Reader's Choice

BY CHARLES J. ROLO

THE Camera moves over two baboon armies while the sound track blares the theme song of the ape-mind, “Give me detumescence.”In each army an identical Einstein, tied to a leash, is dragged before a panel of instruments. Ape-guided, the fingers which have written equations unleash plague fog and atomic missiles. Choking screams announce the death, by suicide, of twentieth-century science. Dissolve to Southern California in the year 2108, where a Rediscovery Force from New Zealand (saved by its remoteness) is landing.—This, roughly, is how Aldous Huxley leads into his second fantasticated parable on the shape of lunacy to come. Except for an explanatory opening, the book is cast in the form of a movie script. A Narrator, speaking partially in blank verse, supplies Huxley’s moral reading on the tale.

When Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932, it seemed to him that mankind was headed toward the soulless, mass-produced contentment of a scientific Utopia. His fable dramatized the choice between this “death-vvithout-tears” and a return to “noble Savagery” which was both squalid and ignoble — a choice between “insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other.” Mr. Huxley has since sought to show that there exists — in the precept and practice of the mystics — a way to sanity. The source of man’s madness, he avers, is that the unregenerate Adam is an angry ape; he can cease to be one only through awareness of his Essence — of the spiritual reality underlying the world. Whence Huxley’s new title, Ape and Essence (Harper, $2.50). Brave New World envisaged the painless triumph of standardization, which Huxley then considered the logical end product of a science controlled by soulless rationalists. “Our Ford” was the prophet. Ape and Essence depicts the miserable triumph of animal bestiality, which Huxley now suggests will be the logical end product of a science controlled by warminded ape men. The prophet is Belial.

It is a society of Yahoos which Alfred Poole — the Rediscovery Force’s botanist, who is captured by the natives and left to them — finds in the ruins of Hollywood. Their religion is a fear-ridden and sadistic demonism. Their clothing comes off disinterred corpses, their fuel from the surviving libraries. The only word most people can read is NO, which is patched on the women’s garments, fore and aft. For woman is a “Vessel of the Unholy Spirit.”Ever since World War III, most babies (due to mutations caused by gamma rays) have been monstrously deformed. As the result of another imitation the mating instinct, in 90 per cent of the population, is confined to five weeks in the year and may be gratified in only two of them, which begin with Belial Day. The unmutated 10 per cent, known as Host, face the penalty of burial alive if they indulge their libidinal deviationism. Some of them have escaped to found a community of exiles near Fresno.

A mutual sympathy and attraction instantly springs up between Alfred Poole and Loola, a vessel with Hot tendencies. The morrow of Poole’s arrival is Belial Day, celebrated with communal saturnalia into which Loola drags her “Alfie.”Hitherto a repressed Mother’s Boy, Alfie is soon in love for the first time. Loola is too, though she doesn’t know the meaning of the word and dreads the feeling, for the legal mating season is already over. At this point Poole, who has been charged with reclaiming the eroded and infected soil, decides on flight.

At first reading, Ape and Essence struck me as an extremely puzzling performance. Why the script form? And what of the “moral”? Poole has the special knowledge which he might use to save the community from starvation. Instead of which he elopes with Ins lascivious Loola to catch up on his arrested Kinsey rating. Is this the final triumph of Belial? Or is it the case of the world well lost for Romance, which would amount to much the same thing—the triumph of Hollywood over Huxley? The fact that these and a good many other questions arise shows that Mr. Huxley, who here as always has something important to say and says it entertainingly, has registered a miss with Ape and Essence. That still leaves it in the upper bracket of the year’s fiction.

The script form is not suited to Huxley’s satiric talent. I am told he tried the idea out as a “straight” novel and found it “too heavy"— he was aiming at pure fantasy (and perhaps wider appeal). The use of the Narrator in place of the customary Huxleyan sage, marginally involved in the plot, is also designed to avoid realism and weightness. It is,

I feel, rather unsuccessful, though the blank verse does give a lyrical quality to the counterpoint — the Essence— which is opposed to the harsh point — the Ape.

The “moral" of the fable, as I interpret it, is twofold. First, ihe idea that love is progress toward Essence. Is there not a hint, asks the Narrator, that there is, “beyond Adanais, the worldless doctrine of the Pure in Heart"? Second, the conviction (previously expressed by Huxley) that our society — of which Belial’s is a sardonic extension — is irretrievably polluted and salvation is possible only on the periphery—in refugee communities of free spirits. One must cultivate one’s oasis.

The brutal naturalism with which Erskine Caldwell introduced a new slice of life to U.S. fiction — you might call it, morally as well as otherwise, the pellagra belt—established him as a serious novelist soon after he turned thirty, some fifteen years ago. Too many of his characters have since been gamy grotesques. His favorite theme has been a trinity of rape, lynching, and murder, heightened by gothic enormities— the whole viewed with a sardonic humor which has seemed to relish cruelty and outrage. (I recall an old sharecropper devoured by hogs, little girls prostituted for a quarter, dog tails sliced off for the sport, and a case of necrophily.) Caldwell’s cult of violence and horror, whose crescendo has had a deadening effect, long since came close to being a perverted form of “cuteness. This Very Earth (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, $2.75) however,

is a partial departure from the patented vein. To be sure, it contains rape, sadism, and murder. But the people here are altogether more human; the point of the story and the pathos of the characters are not submerged in sheer sensationalism.

Caldwell’s subject is the crack-up of a rural family, the Crocketts, who enjoyed a good life on their farm until Chism’s wife died: then, swayed by “the Kluxers,”Chism traded the home place fora house in town. The Crocketts’ tragedy has interlocking roots, private and social. The death of Alice Crockett has reduced Chism to stubborn shiftlessness — “ the only thing on the topside of the world I want to do is hunt possums"; he and his children feel “cut loose to drift in the big, wide ocean.” And the quality of life in the small Southern town — its opportunities for idleness and gambling, its; confining limitations, its political corruption and moral poverty—proves fatal to the drifting Crocketts, Chism and his three attractive daughters. Punctuated by scenes of brutality done with effective terseness, the story moves swiftly to a calamitous finale. That Very Earth is certainly no landmark in Caldwell’s work. But he has put aside that wryly detached bravado; he has written with some feeling and understanding about the Crocketts. One of them, Chism, is a first-rate charnelerization.

James Cain’s eighth novel, The Moth (Knopf, $3.00), is an attempt to tell a tale “of a wider implication.” The result is many more pages than before and some new flavorings unsuited to the Cain recipe: spiritual uplift (symbolized by glimpses of a Curia mot h) ;some philosophy of Hollywood caliber; and an ending which will dismay Cain (aficionados and save the movie-makers a rewrite. The maestro of the slim, sex-propelled shocker has taken himself too seriously.

Cain’s story is essentially the Superman comic strip on a differfnt literary level. Most of the action follows a recurring pattern: Jack Dillon up against it; gets brain wave; comes out on top. Dillon, a whiz at everything he turns his hand to, is, in chronological order: a choirboy whose soprano carries him to Loew’s State, a famous football hero, a super hobo and thief. Then, in the time it takes to control a blazing oil well, he becomes a big oilman; then a major with the Purple Heart and It is future assured as a tycoon in the frozen food business. By this time Cain has given the reader courses on the know-how of oil drilling, safe-cracking, fruit picking, voice and chest control for singers, elementary education for backward children, and matters mechanical galore.

Women, of course, go for Dillon with immense abandon. One of them with “sharky” eyes and an “Aztec” sun tan —says to him: “You’re a damned blond lower of sin that I’d give my eye teeth to cuddle right now.” But", contrary to Cain’s form book, the siren fails to destroy the hero. So much for the “wider implication.” Several episodes, however, have the crackling tension one expects of Cain; a good deal of the writing has his reputed pace and tingle. Cain, jumbo size, manages to be pretty silly without often being dull.

When Tanya Bers was a child, Count Tolstoy taught her arithmetic, told her fairy stories, acted with her in plays he arranged himself. “Tattyanchik the Imp,” he nicknamed her, and, appropriately enough, she was hiding under a grand piano when he professed his love to her elder sister. After Tolstoy’s marriage, Tanya would come every year, “with the swallows,” to spend the summer on the Count’s estate at Yasnaya Polyana. Leo Nikolayevich took long walks with her in the woods, and listened understandingly to her confidences. “What are you always writing in your little book?” Tanya asked one day. “I’m taking notes about you,” Tolstoy answered. Tanya was to appear in War and Peace as the most captivating of all heroines, Natasha Rostova.

Just before her death in 1925, Tatyana Knzminskaya (Tanya’s name by marriage) began to publish her memoirs, which now appear in English for the first time. Tolstoy As I Knew Him (Macmillan, $5.00) covers one of the most interesting periods in his life: his courtship, the first years of marriage, and the writing of War and Peace, chapters of which were dictated to Tanya and read to the Bers family and their circle, several of whom recognized themselves with delight. Many of the letters from Tolstoy to the author have not before been translated. In fact, Tolstoy’s scholarly biographer, Ernest J. Simmons, calls the book “a veritable treasure-trove” of new material.

It is that and more: the spontaneous and vivid story of a girl growing up in a well-to-do family of czarist Russia — of the childish games; the flirtations of proper jeunes filles and soulful cadets, and their first disturbing loves; the soirées of serious conversation, music or amateur dramatics; the traveling under fantastically primitive conditions; the melancholia and the raptures of the Slavic temperament, described without reserve in letters or confided to the inevitable diary. The heroine herself is gay, tender, spirited (and was, one learns elsewhere, quite lovely). Surely Tolstoy married the wrong sister!

Aldous Huxley once said, not wholly in jest, that an afternoon in a wellequipped library could make him the world’s second greatest expert on almost any subject under the sun Latin America: Continentin Crisis (Random House, $4.50) by Ray Josephs makes you feel, after reading it, that you are the second greatest expert on that subject. It’s a methodical, all-inclusive topical report, written in a brisk journalese which enables the reader to absorb it hundredweight of facts and still find the going fairly easy.

The Latin republics, Mr. Josephs shows with a wealth of shocking social statistics, “are only now emerging from their Middle Ages.” Three groups have benefited from the “semifeudal” conditions: “the Church . . . the armies . . . and the wealthy, who joined hands with both.” Two recent developments have brought this fundamental cause of Latin unrest to the point of mounting crisis. The wartime demand for raw materials, Lend-Lease, and social measures sponsored by the U.S. in the interest of greater output set in motion a sharply progressive trend. The immediate post-war period was one of high hopes. But bitterness set in as export markets and dollar aid fell off and prices spiraled — a condition which Communists and Fascists have found fertile ground. Perón, who is working systematically at domination of the continent, “hasn’t missed a trick.”

The Communists, significantly, are weakest where the regime is liberal. But U.S. efforts to create “a bulwark against Communism" are said to be strengthening the hand of Fascist elements: at Bogotá the U.S. junked the principle of not recognizing dictatorships established by force. Throughout the Americas, Josephs heard the complaint: “The United States seems to prefer reactionaries.” This country’s status “is as low as it has ever been this generation and it is not getting any better.” One cause is the curtailment of the U.S. information program, due to a Congressional slash in funds. Chileans said to Josephs: “If you would tell us the why of what you do, you could keep Chilean friendship even though unable to aid us directly.” Another complaint was that the U.S. is represented only by businessmen “here strictly for profits.”

Mr. Josephs’s book is packed with information of a lighter sort. The Caraqueños take their bullfighting so seriously that bulls are flown in over the mountains to spare them a rough motor ride. Venezuela, whose President is a noted novelist, has not a single book publisher. La Paz is the only capital in the world without a fire department: oxygen is so short at 13,500 feet that, “nothing important will burn.” The lamppost on which Villarroel was hanged has never had the globe replaced: “It’s staying that way,” said a shoeshine boy, “just in case.” When the water system broke down at Santiago’s racecourse, photo-finish pictures were developed in Coca-Cola not to hold up the gambling. Chile’s “George Washington” was a General Bernardo O’Higgins.