Living With Books:
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Wyndham Lewis and Lin Yutang Mix Politics and Literature—Unsuccessfully MEN OF LETTERS are seldom reticent about telling the world what is wrong with it,...
...This is a purgatory worthy of Dante, but when at last chance gives Rene a way of escape, Hester, who wants only to return to England, commits suicide...
...However, though his hero does all right with a picked group of people on an out-of-the-way island, I don't believe that I would vote for Laos for President of the United States—even if Eisenhower were running against him...
...Lin Yutang is calmer and more reasonable than Wyndham Lewis, and many of his ideas, which he has expounded in a variety of ways in other books, are worth thinking about...
...In terms of day-to-day happenings, they turn out to be wrong at least as frequently as the expert in the corner grocery or the authority on the commuters' train...
...The war comes along, and Rene Harding and his wife Hester are exiled in the imaginary Canadian city of Momaco...
...For the rest, Lin Yutang tells his story, such as it is, in a clumsy fashion, and the book has no interest apart from its ideas...
...The combination, as I have also noted, is not rare...
...Valuable as their insights often are, they are not so wise as they would like to believe...
...Rene, to be sure, is a crackpot and Hester a neurotic, and they are both snobs, but they are also suffering human beings, and their sufferings are made horribly real to us...
...Whatever we may think of the politicians who currently administer the affairs of the United States, Canada and Great Britain, no one in his right mind would expect Rene Harding, on the evidence presented in this book, to do any better...
...The hero of the present novel, needless to say, belongs to the intelligent minority, and therefore he comes to the same conclusions as Mr...
...Nothing could be easier than to burlesque Self Condemned, but it would be cheap and dishonest to do so, for it is in its own way a moving novel...
...The world may well be stupid, but it is not altogether to be blamed for the skepticism with which it regards the diatribes and especially the prescriptions of the literati...
...His Utopia exists on an isolated island in the Pacific in the year 2004, and is in effect administered by a philosopher named Laos...
...If only the intelligent minority, he has said again and again, could gain control, how much better everything would be...
...university...
...By this time, as a result of a third global war and other calamities, the world as a whole is in pretty bad shape, but on Thainos, though perfection has not been achieved and is not aimed at by Laos, most people are living the good life...
...That, of course, means that it is inferior to Self Condemned, which is much more than a vehicle for its author's notions...
...It is full of things that remind us what a talented writer Lewis is, but it is basically a political pronunciamentum, and as such it is suspect...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Wyndham Lewis and Lin Yutang Mix Politics and Literature—Unsuccessfully MEN OF LETTERS are seldom reticent about telling the world what is wrong with it, and the world's persistent unwillingness to listen only confirms their aggrieved impression of the world's stupidity...
...Lin Yutang, in Looking Beyond (Prentice-Hall, $4.95), also advocates the rule of the intelligent minority, and he has invented an utopia—though he doesn't like the word—to show how it can be done...
...Lewis was an apologist for Mussolini in the '20s and for Hitler in the '30s, but on other occasions has represented himself as a firm anti-Fascist...
...He has always believed that the majority of people are abjectly stupid and pick even stupider people (he hates politicians) to rule over them...
...Rene thereupon plunges from the purgatory of Momaco into the hell of a U.S...
...As Geoffrey Wagner points out in a recent issue of the New Republic, Mr...
...On one issue, however, Lewis has been perfectly consistent, and the new novel shows no wavering...
...These unhappy reflections are suggested by Wyndham Lewis's new novel, Self Condemned (Regnery, $4.00...
...They are, moreover, just as quick to ignore their mistakes and, if they are caught up, much cleverer in talking them away...
...On Communism and other matters, he has done a deal of veering and tacking...
...And from the evidence Wyndham Lewis has so abundantly furnished in his long career, we can be sure that he would do worse...
...If one takes it simply as the story of a man and woman who find themselves in circumstances that are painfully distasteful to them, it is gruesomely convincing...
...As a lesson in politics, on the other hand, the novel is ludicrous...
...It has always been easier to portray hell than heaven, but the real reason for the difference between the two books is that Lewis, as I began by saying, is a gifted writer as well as a false prophet...
...Because he cannot speak the truth, he resigns his post at a British university and flees to Canada...
Vol. 38 • May 1955 • No. 22
