Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
living with books By Granville Hicks Harris's 'Ticket for a Seamstitch' and Gill's 'The Day the Money Stopped' Mark Harris's A Ticket for a Seamstitch (Knopf, $3) is another book about that...
...the novel turns a whole series of dramatic corners...
...More recently, he described the characters in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day as slobs—"gross, talkative, ill-dressed nonentities," "odious and uninteresting people...
...One of them is an obvious slob—greedy, narrow-minded, hypocritical, the kind of person that in "real life" no one capable of reading the writings of Brendan Gill would suffer willingly for fifteen minutes...
...Last spring, an editor of Life suggested to Harris that he might do a Henry Wiggen story for the magazine's Fourth of July issue...
...The writing of book reviews is a hazardous occupation, and any book reviewer is bound to say things that other book reviewers regard as nonsense...
...Gill may seem to be better than he is, but in any case he is good...
...Gill will meditate on this the next time he is tempted to damn novel because its characters are unpleasant...
...living with books By Granville Hicks Harris's 'Ticket for a Seamstitch' and Gill's 'The Day the Money Stopped' Mark Harris's A Ticket for a Seamstitch (Knopf, $3) is another book about that remarkable young pitcher and author, Henry Wiggen, whose adventures with the New York Mammoths have already been recounted in The Southpaw and Bang the Drum Slowly...
...But The Day the Money Stopped, even though it does have a couple of slobs as its principal characters, is a better novel than most...
...But Henry Wiggen is very much a person in his own right, both an individual and an individualist, and the style Harris has creatcd for him is Henry Wiggen's style and nobody else's...
...If it lacks the emotional force of the author's earlier novel, The Trouble of One House, it is a breathtaking tour de force...
...The other character Mr...
...No one, of course, objects to being entertained, but it is perhaps unfortunate that A Ticket for a Seamstitch gives comfort to those who have misread the earlier Henry Wiggen books...
...If Mr...
...Gill has endowed with superficial charm, but—again, in "real life"—any fairly bright individual would see, without having to be victimized by him more than half a dozen times, that this was a badly brought up, immature, unscrupulous slob, a juvenile delinquent aged 40...
...Life's readers lost in the exchange, and we can be grateful to Alfred A. Knopf for letting us share in Henry's latest adventures, but this is not a major work in either the Henry Wiggen or the Mark Harris canon...
...It seemed like a good idea, and the story was written...
...Thanks to Gill's mastery of form, we come to know a great deal about the four persons who are on stage during these few hours and about two or three others who are important to the story, and, brief as it is...
...One of Henry's many admirers, a girl living in California, writes him that she plans to get to New York for the July 4 game and sends him money to buy her a ticket...
...Fiedler couldn't see this in Bang the Drum Slowly, what would he make of A Ticket for a Seamstitch...
...Up to that point, however, I was fascinated by what happens to the brothers Morrow, slobs though they may be...
...As usual, there is a lot of shrewd and amusing writing about baseball, and there is a little more than that but not so much as one might wish...
...And now in The Day the Money Stopped (Doubleday, $2.95) Gill has written a novel about a pair of slobs...
...I hope that Mr...
...Both Henry Wiggen and Piney Woods learn something about human limitations, but the book is chiefly offered as entertainment...
...Because of the ineptitude of some other New Yorker reviewers of fiction, Mr...
...Leslie Fiedler, for example, recently said in the Reporter that in Bang the Drum Slowly Harris tried to "retreat behind a semi-literate narrator" and described his style as a "pseudo-folk" device...
...But then some higher power intervened, and Harris got his story back while Life published—of all things!—a section of William Brinkley's Don't Go Near the Water...
...To my taste, there is one twist too many: adept as he is at sleight-of-hand...
...The problems that Henry encounters in this experiment, the vicissitudes that the seamstitch undergoes in her transcontinental pilgrimage, and the ups and downs of the Mammoths make up the story...
...Gill does not quite carry off the big scene in which the leopard is supposed to change his spots before our very face and eyes...
...Henry, being married, tries to transfer her affections to his roommate, Piney Woods...
...Told almost entirely in dialogue, the story has complete unity of place and time —one scene, with the action moving in an unbroken sequence through a period of three hours...
...Last fall, however, he disposed of Wright Morris's The Field of Vision with this comment on the characters: "They are dull people, and they think dull thoughts, and now and then they say dull things...
...The reviewer who is also a novelist is in a particularly vulnerable position because what he says about somebody else's novels may be turned against his own...
...Brendan Gill is a case in point...
Vol. 40 • February 1957 • No. 8
