Living With Books

...Barney Sand, who is working for a newspaper agency in Paris, hears that a prominent Communist leader named Jacobi is about to be thrown out of the party, and he remembers meeting Jacobi in 1938...

...Felix Jackson's So Help Me God (Viking, $3.50) is an old-fashioned problem novel presented in the form of a thriller...

...From his arrival on the literary scene, Mr...

...As the inner-directed man vanishes, he maintains, there is less and less for the novelist to write about, and we can already see the consequences of "the gradual failure of dramatic possibilities in our culture...

...Thus she finds her own approach to the problem that has been obsessing her family and all their neighbors, and thus she sets her own course toward maturity and freedom...

...Like The Changelings, the novel refutes Mr...

...Spencer Donovan, a well-to-do and thoroughly respectable young lawyer, has served as counsel to a man being investigated by a Senate committee, and his client, though innocent, has been driven to suicide by the attacks upon him...

...Matthiessen has been successful...

...Matthiessen shows that there is still a lot of life in it...

...I have at hand four novels that, whatever else may be true of them, bear witness to the existence of dramatic-possibilities in contemporary life...

...In this particular Jeremiad, it seems to me that he makes two serious mistakes...

...But the meeting between Barney and Jacobi, when it finally comes about, has unexpected consequences for both men...

...They are growing up, or they are falling in love, or they are having troubles with money or with health...

...As he lets us see Cormoris at the outset, the shy, lonely piano tuner, an alien in every sense of the word, is revealed as a touching figure with genuine nobility of character...

...The purpose of all this is to prepare Barney so that he can be used as a tool in the plot to discredit Jacobi...

...Jackson wants to remind people of the dangers of a disregard of due process of law, but at the same time he wants to make his readers worry like the dickens about what is going to happen to Spencer Donovan...

...But she has seen some of the dramatic possibilities of American life, and has courageously grappled with them, and her book is alive and warm...

...Determined to expose the evil of a situation in which mere suspicion is enough to destroy a man, Donovan writes an anonymous letter to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, accusing himself of being a Communist...

...Not only is Donovan denounced as a traitor by a sensational columnist and an eminent Red-hunting Senator...

...Nearby is an overcrowded Negro section, and the Negroes are desperate for places to live...

...One feels that Coates has yielded to the temptation to resolve his problem in the finality of death without taking the necessary steps to make that solution convincing...

...In the long run, the two aims prove incompatible, and it is the lesson that is sacrificed...

...She is separated from her husband but not divorced, and so she and Cormoris simply set up housekeeping together...

...Vincent proves herself a changeling and delights Jules by making friends with a Negro girl...

...Tenaciously holding to the meager privileges they have won in America, the residents seek to maintain a united front against the invaders, but it is clear that they cannot win, and the real question is how they are to take their defeat...

...Second, he refuses to see that even an other-directed society is bound to be full of conflicts and problems of the most intensely dramatic sort...

...But it is not at all discouraging, for at least Mr...

...At that time Barney's father, an American consul in Spain, was trying to get his family into France, and Jacobi gave them a helping hand...

...Finally we have Peter Matthiessen's Partisans (Viking, $3.00), a novel to remind us that the old problems refuse to die...

...I am thinking also of Don Mankiewicz's novel of a few months ago, Trial...

...On the other hand, one finds it hard to believe that it has to end, as it does, in tragedy...

...What Riesman calls the 'inner-directed' man," he observes, "has been the typical hero of fiction from its beginnings and of drama from antiquity...

...But Miss Sinclair has a way of keeping social problems in perspective...

...That is the novel's weakness...

...We are concerned with a section that lies just on the edge of respectability--a section inhabited by immigrants and their children, mostly Jews and Italians...

...They worry about the Negroes who are pressing upon their streets, but they worry about much else...

...The psychotic Cormoris of the climax is not organically related to the Cormoris we have come to know and like...

...In choosing so bold a theme and adopting so ambitious a way of handling it, Miss Sinclair must have realized that she was taking chances, that this was not the kind of neat little story that lends itself to perfection...

...She, it turns out, has been married and has two children...

...Jackson has felt obliged to give his hero the works...

...Jackson builds his suspense is: How will Donovan prove that he wrote the letter...

...The central character is Vincent--properly Judith Vincent, but she scorns her first name--a girl just entering upon adolescence, growing cut of tomboy leadership of a gang into the complicated adult world...

...But, as Jules Golden suggests in a poem that gives the book its title, the young cannot always be held by the established patterns...

...One cannot claim that Mr...

...We can believe that things could have happened that way, but we are not quite satisfied that that is the way they would have happened...

...But the friend vanishes, and the question on which Mr...

...The Zigmans, the Millers, the Levines, the Valentis--each family with its own anxieties and sorrows--surround her...

...This is a good idea for a novel with a message, but unfortunately Mr...

...The scene is a large city, probably Cleveland, where Miss Sinclair has spent most of her life...

...The hero is Anton Cormoris, a Hungarian-born piano tuner in his forties...

...The "marriage," as Cormoris prefers to think of it, turns out very badly...

...There is some crudeness in the book, some sentimentality, but they are faults that can be forgiven...

...The author also treats Edie tenderly, but does not try to disguise her superficiality...

...For one thing, he seems to have planned the book on the wrong scale...

...This, however, is strictly irrelevant to Mr...

...With Cormoris she sometimes rises above herself, but with her friends, sharing with them their idea of a good time, she is what she is, and it isn't much...

...Marat devotes a couple of weeks to educating Barney in the miseries of Paris, and brings him to the point of admitting that there is justice in the Communist ideal...

...This is a novel about ordinary people in New York City, the kind of people who seem nameless and faceless...

...Obviously it isn't easy for the author of a thriller to put over a message and at the same time provide the desired thrills...

...One wonders why Coates chose to tell this story, and yet one is glad that he did...

...That novelists frequently are unable to make the most of these possibilities cannot be denied, but this is a different problem and one that is not peculiar to the 1950s...

...Jacobi's passionate faith in Communism made a strong impression on 14-year-old Barney, and now he resolves to seek out the about-to-be-liquidated Communist and come to terms with him...

...Donovan has counted on the friend to bear witness to his authorship of the incriminating letter...

...As a piece of realized fiction, this is a step backward from Race Rock...

...Aldridge has been talking about the decline of fiction, and it may be said that he has come to have a vested interest in the death of the novel...

...Let us look first at Robert Coates's The Farther Shore (Harcourt, Brace...

...Nearby are the Goldens, with precocious, rebellious young Jules dying of heart disease...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Novels by Robert Coates, Jo Sinclair, Felix Jackson and Peter Matthiessen In an article called "Gray New World," published in the Nation last June, John W. Aldridge discussed the literary implications of David Riesman's theories of social structure, theories to which I have often referred in these columns...

...Her own home is torn apart because her older sister has married a Gentile and her father refuses to see either his daughter or his grandchild...

...Most of these people are imprisoned by their dogmas, their prejudices, their hopes and fears...

...At first glance, this appears to be a hopelessly old-fashioned theme, but Mr...

...The heroine is a waitress, Edith Marshall, twenty-odd years his junior...

...In The Changelings (McGraw-Hill, $3.75), as in her first novel, The Wasteland, Jo Sinclair is concerned with a problem, and this time it is an urgent social problem --the conflict between Negroes and whites...

...Now he has written a short novel about an American youth who is tempted by Communism in the year 1953...

...Jackson's thesis...

...Aldridge argues that if our society is becoming predominantly other-directed, as Riesman believes, this can only mean the death of the novel...

...not only is he ostracized by most of his acquaintances: not only is his practice wiped out: he gets stomach ulcers, loses his fiancee, and is betrayed by his best friend...

...3.50...

...First, he accepts uncritically the idea that ours is at the moment an other-directed society, and exaggerates the prevalence of conformity in present-day America...

...In short, by refusing to isolate the question of racial friction from the rest of life, Miss Sinclair saves The Changelings from the familiar defects of the problem novel...

...What we have, except for the beginning, which is excellent, seems little more than an outline for a novel, and one wonders whether the author could have filled in the details if he had tried...

...A year ago Mr...

...After writing anonymous letters to Edie, Cormoris enters upon a patient courtship...

...That the "marriage" should be a failure is, as Coates explicitly says, inevitable...

...Matthiessen published his first book, Race Rock, a perceptive novel about young people in the postwar world...

...That Donovan can be condemned and punished as a result of an anonymous letter--no matter who wrote it--is what ought to concern us...

...For each of her many characters, the race problem is only one problem among many...

...Aldridge's contention that there is a failure of dramatic possibilities in our culture...

...Matthiessen tried to do something more ambitious and more difficult than he had attempted in his first book...

...The road to Jacobi turns out to be tortuous--by way of an international racketeer, a pair of soft ex-Communists, a hard-core Communist who goes by the name of Marat...

...The betrayal, furthermore, muddles the issue...