Living With Books

...Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox, reviewed by Reinhold Niebuhr...

...We are specially concerned with Charles, who is her favorite son, and we follow his headlong pursuit of death through a staggering series of accidents, diseases, vices and crimes...

...but, on the whole, I am disappointed by it...

...If the book reaches the people who need it, it may do a lot of good...

...The idea that it uses to explore the Negro problem is first-rate: A white man, for no good reason, turns black...

...What matters is the way he stands the test...

...Coming Soon John Dos Passos's The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson, reviewed by Allan Nevins...

...the style is mannered, and the more or less Joycean puns grow tiresome...

...They go together like that, plump heavy-muscled Harry with his head-on belly, lean nimble money with its joyful voyaging into hands...

...There's crinkly money in such a place," Gold writes of Prospect Avenue...

...George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin comes to an old-fashioned climax with the development of color-consciousness in the mind of his protagonist, but the larger and better part of his book is a picture of boyhood in a primitive, self-contained community...

...Judged in literary terms, however, its faults are pretty serious: The realism and the fantasy don't go together very well...

...Three novels about Negroes have appeared in recent weeks, one by a Negro and the other two by whites...

...James Baldwin writes from inside the Negro world in Go Tell It on the Mountain, and wastes no energy in the expression of moral indignation...

...Lillian Taylor, a light Negro, so resents the blackness of her husband that she ruins his life and hers and the lives of their children...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Three New Novels About Negroes Which Transcend the Old Formulas Negro novelists are less concerned than they once were with what is commonly called the Negro problem--i.e., the problem of white discrimination and injustice...

...The effect is to immerse the reader in the garish world of Harry Bowers...

...They have found that the Negro has not only the problems that grow out of his being a Negro but also the problems that grow out of his being human, and in dealing with these they have increased our understanding and enriched our literature...

...Dwight Macdonald's The Root Is Man, reviewed by Thomas I. Cook...

...The younger Negro writers have discovered, as some of them have said, that they must be writers first and Negroes only incidentally...

...Albert Camus's The Rebel, reviewed by Milton Hindus...

...And, in the end, his kingdom is brought low and he with it...

...In all these relationships, Harry is shown to advantage, and yet each of them exposes a flaw in his character...

...And Gold makes us feel them as few novelists, white or black, have succeeded in doing...

...but, for reasons that are never quite clear to him, he decides to play the game straight...

...If we need to be reminded of the injustices and humiliations to which Negroes are subjected in our society, The Prospect Before Us does the job, and does it all the more effectively for its gentle air of objectivity...

...Toward the bullying Gil Leary, Harry is at first politely and then outspokenly contemptuous...

...Perhaps, indeed, her obsession with color is a symptom rather than a cause...

...Everyone likes Harry because he sincerely loves himself, and money does not come first with him: first Harry, then the dollar...

...The real theme, in short, is the devastating impact of a neurotic woman on the persons associated with her, and the causes of her neuroses are of secondary importance...

...The petty prejudices of the Green Glade's guests, the ranting and greed of Gil Leary, President of the Prospect Avenue Businessmen's Association, the abusive anonymous letters to Claire Farren--these things are American civilization at its most degraded...

...No one can doubt Roskolenko's passion for justice, and there is more wisdom in the book than immediately meets the eye...

...And then an organization interested in the rights of the Negro decides to make a test in the Green Glade Hotel, and sends a young woman, Claire Farren, to take a room there...

...and, if he can't, his reasons for thinking well of himself are gone...

...Bowers is perfectly aware of what is going on, and he knows the tricks by which hotel proprietors deal with such awkward situations...

...There is, first of all, a rather disreputable character named Jake, who wants to be loved and, especially, to be loved by Harry Bowers--not, of course, in homosexual terms...

...The quality of our civilization is constantly being tested by the existence of a sizable minority of people who are different in a conspicuous way from the majority...

...He is a man who knows on what terms he wants to live his life and is willing to pay the price for doing so...

...Their experience is necessarily influenced by the color of their skin, but they can make infinitely more of it once they have abandoned the rigid, cramping attitudes of protest...

...Gold's The Prospect Before Us, on the other hand, is a novel that is really "written," and it makes me eager to read his first book, Birth of a Hero, which I missed...

...By such touches as that he gives us Harry and builds an original and moving novel...

...There's an honest dollar for Harry...

...One of the important elements in Gold's success is his mastery of a colloquial style...

...That his principles are tested by way of the Negro problem is an accident, though perhaps no other test could so well define his elements of greatness...

...This is all to the good, not because the Negro problem is unimportant but because there is so much else that is worth writing about...

...Toward the end, when the novel should be most impressive, it is merely sensational, and one lays it down with annoyance...

...But they are not what the book is about...

...The man is James Oggen, fifty-odd, successful, conventional, prejudiced...

...The book is about the triumph-in-failure of Harry Bowers, and in order to make us feel that, in all its truly tragic implications, Gold must arouse in us a sense of Harry's greatness...

...He works for it, don't he...

...Unfortunately, however, the novel is serious only in intent, not in execution...

...the deeper meaning of the book is blurred by the bizarre ending...

...With Claire Farren, on the other hand, through his sensitiveness and his capacity for love, he achieves complete understanding...

...But in other aspects the situation is anything but simple, and it is these other aspects that our novelists, both Negro and white, have taken to exploring...

...The other white man, Herbert Gold, uses the Negro problem as his point of departure in The Prospect Before Us (World, $3.50), but goes far beyond it in a subtle and meaningful study of human relationships...

...The same sense of obligation, with a more obvious motivation, dominates Harry's relations with his incompetent brother Morris, whom he has kept afloat for many years...

...Richard Wright, in The Outsider, is even more explicitly philosophical, using the Negro problem as an approach to the human problem...

...The dialogue is so perfect that it seems artless, and, when it serves his purpose, he uses the same style in his narrative...

...Ernest Jones's The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis...

...Of course he can't...

...The Prospect Before Us is the story of Harry Bowers, an immigrant who has prospered in a world that lies just within the boundaries of respectability...

...In any case, the reader is interested in Charles as a human being, not as a Negro...

...Roskolenko has invited us to put ourselves, quite literally, in the Negro's place, and there could not be a more effective way of dramatizing the sufferings that are caused by prejudice and discrimination...

...The writing is usually undistinguished and sometimes slovenly, and the characters come alive only in occasional episodes...

...On the surface, he is not a prepossessing character: middle-aged and fat, with a kind of professional cheeriness and a stock of corny jokes, with a quick eye for a fast buck and the showy manners of a good spender...

...Even as he commits arson, we see him as a good man--the most difficult kind of character to create in fiction--and, at the end, goodness and love and destruction go hand in hand...

...It's piece-meal money, warm, sweaty, perfumed by pockets and love...

...But he is arrested and charged with raping a white woman, and things are going badly with him until his wife, who has had a change of heart, testifies on his behalf...

...The sense of obligation that Harry feels toward Jake and that makes him Jake's accomplice is a remarkably complicated emotional pattern...

...Gold helps us to see Bowers by showing him in relation to other persons...

...It is, moreover, an eloquent plea for understanding and love in all human relationships...

...and if Himes had been able to make us believe in Charles's self-destructive behavior, this would be another example of the broadening and maturing of our Negro novelists...

...And white novelists are beginning to learn, no doubt from these Negro novelists, that the relations between Negroes and whites are too complicated to be summed up in the old formulas of injustice...

...And Chester Himes, in The Third Generation (World, $3.95), quickly leaves the problem behind, to plunge into a not wholly successful portrayal of a neurotic woman and her self-destroying son...

...It is mostly a matter of pride: He is king on Prospect Avenue, and he thinks he can beat the pressures that he knows will be exerted on him...

...He takes refuge with a Negro prostitute, who falls in love with him and reforms, and for a time he is on the verge of accepting life as a Negro...

...but his parable, I think, will puzzle those of both races who see equality strictly as a legal question...

...In Black Is a Man (Padell, $2.00), one of the white men, Harry Roskolenko, has written a vigorous and bitter protest against injustice...

...Black Is a Man is a combination of tract, satire and fantasy...

...In The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison gives a grim account of discrimination and its brutalizing effects, but his central theme is philosophical rather than sociological...

...Then everybody has a change of heart, and, in a fantastic finale, not only Oggen's problems but the whole world's are solved...

...in his own eyes and those of his associates, he is a success...

...To many people, myself among them, the rights and wrongs of the situation are about as clear as rights and wrongs can ever be...

...When he turns black, his wife deserts him, his minister fails to help him, he finds himself barred from his bank and his apartment house...

...As the owner of a small, profitable hotel, he is liked and looked up to in that world...

...The apparent theme of The Third Generation is the havoc wrought by a particular kind of color-consciousness...

...Customers leave, business associates threaten and try violence, the bank bears down...

...But we come first to like and then to respect him...