Living with Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Novels by Robert Graves, Bernard Wolfe, H. M. Lynde and John Wyllie On the jacket of Robert Graves's They Hanged My Saintly Billy (Doubleday, $3.95) there is...
...Robert Garmes, the narrator, a diver with headquarters at Key West, discovers that Barto, his partner and best friend, has been murdered, and sets out in pursuit of the murderer...
...Order is finally restored, but no problems have been solved...
...The difference lies in the fact that crime is this book's only excuse for being...
...Since he has stated that he regards all his novels as potboilers, poetry being his only serious form of literary expression, he need make no apology for this particular bid for popular favor...
...That they should be denied the benefits of technological progress is manifestly unjust, and yet they are, by and large, incapable of controlling and maintaining an industrial economy...
...Murder trials ate themselves tediously repetitious, and so are many of the books written about them...
...Wyllie is certainly not colder-blooded than Mr...
...He has a good deal to say about diving, about sex...
...On the other hand, the predicament in which all the characters find themselves is admirably rendered...
...This could be an amusing game nf cops and robbers, but Wolfe has tried to make it more than that...
...Wolfe never calls Brod a Communist, though the whole point of the book is that he is one...
...He was simply an irresponsible rascal, with little intelligence and nothing resembling a conscience, a dull fellow albeit at times a dangerous one...
...We also have a local boy, Jim Mears, who is in love with Joyce, and a mysterious stranger, Mr...
...he is a knowledgeable person, and he has a way of Haunting his various kinds of knowledgeability...
...there are far worse crimes described in I, Claudius, for example, than in this book and many more of them...
...At the same time an American agent...
...But though I deplore any miscarriage of justice, even one a century old, it is hard not to feel that Palmer deserved hanging if ever a man did...
...a retired journalist with a bad heart, keeps reminding everyone that, thanks to the H-bomb, the day of doom may well be at hand...
...Graves has invented an ingenious device to spare his readers boredom: He writes as if he were a contemporary investigator., talking with this person and that and gradually exposing Dr...
...Its pattern is the chase, with vengeance as motive...
...The general idea, which Miss Lynde regards as highly original, is that every day is judgment day, and the implications of this are explored with ruthless banality...
...Wyllie, who was born in India and spent three-and-a-half years as a Japanese prisoner of war, has served for some time with the Gold Coast Branch of the British Red Cross...
...It is also a day that invites reflection on all sorts of serious matters, and Miss Lynde's characters do their reflecting out loud...
...Wyllie foresees a long period of struggle, with power often in the hands of those who are unfit to use it...
...He wants them to feel the situation in its entirety and, so far as possible, to understand it...
...As Dortweiler, the wisest of the characters, realizes, history has played a cruel trick on the people of Africa by bringing their primitive culture into such sudden contact with an advanced technology...
...The causes of unrest remain, and no one knows how to eliminate them...
...Although there are enthusiasts who welcome any account of any trial, the annals of crime often make turgid reading...
...Wyllie feels strongly but writes with restraint...
...The action, which takes place in 24 hours, is laid in a California town, chiefly in the home of Norma Collins, a middle-aged widow...
...There is plenty of action, but in the end one suspects that Wolfe is interested in action as an excuse for talk...
...The multiple pursuit goes through many ingeniously contrived phases until Brod finally escapes, bearing with him the precious secrets he has stolen but headed for destruction...
...He is currently in disrepute in Moscow—for the sake of economy I use my own terminology instead of Wolfe's circumlocutions— and has been summoned back to Russia, where, no doubt, he will be liquidated...
...Readers will recall that Mr...
...But he was not, Graves insists, proved guilty of the crime for which he was hanged...
...Palmer was, he grants, "a scoundrel and spendthrift," and was most suspiciously associated with what Graves charmingly describes as "an unfortunate series of deaths...
...Barto, we learn, was a volunteer in the Loyalist army in the Spanish Civil War, and was shot in the back by a supposed comrade, Michael Brod...
...I suppose the statement comes from some letter in which Graves exuberantly told his publisher what he was up to...
...Palmer's inglorious career...
...It is a day of crises, and Miss Lynde has painstakingly carried each of the lives she deals with to one kind of climax or another...
...It is to Mr...
...They arrive, as it turns out, at appropriately violent or appropriately happy ends—those who are still alive still talking...
...Bixby...
...as bait...
...As he demonstrated in Limbo, an imaginative anti-utopian novel published five vears ago...
...Inexplicably, Mr...
...William Palmer if he had not been hanged for murder on June 14, 1856...
...Bernard Wolfe's In Deep (Knopf, $3.95) is a study of violence in a different but equally well established genre...
...The great difference between John Wyllie's Riot (Dut-ton, $3.50) and the novels I have been discussing is that they have an air of make-believe whereas it gives an impression of solid reality...
...He was no saint, no matter what his poor demented mother may have thought...
...This seems to be true, for the trial, as Graves describes it, was outrageously unfair...
...The situation is never wholly out of control, but native mobs riot, buildings are burned, stores and warehouses are looted, a few people are killed...
...The principal characters are her house guests, Roger and Miriam Norbeck, her daughter Joyce, who returns in the course of the day from a visit in Los Angeles, and Joyce's supposed suitor, Don Landis, who is really after Mrs...
...Talkiness is one of Wolfe's vices, but he seems laconic in comparison with H. M. Lynde, author of The Adversary (Random House, $3.75...
...Emotionally he is much more deeply involved with his material than any of the three writers I have been talking about, and it is because of this true involvement that he never relies on violence for the sake of violence...
...It is characteristic that he describes a mass rape with calm objectivity, whereas Monsarrat in his novel sets forth a similar episode with lingering relish for its horrors...
...Because he is aware of Palmer's intrinsic dullness, Graves seeks to present him as a martyr...
...Graves's bibliographical note lists several contemporary comments on the case as well as two books published in the present century...
...This is what the public really wants...
...Graves might have kept his pot boiling...
...He is not, as is Nicholas Monsarrat in The Tribe That Lost Its Head, an apologist for the colonial administration, but he has no illusions about the natives' capacity for self-government...
...He was not even a spectacular sort of villain...
...Norma and her guests, of course, regard the villagers as ridiculously gullible...
...there is merely a city called Port Christian...
...That is to say, the reader gets to know none of them well, though he sees enough of some of them—Dortweiler the American missionary, Police Superintendent Rankin, Benson the refugee—to feel that they are worth knowing...
...Wyllie knows that there is no easy solution for the problem he presents...
...but they are affected by the atmosphere of uneasiness, and Roger Norbeck...
...But the book, however skillfully it is put together, remains one of Graves's lesser efforts...
...For 20 years Barto has been seeking revenge for this treacherous—¦ and, of course, politically motivated—attack, and now, just as Brod seems to be within his grasp, he is wiped out...
...The African colony in which his book is laid is given no name...
...no one would think of writing about Dr...
...Garmes resolves to carry on his pal's crusade...
...The day derives its special character from the fact that most of the villagers believe it is their last day on earth, and in the evening, wearing white robes, they troop up a nearby hill to await the end of the world...
...and of course about politics, but chiefly he goes in for depth psychology, and much of the book sounds like a report on a clinical conference...
...Graves's novels of Greece and Rome are by no means free from scenes of violence...
...Major Caprio, is trying to intercept Brod, and is using Garmes, as he has already tried to use Barto...
...Yet Mr...
...You can imagine him sitting at his desk in his home on Majorca and saying to himself, "Boy, I've got it this time...
...Wyllie has chosen a moment when unrest in Port Christian reaches a climax—only a minor climax as things turn out...
...The chase is complicated by the fact that a number of other persons are on Brod's trail...
...Norbeck...
...Wyllie's credit that he has tried to present the situation from as many points of view as possible, but in doing so he has introduced a greater number of characters than so short a novel can easily accommodate...
...But whether or not he has a specific country in mind, the reader knows that what happens in the book is the kind of thing that has been happening and is going to go on happening in many parts of Africa...
...To the trial itself he devotes little space, and what he quotes from the official record is chosen to support his charge of unfairness...
...This is, at least in intention, a novel of suspense, and, I must say, skillfully plotted, but after one has listened to the characters as they go for pages and pages, one has little interest in what happens to them...
...Monsarrat, but he has no interest in harrowing the sensibilities of his readers...
...Brod and Caprio hold forth on the psychology of the secret agent, while Brod and Garmes exchange views on the death wish...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Novels by Robert Graves, Bernard Wolfe, H. M. Lynde and John Wyllie On the jacket of Robert Graves's They Hanged My Saintly Billy (Doubleday, $3.95) there is this sentence: "My novel is full of sex, drink, incest, suicides, dope, horse racing, murder, scandalous legal procedure, cross-examinations, inquests and ends with a good public hanging—attended by 30,000...
...Injustice, he sees, will feed upon injustice, and the innocent will suffer...
...We feel and respond to both the physical setting and the emotional atmosphere, and tension mounts as the novel progresses...
...And the crime fans will like the book, even though the rest of us may think wistfully of other ways in which Mr...
Vol. 40 • July 1957 • No. 27
