Living With Books

...I thought I knew what qualities would be needed to I ell that kind of story, and I didn't believe that Hersey had them...

...Any novel about a tuberculosis sanatorium, and especially one that searches into the psychic as well as the somatic elements in the disease, reminds us of The Magic Mountain...

...The book was published last spring, but I have only just read it...

...Like Hemingway, Hersey explores the values of a primitive way of life and finds them good...

...Even without Mischa, most of the people in the book are able to get themselves into a great deal of trouble...

...Miss Murdoch begins by introducing the reader to an odd assortment of characters: a young woman running away from a finishing school, an ineffectual highbrow, a sinister private agent, an ascetic scholar, a timid bureaucrat, an upper-class woman who works in a factory...

...life is bizarre, and there is no sense in expecting it to be anything else...

...Soon he is involved in her life and the lives of her friends among the patients, and is drawn deeper and deeper into the unfamiliar world of the sanatorium...

...One of them, John Hersey's A Single Pebble (Knopf, $3.00), I more or less deliberately put aside, believing that I would not like it...

...There is unabashed farce, as when old Mrs...

...The problem is to make the infatuation seem real, and it is a problem that not even Proust was always able to solve...

...It is always harder to represent good than evil and terribly hard to represent a mixture of the two, and Hersey is to be admired for coming as close as he has to doing it...

...Hersey has had an interesting career as a novelist...

...She carries conviction, too, except in the case of Mischa Fox...

...Miss Boros is perfectly successful, and the explanation lies in the effectiveness with which she has evoked the atmosphere of the sanatorium...

...Then, six years later, came The Wall, another journalistic novel but one that attempted an enormously difficult subject and brought to it resources of an extraordinary kind...

...The man who is infatuated with an unsuitable woman has always been a favorite theme of European novelists...

...The engineer is exposed to two things—to inanimate nature in a grander and more dangerous form than he has ever known and to a human nature that is strange to him...

...The scholar is conducting a futile piece of research...

...It was, I suppose, my disappointment with The Marmot Drive that made me wary of A Single Pebble...

...It was, most reviewers felt, a mistake...

...Although Aladar comes to see, "'with a terrible certainty," that Lalla cannot exist without her illness, he continues to struggle, but when he tries to move her out of the sanatorium he loses her...

...Picking it up by chance six months later, I found myself reading it with satisfaction, and I want to say why...

...The reader does have to take it on faith that the young engineer has the sensibilities of a poet, but once that is granted everything follows...

...A successful businessman named Aladar, who has lived alone since his wife deserted him, meets a little peroxide blonde in a cafe...

...This, she seems to be saying, is the way human beings are...

...It is completely unified by the mood that the author creates, and the writing has a kind of purity that takes the breath away...

...Annette, the fugitive from a finishing school, is obviously born to get into trouble—and out again...

...Miss Boros succeeds in communicating to us the spell by which Aladar is enthralled...

...At the end of mv re-Mew of The Marmot Drive...

...The effect on him of these experiences is the book's theme...

...I called it "the kind of failure that leaves one's interest in the author s future undiminished...

...Up to a point we are prepared to accept these paradoxes, but we do expect to be taken sooner or later to the heart of the mystery, and we are disappointed when, to the very end, he eludes us...

...Conrad sought to create an atmosphere of pure evil, and was as successful as any writer has ever been, but for Hersey and his engineer the river and the Chinese on the junk represent extremes both of evil and of good...

...It is a theme that has been treated many times, most notably in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness...

...He is meant to be mysterious, of course...

...all we really know about him is that whenever he appears on the scene things begin to happen...

...It is a long way from either A Single Pebble or The Mermaids to Iris Murdoch's The Flight from the Enchanter (Viking, $3.75), a comedy of manners so bizarre as almost to be surrealistic...

...Having done an admirable piece of reporting in Hiroshima, and having carried the journalistic novel to a high point in The Wall, Hersey could not have been blamed if he had felt that he had found his proper literary career...

...There is pathos in the death of a refugee dressmaker...

...As I knew from the jacket, this is the story of a young American engineer who is traveling up the Yangtze River in a junk—the time is the 1920s—and who experiences some sort of revelation...

...The bureaucrat proves inept both in office intrigue and in love...

...There is melodrama, as in several scenes involving the Polish brothers...

...A Single Pebble is a simple, direct, carefully fashioned tale that becomes steadily more moving...

...Rosa Keepe, the aristocratic factory worker, is engaged in a strange amatory adventure with two Polish brothers, charming, barbaric and dangerous, and is at the same time trying to save a little magazine, bequeathed to her and her brother by their energetic mother...

...He has the same resourcefulness, the same mastery of a craft, and the same loyalty to tradition...

...Fox's antecedents, the sources of his income, his activities, and his purposes are all mysterious...

...At first these characters seem to be pretty much unrelated, but in time we realize that they are all involved in some way with an enigmatic person named Mischa Fox...

...think, for instance, of the variety of ways in which Proust wrote about it...

...So much has been given us, however, we have been so richly entertained, and so many characters have been brought alive for us that Miss Murdoch's failure with Mischa does not seriously diminish our pleasure in her book...

...As I wrote in The New Leader (November 30, 1953) : "The novel begins in distortion, and it ends in incredibility...

...But we always come back to Mischa, who is responsible for the predicaments in which some of the characters find themselves and who knows how to make the most of anybody's predicament anywhere...

...Also admirable is Hersey's portrayal of the major Chinese character, Old Pebble, the head tracker...

...A young man, in spite of his name, the tracker nevertheless reminds us of the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea...

...A first-rate journalist while he was still in his twenties, he carried his talents into the field of fiction, and the immediate result was A Bell for Adano (1944), an excellent topical novel but no more than that...

...Later he discovers that she is a patient in a tuberculosis sanatorium...

...That Hersey's novella doesn't measure up to Conrad's is no surprise, but one must recognize that Hersey was attempting a more difficult task...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks A Late Look at 1956 Novels by John Hersey, Eva Boros and Iris Murdoch THIS PIECE, written as 1956 nears its end, is devoted to three of the year's novels that I overlooked at the time of publication...

...This is the more remarkable because Miss Boros is Hungarian-born...

...She cannot contemplate normal life as a real possibility, and she flees...

...And there are many passages that sound a sinister note, so many that the reader is a little dismayed when he finds himself laughing at the comic episodes...

...In short, A Single Pebble, though not a great flight of the imagination, is on a level that not many contemporary novelists can reach...

...Her mastery of English naturally reminds one of Conrad, and if there is nothing here to prove that she has a range equal to his, the sureness with which she handles English idiom is greater than he ever achieved...

...Miss Murdoch offers a large variety...

...Miss Murdoch's inventiveness makes one think of the Aldous Huxley of Antic Hay and Point Counter Point, but her attitude is quite different from his, for he was acutely conscious of the eccentricities of his characters whereas she takes her people for granted...

...Miss Boros, of course, is trying to do something very different from Mann, something much smaller than he attempted, but on her own scale she has been quite as successful, and that is a great deal to sav...

...Having made us believe in the mermaid by creating the kind of milieu in which only mermaids can exist...

...Hersey tried too hard, and was too self-conscious in his manipulation of symbols...

...Wingfield' enlivens a meeting of the little magazine's stockholders with a supply of champagne...

...1 wasn't absolutely wrong, but I was a long way from being right...

...Because he has come to love poor Lalla, Aladar tries to take her out of her strange world, and for a time she seems to be growing well enough to lead a normal life...

...The story, which is laid in Budapest in the middle Thirties, is simple enough...

...Conrad's ultimate revelation concerns darkness—in nature and in man— whereas Hersey's character, though finding evil in abundance, comes to a revelation of light...

...Eva Boros's The Mermaids (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, $3.50) is also a novella, and perhaps an even better example of the species than I Single Pebble...

...Aladar is indeed like a man who has fallen in love with a mermaid...

...Since the story is told by the engineer, we see Old Pebble onlv through his eyes, whereas Hemingway's tale is presented from Santiago's point of view, and yet I think Hersev's character is almost as fully realized as Hemingway's...

...She tells him that she is a dancer, but that is a lie and he knows it...

...But he was not satisfied, and in The Marmot Drive he attempted a more purely imaginative kind of fiction...

...If I had remembered that last June, I would have read .1 Single Pebble then...

...We see him only through the eyes of other characters, and there is a deliberate emphasis on the contradictions in his nature—for example, his tenderness toward animals and his ruthlessness toward people...

...There is sharp satire, especially in the accounts of the bureaucrat and his office...

...He goes to visit her and finds her as commonplace as he had expected, but is moved by pity to see her again...

...If the flesh is able, however, the spirit is weak...

...In parts of The Wall Hersey went far beyond journalism, and if the novel as a whole never quite got off the ground, it was a book which one had to respect...