Books and Writers
CASTELAR, PAUL
Books and Writers Mumblings of a Drunk By PAUL CASTELAR THE LOST WEEKEND. By Chariot Jackton. Farrar and Rinehart. |2.50, IT has often been my unpleasant duty to play the Devil's Advocate to • t...
...Divided into three books...
...There is the same base of folk-lore and hardy, realistic knowledge of the terrain which made Broad and Alien It the World th* -solidly grounded regional work that it **¦: but her* th* anthropology, the aongs, the feasts are for their own sake and not for that of a larger deaign...
...But since I am ¦e party te that process, I have occasionally endeavored to make the painful truth even more painful, like a dentist who refuses the novocains and then insists on showing the bloody tooth to his victim...
...Yet Our Daily Bread, animated by a compulsive vision of the doorr inherent In nature, does not quite make that evaluation acceptable, as Hardy did, although in different, because moral, terms...
...What runs through a drunk's mind, what motivates his erratic deeds, the terror he feels at the obliterated actions which he cannot retrace, these make fine copy...
...I am afraid that Mr...
...Nor does Eusebio recognise thst the very ground on which he stands is being washed away by the river...
...Because of sn unconscious oversimplification of the implications in the conflict between man and an unfriednly physical environment, as well si because of the confused writing that frequently grows out of this involvement, Our Daily Bread is, on the whole, sn unsuccessful novel...
...As a matter of fact, hia imagery is so inventive, so brilliant, so intimately related to the hectic, unhealthy lushness of the jungle itself, that frequently th* complexity of sensation and detail breaks down into a jumbled, somewhat rococco neo-primitivism, stylistically reminiscent of the most disorganised elements of French Symbolism...
...T»« episcdic chapter* *hift in empha»i* from one to the other of the river folk, from the brother* Rogelio and Arturo, *ho are the beit ferrymen, to the young •ogineer from Lima who comes to conVM the uncharted and rich river land* only to be sucked into the general doom *bich inhere* in the country—'dying, ironically, by a serpent's bite—a serpent perhaps the very prototype of the Golden Serpent of which the river hsd reminded him and which he planned to make the name of his mining company...
...But Eusebio does not recognize the' death surrounding him nor his own death...
...that famous city which is known to us for two reasons: it's there they change the government ind it's there they have th* biggest jail...
...248 popes...
...King Coal By ItOlf IIT TOWNSf NO...
...The tight silence of mouths that have only a small register of grief...
...The Planter!, The Incloture, Men Without Detiiny, the italicized expository paragraph prefacing each book sets up the central issues involved therein...
...There is some horror but it is fragmentary, not cumulative, and in the end chronic alcoholism seems rather charming and pleasant, despite the screaming-meemies which come on the morning after...
...MEN AW COAL...
...It is every man's right to turn out pot-boilerp or even sosp operas, especially in a world where landlords and butchers are so perversely unsympathetic to th* arts...
...Men and Coal traces the history of the Mine Workers Union from its origin to the present...
...Farrar and Rinehart, Sew York...
...But in spite of that, it has its own rich compassion anc' insight, although keyed in simpler terms...
...The story of John Siney, founder of the mine workers, of John Mitchell, spiritual guide and articulate leader of the miners, of Alex Howat, John Brophy, Powers Hapgood and Oscar Ameringer —and the roles they played—is told compactly, and gives one the feeling of living through the- fights within th* UMW, especially the effort* by Brophy and Hapgood to unseat Lewis in the hectic twenties...
...Not a corner however remote and dangerous would escape their search...
...The commentary ia clear "For t!u moment they h*d passed « by...
...and that it has hsd a strong effect on South American literature is clearly demoV strsted in the work of the Ecuadorian novelist, Enrique Gil Gilbert, whose Our Daily Bread is its most recent descend-ent...
...it Oni...
...Nevertheless, Gil Gilbert, who is only thirty-one, displays an extraordinary, virtuosolike resourcefulness with language...
...Farrar and Rhinehart, New York, i I (Mi JhJIAN V years ago Jpton Sinclair wrota a story of the mining communities under the name Ring Coal...
...It is, in reality, "the eternal flgh...
...Only momentarily does the out-aide world impinge and threaten the life of th* community and that i* at the end of the book when the brutal cattle-buyer, Bon Policarpio Nine*, drives down the herd of wild cattie from the other side of the river bank...
...The element which is lacking, however, in "The Golden Serpent (first published n Chile in 1935 although published here as his second book) is the deeply felt and intellectually established Marxist analysis of the patterns of decay in a primitive communal economy which provides the dynamics for the later book...
...But it is not in the announced order that these problems actually interest the author...
...I do not like to pound my arguments to a pulp, but it is more than a little fair to sum up Don Birnham and The Lott Weekend as Robert Montgomery via Partiean Review...
...But when something appears a* pungently unfsithful to the tenets of creative expression ss The Lott Week end, th* time ha* com* to cry havoc and let Ice** the adjectives...
...Perhaps certain touches of observation which ring true even to the most amateur drinker sent them running to the thesaurus for enthusiastic adjectives...
...Jackson has touched on all this, but he has made his analysis vague and synthetic...
...The jungle eventually triumphs over everything, the tenants, and the landlords, the conquered , snd the conqueror, "the lovers and the losers...
...2.00...
...Th* Lott Weekend of Mr...
...for the people renew themselves, just like the Maranon, and there will be little choloe gro ing up to take their fathers' place on the eel river-rafts...
...Implicit in his story of the Maranon River in Peru are the materials and method of Alegria's more ambitious "Broad and Alien Is the World...
...So inevitable is the progress of this contest that the structure of the novel becomes rigidly schematised in precisely the terms of that conflict...
...By Giro Alegria...
...And even death, when seen in terms of the river's endurance, seems trivial...
...Jackson, for all his admitted skill at painting pictures and evoking moods, is usually superficial, often banal...
...Perhaps this carefree gentry serves a function in the necessary process of effecting a transfer of legal tender from the pockets of the so-called reading public to those of the publishing trade...
...That is not to say that it is not an interesting novel, nor that it does not I indicate rich sources of talent and imagination which, it is to be hoped, Senor Gil Gilbert's American sponsors will continue to make available to us...
...By McAlitter CeU-wtan...
...And in that lie* its merit, for the important United Mine Workers union can be understood less through the flamboyant and quixotic actions of John L. Lewis, than by understanding the clannish and suipicioui temperament of the minen in their close-knit community...
...Probably all they needed was a good drink...
...Perhaps the memory of an old hangover haunted the critics who shivered In their bathrobes as they read The Lott Weekend...
...Book II, The Eneloture, dramatizes on another level his secondary concern: the conflict between violence and order...
...Book I, The Plantert, deals with the efforts of a heterogeneous group of dispossessed natives to establish a rice plantation "on the banks of the Guayas River in the hot coastal regions of Ecuador . . . they could not escape the problems of money, nor the eternal fight against nature, nor the fact that their land had been rented from the wiley Captain Hermogenes Sandoval...
...Here the victory is of the violent (as represented by the guerilla Captain Sandoval) over the status quo (as symbolized by the obese, pro-government landowner, Don Bartolome Mosquera...
...Seen in the perspective of Broad and Alien, The Golden Serpent is slight, suggestive and pictorial rather than a powerful, dramatic and originally related narrative...
...Though the characters were stilted and the plot quite unbelievable, Sinclair conveyed the authentic fee) of the grimy and drab mine town*, choked with soot and coal dust McAlister Coleman tell* a story that has been oft-told, but a* John Chamberlain write* in a blurb, it i* * book "with real human juices" about the mine worker* and their union history...
...The South American Folk ly VIVIfNNf KOCH OUR DAILY BREAD...
...THE GOLDEN SERPENT...
...It I* not a defense of John L. Lewis, dictator of th* UMW, but an understanding of th* miners who follow John L. in the economic field, but refuse to support him in his political ambitions...
...It is a picture of a labor movement as a living organism...
...2.50, IT has often been my unpleasant duty to play the Devil's Advocate to • t book which has won the uncritical praise of our most enthusiastic uncritical praiaers, the Sunday reviewers and the professional granters of opinion...
...Th* weekend adventures of Don Birn-ham, his leading and only character, might have made very interesting reading...
...By Enrique G. t. Gilbert, Utin-American Prize Sovel Contett...
...2.60...
...against nature" that Gil Gilbert understands best and handles most brilliantly...
...Unlike Ciro Alegria, Senor Gil Gilbert seems more intensely sbsorbed in the implacable and unceasing conflict between man and nature...
...As for the choloe, that hardy, Isughter-loving, hospitable people who are so closely in harmony with nature that they "chatter away like the river snd the trees" (unlike the silent, uplsnd people), who work, make love and get drunk with a rhythm thj>t is dependent on the whims of the central fact in their live*—th* river, they care as little for the outside world (of which Lima is the emblem) as does nature herself: "Lima...
...Charles Jackson is the esse history of a drunk, but no ordinary one—a lush who has sent the world from Cannes to Canarsie, with a background running from Donne to Krafft-Ebing, truly a dready rum pot...
...He has used neither exterior action or exterior exposition, but used as his medium the reverie, and interminable reverie it is...
...And yet so central, almost obsessive, is Senor Gil Gilbert's preoccupation with the antagonism, not to say dualism, of man and nature that after having allowed Captain Sandoval a brief period of domain over the country and the people, we find his son, Eusebio, educated as a lawyer, returning to the land, drawn by some malevolent need to identify with it, and in so doing, to subdue it and the people who work it...
...Thus in Book III, significantly titled Men Without Dtltiny, nature, destructive and corrupting, sweeps before it into a common destiny of negation both the senile Captain, Eusebio himself, and aNn the inferior mountaineers from the interior whom the latter has brought down to work the new machinery and who cannot adjust to the "custom* or the weather of the biasing coastsl lands...
...Case histories sre no new device in writing, but to be worth their thermon-eters as literary effort, they must be as incisive as they are clinical...
...That is why the rum, "which on other occasions became talk or crying or laughter or song, now in the presence of a corpse, became silence...
...ENRIQUE GIL GILBERT, whose novel has won honorable mention in the Latin American Prite Novel contest, is deeply concerned with regional problems...
...For in "The Golden Serpent" it is only nature who is the enen implacable, challenging and yet unable to down the stoical, brave-hearted choloe who say "we «tay because we are men aad we have to live on the terms life offers.'' For these half-breed* of the Maranon Valley, depending on the river for their subsistence as small farmers of yucca, coca and corn, or as the boatmen and ferrymen of its treacherous waters, live under th* conviction that "Nature is Fate...
...Trantlated from the Spanith by Harriet Farrar and Rinehart, New York, 246 paget...
...The outstanding contribution of the book, however, is not its use by labor scholars, labor leaders, or journalists, but its appeal to the layman, the rank-and-fller snd the outsider, a book written in a human way, unencumbered by statistics, that combine* meaning and warmth...
...THE GOLDEN SERPENT" bears a seminal relationship to Giro Alegria's 1 recent "Broad and Alien Is the World" similar to that which Joyce » "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" bears to "Ulysses...
...But essentially The Golden Serpent is I genre piece, a sunny, genie!, loosely strung snd anecdotal portrait of a aimple and charming people...
Vol. 27 • March 1944 • No. 10
