NEW FICTION
Hayes, E. Nelson
New Fiction by E. NELSON HAYES TN HIS little book on Kierkegaard, British critic Rudolph Friedmann remarked that "England is the only existential country." If the English were unaware of this...
...C. P. Snow has told in detail the emotional life of an alienated person, a spectator, a man detached from life, in Homecoming (Scribners...
...The heroes of novels by Barbusse, Sartre, Camus, Hemingway, and others are presented as literary prototypes of the Outsider, followed by studies of T. E. Lawrence, Nijinsky, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Blake, and Dostoevsky as men who have had the same problem as these fictional characters, and have endeavored to move on to some sort of solution...
...E. NELSON HAYES formerly taught English at several Eastern colleges...
...He uses, indiscriminately and uncritically, the lives and writings of others to portray indirectly, and distortedly, his own religious conversion...
...His hero, the foreign minister, determines to break with the new Communist regime...
...he was alienated from friends and society alike, almost to the point of paranoia...
...399 pp...
...Lania, a well-known foreign correspondent, writes knowingly of the complex forces leading to the destruction of democracy in an Eastern European country following World War II and creates an impressive and believable gallery of public and private figures...
...Above all, he is a reactionary in the worst sense of the word...
...3.50), while avowedly not a rotnan a clef, in actuality analyzes the background and suggests the circumstances of the death of Jan Masaryk in 1948...
...A science-fiction book of unusual irony and paradox, it emphasizes the need for poetic vision and imaginative faith even in a world of psychiatrists and physicists...
...282 pp...
...He condemns science and humanism, yet gives no evidence that he knows what either represents...
...The author is an intense egotist, who measures the meaning and content of life by the satisfactions, whether emotional, intellectual, or spiritual, which it is able to give him, or his heroes...
...797 pp...
...ROBERT P. BROWDER is an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado...
...It is a novel of fine irony, of intensely dramatic interplay between character and event, of restrained syle flashed with metaphor...
...W. Grey Walter, famed British physiologist, tells in The Curve of the Snowflake (Norton...
...Bound in hard covers and packaged in a cheery envelope, it makes a very special kind of Christmas greeting...
...We are growing up and away from the childish fears and superstitions of primitive religion, putting more and more of our faith in our own ability to solve problems...
...3.50), which concerns an armed insurrection in an imaginary country, where a British engineer and his Eurasian girl-for-a-week are trapped and held captive by the revolutionaries...
...Further, he is astonishingly ignorant...
...College, wrote "Midwestern Progressive Politics...
...This is an exciting, dramatic story, excellent for an evening's entertainment...
...He does not understand the pathological origins of Van Gogh's insanity or of Lawrence's loneliness, but writes off their terrible tragedies as a hunger for religion...
...This is a fearsome evolution and requires strong courage and conviction...
...In revolt against the philosophy of science, the values of humanism, the habits of the middle-class, he seeks to find himself, and through himself a way of salvation, a religion only vaguely conceived by Wilson...
...Perhaps every thinking individual is both Outsider and Insider...
...Wilson has neither, and would rather hide himself in the fogs of mysticism...
...The Letters of Thomas Wolfe...
...he finds that way through love, and comes finally to accept the human situation...
...We can confidently predict that his next step will be toward some distorted version of an Oriental religion, possibly Zen-Buddhism, which he will misunderstand as grossly as he has the world in which he is morally committed to live...
...Leo Lania's The Foreign Minister (Houghton, Mifflin...
...There is a profound dilemma in Twentieth Century culture...
...Employing the supposedly empirical method of "taking concrete examples," Wilson has written an apologia for the turmoil, the anguish, the uncertainty of adolescence...
...And it brings home the concept of free will in conflict with the determinate forces of the human world...
...504 pp...
...In his own words a man with "an almost insane hunger to devour the entire body of human experience," Wolfe put that hunger down on paper, both in his letters and his fiction, and created an enduring monument to himself and to the America he loved...
...And for a complete escape for a few hours, let me recommend King of Paris by Guy Endore (Simon and Schuster...
...He loathes humanity...
...3.75) something of what the science of today may lead to tomorrow...
...248 pp...
...Or, to use RUSSEt B. NYE, chairman of the department of English at Michigan State...
...The word "self" is here important...
...As this correspondence so eloquently reveals, he displayed both in his personal life and in his novels every characteristic of Wilson's "hole in the corner" man...
...Scribner's...
...Possibly it will be helpful to look at this matter from several other viewpoints...
...For them you might consider The Cultivation of Christmas Trees by T. S. Eliot (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
...before he can make his announcement to the Parliament, he is thrown out of a window to his death by Party henchmen...
...What is the problem of the Outsider...
...In any case, Alexandre Dumas bursts from its pages in full and dazzling color, and appears in a variety of often indiscreet, always intriguing, and endlessly engrossing episodes...
...4) suggests that some of them now realize a deep concern for death and other ultimate problems...
...I'm not quite sure what to call this—perhaps a fictionalized biographical novel, an odd compound of fact and fancy...
...He is a religious snob, a sanctimonious bore, recklessly identifying himself with such would-be saints as the phony Gurdjieff whose stupidities did much to hasten the death of Kath-erine Mansfield...
...10...
...1.25), an attractively illustrated poem about the beauty and mystery of the Yuletide...
...Wilson's term, the artist is both Outsider and Insider...
...Yet he was also symbolic of the tremendous energy and creativity of Twentieth Century America, and was himself as American as the multitudinous life, and its grandeur and misery, of which he wrote...
...There could be no better example of this than Thomas Wolfe, whose letters are now published...
...3.95), the sixth novel in his magnificent series, "Saints and Strangers...
...So far as I can determine, he strives for self-realization, self-expression, self-freedom, through the processes of intuitive thought...
...he is almost wholly without understanding of the problems of common men, is without compassion for their pains and sorrows, without empathy for their loves and joys...
...In Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture, reviewed here some months ago, Lionel Trilling suggested an inevitable ambivalence in the relationship between the artist and the culture in which he lives...
...234 pp...
...Another corner of this troubled world, Southeast Asia, is employed by Eric Ambler in his new thriller, State of Siege (Knopf...
...If the English were unaware of this affinity in 1948 when those words were written, perhaps the startling enthusiasm of Edith Sitwell, Philip Toynbee, Cyril Connolly, and a host of other reviewers for Colin Wilson's existentialist The Outsider (Houghton, Mifflin, 288 pp...
...If you're like me, you have friends for whom a Christmas card would not be an adequate expression, and an expensive gift more than the budget could stand...
...Wilson, a cocky cockney critic at the tender age of twenty-five, defines the Outsider as a man who has come to know the emptiness and futility of contemporary life, who has suffered a vision of the horrors and irrationalities that hem him in...
...If Homecoming and The New Man (the fifth novel in the series) can be considered sufficient evidence, Snow may well be the most important English novelist of Our time...
...Lewis Eliot, after the death of his neurotic wife, seeks to find a way into life, a way out of the isolation of which his marriage had been both symbol and fact...
...8 pp...
Vol. 20 • November 1956 • No. 11
