INTEGRITY VS. SOCIETY
Hayes, E. Nelson
Integrity vs. Society by E. Nelson Hayes IN his sociological study of Cervantes, Shakespeare, the classical French dramatists, Goethe, Ibsen, and Hamsun, Literature and the Image of Man (Beacon....
...229 pp...
...240 pp...
...New World Writing No...
...Two books about the world of children are highly recommended...
...The spokesman of this unorganized, or disorganized, group of under-ground literary saboteurs is Kenneth Rexroth...
...and he tentatively and timidly moves toward some assertion of religion, some concept of God and the good, some idea of sainthood...
...Kerouac writes in...
...4.95), Leo Lowenthal concludes that Western man from 1600 to 1900 became "increasingly preoccupied with his own integrity and increasingly aware of the forces which threaten it...
...Also one thinks of Thomas Wolfe, but with a difference...
...The Velvet Horn (373 pp...
...3.75), has taken as his scene the production line of a modern factory, and as his characters a group of men on that line, men who despite their seeming prosperity are chronically fatigued by the hard work, dulled by its monotony, and soiled in body and spirit by its ever-prevalent dirt...
...The style is flat, unimaginative, as it details the daily toil by which is produced our greatest symbol of conspicuous consumption, the automobile of flashy fin and high horsepower...
...Yet another approach—and one which Mankowitz sometimes uses with great success—to the problem of integrity versus society is laughter...
...3.50) is the kind of maverick novel we have come to expect from Clyde Brion Davis, an odd tale of good and evil in a Western town, and of an ageless man with human heart and no body...
...exciting prose compounded of lroantic phrasing, jazz lingo, and bittiter talk...
...One of the most amusing books I have read in recent years is Come with Me to Macedonia, by Leonard «P"'(Knopf...
...in that case, he will probably write of what Harvey Swados has termed "the proletarianization of the middle-class...
...3.50), written almost entirely in the present tense, is a realistic yet lyric narrative of the important events in the life of an eight-year-old English boy—the building of a hut, a picnic, a shoot with his father and brother, and so on...
...254 pp...
...Jack Kerouac has said of the young American writers since World War II—and by this he means a special group, most of them now in San Francisco—that they are the "beat generation," to which one might add they are not yet beaten, to judge from the publicity and publications of the last few months...
...In this tale of deep passions and tragic violences, written in a rich and satisfying prose, Lytle asserts once more his faith in the wisdom and endurance of the people...
...344 pp...
...Drohan man-wfcs to get across the idea that people BTmore important than institutions, pen though the institutions may be accessary, and in the process provides jpe reader with a good deal of fun...
...3.95), a Hp'on the bureaucratic and Army ESape of a government office at the |pe of the Korean war...
...In a series of essays in several anthologies (New Directions No...
...here is neither imagination, nor hope, nor a vision of the future, and on such good literature feeds and grows...
...Buried under the innovations of style, and lost in the ram-blings of the story, are hints of what he wants to say about fatherlessness...
...This novel is a disorgan-*zed, sprawling, confused story about the mad journeyings of a young writer and his friend Dean, journeyings across the face of an America which they little understand, and to a Mexico which becomes a symbol of the anarchical heaven where every whim wish are gratified...
...Fane has an almost magic touch as he portrays the mercurial yet profound emotions of a child...
...3.50) is compounded of the elements of the fairy tale and the circumstances of life in France, 1955...
...Wolfe was rooted in the soil of America, while these young men and women know only the hard pavements...
...He can—and this is the rut to popularity and financial success—assume that the threats to personal integrity are not real...
...2, San Francisco Scene, Grove, 160 pp., $1), he has written about these literary anarchists...
...The San Francisco group will be best represented this fall by On the Road of Jack Kerouac (Viking...
...233 pp...
...245 pp...
...As a novel, this is something less than successful, precisely because of its materials...
...Briefly Noted A new publisher, McDowell, Obo-lensky of New York has begun remarkably well with two volumes...
...Harvey Swados, in On the Line (Little, Brown...
...Kerouac strives to make his book something more than what I have said it is...
...These are the fragmented people that Nelson Algren and Henry Miller have been writing about...
...3.75), a collection of excellent short stories in which petty passions are sometimes played out as if they were Senecan tragedies, are but little at odds with their environment...
...Macauley constructs situations, not plots, and develops the ordinary ironies of daily life, ironies which we usually overlook because they are so obvious...
...the result is a pure delight...
...191 pp...
...significantly, he is a hobo who takes a job for a few months until he has saved a stake for the road...
...Or the novelist can write directly and honestly about men and women caught in the smothering embrat||| paternalistic industrialism and urbafr ism, but without creating either a hero or an anti-hero because norie seems possible in the milieu he is describing...
...3.50) by Robie Macauley, a collection of some of his best short stories...
...But none of the hints comes through, because he is too entranced by memory and language, too close to his characters and their adventures and their madness...
...16, New Directions, 264 pp., $2.50...
...11, The New American Library, 285 pp., 50 cents...
...3.95) is a poetic novel of the mountain folk of the South following the Civil War, by Andrew Lytle, who is much remembered for his earlier books, especially A Name for Evil and At the Moon's Inn...
...Or to phrase it another way, "no literature of the past two hundred years is of the slightest importance unless it is 'disaffiliated.' " The Evergreen Review gives a fair sampling of the writings of this group, and some of it is very good indeed, especially the poetry...
...The nub of the matter according to Rexroth is that "it is impossible for an artist to remain true to himself as a man, let alone as an artist, and work within the context of this society...
...The lower middle-class and proletarian characters in Roman Tales by Alberto Moravia (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
...3.75), the author infuses into the lives of the small business men and the sharpsters of London a love and a poetry which transcend the meannesses of their environment...
...The writer of the Fifties has, I think, to face essentially the same problem of integrity versus society, and can react in a number of different ways...
...207 pp...
...Here is the new American primi-tiveness, the primitiveness of the cities, of jazz, liquor, neon lights and speed, and of a sense of loss and of directionlessness...
...Most of Swados' workers want to leave the line, although in reality there is no escape except for one...
...Sean O'Faolain has remarked that tie writers of the Twenties "may nave been a generation astray, but they were not in the least a lost generation...
...The plot of Faraway by Andre Dhotel (Simon and Schuster...
...For writers like Zola, Dreiser, and the other naturalists, those forces represented a challenge against which the hero pitted his strength and courage...
...And in the title novelette and the section entitled "Good Business with Sentiment" in The Mendelman Fire by Wolf Mankowitz (Little, Brown...
...Evergreen Review No...
...It is, however, questionable whether Swados is correct in assuming that men and women in industrial and related jobs are so much dissatisfied with their life as they are anesthetized into believing it to be at least acceptable and perhaps good...
...Unholy Uproar (Lippincott...
...Their second volume is The End of Pity (246 pp...
...Morning by Julian Fane (Reynal...
...310 PP- $3.95...
...Or, and this is more important, here we have a new kind of Huck Finn, one who has never experienced the river...
Vol. 21 • October 1957 • No. 10
