BOOKS

...He is able to show with ease how Williams fitted in with his generation, how he responded to the great political issues of the times, and how he matured both emotionally and poetically...

...TeSelle's ability to communicate what she has to say about the way language works in a.manner which a "layman" can understand...

...Who, after all is to say what it means to be an American...

...For we are still laboring under the rationalistic prejudice that gives primacy to abstract thought, in the belief that the more abstract our discourse, the truer it is bound to be...

...Surely the didactic mode is not foreign to Biblical litera-ture, and its directness, while no sub-itute for the concreteness of the parable, is perhaps a necessary complement for a mode of utterance which, precisely because of its concreteness, must ever remain ambiguous...

...One must also praise the beauty of Ms...

...Calisher feels that a novella is a novella, and not a long short story: "A story is an apocalypse, served in a very small cup," she writes in her useful and autobiographical Introduction...

...Then there is the intellectual dimension to Whittemore's book...

...She writes'with understanding of the persons who have "a homing instinct for the vitiated, the in-between," and of the persons who live alone and who come to feel "that only one's own consciousness held up the world, and at the very same time, that only an in to the world, or a recognition from it, made one continue to exist at all...

...Books Speaking in Parables A Study in Metaphor and Theology SALLIE McFAGUE TeSELLE Fortress Press, $4.25 (Paper) SCHUYLER BROWN The close interrelation between revelation and proclamation makes the use of religious language one of the major problems of theology...

...When he talks of the influence Wil-liams has had on succeeding generations specifically on people such as Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Robert Creeley one has the feeling that it was only modesty that prevented Whittemore from including his own name in that list...

...The truth is he was a kind of closet beatnik, a family man who was an orphan to classical European traditions...

...This still leaves many stories to praise...

...Given that definition, a novella is no demi-tasse...

...Ultimately one must praise Ms...

...The task of revitalizing the language of faith usually concerns itself with the "relevance" of traditional concepts...

...Though Williams' heart was in the right place when he wrote the Stecher trilogy (some of his short stories are far better than the novels), his pen was not...

...Others, such as "D Ploer Da Mo Koeur," are beautifully constructed but slighter...

...So Many Rings to the Show" on the trials of a loving heart...

...a symbolic story of pent-up passion and human loneliness...

...There are frequent, and always relevant, references to Ezra Pound, Robert McAlmon, H.D., Ford Madox Ford, and Louis Zukofsky...

...Either way, perhaps her publisher will someday be sufficiently canny to package The Collected Novellas of Hortense Calisher...

...If asked to list favorites, I'd cite the following ten as her best: "In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks" a beautifully-realized tale of loneliness...

...The entire "Hester" group comprising about a third of the book seems less significant than the adult stories in die first and last sections...

...Coles' reading of the fictional trilogy is akin to trying to make Emily Dickinson into a masterful critic of nineteenth century American capitalism...

...If theology were to be truly par" abolic in language, belief, and life, what would it be like...

...the train creaked through the soft, heat-promising morning like an elderly, ambulatory sofa...

...Coles' book originally a series of lecture given at Rutgers, Wiiliums' fiction...

...And so it goes...

...the regret of "a life spent among values despised...

...But as a writer, Williams' reputation will deservedly rest in his poetry...

...It is impossible to overpraise the psychological acumen which the author brings to each story...

...A pair of descriptions each for people and places demonstrates Calisher's linguistic care: "her long hands lay in one's own like a length of suet just out of the icebox and her upper teeth preceded her smile...

...I had to watch him carry my world off with him, the fool, to the enemy...

...In short, there is a personal dimension to Whittemore's book that continually enhances the plethora of fact that any biographer can assemble...

...The Hollow Boy" in which an ignorant family attempts to keep their son ignorant as well...

...As the new henneneutic insists, we do not interpret the parable...

...rather, that he realizes he is part of a literary landscape that is the way it is because of writers like Williams...

...Whittemore is particularly eloquent in talking about Williams' attitudes toward marriage and writing, and in depicting Williams as a kind of bourgeois rebel, a man who would have liked to reject society completely, but remained a professional man and a solid middle-class citizen right to the end...

...the narcissism of the analysand...

...As long as the theologian remains conscious of the derivative character of his discipline, can he not make use of that degree of abstraction which is proper to "the science of faith...

...Today, at a time when the application of linguistic analysis to Biblical literature makes the conventionally trained exegete feel quite inadequate, I feel a deep gratitude for Prof...

...I am also less fond of her fantasies man her realistic tales...

...There is also the expected esthetic dimension to Whittemore's book...

...Rather, the parable interprets us...

...She understands "the animal' self-possession of the very handsome...

...But concepts are really only "dead metaphors," whereas metaphorical language, in which the objective and subjective aspects have not yet been split apart, is the mode of discourse which best mirrors the unity of body and soul in man...

...Coles sees Williams as an outstanding social critic in his fiction: He is a novelist who has a sharp eye for that intersection of the private and the public which determines the moral character of human beings: how they combine their obligations to the demands of the world with their sense of what they want for themselves and those they call their own...

...Jesus gives us the "exegesis" of God, and it is no accident that his favorite form of instruction is the parable...

...The result is contusing and pretentious...

...This is a very good biography...

...Let us hope she continues her dedication to the shorter form in the years to come...

...The parable, as an "extended metaphor," uses the secular, everyday language of human experience, but it cracks the surface realism in order to give us a glimpse of something lying beyond it As though through a screen or grid, we see something new and extraordinary which is not the direct object of affirmation at all...

...Williams opposed poetically, was T.S...

...I think not...

...But, as Prof...

...Nevertheless, in story after story, Hortense Calisher displays a sensibility full of grace, compassion, and insight...

...the frustration of those doomed always to exist on the fringe of things...

...Not since Elizabeth Bowen has such gorgeous prose been employed to spin a tale (and Bowen, like Calisher, seems to have studied the figures in Henry James's carpet...

...The fourth evangelist declares expressly, "No one has ever seen God...

...It was that perilously soft hour of all great cities in the spring, when the evening rises to a sound like the tearing of silk and it is better not to be alone, to have some plan...

...Probably Ms...

...Richard Wilbur once remarked that at times Williams' poems seemed like notes to a text outside his poetry...

...For though we may know that...

...First of all, there is the emotional dimension to his book...

...Life Along the Passaic River, * and a trilogy of novels about an immigrant family, the Stechers, and their rise to wealth...

...another is called The Great American Novel...

...others I know hung in there until the seemingly endless novel The New Yorkers...

...There, he was an original...

...Her most persistent theme is failure...

...That task may have its rewards...

...If Whittemore identifies with the poet in Williams, Robert Coles identi-' fies with the medical man who dealt with children, sympathized with the poor, and was at heart a writer...

...Williams' best writing was in his poetry, although he also produced criticism, historical essays, novels, short stories, and reams of correspondence...

...When, at the beginning of Chapter 2, Whittemore recounts a visit to Flossie, Williams' widow, it is as though the reader is also present...

...It is the vehicle of insight, an insight that leads to action...

...Old Stock" about anti-seraitism...

...Amazingly, Whittemore is able to bring to life a wide range of Williams' own emotions: his elan'ons, depressions, quackeries, generosities, struggles, guilts his anguishings as well as his triumphs...

...the one story which should have been omitted altogether, "Heartburn," is a Roald Dahl-like nick which entertains but does not enlighten...

...as good as the Collected Stories is, it may forgivably fall short of the dust-jacket's description as "a signal event for the language and the short-story form...

...But as a whole, Whittemore's book stands up with distinction...

...At the same time, Williams at his weakest approached incoherence...

...The landscape of her stories is more often than not a psychescape of the protagonist...

...and those two famous stories, "In the Absence of Angels" and "The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street" both concerning human responsibility and irresponsibility...

...Williams drew from his personal experiences as a pediatrician, father, husband, lover but he was not limited by them...

...For example, in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, God is never mentioned, and yet in what appears on the surface to be a worldly, sensuous story of human life, we have a profound statement about the mercy of our heavenly Father...

...the only Son, who is in the bosom of Father, he has made him known (exegesato)" (Jn 1:18...

...Unfortunately, traditional theology has all too often forgotten that "beliefs come from believing...

...the ruses practiced by those "preserved in the amber of the status quo...

...The locality which in fact gave Williams fruit, as he says, was the town of Rutherford, New Jersey...

...the tide of one of His books is In The American Grain...

...The scene is dramatic, warm and evocative...

...If and when he does, the blurb-writer for the jacket should be cautioned to be a trifle less effusive...

...Would it be itself a parable...

...TeSelle convincingly demonstrates, the problem goes far beyond this...

...The collection is formidable in length as well as skill: S02 tall pages long, it contains thirty-six stories, all those she wishes to preserve...

...Of all the things to praise, plot is not one...

...Presumably they would have made the present book too large...

...True enough...

...For "good poets of whatever religious persuasion are a source for learning the way metaphor works to create insight...

...Not that Whittemore shows any direct debt to the good doctor...

...This is because in her fiction incident is subordinate to insight...

...and believing is generated m experience" (Richard R. Niebuhr...

...But perhaps the best explanation is that Williams was a kind of Gestaltist who thought in terms of the whole reality, and tried through his poems to bring back pieces of that reality, leaving the connection between them to the reader...

...No ideas but in things," he advises in Paterson), and a constant search for form...

...When he discusses particular poems of Williams', or Williams' concept of the variable foot (which was actually a variable line), he is absolutely first-rate in his appraisals and insights...

...It does not, alas, contain her novellas 'Tale for the Mirror," "Extreme Magic," "The Railway Police," and The Last Trolley Ride...

...What The Collected Stories makes dear is that Hortense Calisher not only is best at writing short stories, she is one of the best...

...God is, we cannot directly know what he is...

...The stories of adolescence, for instance, seem /less successful than those of the adult world, perhaps because she allows sentiment to shift into sentimentality, an emotion which totally underpins at least one tale, "A Wreath for Miss Totten...

...The Night Club in the Woods"' concerning the distances which grow between loved ones...

...Calisher's language...

...His best poems, meanwhile, are short ones, those that sustain a particular emotion, rather than those that are burdened with a narrative structure...

...Furthermore, it might have been helpful to make clear that the experience that lies at die root of religious utterance can be of two kinds: the personal experience which leads to a generalized idea of the holy, and the experience of God in the history of a people or community which results in the disclosure of a concrete God...

...It was not...

...Eliot...

...Williams was concerned with being an American, particularly in that he was an anti-traditionalist and that the traditions he opposed were .European...

...nor was Frost, raised in San Francisco and a life-long resident of New England...

...Randall Jarrell has said of Williams' poetry that his metrical demands were minimal, and his ideals of organization mosaic...

...A return to the experiential roots of faith is necessary if theology is to recover its evocative power, and for this the study of contemporary poetic language can be most helpful, even when the poets in question are non-Christians...

...Is it impossible for theology to recapture some-tiling of the immediacy of parabolic language and still remain theology...

...TeSelle, have something to do, perhaps, with this distinction between personal and historical revelation...

...Calisher does all things equally well...

...The Collected Stories combines the short work from all three of her previous collections, plus a story new to book form...

...Unfortunately, Coles' book reads like that of a psychiatrist doing a socio-political study of fiction written by a poet...

...Also true...

...The trouble is that the exegesis is unnecessary what happens in Williams' fiction is generally painstakingly clear while Coles' inferences are highly suspect namely, that Williams as a social critic can be compared with novelists such as Dreiser and Dos Passos...

...For Christians the unknown God is known only through the life and death of his Son, Jesus Christ, who thus becomes the "parable of God...

...Does the distinction between the poem and the story, both of which are analyzed so ably by Prof...

...Speaking of The Waste Land, Williams once said: I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years, and I'm sure it did...

...Night Riders of North-ville" an extraordinary study of in-corrigibility...

...Williams was always "one of us," to borrow Conrad's phrase, at the same time that he was always his own man...

...Williams' trilogy of novels (White Mule, In the Money, and The Build-Up) is regrettably little more than crude proletarian naturalism with a Horatio Alger ending: European immigrants (husband Joe from Silesia and wife Gurlie from Norway) who work hard, and live tough, eventually succeeded...

...TeSelle's familiarity with contemporary literature is profound, and she has a true instinct for distinguishing those authors who maintain the concrete indirection of metaphorical language from those who lapse into allegation or self-absorption...

...that is the message, hardly an original one, and not even necessarily true...

...And it is in his poetry that one feels his personality: a vibrant energy, a tensile strength, an almost cranky romanticism, a love for concretion as opposed to abstraction ("Say it...

...One of her singular abilities is to link or relate the individual defeats of her protagonists to the defeat of traditional social and moral values in the world at large, a world which has either progressed or regressed to the point of ignoring or defeating former standards of behavior or excellence...

...of love, of marriage, of communication, of identity...

...Williams of course contributed to this myth by continually emphasizing his Americanness...

...There are times when the connections between images and ideas in his poetry are obscure, and the collage of the poem becomes an unrelated collection of objects, a body of limbs and nerve endings without a central nervous system, a Beautiful Thing (Williams' phrase) that is more Thing than Beauty...

...Is it not perhaps something of an exag-geration to assert: "The only legitimate way of speaking of the incursion of the divine into history, or so it appears to this (Judaic-Christian) tradition, is metaphorically...

...Bat bis durability was that of an artist, not that of a mere American, alhough he was certainly an American product...

...For here the primacy of the metaphor arises not only from the nature of man, but also from the nature of God, as he is understood in the Judeo-Christian tradition...

...In fact, Whittemore is such a sympathetic observer that his writing is actually most exciting when he is talking about the things in Williams' life that excited Williams most, and he is at his lowest ebb when he is describing Williams' least creative endeavors...

...The good doctor is constantly characterized as a uniquely American poet, as though his uniqueness were a national trait...

...Reed Whittemore's biography of Williams is a pleasure to read, an inspirational rendering of an inspired life...

...In places his poetry is kinesthetic, borrowing from both painting and music, almost as though he were mixing the senses in order to maximize their appeal, in opposition to the intellect...

...the "malpractices of the rich and worn...

...But whatever his approach, Williams was a magician, and an innovator...

...She writes of the urban and the suburban, the adult and the adolescent, the male and die female, the historical past and the hysterical present...

...Nor was Pound, who spent most of his adult life in Europe...

...It also prints for the first time as a group the highly autobiographical "Hester" stories which, taken together, form nearly a novella in themselves...

...it is, therefore, neither an embellishment of language nor a primitive form to be superseded by conceptual language, but the method of human thought'* This general observation takes on particular significance when applied to the language of faith...

...Critically, Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt that we were on the point of an escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself rooted In the locality which should give it fruit...

...While her range is great, this is not to say Ms...

...it breathes...

...TeSelle is not less tantalizing in her suggestions as to how the return to the parable might affect the theologian...

...They become wealthy, even though they lose some soul to materialistic America in doing so...

...Possibly...

...she looked the way a tired, pretty woman, of a certain age and responsibilities, might look at tile hour before dinner, at the moment when age and prettiness tussle for her face, and age momentarily has won...

...Perhaps...

...The pure products of America go crazy" he writes in one of his poems...

...Coles' book is about Williams' fiction, which included a volume of short stories...

...The Collected Stories should regain readers for the author, readers who have found it difficult to keep the faith after experiencing her recent novels.' (This reviewer found it difficult to praise Calisher from the advent of Journey frotn Ellipsis, that novel-length work of speculative fiction...

...Metaphor is the language of 'a body that thinks...

...Prof...

...The Collected Stories of Bortense Colisker Arbor House, $15 ROBERT PHILLIPS The title of one of Hortense Calisher's earlier collections, Extreme Magic, is an apt description of her legerdemain with the short story genre...

...Calisher's range...

...the shiny readiness" with which we cover the segregation of Self...

...The parable is not an illustration of some timeless truth that can be learned in some other way...

...The Rabbi's Daughter" on the death of impulse...

...At best, Coles' book will force a rereading of Williams' fiction...

...Fascinated as I am by this book and by its implications for the renewal of theological language, I only regret mat Prof...

...Her story lines often are fragile, if not non-existent...

...Whittemore in his book suggests that Williams adapted to his own use Picasso's technique of assassinating objects and then re-creating them...

...And Williams' affection, which at times approached obsession, for local experience, has unfortunately led to a misreading of his achievements on the part of many of his admirers...

...Moreover, no amount of textual explication can overlook the fact that Williams' fiction is deadly to read...

...Was Eliot, self-exiled, who declared in Little Gidding that "History is now and England'' any less of an American than Williams...

...The reason why the parable is such an effective mode of religious instruction is that the insight that it conveys is altogether concrete...

...Finally, Whittemore's book is valuable for its little side discussions, such as the story of how Williams was ignominiously done out of assuming the post of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1952-3 (a post, . incidentally that Whittemore himself held in 1964-5), due to a McCarthyite smear campaign that mistakenly made Williams out to be a Communist...

...What a Thing, to Keep a Wolf in a Cage...