BOOKS
Dedek, John R & Breslin, John B & Meyers, Jeffrey & Terzian, Philip
The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers VIRGINIA SPENCER CARR Doubleday, $12.50 JOHN B. BRESLIN I recently sat through a screening of The Member of the Wedding in a Manhattan theater...
...Her . husband, Reeves, who shared her sexual ambivalence but not her acceptance of it, suffered most in these triangles...
...All of the essays are exceptionally good, but I would like to single out one for special comment...
...It is curious and unsettling to learn what torment brings forth art, that it is deliverance, not fame, that is the spur, that minds should be so consumed as to ultimately consume themselves...
...The parallels between the broader themes of the books are astonishing...
...it merely abets the politics of evil...
...During the Hitler regime they recognized their common bond as representatives of a humanist tradition that had been destroyed in Germany and as exiles who had moved from national ties through loneliness and ostracism to world citizenship...
...Despite the destruction of Europe and the collapse of Germany, both Mann and Hesse carried on their work with amazing tenacity...
...Harris seemed older than Frankie's 12 years or was it more tellingly, that the painful feelings of rejection she expressed had to be exorcised somehow...
...Hesse, who had had a nervous breakdown in 1916, claimed he was able to keep himself together through the Hitler years by concentrating on The Glass Bead Game...
...And that insight, despite the book's length, occasional repeti-tiveness and lapses into preciousness, is captured and conveyed in The Lonely Hunter...
...Physical and emotional closeness rather than sexual consummation was her constant goal in these relationships and though she eventually wore down certain friends with her constant demands, she always found others who responded sympathetically, even eagerly...
...and she confides that only her weakness and good nature forced her to give in to her son's plea for memoirs...
...One of course does not look for unity or a systematic development of thought in a book such as this...
...Harper & Row, $10 JEFFREY MEYERS When Hesse and Mann were in their late seventies, the former observed so many of their friends had passed away that they now had more intimates in the "beyond" than here below...
...But I believe that he has surfaced the basic ethical issue and has set us on the right road to an answer when he says, "My strong hunch is that to be human is to have a vocation, a calling...
...They also reveal a man of penetrating intellect, wide reading, profound faith, a natural skepticism, openness and fairness, and a finely balanced judgment...
...When she called up Mann's brother Heinrich and asked, "how are things with you two?," he replied, " 'Not good...
...She has read letters and diaries and manuscripts and done everything else a professional biographer must do...
...Hesse was a pacifist during the Great War and articulately resisted the German power-madness at a time when Mann was still engaged in his romantic-Protestant defense of counter-revolutionary Germany in Reflections of a Non-Political Man...
...I much prefer his evocation of New York in the twenties-surely a lost world if ever there was one-the offhand remarks of a knowledgeable stranger...
...Also a bibliography of Gustafson's writings between 1951 and 1973 has been compiled by the Reverend Ms...
...Though Mann is a much greater writer, Hesse's strange mixture of Jungian psychology and Indian mysticism has now become very fashionable and has made him a much more popular and influential writer than his colleague and rival...
...Carson McCullers' novels and stories are discussed in their appropriate chronological order, but the critical intelligence at work is more interested in the biographical sources of the themes than in the distinctly literary qualities of the fiction...
...that it is to become what we now are not...
...Sir Osbert was, of course, the victim of the usual pitfalls attendant to a successful writing career, and it is a delight to read about some of the impositions, not the least being those stateside literary luncheons, author surrounded by solicitous ladies and gentlemen-in Malcolm Muggeridge's phrase, "wherever two or more sometime visitors to the Edinburgh Festival are gather together...
...Even though Virginia Carr faithfully sketches in all the warts, her mammoth portrait is clearly a labor of love...
...Carson was born there and never really left...
...Gustafson has not fully answered his own question...
...Theology and Christian Ethics JAMES M. GUSTAFSON Pilgrim Press, $8.95 JOHN F. DEDEK James Gustafson is one of the ablest theologians of our time...
...The unifying theme of their correspondence is the "coincidence of opposites" between Mann, the urban cosmopolite from north Germany who wrote ironic epics and Hesse, the rural recluse from south Germany who composed confessional lyrics...
...But even in his discussion of these issues his careful methodolgy is illustrated...
...I used to find that a saddening entry, not only for what it conveyed of an old and lonely man, but because Sitwell must have realized-if he ever did listen to his voice-that it was the sound of a dying age he had outlived, filling his ears...
...but after the war he came to believe "nothing that is alive can sidestep politics...
...Unwritten Memories KATIA MANN Knopf, $7.95 The Hesse/Mann Letters ANNI CARLSSON & VOLKER MICHELS, EDS...
...The emotion was reciprocated, but after a while Diamond realized he was being torn apart between the two of them...
...Was it simply that Ms...
...The sickly, crippled woman with the little girl's face was also the "iron butterfly...
...And when Mann died in 1955, Hesse praised his irony, sense of play and integrity and wrote to Mann's widow, Kati, "without you our faithful friend could not have lived so wonderfully rich, courageous and great a life...
...At one point in the narrative Virginia Carr quotes Robert Walden, a Southern friend and host of Carson's: "If she wanted to please you, she would suddenly decide 'I'm going to be charming,' and charming she was-like a princess...
...This is the century of the common man, or the common literary man, the age of neurosis, and that fact is abundantly brought home...
...Since everything changes so quickly nowadays, it is no surprise that a few of the moral issues of the late 1960s no longer appear so urgent to us today...
...Queen Mary and Others OSBERT SITWELL John Day, $6.95 Closing Times DAN DAVIN Oxford, $12.95 PHILIP TERZIAN For his Who's Who biography, the late Sir Osbert Sit well used to mention "listening to the sound of his own voice" as his favorite form of recreation...
...She satirizes the pomposity of the King of Sweden during the Nobel ceremonies...
...But the disparate essays are organized in a coherent way...
...It seems to me that chapter twelve, "What is the Normatively Human...
...This collection of posthumous essays is an admirable and fitting adieu to the English literary world of the last century and the first half of the twentieth, a world into which he was comfortably born, flourished and, alas, survived, plodding along-undoubtedly recoiling-into our own...
...We find them retreating helplessly into the flophouses of modern culture-PEN conventions, the BBC-drying out, bemoaning the poems unwritten or the stories unread-racing against cancer or the weight of failure to cross the line into-into what...
...Hesse's novel arrived when Mann was composing Doctor Faustus, and Mann "was almost alarmed at the kinship with the task I had elected: the same idea of fictional biography, the same connection with music...
...There are three main sections in the book: 1) "Perspectives on Theological Ethics" which considers problems about the discipline of theological ethics, 2) "Some Substantive Issues" which considers problems within the discipline of theological ethics, and 3) "Ethics and the Sciences" which considers the relation of theological ethics to other disciplines...
...In 1937 Mann praised Hesse's early-won spiritual freedom and absolute philosophical detachment...
...pokes fun at Bruno Walter's objections to Mann's portrayal of the demonic element in music...
...We can not turn away, nor can we, as Davin admits, begin to understand what is before us...
...An empirical and statistical study of man as he actually is and behaves cannot disclose fully the normatively human, because man as an individual and a race is continually changing and developing...
...Everyone is for the human and against the inhuman, and everyone assumes that he understands what everyone else is saying...
...After several threats and abortive attempts, he finally committed suicide...
...That, I believe, is exactly right...
...The irony in the fate of Dylan Thomas," says Davin, "no compensation for its tragedy, was that security came only after he was in the safety of the vault...
...Mann, who had achieved instant fame with Buddenbrooks in 1900 (a motorcade of tony trucks were needed to deliver the cheap edition of the novel to Berlin bookstores), generously helped Hesse with American publishers, recommended him for the Nobel Prize (Mann won it in 1929, Hesse in 1946) and encouraged him to finish his major novel: "even in this difficult instance the old habit of form-giving and embodiment, the social drive toward realization and communication will surely win out...
...Also, a criticism of culture and our era...
...It was Frankie Adams, too, who expressed most directly the formula for happiness that Carson McCullers sought all her life and only rarely found- "the we of me...
...She has tracked down just about every person who ever met Carson McCullers and got them to speak not only about her but about themselves...
...Still, the book is indispensable for anyone who has been gripped by Carson McCullers' writing...
...She paid the price for that allegiance in mental anguish, but she extracted from her pain an insight into the tortuous ways of the human heart that has spoken eloquently for many less articulate sufferers...
...If we are going to use this language in ethics a number of questions have to be clarified...
...and that Mann preferred to base his works on reality rather than on imagination...
...His father, the supreme eccentric Sir George Sitwell, is mentioned only in passing, and the controversies into which Sir Osbert and his sister and brother threw themselves with such passion are missing altogether, as though their vindication made any reflection unnecessary...
...The fourteen chapters cover diverse questions such as the importance and limitations of involvement and disinterestedness in making moral decisions, moral education, the proper role or vocation of the theologian, moral discernment in die Christian life, the place of scripture in Christian ethics, the relationship between the spiritual life and the moral life, the relevance of the historical context to a moral issue, the relationship between the empirical sciences and Christian ethics, and basic ethical issues in the biomedical field...
...As a critical biography this suffers from an excess of anecdote and shortage of analysis...
...This, then, is the dark side of the literary moon, a key perhaps to why Osbert Sitwell preferred the jaundiced and leisurely pace he set for himself...
...that apart from a telos, a vision of what man can and ought to do, we will founder and decay...
...Davin's writers are exiles from the leisurely give-and-take of Georgian drawing rooms and high-minded discourse...
...For as Teilhard de Char-din reminded us, in the card game of evolution we are no longer just the cards and the stakes...
...Today nearly everyone is talking about the "humanizing" and the "dehumanizing" and what makes and keeps human life human...
...Another piece, "What It Feels Like to be An Author," is hilarious...
...The bizarre minor characters in The Magic Mountain were the actual people she had described in her letters to Mann from a Swiss sanitorium...
...and when they first' arrived in Venice in 1910 they "really did see the graying dandy, an aging man who was all spruced up and obviously wearing make-up, surrounded by young people...
...That treatise was published in 1918, the year Hesse left his country for Switzerland...
...Then again, they have been treated elsewhere, and this book is an after-hours rumination...
...S. Anita Stauffer and is appended to the book...
...The title essay is the longest, although not in my estimation the best...
...My wife just died,' That's the way he was-very strange...
...and there was affection and mutual respect as well as close intellectual sympathy between the friends, and interest in each other's complaints of ill health and artistic progress...
...They are, for that matter, largely exiled from the fever of contemporary life, sensitive and yet insensitive (or oblivious) to the practical realm in which we, and Davin, so assuredly circulate...
...that it calls for a surpassing of what we are...
...Therefore finding what is truly and fully human is an ongoing process of discovery...
...In fact, I think she may have done too much collecting...
...The exceptionally beautiful and sophisticated Katia was clearly unimpressed by the great ones who came her way...
...For Frankie it meant being part of her brother's marriage, from the honeymoon on...
...Swezey also has written an excellent seventeen-page introduction which gives us a fine summary of some of the basic ingredients in Gustafson's ethical thought...
...This lasted only briefly and Reeves turned back to the army, the only place where he felt he could be his own man...
...In her charming and chatty, amusing and anecdotal Unwritten Memories, the practical and common-sensical Katia Mann, who justly compares herself to Leonore in Fidelio, conveys with Wilhelmine propriety the public image of her husband...
...and Hesse returned the compliment in The Glass Bead Game when he affectionately portrayed his friend as the magister ludi, Thomas von der Trave, whose work "was irreproachable in plan and construction...
...She wrote and lived in a whirlwind of keenly felt emotions: love and jealousy, rage and submission, tenderness and hostility...
...The ethical norm, Gus-tafson argues, is not identified with the descriptive norm...
...Whatever the explanation, the reaction typifies the risks Carson McCullers took in her fiction-and, according to her biographer, in her life as well...
...The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers VIRGINIA SPENCER CARR Doubleday, $12.50 JOHN B. BRESLIN I recently sat through a screening of The Member of the Wedding in a Manhattan theater and was surprised at how much laughter Julie Harris provoked with her impassioned interpretation of Frankie Adams' anguish...
...is the most important in the book...
...Left Hand, Right Hand...
...Tennessee Williams, her cousin Jordan Massee, Dame Edith Sitwell, her sister Rita Smith, John Huston and especially in her final years, her psychiatrist and constant companion Mary Mercer -all of these provided her with the "we of me" she so desperately needed...
...His consideration of the 1970 U.S...
...His writings have made a significant contribution to ethical clarity...
...In the meantime Charles M. Swezey again has collected some of Gustafson's essays to make up the present volume...
...He is one of the truly wise men of our age...
...And what is the relation between the empirical and descriptive elements and the ethically normative elements in the concept of the human...
...In 1932, as Mann naively claimed "the worst is over-I think the madness seems to have passed its peak," Hesse expressed his profound distrust of the German Republic and of the intellectual bankruptcy of the universities, and stated that the revolutionaries had been murdered (as the Jew were to be) with the approval of 99 percent of the population...
...She also continued to fall in love-with women especially but not exclusively...
...The fourteen essays which form Theology and Christian Ethics were written between 1968 and 1972...
...Katia remained, for more than ninety years, the only member of the Mann family who did not write...
...She moved secretly from place to place during World War II for fear of bombing or kidnapping and Sitwell was frequently on hand to amuse at luncheon...
...For instance, what do we value about human life...
...After the war he and Carson remarried, but life in the shadow of a celebrated writer was too deeply painful for a man who had himself ambitioned becoming a writer...
...relates best what Osbert Sitwell had to say and there are, in this book, only faint echoes of the voices and trumpets that heralded his career...
...He retained, furthermore, an element of detachment, a quality so important to a memoirist and so often missing elsewhere...
...Davin's circle of acquaintances is (or was-everyone in the book is now dead) extensive, and this perceptive series reflects not only on his own admirable character, but serves as a tragic, perhaps unintentionally revealing mirror of the lives of some of the bright lights of contemporary literature: Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice, Enid Starkie, Joyce Cary, among others...
...It would be interesting to see how Gustafson would put together the profound insights found in his disparate essays and reviews and in particular how he would put together the Lutheran and Calvinistic streams in his own ethical thought...
...The formal and dignified Mann-Hesse letters, a somewhat self-conscious reflection of the Goethe-Schiller epistles, lack the tension and dramatic conflicts of the Freud-Jung correspondence...
...Shortly after the success of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the McCullers met and simultaneously fell in love with the composer David Diamond...
...Her characters inhabit a land that most of us have visited, however briefly, but few would have the strength or the will to settle in for long...
...This is a world far removed from the stately homes and Italian villas of an Osbert Sitwell...
...Fifteen years ago the word human was seldom used in moral discourse...
...It is rather ironic that their fortunes are now reversed...
...and Reeves McCullers spoke volumes when he replied to a query about his wife's condition with a long pause and then an explosive "Indestructible...
...But after 1933, when Mann went into voluntary exile and found temporary refuge in his friend's Swiss home, he became increasingly radical and intensely involved in political controversy while Hesse swore to defend himself to the death against being drawn into politics...
...A key also to why Davin has so vividly titled his book, how the empty glasses, the dust and wrappers, the entrails of daily life are swept away each night by the disembodied spirit of Art, calmly awaiting the next day's business...
...Closing Times is in vivid contrast to Osbert Sitwell, a short volume of literary reminiscences by the New Zealand-born novelist and publisher, Dan Davin...
...The Christian world still awaits his development of a systematic ethics...
...For her creator it meant a series of three-way relationships that often proved intolerable...
...It is not for nothing that the book is named for the hours of pubs...
...Davin was not always there at critical moments, standing over shoulders or editing copy, and he says so, but he heard and saw frequently enough to draw the threads together and eulogize with authority...
...Davin's watchful eye captures the unfolding drama of his friends as they could not hope to see it...
...finds the one-sided genius of Einstein quite ordinary in everyday life...
...Mann alluded to Hesse's Steppenwolf in The Young Joseph, a volume of the Jewish epic that he wrote during the Nazi era...
...But she was still a bitch...
...Not for him the raucous promotion, the canned interviews and media blitz of the model of a modern major author, but the measured, seductive tremolo of a man of letters...
...Through it all, Carson McCullers continued to write despite a series of severe strokes that made every movement a torture...
...In a more serious vein, Katia relates that "The Blood of the Wal-sungs" was suppressed by her father, who objected to the satiric portrayal of his Jewish family...
...Even a refusal of politics is political...
...and says that Alma Mahler, who "always drank far too many sweet liqueurs and was'rather malicious by nature," was too much for Gustav's nervous system and was partly responsible for his premature death...
...His softer, more sentimental, more self-sufficient, more romantic and more playful...
...That ambivalence, symbolized also by the bisexuality that permeated her fiction and her life, accounted for the different images individuals took away from their encounters with her...
...For each found in the other a responsive and understanding reader...
...Queen Mary, the great dreadnought of twentieth century royalty, is treated with deference and awe, but the circumstances surrounding her portrait are faintly comic...
...The line between the sublime and the ridiculous was always threatening to disappear...
...invasion of Cambodia, for instance, serves as an apt illustration of how the scriptures, are to be used-and not used-in critical ethical thinking...
...When Carson and Reeves split up, Reeves moved in with Diamond...
...Mine probably more pointed, sharper, searing, more dramatic, more topical and direct...
...Davin is what every writer needs: a steady, reliable, guileless friend, happy to extend his sympathetic arm in the midst of delirium tremens, faltering careers, or whatever...
...It is a small work, a few odds and ends that Harold Acton in his foreword says Sitwell was too infirm to polish, a supplement to the bulk of his writing...
...we are now the players...
Vol. 102 • October 1975 • No. 16
