BOOKS:

...In Thieves of Fire, adapted from the series of lectures offered in 1972, Professor Donoghue discusses what he calls the Promethean imagination, present in Milton, Blake, Melville, and D.H...

...the Promethean writers gave him, or saw themselves as giving him, consciousness...

...Yet the battle ends in compromise, and the youth revolution seems at present incapable of toppling a world whose credos include, "Everybody's available to everybody...

...In a few strokes we are given whole personalities...

...One excellence of the novel is Stern's fine eye...

...All of which is to say that the first sentence of this review is a lie...

...Confidently taking the elevator up to her room and poised outside the door, I overheard what sounded like a mild domestic disagreement over their plans for the evening...

...MARK TAYLOR...

...Another virtue is Stern's incisive characterization...

...Left with nothing except time to explore the motiveless malignity, the narrator discovers in the young criminal's language evidence of a terrifying isolation brought about by the failure of language itself...

...Helpless to win a senseless war in Asia, they too thought they could gain control of a situation simply by dropping bombs and by killing people...

...In each case-and this is the central point of the analogy-the gift has been stolen and "cannot release itself from its origin in violence, risk, and guilt...

...Lawrence-writers who "refuse to accept that in practice the limits of the language determine the possibilities of their feeling" and who share, with each other and with the god Prometheus, "a sense of the risk of experience, and a determination to maintain such a life by force of will...

...In Hollywood's history Stern sees the country's history...

...At the border of satisfying his infatuation with one of Breasley's young "gels," the journalist, Miller, withdraws, choosing instead the "technical innocence" of faithfulness to his wife, just as he opts for the technical superiority of abstraction in his taste for art...

...The male characters tend to be immersed in crises of history, occupying periods of transition between older forms (of faith, science, art, physical skill) and some new dispensation that always threatens to render them obsolete, a mere relic of someone else's collection...

...The Ebony Tower JOHN FOWLES Little, Brown $7.95 JAN B. GORDON Two years ago while in midtown Manhattan to deliver a paper at a professional conference, I casually noticed that one of the attendants at the conference was a woman with whom, years previously, I had shared dreams, disappointments, and insofar as it is ever possible, my self over a prolonged period...

...Breasley, like Yeats before him, is more a believer in fundaments than fundamentals and regards abstraction as the ultimate betrayal of the flesh...

...In Stern's world, "the desire to exercise power over another man or woman" is the final and unkindest cut of all...

...Since their inauguration by W.H...

...The effect of the theft is that we are enabled to differentiate ourselves from nature, much to our advantage, but the advantage is acquired at the price of guilt and division...

...To those sufficiently insensitive to the power of the word, language, represented by the soon-to-be reconstructed manuscript, is a peculiar form of private property...

...Fugue-like in structure, these stories rework the same basic melody at a constantly varied scale so that innovation frequently wears the mask of translation...

...In such a tense atmosphere human values are more totally disregarded than before: "An airplane crash is what jeopardizes a deal and death is what hurts the price of the stock...

...In short, a world which buys and sells what should only be taught or given...

...In a plot reversal from Death in Venice, the love object himself is killed rather than his male pursuer...

...Karol's murder is symbolic of the destruction of good music, good conduct -of all beauty...

...What none of his characters can ever tolerate for long is unconditional solitude...

...Men are...

...No one interested in literature should neglect this book...

...Stern's Tadzio-figure, an Hungarian boy-child with the sexually ambiguous name of Karol, is himself doomed...

...In his "Personal Note" to The Ebony Tower, Fowles mentions that the working title for the volume was to have been Variations...

...His interrogator is puzzled over the living arrangements at the villa at Coetminais--two young, attractive aesthetic groupies who tend but apparently, occasionally make love to an aging painter whose flesh has long since lost the sinuous delicacy of his line...

...There is such a scene in The Day of the Locust, in Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, and, I suppose, in every other thinking-man's Hollywood novel...

...It probably will be hawked as another "Hollywood novel," since Stern has here objectified his own brief but involved experience in the film industry...

...but it too is a campaign waged out of season...

...His intruder is a young vulgar-Marxist robber who believes that the disappearance of all private property is a prelude to the necessary revolution...

...Death as well as youth, haunts this novel...

...Final Cut DANIEL STERN Viking, $8.95 ROBERT PHILLIPS Daniel Stern's eighth novel is also one of his best, more realistic than his last two poetic "novels of the future" (to borrow Anais Nin's description), and a big book as solidly rooted in today as was his After the War...

...But prior to making off, the young hoodlum commits his bespectacled victim's manuscript to the fireplace...

...For, like Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the novel is concerned with the unforgivable sin...

...It's only a question of when and how long you can wait...

...the receiver is incriminated in the donor's crime...

...Eliduc," the second story in this collection, is actually a rendering of one of the twelfth century Lais of Marie de France...

...On the other hand, I wish the novelist had resisted the temptation to include the now near-obligatory scene of the prop warehouse, that Sargasso of the American imagination containing, in Stern's words, "the accumulated dreck of a whole world...

...One thinks of Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Mailer's An American Dream, Styron's Set This House on Fire, Oates's Expensive People, and there the list seems to end...

...The charm in his work stems from the fact that his retreating souls who turn back, unlike the rest of us, are neither overly sentimental nor cop-outs...

...Like Mann's Aschenbach of Death in Venice (a work Stern invokes here in many ways, including a subplot on the making of a film supposedly based upon a story of Lawrence's, but literally paralleling Mann's), Stern's Ezra attempts classically to triumph over the forces of formlessness and decomposition...

...a ball of fearful amiability, with anxiety just under the surface of every remark, every gesture...

...Not only is it corrupt and immoral as the Watergate morass...

...Vaunting a gentlemanly demeanor in the manner of the best British criminals, he abhors violence, confining himself to silverware, crockery, and cliche...

...The identity of Stern's murderer is concealed until the end, as in all good whodunits, but the moral issues posited throughout the novel make it more than a "mere" murder mystery...

...John Fowles' characters in The Ebony Tower are, more often than not, intellectuals who feel the necessity of invoking distance in order to preserve mystery against the pressure of preferences, property, and jealousy...

...and, "Be paranoid...

...John Fowles' The Ebony Tower is a collection composed of similar episodes, common to most lives, that involve "visitations" to fantasy...

...And the threat to free will, at least for the sufferers in his novels, results from the sudden experience of life as an art form over which they exercise neither choice nor sensitivity, but only act out being-as-appearance...

...Some characters deliberately are larger than life, especially Kleinholz, a Nixon figure who even, yes, bugs himself...

...Eliot Memorial Lectures, given each fall at the University of Kent in Canterbury, have been the occasion of an impressive array of critical statements, delivered by a number of our most distinguished literary scholars and critics...

...Fowles' novels and stories by now have easily recognizable characteristics...

...Relationships in his work tend to be triangulated so that at least one member is always in the position of betraying or being betrayed...

...Stern's is the post-TV Hollywood, where any one picture can break a studio's back...

...Now married and living a half-continent away, she had continued to barter holiday greetings for one of my equally periodic offprints...

...The two men quickly become immersed in an argument over the relative importance of abstraction and realism...

...Daniel Stern successfully investigates his large themes, and ultimately manages to make us feel that we are indeed all part of one chain, all responsible for our individual actions...

...almost as guilty as the thief...

...These parallels are subtly handled...

...Because they are invariably regressive, his fiction often has a faintly ritual quality: removed in time and space, like the French Lieutenant's Woman or, in the case of these stories, making use of medieval settings common to the "idyll" or the matiere de Bretagne...

...It is also a world where bestsellers are prefabricated and knighthoods acquired through publicity...

...And, my fantasy violated, I withdrew, immersed within the symbolism of descent, to glance over my tedious paper on deceptive ventriloquy in late nineteenth century narrators...

...I also wish I were more prepared for Ezra's somewhat sudden shift from a round character to a flattened one, from a man of confidence to one whose apparent specialty is compromise, one who begins to enjoy the illusions of power and manipulation...

...He contrasts many visual and Lawrencian symbols of the natural world (rabbits and snakes and the ocean) with the metallic glitter of Hollywood and Rome...

...It is this incompleteness over which the promise is a sort of bridge...

...His new novel is a convincing portrait of a world ruined by indifference and power...

...Hence the reader is quickly thrust into an appreciation of the aesthetics of genre...

...Are they all just one more translation-or projection...

...Which suggests another element of uniqueness: Final Cut is one of the few serious American novels in which a murder figures centrally...

...Auden in 1967, the T.S...

...Fortunately, Stern's warehouse serves as symbolic backdrop for the book's single most compelling human drama, and therefore the familiar is propitiated...

...In Final Cut Stern has produced a moral fable, a tale of the conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian...

...Language is no longer merely evidence of social access, but is itself a vehicle of that access...

...But the ivory tower where every rite du passage concluded, usually by entering into a covenant with some oracle, has now become The Ebony Tower: the promise has been compromised from its original derivation meaning "to place before" (pro-mettre) because of the crisis of history...

...But he has accomplished far more...

...kingpins like Kleinholz are like all three of our last Presidents...

...And like Death in Venice, Stern's novel dances variations on the Platonic themes of love, beauty of form, and moral goodness: While all three themes are important to the book's meaning, it is the latter which is especially salient: Stern, as many before him, employs Hollywood as a microcosm of the American dream gone wrong, of the debasement of art in favor of commerce...

...Were John Fowles to write a cultural history of the world, it might well be an account of civilization's promises and what prompted them...

...His Hollywood is not that of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, a book set in a time when at least the ruthlessness was profitable...

...It is as if the process of knowing were itself a kind of violation...

...Max is "all plump desperation to please...

...Partially as a defense, I imagined my self as an inspector, searching for emotional leaks in the institution of marriage and confident of my ability to spot any hemorrhage in her ideas of fulfillment...

...Becker "gave the impression of a man who had pasted himself together from various parts he assumed were desirable...

...Hence the abundance of detached types in Fowles' fiction: the journalist, the detective, the "new" Darwinian scientist who always go so far only to turn back...

...Given such values, it is natural that the youth-directed counterworld exert its dissension, and part of the novel is devoted to the struggle between the old order and the new chaos...

...IN BRIEF Thieves of Fire, by Denis Donoghue, Oxford, $6.95...

...how do our fictions commence and perhaps secondarily, what is the nature of the interface between the various fictions: art, history, fantasy, family life...

...There is invariably a contrived incompleteness, such as the one in "The Enigma" in which a respected, if boring MP arranges his own disappearance and a novelist manquee either solves the mystery, commits a crime, or writes her first successful novel, depending upon your perspective...

...Prometheus gave man fire...

...Poor Koko," my favorite in this collection, is about a writer who, having retreated to a friend's country house in order to complete a long dormant manuscript on Thomas Love Peacock, wakes to discover that his residence has become a literal "Nightmare Abbey...

...Lurking beneath these tales is a medieval Celtic countryside where the myths of courtly love and feudal defense agreements insured that the private and public modes of defense were one...

...Instead of Mann's aging writer destroyed by the Beautiful in its catastrophic ambivalence, we have the murder of Stern's young actor, the Beautiful itself...

...Professor Donoghue's readings of the four writers are uniformly brilliant, but the implications of his argument for an understanding of the creative act go beyond them...

...His fiction seems to explore most often that process by which the extremely private individual becomes socialized, hence his fascination with folklore and the rituals of initiation, conversion, and renewal...

...He also uses his pen like the camera eye: at one point the movie mogul Kleinholz is described as having "raised his hands high, becoming in that strange position a kind of sun-baked icon...

...Since there is no longer a discernible succession of before and after, our promises as well as our sins are merely another facet of the conditional...

...It's only natural...

...Of course this is merely another way of talking about promises-those we make to ourselves which fall under the rubric of conscience and those external contracts that enable us to be social beings...

...The title story of The Ebony Tower details the visit of a young journalist to the Normandy estate of a bawdy, expatriate painter named Henry Breas-ley who has consented to a rare interview...

...there was nothing casual in my awareness of her presence as there seldom is when one stalks the past-for the very reason that as part of my past she had always been with me...

...A transfer student had recently brought me her good wishes and, vowing to see her again, I constructed a fantasy about our necessarily menage a trots reunion...