Living with Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks A Masterful Novel by Heinrich Boll And Short Stories by James Purely Tomorrow and Yesterday (Criterion Books, $4.50) is the fourth of Heinrich Boll's novels...
...Or perhaps it would be truer to say that what tenderness there is grows out of the loathing...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks A Masterful Novel by Heinrich Boll And Short Stories by James Purely Tomorrow and Yesterday (Criterion Books, $4.50) is the fourth of Heinrich Boll's novels to be published in this country, the first I have read...
...Nella Bach, having no practical problems, suffers, perhaps more acutely, from the emptiness of her life...
...Boll's view of life is grim, but it is not without hope, and it seems almost boisterously optimistic in contrast with the feeling for existence expressed in James Purdy's collection of short stories, Color of Darkness (New Directions, $3.50...
...Nella, on the other hand, still unreconciled to the death of her husband, wrestles with problems she cannot define, let alone solve...
...But revenge, though long contemplated, offers her nothing, and she refuses to consider marriage...
...Some of the stories in the volume have been privately published, and highly praised, but to all intents and purposes this is Mr...
...Although the time is eight years after the end of World War II, Mr...
...He can drop back into the past to let us see the gay, romantic youth of Ray and Nella Bach and their friend Albert Muchow, and he can tell in a single chapter the tragic story of Albert's marriage...
...In one of the best, two hopeless women confide in one another, and one of them thinks, "There isn't anything to say about such private sorrow...
...There is nothing to do, Mr...
...Frau Brielach has a characteristically simple decision to make: Shall she, in order to get her teeth fixed, leave Leo and become the mistress of her employer, a thoroughly unattractive man who dotes on her...
...In particular, he looks closely at the households of two men who were killed on the Russian front in 1942...
...Heinrich Brielach shares a squalid apartment with his mother and a man he calls Uncle Leo, the latest and least pleasant of a series of "uncles...
...the boy persecuted by his mother...
...the violently quarreling husband and wife...
...In the end it appears that there is no salvation for Nella, bound as she is to the past, though there may be for Frau Brielach and the boys...
...the crippled husband torturing his wife...
...Purdy's vision of life may well be distorted, but one cannot deny his ability to render it...
...A thoroughgoing relativist, convinced that no event can be the same for two beholders, he nevertheless creates solid characters in a substantial world...
...Her husband's closest friend wishes to marry her, as much for the boy's sake as hers...
...Boll has achieved an extraordinary freedom...
...Otherwise the households have nothing in common...
...The two widows, Frau Bach and Frau Brielach, each have a son of 10 or 11, and the boys are good friends...
...For Frau Brielach, the death of her husband has meant a decade of poverty, hard work and emotional insecurity...
...Through technical mastery Mr...
...They are grotesques, but, unlike the grotesques in Sherwood Anderson's Wines-burg, Ohio, they are portrayed with loathing, not with tenderness...
...Boll moves freely and skillfully from one point of view to another...
...Purdy seems to believe, except to show it, and show it he does, with bewildering power...
...In such a story as "63: Dream Palace," the grotesque-ness is almost unbearably brutal, but in most of the stories there is, somewhere down in their black depths, a desperate kind of pity...
...Because Nella's life is dominated by the past, that also enters into the story...
...I cannot easily think of another book that presents such a gallery of private sorrows—of beaten, frustrated, twisted men and women...
...We repeatedly enter the minds of Martin and Heinrich as each tries to fathom the meaning not only of his own but also of the other's way of life, but we see their contrasting worlds through adult eyes as well...
...These are stories about terrifying people, terrifying in their misery and their ugliness: the widowed father repudiated by his son...
...Purdy is sorry that human beings are so contemptible, but it is clear to him that they are...
...Purdy's introduction to the public...
...Her husband, a poet of some distinction, is now praised and in a sense exploited by men who flirted with Nazism when he refused to compromise— among them the man responsible for his death...
...In telling the story, Mr...
...He can identify himself with either of the boys, so different in what they have experienced, so alike in their bewilderment, and he can reveal the hearts of Frau Bach and Frau Brielach...
...Martin Bach lives in a large, comfortable home with his mother and his wealthy, eccentric grandmother...
...It reveals him as a talented writer, as uncompromisingly fierce as Flannery O'Connor...
...Boll is concerned here—as, I gather, he has been in his earlier books—with the effects of the war on German life...
Vol. 40 • December 1957 • No. 51
