Two Novels
PARSONS, ALICE BEAL
Two Novels Review by ALICE BEAL PARSONS put OFF THY SHOES. By E. L. Voynick. MacmUlam, New York, m pages 13 00 ISTERIM. By R. C. HuUkmto,,. Farra, and Rin*kart, New York. 186 pay*,. yiM[ AT the...
...The book opens in 1763 with young Henry Telford, an undistinguished country squire, being groomed by Beatrice's friend, lady Merriam, to meet and marry her, thereby rescuing her in the approved fashion of that and most other centuries from an intolerable situation...
...They complete each other's personalities and develop habits of increasing, and unconscious, dependence...
...Perhaps it is a matter of the speech her characters use...
...R. P. M. Negro Pioneers •eview by MARGARET I WILiY THEY SEEK A CITY...
...We have had beaten upon our consciences the whole catalogue of our Individual and collective sins until a ",V7«a eulpa" has been wrung from us...
...dedicate themselves to fulfilling the mission of those who "died in the faith...
...The reader feels that having lived through this much of American Negro history, he has a sounder basis for his faith in the possibility of human brotherhood...
...The heroine, Beatrice Rivers, is one ef the most interesting feminine portraits in fiction...
...Laying down her book, I ask myself why I began this review by assigning ft to the lesser category of popular novels, since it hss so many major qualities...
...The subtle parallels that are drawn between the Nazi propaganda line and that of Negrophobea in America is sobering...
...You can see the man has energy— apparently that is not enough...
...His heart nearly breaks when he first learns that all his inventions have been made before, and that his lack of education had prevented his knowing this...
...Sufficient meditation upon the title and Its context in the Epistle to he Hebrews might lead both whites snd Negroes to...
...Meantime he fills his house full of refugees, chance acquaintances and friends, who all admire Bernard as a saint and alt sympathize with him for having a wife mean enough to prevent his returning to China by being sick...
...There are obviously great temptations to sentimentality in such a plot, and Maxwell has not always resisted them...
...Maxwell possesses more of these qualities, to be sure, than most of our younger novelists...
...Perhaps the one flaw is her failure to mold her material to convey some governing idea, that there is nothing in particular to hold the many pieces on the chess-board together, except the fact that they belonged to or came within the orbit of one family...
...Those last things, tha last pleasures, the secret dreams— what are we waiting for...
...Peshaps if she bed used a greater sdltctlvenesa ? But the few shelves necessary to contain the world's geat novels refute this pallid notion...
...Its failure lies in more important qualities: an inadequacy of spirit, intelligence and understanding...
...Perhaps then we must deny her true inipoi tarce because sentence by sentence her book doesn't make literature...
...The grandson of a coal miner and son of a gentleman's gentleman, Bernard was educated by the gentleman to be a doctor, merited the gentleman's beautiful daughter and took her off to be a missionary doctor's wife in China...
...Voynich belongs on the popular shelf, and she'll stay there a very long time...
...It is precisely because he intends much more and occasionally comes much nearer maturity of writing that his deficiencies are so apparent and so disappointing...
...82.50...
...Somehow this book escapes the patchwork character of most volumes produced in collaboration...
...If you like popular novels—and looking over the current New York Timet bestseller tally, 1 find that sixteen *t the nineteen listed definitely belong to that category, while the Steinbeck, Lillian Smith and Glen way Westcott works will probably also be so adjudged in a decade or so—this book is definitely tops...
...Xbert hi uniformity In the narrative, and the whole builds to a powerful though unobtrusive conclusion...
...The boys themselves sre individualized, sometimes very movingly, but even about them we know very little...
...Most of the recent literature in this field has made white readers acutely conscious of the danger zones in Negro-white relations...
...The boys' mothers, Spud's living and I.ymie's dead, are simplified and idealized suggestions of real women...
...310 pages...
...This seems to me a puerile, ill-natured story which smacks of some real marital disagreement in which Hutchinson took the side of the husband...
...Maxwell seems to have decided, on as arbitrary a basis, not to write about books...
...Hutchinson, of course, should be taken very much more seriously...
...One of the more heartening stories is of three white Bailors in Detroit who beat off a gsng of hoodlums attacking a Negro...
...Comina Home is the story of a Marine who comes back from Guadalcanal to find that the ward boss of his district in Pittsburgh has raped his girl...
...Mostly they poured...
...Whatever the reason, Mrs...
...The Marine beats up the politico, and is jailed...
...Didn't Hugh Walpole say of him that he "shows a genius for creation of character that no novelist in England has equalled since < om ad'' ? Didn't William Lyon Phelp* ssy "he has greater gifts, more ideas, mora ability and more profound knowledge) of human nature than any other novelist now living...
...Now he thought, why not...
...Life waa going...
...The great body of regional literature in which America proclaimed her self-consciousness has curiously by-passed an important source of material...
...By Lester Cohen...
...Harper and Bros., 1945...
...Once started it is impossible to lay down...
...The story concerns the troubled school-friendship of Spud Latham, muscular snd violent, and Lymie Peters, thin, reserved and bookish...
...Since as a novelist he is compelled sccaaionally to comment and digress, he does so in too restrained end summery a manner, so that comment and digression, without exploration and qualification, lake the lone of moralizing...
...The programs and activities of leaders like Frederick Douglass and Marcus Garvey are explained in detail, and one can draw his own conclusions ss to their relstive value...
...Yet each talks in his or her own character, and that is an achievement beyond the reach of most writers...
...The prejudice of some historians snd the indifference of others nave been responsible for -this omission, line wonders what blows might not have been struck for racial tolerance if the roles of white man and of black man in settling and shaping the continent bad been described together...
...When asked why they didn't mind their own business, one of tha sailors replied: "That's just what we're doing, punk...
...The submerged, for example...
...Each comes from a home that is physically unstable and emotionally incomplete, and the result is a retardation of their psychological growth at Ihe pre-adolescent, homosexual level...
...His wife is sick and he has promised her not to return without her...
...He polishes every sentence to the lsst degree, uses all the newest tricks of style snd invents some new ones, knows the up-to-the-minute fashionable way for young intellectuals to talk, knows Bond Street and Savile Row, and in addition to all these accomplishments, goes In for mystical experiences and celebrates a saint...
...Voynich is not afraid of fha melodrama of real life, and the brilliant character portrayal, but for the contact with a vigorous, original mind, ||rs.*Voynich has something interesting to show or to tell about every human phenomenon she brings under her lense...
...But let Cohen speak for himself...
...The rest of the book is the often dreary account of his righteous, uphill struggle against the graft snd corruption of some of the political and industrial bosses of the city...
...It is said to be a rule at The New Yorker, where Maxwell is an editor, not to accept stories about writers...
...Few chroniclers of the development of the country have taken any note of the part played by Negro migrations from Revolutionary days to World War II...
...We're doing this for a colored boy in our outfit that saved a couple of while lives over in the Pacific...
...He lost his own while he waa doing it...
...After a lifetime spent jointly doctoring and nursing cholera-stricken peasants in one lost little village after another, the war brought them home, s rich relative of the wife's loaned them a house in the lake country, and the book begins with Bernsrd chafing at the bit in his desire to get bsck to China...
...If you want to forget everything for two or three days, start this book...
...Til ? autobiographical novel of adolescence is„ In a sense, a substitute for confession, reflecting as it does tbA need for retelling, understanding and* catharsis...
...xv}J + 266 page...
...When they both fall in love with the same girl, the conventional triangle situation is complicated enormously by the fact that they have not yet emerged from a state of Jove for each other, I.ymie's nearly successful attempt at suicide is the act of sacrifice which explodes the emotional barriers and opens the way to a new le.el of mature ptltonality development...
...Voynich's novel...
...With the'exception of the Cornishmen, on whose dialect she has lavished great pains, they speak with the locutions of today rather than those of 1763...
...Many times ha had thought of it, what would it be like...
...This bit is from the rape scene.: One thing he was not, a rapist...
...not having received the promises...
...The excursions Into the boys' family backgrounds seem almost Irrelevant dramatically, but Ihey provide the basis for psychoanalytic Insights...
...Back From War COMING HOME...
...In the rough Cornish fisherman, Penwryne, a link with the Gadfly story, she portrays a mathematical genius, condemned to obscurity and impotence by poverty, yet constantly straining to produce ingenious, truly remarkable inventions...
...Now this book comes to supply exactly what was needed—en objective and carefully documented account of Negroes who pioneered both geographically and spiritually In America...
...He has yielded too easily lo The New Yorker technique of concentrating on small external details of behsvior...
...This, of course, is a mean test, even if the correct one, all too apt to drive young contenders to precious high jinks and self-conscious mannerisms to cheVt the dust...
...They all assume that her sickness is self-induced, snd when the symptoms of approaching death are unmistakable, think it only natural that her neurotically assumed illness should become the real thing in a few months...
...I78 pages...
...Novel of Adolescence Review by HATHAN GLICH THE FOLDED LEAF...
...Graced with many gifts, Beatrice's life is warped out of its course by the sexusl shock suffered when her drunken stepfather tries to rape her...
...By Arna Bon-tempt and Jack Conroy...
...He had never raped anyone before...
...The book has a thesis, to be sure, but It Is not allowed to overshadow the moving story being told...
...Or, at any rate, he evidently thinks his hero, Bernsrd Quindle, is a saint...
...2.75...
...It is an unpleasant skeleton inside the fashionable literary costume which diverts us with gems of writing like' the following: "An Australian corporal sat bolt upright like one on horseback, snd as if to point the anchylosis of his face the squat couple who shared his pew had faces like butter soaking into toast...
...The intention of William Maxwell is in this tradition of purification through realistic self-exposure, of achieving psychological superiority by means of an unabashed revelation of Inferiorities...
...His primary qualification as a writer, I believe, is the energy with which he infuses his work...
...Voynich has done...
...Shakespeare molded his material into a King Lear, a Macbeth, a Hamlet...
...Arna Bon temps and Jack Conroy out of a wealth of historical material, carefully gathered, write an outstanding and hitherto neglected chapter in the saga of America...
...In fact, none of the secondary characters is caught in the round...
...yiM[ AT the sure of eighty-one the extraordinary woman whose flnt novel The Gadfly published in 1897, wss an International bestseller for years, shows In this new "· book the same deep comprehension of the human heart that made people read and re-read the early books, and a greatly increased narrative skill...
...But no, this apparently isn't the answer, because in the equally great historical plays Shakespeare gives us merely slices of experience, as Mrs...
...By William MAXWELL...
...What might have evaporated in feckless goodwill is now bolstered by a dispassionate account of the migrations of Negro "exoduslers" from the South, the varied attitudes of white communities in the North, East and West, the influences of Negro churches and newspaper, housing and labor difficulties, and infrequently the achievement of peace and under standing...
...The Viking Press, AVm i'm iV...
...The Folded Leaf is admirable for an economic language snd a strictness of observation rare in this genre...
...LesTER COHEN has turned out several books, one of which, Sweepings, was quite successful...
...This tendency to narrow the scope of the novel and simplify its characters and its language reflects, in part, a war culture and the concomitant distractions militating against breadth, thoughtfulness snd depth...
...We know, for example, that Lymie is bookish, but we do not know ' the name of a single book he has read in the last year of high school or the first year of college, a period when books hsve the most violent impact...
...Doubleday Dorun and Co...
...The editorial effect is emphasized by Maxwell's manner of analyzing a situation before the situation itself has been given...
...How much selcctiveness did Henry Fielding, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Dickens use...
...You read not only for the story, always exciting because Mrs...
...What Henry and his more distinguished wife make together of their life together ia the country affords the substance of Mrs...
...When it is honest and intense, as in Thomas Wolfe or in some of the stories of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, or, more recently, in Jean Stafford's Boston Adventure, it serves the same function, symbolically, for the reader...
...12.76...
...They selected in a way, of course, as every skilled writer does, but not in a finicky, precious fashion...
Vol. 28 • September 1945 • No. 37
