Marris' language provides a key to his assumptions...

...At the same time it exacts his services...

...Some of his more outrageous childhood memories bring to mind episodes from The Painted Bird, while his interest in photography, his endless fascination with recorded realities, reveal an affinity with the TV-worshipping hero of Being There...

...His argument hinges on a theory of human nature and on the presumed predictability of social events...

...Later, in an equally repugnant strike scene, a horde of stereotypes, including his radical Black preppy girlfriend, clear the way for the prodigal son's last test of manhood and return to the fold...

...Through occasional glimpses overseas we witness in detail how one of these failures affects a flier named Buchfarer: it kills him...

...And his "eloquence, irresistible to the quoter, is aroused by its own self-sufficient replacement of what one at first supposes it is 'about.' " Marianne Moore's poems, . . . American literature is tricky for the critic...

...More substantively, he gives us no clue as how, once narrowed and numbed by "modernization" or old fashioned sin, we can re-enact the saving story of Jesus in our lives-no "praxis" such as Friere offers, no "republic of the wards" such as Arendt advocates, let alone a contemporary "ascent of the mind to God" such as we might expect from someone for whom the centering "presence of Jesus" is so critically important...

...Their contact began in 1943...

...It is not without its flaws...

...A former operative of the "Service," Tarden continues to live the elusive, self-sufficient life of an undercover agent, shuttling between continents and electronically-fortified apartments, and devising frightful stunts with which to punish his enemies and reaffirm his own omnipotence...

...And, one might add, what a pleasure...

...I shall assume, for the sake of this review, the less obvious proposition that this default of authority, and consequent powerlessness of the people, stems not from malignant public servants, much less from defects in the inspiring mythos to which our Presidents appeal in launching foreign and domestic policy, but from our failure, thus far, to understand the differing contextual problems of imperative and massive social change, and to devise appropriate measures to facilitate such change without intolerable pain and loss of human meaning...

...The tale of revolutions and our response to them will be told in tragic terms unless the saving Jesus-story is informed by scientific intelligence and action in ways Lehmann does not attempt...

...Both that first book and his second novel, Easy and Hard Ways Out, invite comparison as well with the crazily-logical world of Catch-22, and portions of the second echo the concern with bureaucratic tyranny that marks Thomas Pynchon's fiction...

...Presence," like "humanization," remains an unpacked term...

...In articulating the inarticulate, the painfully non-verbal for comic ends, Browning approached the territory of Vallejo, our greatest poet of pain, who twists grammar, torments syntax, and racks orthography, not for effect-oh, surely not for that-but to wring something like his own misery out of a Spanish that suddenly becomes plastic in his fists whereas its greatest virtue has traditionally been its looping, linear grace...

...For all that, it seems to me an example of the "incarnational politics" Lehmann claims to offer, but does not...

...they turned with him, drawing closer-slim, vicious, robot cylinders that could not be shaken, terrifyingly fast, twin dots converging on the center of his radar screen...

...I hated the sense of an autonomous force in my body, determining what would happen to me...

...Still, this selective anthology is a wonderful introduction and if you are coming to Neruda for the first time I recommend it to you as the best...

...Marris, however, insists that he has been driven to his conclusions, his "laws" of human society and behavior, through an abstraction of some "common core" from his case studies...

...Since I cannot survive unless I can order every aspect of my existence," he says, "my mind exploits my body...

...He is thrilled to be able to manipulate others without their knowing it, but his much-cherished sense of inviolability rules out total enjoyment...

...ruda here...

...August 9, 1965) Appropriately enough, Fowlie received similar inspiration from Miller: The passages on France in the manuscripts you sent me made me weep...

...For Belitt's readings make no claim to definitiveness but some claim to being poems and these selected poems also exist in a pluralistic world -that of the poet's entire obra, because unlike Vallejo, whose poetry intensifies a single passion, Neruda develops what he called in the title of one poem "Full Powers...

...And fortunately, since both men were writers, they corresponded frequently during that time, most heavily in the 1940s...

...In 1945, Miller requested, and Fowlie accepted, that Fowlie become the godfather of Miller's and Lep-ska's first child, Valentin...

...Ardway...

...Since the first note you wrote to me, I have not ceased praying for you-because I know that is how I can serve you best...

...In failing to provide a casuistry to bring his principle-talk down to the concrete issues to which his chapters describing contemporary revolutions advert, and thus down to the earth demanding concrete strategies, he throws a burden upon the mythic dimension of our lives which it will not carry...

...Soon after, he received a letter from Miller praising the article...

...Marris stretches his conservative impulse to cover innovation, rebellion, and revolution: all are its products...

...When Schectman "went" near the end of Someone Great, I could see Grossbach's point-Schectman's need to extricate himself from his past -but I couldn't help wondering, wanting to know more about his going...

...Grossbach lets Schectman take an easy way out...

...like many of his fellows he pretends to bring a story to life while he manipulates the lifeless contents of his book...

...11, 1944) Finally, twenty years after their first meeting, Miller writes: "You are like a spiritual god-father to me...

...Trilce" itself is a significantly unintelligible word that we must sense as a hieroglyph of feeling using letters instead of pictures for its realization, like the conclusion of poem XIII: Oh honeyed scandal of twilights, Oh mute outcry, Yrctuoetum...

...Indirectly and modestly, Berger's book assays this...

...But if your sympathies are already with the aspirations that make for revolution around the post-colonial globe, and your definition of the problem is that the messianic politics of our "civil religion" wants for programs that in a revolutionary world congruently express it, then for starters in sound ethical decision-making in this area I recommend Peter L. Berger's attempt to join hard-nosed expertise and Utopian imagination in dealing with developmental problems...

...Although Easy and Hard Ways Out lacks some of the comic spontaneity of Someone Great, I think it surpasses the latter book in this regard...

...And next to Gravity's Rainbow, Easy and Hard Ways Out looks a little austere and common, like a neighborhood kid who's just grown out of his dreams and the vagaries of his dwarfed world-the el plunging down its trestle at the point it becomes the subway, the loose board under the radiator that conceals dirty pictures...

...Indeed, he was nourished by it...

...Actually, Kosinski is a fictionist of the first order whose stunning verbal snapshots of violence and terror bespeak restraint, modesty even...

...on the other, Henry Miller-anti-academic, creator rather than critic, boastfully and zestfully undisciplined, debunker of organized religion, husband and father more than once, and an Epicurean...

...And, in the same vein, if one remembers that Belitt's are not the only translations-a point he makes, alluding to the "niggardly and possessive" quality of some translators-there is so much of NeREVIEWERS janet groth is a member of the editorial staff of the New Yorker...

...I'd say more about these scenes, and others, but I'm afraid doing so might make you think they're worth reading...

...And he will make them so good a guide over this tangled terrain not only because of the extraordinary stretch of his learning but also because he commands a sprightly, civilized tongue which is incapable of that gray, dead language normally employed by academic criticism in our time...

...What glue," said Ardway...

...There are no impulses here, no innate drives linked to "laws of search for meaning grounded in the human society...

...He zinged a fast-ball smile across his lips before collapsing back into his scowl...

...I hope you won't be irritated by this...

...If we want not merely to speculate, but to change the world, then we're going to have to use our methodical heads as well as our inspired hearts as never before...

...Kinny...

...The author knows full well that the towering evils of twentieth-century history put the most fervid imagination to shame, so instead of trying to deal with such things as totalitarian terror, racial madness, technological dehumanization in a comprehensive, realist manner, he dwells on minor atrocities, casual cruelties, private aberrations, but in a way that always hints at the historical models inspiring them...

...nathan a. scott, Jr., is Shailer Mathews Professor of Theology and Literature at the University of Chicago...

...These "laws," moreover, are presumed to apply cross-culturally...

...Lines like "I seeck to hittt back right away" and verses like What do you call everything that us bristles...

...Fowlie agreed, and from then on their friendship was cemented...

...His first novel, The Painted Bird, was a series of fanciful variations on the basic themes of Nazi inhumanity...

...10, 1944) Miller was of course not at all irritated by Fowlie's effusive concern...

...Perhaps the best comment on these letters is the one made by Miller himself when reading them again prior to publication: "What an adventure...

...Towards the end of the book he relates the bizarre escapades of a pathetic lecher, and then dwells lovingly on the old man's fantasies about living in a clean, serene Swiss village...

...He plugs in the arrangement of social institutions long enough to urge that the frustrations which generate movements for change can be traced to the "reaction" of certain individuals to "underlying tensions in society...

...I myself have complained in these pages of Belitt's liberties with the text, of what still seems to me the excessively literary voice he sometimes finds for the poet, but reading this volume I have rediscovered that admiring Neruda tremendously, I can still like him-he is large enough for that-and enjoy Belitt's translations too...

...If taken as a request for a moral and realistic policy toward the underdeveloped world or the marginal in our own society, does not the "What is truth," question sound eminently plausible, the logical question of an educated, professional managerial class aware of the enormous complexity of the issues- for which, Berger reminds us, there are no simplistic ideological solutions...

...Gone Away, Brooks's first novel, records a critical period in the history of a well-to-do Connecticut family, four people high on their old farmhouse home, horses, and (off-and-on) each other...

...What glue are you talking about...

...He urged the girl to excite him just the same and tried himself to avoid having an erection which might snap the clamp...

...Instead one must ask of any social theorist's work: what gets assumed in this perspective which would be a problem to be explained in another...

...The paradigm sets the frame within which certain phenomena provide solutions to problems set by the paradigm itself...

...The world of the spirit is too vast and deep for mere honesty to be of much value...

...It is filled with cordiality, mutual trust and frank affection...

...Isn't that silly...

...On all these pages which I have read and reread, I have found that strong dedication to art-that made me love you as a writer and as a man from the first time I read you...

...In a revealing reminiscence he tells us how shocked he was to discover as a child that wounds healed by themselves, independent of his will...

...That "bag-of-bones blazing" is the Vallejo who incinerates the pages of this too pretty edition of Trilce, which tempts your eye with a mellow richness while the poetry grinds its teeth and scrapes your bones with white hot wires, a poetry that moans and howls a wretched inversion of Browning's great comic line "Gr-r-, there go, my heart's abhorrence...

...Although Marris' argument depends on the existence of a universal "impulse," he never explores the nature of an impulse...

...He condemns those who believe social problems can be solved by such physical means as tearing down slums as if slums were just dilapidated buildings rather than neighborhoods...

...Both had a passion for French literature and culture, for Paris, for esthetics, and most important, both had a deep spiritual dimension...

...Not working...

...Mostly there is a poetry of things asserting The real...

...We meet on the aesthetic, and I believe we are one also in our apprehension of the tragedy of man, even if my explanation differs from yours...

...Indeed, apart from Richard Ellmann, no one else has dug so deeply into the classic tradition of twentieth-century modernism...

...He is determined to create a theory of loss and bereavement in the hope of influencing the "way we manage social changes...

...Or, again, though Kenner rightly considers Nick Carraway, with his ponderous and overblown sententiae, to be something of a bore in Gatsby, he reminds us that the knowledge that this skeptical personage "is somewhere around, like a saturnine big brother, helps keep Fitzgerald from talking nonsense...

...While Schectman's plight dominates Someone Great, Buchfarer, however brief his appearances, becomes nearly as important as Brank in the course of Easy and Hard Ways Out...

...john druska is a writer who currently teaches high school in Indianapolis...

...ivan sanders is an associate professor of English at Suffolk County Community College in Selden, New York...

...The younger of two sons narrates a story in which "the Old Man" is featured as an aloof, suffering patriarch, battling the forces of cultural decay, chasing his older son from the house because of a car theft that led to expulsion from school, and soon after losing his wife to the attractions of self-liberation...

...Brooks wrote this book, his first novel...

...Tradition...

...The answer is, not as Marris would have it, that revolutionary analysis must convincingly promise "absolute meaning" and a quick restoration of "predictability" to human life and affairs before a majority flock to its banners...

...and couldn't help thinking of his exit as an arbitrary narrative act...

...Letters of Henry Miller and Wallace Fowlie (1943-1972) HENRY MILLER AND WALLACE FOWLIE Grove Press, $9.50 PHILLIP CORWIN The computer would never have predicted it...

...Some men take the long route and some take the short route...

...From the biblical perspective which Paul Leh-mann's new book applies to the revolutionary theme, the revolution is never finished...

...Hence, I question the presupposition of LehOur time is full of visions of the future, loudly and arrogantly proclaimed...

...We're working in the forefront of science here, and you can't find some half-assed paste...

...So he moves his characters around like counters in a landscape full of the sporting life-fox-hunts, football, polo, soccer-and in an atmosphere redolent of crisp green machismo Brooks labors to bring forth his leaden lessons of...

...Belitt acknowledges that to properly read Neruda you must read him in the whole books he wrote...

...The way it's told-some of the chapters sectioned into lettered groups like outlines, some of them punctuated with asinine inter-office memoranda, and the story framed by a couple of colossally myopic newsservice items-helps to illustrate, I think, the inherently nutty, mechanical and fatally prosaic qualities of the particular big business Grossbach satirizes...

...The name is Thesame that you put up with name name name name embody this torturing of language by a suffering sensibility expressing even sexual intercourse as a "horrible suture of pleasure...

...Still, the translators have been faithful, in their fashion, and their text carries none of the fundamental errors marring Trilce...

...You have a magnificent soul, one which is certainly loved by God...

...There's a pseudo-Salinger-Roth ploy that leads us to think the speaker might be readying himself for psychiatric care, but this turns out sounding more like a teaser, part of the act-that is, part of another ploy, which is the narrator's fantasy that all the family's adventures are episodes in a carefully-scripted TV serial...

...jean bethke elshtain is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...

...Reality, for us Westerners, the etymologists remind us, is things (Latin res meaning thing is the root of the word) and Neruda is consistently real, in this sense...

...It is necessary to act quietly and disbelievingly, out of that compassion which is the only credible motive for any actions to change the world.-Pyramids of Sacrifice mann's major effort to attack the current political crisis by means of a fundamental ideological repair job, in this case a highly erudite (and densely obscure) exploration of the revolutionary bearings of Jesus' politics...

...rather, structures of oppression exert constraints upon the life chances and choices of individuals, including the possibility for critical thought itself...

...it is chiefly in this respect that he resembles a Wallace Stevens, a William Carlos Williams, a Marianne Moore, who resemble one another in having invented new kinds of poems...

...to 'trouble-shoot, update and improve' the electronic countermeasures system on the currently grounded F24BZ fighter plane") Grossbach achieves a sense of narrative completion that his characters and stories seem to require...

...But the more I think about it the more I feel that it is important not to communicate what I think I have learned-a most tremendous truth-but to live my life in the light of it...

...No one will dispute, I think, that our country currently faces a crisis of authority-perhaps the result of an inattentive people, that as Jefferson warned, allows the magistrates (and multinational corporate managers) to become wolves...

...your Christianity allies you politically with established injustice at home and abroad, then Lehmann's re-reading of the revolutionary dimensions of what God is doing in the Jesus-story will indeed prove a therapeutic shaking of the foundations...

...and the ending, which perhaps intersects with the start of another baffling cycle of human ineptitude, makes this clear and makes us, if we assent to the book at all, take the hard and conclusive way out...

...His critique of Paolo Friere's "consciousness-raising" struck me as misplaced in view of Friere's own awareness of its dangers...

...The Transfiguration of Polities PAUL LEHMANN Harper & Row, $12.95 Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change PETER L. BERGER Basic Books, $10 DAVID S. TOOLAN "What seems to be beyond doubt and belief," Hannah Arendt has written, "is that no historian will ever be able to tell the tale of our century without stringing it 'on the thread of revolutions' . . ." It has not yet appeared what we shall be in this dramatic trial when historians come to score it, but if recent past is prologue, the record may cite us as the leading counterrevolutionary force of the century, and as betraying the passion and promise of our own revolution in the process...

...shouted Kinsella...

...Though one suspects that his standing in the stock market is not nearly so high as that of many others who are by no means his equal, Hugh Kenner is today a marvel of American criticism and one of its few great men...

...Who would have expected a long, warm friendship between these two men...

...Eighty-five millimeter he recorded distantly, and one second afterward a jagged, exploding chunk of white-hot metal tore him neatly in half, just below the waist...

...Even when he is a full-fledged participant in a physical relationship, he derives greater pleasure from knowing he is in control than from yielding to his sexual impulses...

...About all he has in common with Grossbach is his publisher...

...And, though Kenner is a systematic thinker and no mere epigrammatist, the unflagging vivaciousness of his mind makes it natural that he should specialize in the kind of jeu d'esprit with which this splendid book is constantly studded...

...Ko-sinski is unique in being disciplined about his excesses...

...In other words, I am assuming our crisis of authority is, first, linked to the aspirations of the revolutionary Third World for many of the things we have already attained, and secondly, is primarily practical, the problems of gearing our "Manifest Destiny" to the immensely complex issues of global institutional change-problems that stymie the ingenuity of planners in Washington as well as those with the most revolutionary sympathies...

...Unable to meet Air Force test specifications for the Yig filter, a small but crucial part of the new and long-delayed F24BZ war plane, the Auerbach Labs hierarchy fakes data that allow the aircraft to pass inspection and make it to the runways of Vietnam...

...Berger's book, it is true, is short on the Utopian imagination side, long on the social scientist's cautionary notes for would-be messiahs...

...Put one way, Vallejo's Spain cannot be translated into English...

...He recalls how he frightened a girlfriend in high school by making her believe he was a sexual cripple...

...If, under the gun of texts like Rom...

...Along with their work, its writers invent the criteria by which we must understand them...

...Even so apparently simple a writer as Hemingway has attracted a long critical bibliography...

...he has established an identifiable Neruda in English...

...There, several of the planes develop mysterious and lethal problems...

...It is there, Never doubt it-the power of the real to augment and enlarge us, to make our teeth chatter, still able to write on the card of our hunger an order of bread and an order of soul for the table...

...It would help if we had a translation of what Jesus might look like in gray flannel and briefcase, as policy-maker in business and government...

...His smile was my bread till we moved out of range and he hollowed a place in the ground and they hounded him into it...

...In fact, with Five Decades and Trilce in English we have the two greatest Latin American poets of their time available in volumes reprinting much of their best work...

...phillip corwin is a poet, novelist and critic who works for the United Nations...

...Their correspondence is, in a word, inspiring...

...Easy and Hard Ways Out rooms...

...FATHER DAVID S. TOOLAN, S.J., teaches religious studies at Canisius College in Buffalo...

...Jesus was not confronted by these problems, nor by the military-industrial complex...

...One title says it all: "What Can I Say Without Touching the Earth With My Hands...

...Individuals are anxious and self-interested, driven by a "deep-rooted and insistent need for continuity" which Marris terms the "conservative impulse...

...It is not, of course, in its bare essentiality, a startling argument...

...His essential thesis is set forth in his title, for he is contending that the great American modernists-Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore- were deeply committed to their own native cultural inheritance...

...He put the aircraft into a dive and yelled into the intercom...

...The oppressed simply change places with the oppressor...

...ideological purism and innocence receives a sobering de-mythologi-zation in the face of inconvenient facts, both cultural and economic...

...Brank found it...

...For more than twenty-five years, in book after book, he has regularly talked about the principal strategists of the modern movement with a most remarkable trenchancy and brilliance and wit, and thus he requires to be thought of now as simply our foremost master of the major Anglo-American insurgencies in the literature of this century...

...The glue's no good under temperature...