SENSE AND NIGHTMARE
Hayes, E. Nelson
Sense and Nightmare E. Nelson Hayes ALTHOUGH he died only six years ago, at the age of 73, Christian Gauss, teacher, scholar, and dean at Princeton, is already becoming something of a legend. A...
...She speaks of "that muck of sentimentality which has choked all truth and courage and vividness out of English art," and she writes movingly of the dreadful conditions of the poor in London's East End...
...Essentially an adventure in human understanding, a study of the barriers which separate husband from wife, parent from child, sibling from sibling, it is also a close analysis of the decline of artistic taste, of intellectual honesty, of social cohesion in the years before World War I. If the novel is Victorian in pace and phrase, with the sentimentalism of Dickens and the logic of Meredith, it is also distinctly modern in its dissection of those causes of yesterday which made inevitable our today...
...I would hazard that Camus, whether he knows it or not, is well on the way to becoming a Christian...
...He narrates the bitterness and loss of America through two world wars and a depression, and of the near-tragedy of his own personal life caught in the scandal of an unsuccessful marriage and a successful love affair, and burdened with heavy responsibilities...
...Individually, in the years immediately before and after the War, they gave us some of the most distinguished intellectual achievements of Great Britain in this century...
...The mother, a talented pianist of almost saintly patience and love...
...5) the faltering struggle against the rising tide of vulgarity—social, intellectual, and aesthetic—in Edwardian England is symbolized in the chronicles of an eccentric family living on the fringes of respectability...
...3.50), remembers them, and himself, in those years somewhat differently: "As a set, we were earnest, hard-working, and intellectually adventurous...
...6), including sketches for an autobiography, journals of three trips to Europe, some notes on the problems of a college administrator, several lectures on literature, essays on the American scene, and especially his correspondence with Fitzgerald and Wilson...
...Albert Camus is the inheritor of their nightmare...
...However, she was aware of poverty and decay, and of a general lowering of standards...
...Perhaps this is somewhat unfair...
...His latest book, The Fall (Knopf...
...246 pp...
...Closer to the head, but certainly not to the heart, of England at that time was the Cambridge-Bloomsbury group, among them Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, and Betrand Russell...
...The author has a hard and awkward time making us admire and like such a character, but he succeeds, and succeeds too in making us understand the importance of such principles...
...To it and to the memory of its designer, a younger brother dedicates himself...
...Miss Cather was not the gaping American tourist...
...This miscellany, although unified only by the kindly personality, broad interests, and many activities of the writer, exhibits a man who, despite occasional crotch-etiness, idiosyncrasy, and prejudice, may rightly be thought of as a foremost example of the scholarly mind that is both American and cosmopolitan, and a critical spirit that is universal in range and high of standard...
...Random House...
...This impression is strengthened by the correspondence of two of them, Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, in Letters (Harcourt, Brace...
...and nowhere does she praise the mechanical conveniences of the United States at the expense of the English and French...
...To put it another way, here is a man who, having experienced the fall and having come to know universal guilt and the need for absolution, has also found that "nerve, sex, and sense" are not enough to live by...
...He writes engagingly and frankly of his own Victorian childhood, of his personal and intellectual emancipation through philosophy and mathematics, of his long and still not ended search of absolutes and for some satisfaction of the religious impulse...
...of his personal convictions, particularly the hope he still has that humanity may yet be able to work out its problems and avoid destruction...
...In spite of rather solemn ambitions, we had lots of fun and thoroughly enjoyed life...
...A pagan Christian, an unpolitical liberal, a conservative humanist, and a thoroughly American student of European literature, he worked his primary influence not through books but through personal relationships with several generations of undergraduates, and particularly with F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Peale Bishop, and Edmund Wilson...
...Despite their close personal friendship, they wrote each other in a style marred by self-consciousness and even stiltedness...
...The Tower itself, a hotel and office building constructed in 1916 shortly before the death of the architect, is a masterpiece symbolic alike of the genius of its creator and the integrity of the arts...
...During the last three decades of his life he was in a sense living on borrowed intellectual time...
...The volume is a little treasury of materials, themes, and techniques which she was developing to the maturity which marks her later work, as she visited the Shropshire of Housman, the East End of London, the studio of Burne-Jones, the canals of England, a performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor, as well as scenes and sights in France...
...To that pre-War Europe the twenty-eight year old Willa Cather, then a school teacher, first journeyed in 1902, and her account of that trip, originally published in the Nebraska State Journal, has now been issued as Willa Cather in Europe, edited with explanatory notes by George N. Kates (Knopf...
...and three daughters and a son, all precocious—these are the Aubreys of whom Miss West writes tenderly, lovingly, and not a little sadly...
...Now his daughter, Katherine Gauss Jackson, and Hiram Haydn have edited some of his work (The Papers of Christian Gauss...
...of his friends and acquaintances, Shaw, Conrad, Wells, Santayana, and especially Whitehead and the Webbs...
...There is much about the narrator that is Victorian—his pompous morality, his high dedication, his sometimes foolish sense of self-sacrifice...
...but as a self-conscious coterie, it is easy to accuse them of being pretentious, snobbish, and detached from the lives of ordinary people...
...That it is not a simple subject, nor a simple lack, is the theme of Frank Norris' prize-winning novel, The Tower in the West (Harper...
...This is surely an accurate statement of Russell's own life, as is clear in this volume of notes...
...A not uncommon plaint about people and attitudes of the Twentieth Century is the lack of old-fashioned integrity...
...435 pp...
...Bertrand Russell, in Portraits from Memory (Simon and Schuster...
...his tastes and attitudes belonged to an earlier age, and he was not always understanding of, and seldom sympathetic toward, the thought and literature of the post-World War I era...
...4.50...
...while she respected the cultural heritage of Europe, she did not blindly worship it...
...Until now on the fringes of existentialism, in The Fall he has written what seems to me to be a Pascalian statement of the possibility that man has nothing to lose by becoming a believer in Christ, if not a believer in a particular church...
...362 pp...
...147 pp...
...3.95...
...3), is certain to stir controversy if for no reason other than its moral and religious ambiguities...
...Cast into the form of a monologue, the novel—if such it can be considered—consists of the confession of a "judge-penitent," a sinner who has learned that "all is vanity" and who hopes to make his listener, and presumably therefore the reader, confess his own sins after hearing a recital of the sins of another...
...and despite, or perhaps because of, their wit, learning, and literary bawdiness, they seem quite isolated from the decrepitude and decay of which Willa Cather was so aware...
...178 pp...
...the cruelly selfish father, a journalist who supports all lost causes except that of his own family...
...Once an admired and respected lawyer, a defender of widows and orphans, a bon vivant, the narrator had late one night turned his back on an unkown woman who jumped from a bridge...
...373 pp...
...In an open letter written in 1924 to the younger generations, to the admirers of Aldous Huxley, James Branch Cabell, James Joyce, and others of that ilk, Gauss remarked that theirs was essentially a destructive art, an art of hostility, sensuality, and boredom...
...He spoke of these young men as "reactionaries without a principle . . . initiators of decadence . . . in an age without beliefs," who, having passed beyond the limits of good and evil, could trust only sense, sex, and nerve...
...166 pp...
...In Rebecca West's first novel in twenty years, The Fountain Overflows (Viking...
...Soon thereafter he began to hear the laughter which, coming from nowhere, was to torment him, to drive him to drink and debauchery, and finally to his present role...
Vol. 21 • April 1957 • No. 4
