RECENT FICTION
Hayes, E. Nelson
Recent Fiction by E. NELSON HAYES THE publication of Edna St. Vincent Millay's Collected Poems (Harper. 738 pp. $6) now, six years after her death, affords a much needed opportunity for a fresh...
...These three books have given me a good deal of pleasure...
...her 88-year-old father, who relives through memory the pioneering days of Nineteenth Century America, and has no sense of present time or event...
...3.50), in which seven Americans representing four different generations watch a bull fight in Mexico, each seeing in it a reflection of himself, that "this imaginative act is man himself...
...3.50) by Hungarian-born Eva Boros is the beautiful and moving story of a middle-aged business man who has been deserted by his wife, and of a young girl who has been in a tuberculosis sanatorium most of her life...
...216 pp...
...Despite the common opinion of her as the ironically erotic voice of an emancipated generation of women, she had surprising range and depth of technique, motif, and meaning, especially in her later poems...
...In sum, hers was the purest lyric voice heard in America in the first half of the Twentieth Century...
...Yet it is a ma-jor act of the imagination, for the author has created a whole new world, a "climate of potentiality," a kingdom of second-chances...
...Each of them, except the boy, is trapped in and by the past, which is unrolled before us like a tattered pennant' of lost hopes and unachieved dreams...
...561 pp...
...4), is...
...Monsarrat has thus carefully rigged his story in order to say that the Negroes of Africa can and should be given freedom only gradually, and only after they have been thoroughly brain-washed in the ways of Western civilization...
...their grandson, who imagines himself to be Davy Crockett, but who after the conflict of life and death in the ring is already in process of becoming someone and something else...
...6) now, six years after her death, affords a much needed opportunity for a fresh evaluation of her work...
...It is a novel extra ordinarily rich in thought and feel ing, stunningly intricate in the ironied interplay of narrative, character, ana theme, and a most rewarding experience...
...The result shows us Cocteau as a masterful poseur, a man more dedicated to himself than to the arts...
...If love was central to her spirit and art, so it is to life itself, and so she law it...
...and Mrs...
...The field of vision is the pattern of meaning it brings to his life...
...The one crippled physically, and both emotionally, they move inexorably toward the painful parting...
...the style is uneven, the detail sometimes inconsistent, the charac ters not all »f a piece...
...598 pp...
...it is much too long and even at times a bit tedi-ous...
...the often bathetic verses in protest against the assassination of Sacco and Vanzetti, the betrayal of Czechoslovakia, and the injustices she took so painfully to heart...
...4.95...
...This is a rather dismal per formance except for the engaging glimpses of Gide, Proust, Picasso, of other contemporaries and friends of the enfant terrible...
...4.95), a vast fiction-at|B Napoleon's expedition to EgYP^^H eryone and everything in it is ehbjfl larger or smaller than life, and t£fl whole is improperly seasoned widj sex and pseudo-scholarship...
...Wallace Fowlie has snipped from six of Jean Cocteau's precious vofit umes a number of personal passages and pasted them together to make what he calls Journals (Criterioto 250 pp...
...Now she has done it again, in Mirage (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
...Seldom have I been so angered by a novel as by Nicholas Monsarrat's The Tribe that Lost Its Head (William Sloane...
...The title piece, a longish short story, gives us the crucial day in the life of Tommy Wilhelm, an ineffectual, selfish, self-pitying, slightly revolting slob who takes expectations for realities and has made a complete failure of his life...
...not a "well-made" novel...
...McKee, married for many years and apparently happy together, yet essentially unloving and unrelated...
...A complex novel of many levels of meaning, The Field of Vision is another quiet triumph by a writer who, whether so recognized or not, is among our most important authors...
...3.50), which is as much fun as its predecessor, Life Among the Savages...
...Cocteau might have done better with Shirley Jackson as a mother The savages have now become de-mons, but she continues to bring them up as if they were children How she does it is chronicled Raising Demons (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
...Bellow skillfully leads him to the breaking point, then opens the way for transformation and redemption through having him weep at the funeral of a stranger...
...Monsarrat imagines an island off the West coast of Africa—a British colony ruled by bungling bureaucrats and inhabited by peculiarly childish, stupid, and potentially brutal natives...
...Miss Boros writes a wonderfully controlled, clean, simple English, sketches rapidly and deftly the inner decay of her characters, fixes upon exactly the appropriate details to portray their depressing milieu, and delicately suggests an allegory on the decline of Europe...
...the enigmatic Paul-Paula Kah-ler, who through an act of will and in reaction against cruelty and evil has metamorphosed from man to woman...
...The tragic flaw in their lives is that they are no longer capable of transformation, of becoming rather than merely being...
...The "working" balance of power is upset by a chief-designate returning after seven years of education in England, and by hypocritical, cynical newsmen, vaporous crusaders, and bloody liberals...
...Mr...
...Virtually all of her poetry, except the few self-pitying or mawkish love lyrics and most of the topical poems, has for me today the same freshness, magic, and appeal as on first reading...
...the lyrics in praise of poetry and poets...
...Lehmann, who is a specialist in transformation of personality and soul...
...211 pp...
...I have just reread all her poetry—the many-themed sonnets, perhaps the best yet written in this century...
...The Green Kingdom by Rachel Maddux (Simon and Schuster...
...That five men and women live and die testing their capacities for making of and by themselves the land of their dreams, and learning the hard les son of knowing and accepting then selves for what they are, and of low ing one another...
...Briefly Noted The Mermaids (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
...The next has not, nor would I even mention it if it did not have important implications both in its topic and in its viewpoint...
...Wright Morris has written of his latest novel, The Field of Vision (Harcourt, Brace...
...the bitter-sweet songs of nature...
...Through scores of pages of blood, sweat, and fears, he creates a terrifying image of black savagery unrestrained by the wisdom and strength of Europeans...
...She spoke, again and again, of the bitter transiency of life, of the terrible loneliness of the individual, of the poignant beauty of nature, and of man and his Maker...
...and most important, the boldly imaginative Boyd—these are the characters who watch the bull fight...
...perhaps I can best indicate my attitude by noting that it outdoes Ruark's Something of Value, to which it bears a more than incidental resemblance in its anti-Negro bias...
...Finally, I want to mention briefly a very special book, one which wil take a treasured place o,n my shelve along with The Fellowship of the Ring, Islandia, Spear in the Sand and others of that select group of fantasies which tell us so much be cause they are so little bound by the trivialities of time and space...
...Another of our major writers, Saul Bellow, has flexed his talents in Seize the Day (Viking...
...Of whatever she spoke, she spoke clearly and unequivocally, directly to the mind and the heart, with none of the torturous contortions that mark and mar so much modern poetry...
...In summing up Ruth McKenney's labor hero in her novel Jake Home, Walter B. Rideout in The Radical Novel in the United States rightly re-marked that she had produced something close to an unconscious caricature...
...each of them, except the boy, has become placid, passive, complacent in the present...
...310 pp...
...A revolt ensues, and Monsarrat is off to the races...
...251 pp...
...The volume also contains three short short stories and a one-act play, all of them competent without being much more...
...726 pp...
Vol. 21 • February 1957 • No. 2
