A Colony of 'Artistics'
EDWARDS, L. B.
A Colony of 'Artistics' But Not For Love. By May Natalie Tabak. Horizon. 255 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by L. B. Edwards Associate Editor, ''East Europe" The hallmarks of caste and class in postwar...
...A study of this new kind of community seems timely since the old stereotype of romantic penury in Greenwich Village and Provincetown is at least partly invalidated today by the unprecedented prosperity of a substantial number of fashionable painters and writers...
...Far from being unique, the colony seems almost indistinguishable from any standard Philistine suburb...
...The fact is that while May Natalie Tabak is adept at portraying states of mind, she lacks the eye for the telling material detail and the ear for speech which conjure up a particular and singular "set" of human beings...
...Only the husbands are examined in connection with the process of creative work, but here too problems are presented in terms of psychic pathology: the throes of creative "block" and the rather contrived mechanisms by which they seek to free themselves of it...
...American public...
...Or perhaps it is merely as Herbert Sand noted in his inevitable writer's notebook: "The trouble with the crowd was that it was made up of a lot of personalities, but there was not one single dramatic character among them...
...Eschewing the clinical approach to her subject, the author omits all physical description, leaving us without even the sense of a specific geographical setting...
...The mise-en-scene is the stylish art colony which has sprung up on the eastern tip of Long Island, encroaching on the preserve of the conservative rich who formerly held it in fee...
...The tribal rites, morals and social technics of life in the big corporation, in the suburbs, in the academic community, have been satirically or "scientifically" pegged by William H. Whyte, John Keats, Vance Packard, A. C. Spectorsky, John Cheever, to name only a few...
...there is considerable destruction of movable property...
...These are predominantly female—the wives of the artists, themselves also practicing artists on a trivial scale...
...The weakness of the novel is that while all the characters bear some likeness to real individuals, they do not "work" as a group...
...She is the second wife of one of the local squires...
...Thwarted by the hostility and hauteur of her husband's friends, she seeks to enter the artistic set as a revenge and escape...
...Rather than artists, these people might perhaps be better labelled "artistics...
...nothing is resolved and nothing is started...
...One of the best, and perhaps the most appealing, of the portraits is of Babs Trumbull, who makes the startling discovery that all her good will and wisdom are simply the products of indoctrination (mainly at the hands of a progressive girls' college) and do not truly reflect her own experience at all...
...May Natalie Tabak's novel But Not For Love is in this genre of social anthropology and as an examination of a new species of group living it holds out considerable promise...
...Social competitiveness is the fuel that powers its main engine, sex and alcohol the palliatives for the poisonous fumes this generates...
...Reviewed by L. B. Edwards Associate Editor, ''East Europe" The hallmarks of caste and class in postwar American society have been subjected to intense microscopic scrutiny in the past 10 years...
...They did odd things and wore odd clothes but nothing ever really happened to them that couldn't be described better in a travelogue or a documentary than in a novel...
...her husband Herbert as a character in his new book, etc...
...Rather than moments of dramatic revelation, these gatherings are vortexes of obscurity...
...And there are the Bensons, intent on gaining entree to the great world of art, who lavishly butter up a visiting museum director only to find they have got hold of the wrong man...
...If none has matched the achievement of such earlier masters as John Marquand, they have nonetheless provided entertainment and some enlightenment to the self-conscious (self-absorbed...
...In at least two instances the irony is overstrained: in the case of Vaidel Lanier, who migrates compulsively from lover to lover until, momentarily checked by a hiatus in the supply, she is forced to lay siege to her own husband—only to find him barricaded in his laboratory with his own mistress...
...Her method is "ex-pressionistic": sharp intermittent flashes of illumination successively applied to the characters one by one...
...There is Katie Sand, convinced she can never be accepted by the "group...
...The deus ex machina is that trite but apparently never-fail igniter: a bikini-clad blonde at the wheel of a Jaguar...
...There is the rich divorcee, Amy Cooper, who has bought herself a painter whom she tends like a fragile greenhouse bloom...
...Unfortunately, the implied promise of the novel is not fulfilled...
...The "artistics" in turn seek to exploit her for their own purposes: Katie, who discovers her, as a catch and a bait to lure the elusive "group...
...Their gatherings invariably occur in the form of a party and the effect is simply that of bodies colliding in the dark...
...One cannot, after reading the novel, feel securely in possession of the taste, sound, atmosphere, of the new art colony on the eastern tip of Long Island...
...Art and "culture" are a means, primarily, for social advancement, in the classic bourgeois tradition...
...The conversation is witless repartee...
...In uncovering the motives and strate-gems of these women, the author ironically depicts a sort of generic female psyche: grasping, hysteria-prone and corroded by self-deception and despair...
Vol. 43 • August 1960 • No. 31
