WITH the office shelves pressed down and running over with review books, the bookworm is minded to take a taste here, a taste there, until he discovers those few which he prefers to swallow whole. The first to whet my appetite was What Price Football by Barry Wood (Houghton Mifflin, $1.75), the honest, likable testament, of an athlete who can speak his mind. The title suggests a bumptiousness which the text does not allow. Barry is not argumentative, quarrelsome; it is his intent to give an honest, impersonal picture of the conditions under which he and his team (one of the best since Haughton’s day) played football at Harvard. It is good to have this clean-cut picture of a game which has been ballyhooed almost to its ruin, but which, if played as Wood describes, is capable of intense enjoyment by others than the spectators.
Next. Buying Happiness was the title scribbled on a new set of proof sheets, and as I wormed my way inside the forematter I found I had got hold of the fresh, crisp salad of essays by that delightful Chicagoan, Edgar J. Goodspeed (University of Chicago, $2.00). This name needs no introducing to Atlantic readers, for Professor Goodspeed, one of the few real essayists still footloose, has helped to give the Atlantic its trade-mark on several occasions. As everyone knows, in his soberer moments this scholar has translated the Bible into modern, flexible American, an exercise calling for deftness, fine accuracy, and a capacity for compression and power —but not for wit, not for that graceful surprising humor with which the good Doctor surveys the more intimate world about him. These new papers, with their MidWestern tang and their laughable, quizzical ‘deflation ’ of American salesmen. Continental innkeepers, English lecturers, —to seize upon three choice victims, — are turned with the ease and command of a prose writer who knows how to play.
But there was sterner stuff ahead. Light in August (Smith and Haas, $2.50), to my mind the most complete, potent, and explicable of William Faulkner’s novels, is slow to read, difficult at first because it requires a suspension of one’s judgment in the face of so much brutality. In the introduction to the limited edition of Miss Zilphia Gant, the editor, Mr. Smith, gives us this elucidation of Faulkners work: ‘He is obsessed by decay and insanity and by the futility of man’s struggle to become godlike in his wilderness of flesh. . . .’ Without wishing to run counter to Mr. Smith, I should like to suggest that the work of this Southern novelist is even more profoundly influenced by the conflict between the white man and the Negro which smoulders beneath the surface of the South that he knows.
Light in August has for its setting a small Southern town with its surface of lazy, indolent life. To this town comes Joe Christmas, a man divided against himself. An orphan with tainted Negro blood in his veins, he has had imposed upon him the loveless standards of white civilization. In the orphan asylum at the age of five, he is told that he will never know his parents and that he must be ashamed because of his ’nigger blood. In his adopted home, the Hell-and-Damnation cruelty of his Presbyterian foster father does not break his spirit, but rather makes him ruthless in his revolt. He murders his patron, and in his escape is irrevocably doomed to play the part of a fugitive, lonely, embittered, predatory. It is in this condition that he comes to Jefferson, the sleeping community in which he is the tinder that sets fire to a fanaticism of religion, of abolitionism, and of blood.
Written with amazing vividness, capable of the most breathless accuracy and brutality, unerring in its character strokes, even of such minor characters as the Sheriff, capable, us when describing the bloodhounds or the fire, of the most skillful irony, this narrative, it seems to me, aims to depict — does depict — the futility and superficiality of civilization, at least that civilization which we have tried to impose upon the innate racial conflict in our country.
