Reader's Choice

BY CHARLES J.ROLO

THE publishers’ spring lists look more promising than they have in recent years, and part of the promise has been fulfilled. This month’s line-up includes two exceptionally lively biographies, a distinguished autobiography, and some superior fiction and that leaves a number of good titles unaccounted for. Among them, to single out a few, are a volume of short stories by Graham Greene; David Davidson’s second novel, The Hour of Truth; the Hungarian family saga, The Dukays, an immediate host-seller; and England’s highly praised, bestsidling war novel, From, the City, from the Plough, by Alexander Baron. Also a notable cluster of works by Gide, Kafka, and Proust, published in English for the first time — Gide’s Dostoevski, his Oscar Wilde, and Volume III of The Journals; a collection of Kafka’s stories and Volume II of his Diaries; and the Letters of Marcel Proust.

Shortly before his death the late James Walker, onetime hundredth Mayor of New York City, asked his friend Gene Fowler to write his biography. Mr. Fowler, whose admirers are legion Good Night, Sweet Prince, Timberline, and other books of his have each sold 100,000 copies — is a tolerant and affectionate chronicler. His Beau James: The Life and Times of Jimmy Walker (Viking, $4.00) has a superb story to toll - Walker’s beginnings as a song writer, his career as state senator, the lush years of his caliphate at city hall, the romance with Petty Compton, his fall and decline — and the telling is done with skill, vitality, and feeling, occasionally with unabashed schmaltz. Fowler’s memoir is packed with good anecdotes, Broadway lore, and samples of Walker’s quick wit and gift for repartee.

Though at school Walker found study “almost an impossibility,” he became an effective lawyer and an agile debater. His surprising fund of knowledge he picked up by car — in all of Ids adult life, Fowler reports, he finished only fifteen books. Walker took political attacks with complete geniality; when a Hears! reporter, a good friend, was ordered to write a series of anti-Walker stories. Walker himself supplied material which, the writer protested, was too damaging. For all his jauntiness, “Beau James” suffered from peculiar phobias. Though he loved mass adulation, he was panicky in crowds. He hated to be touched, was nervous in elevators, instructed his chauffeur always to drive slowly. He was incurably allergic to correspondence. When Fowler examined his papers, he found hundreds of unopened letters.

In dealing with Walker’s private life, in particular the relationship with Betty Compton, Fowler strikes a nice balance between frankness and tact. In handling the “times,” he gives free rein to his zest for the Era of Wonderful Nonsense.

Beau James is not, Fowler insists, a whitewash: he has carelully studied the testimony given at the Seabury investigation and the Roosevelt hearings, and he reports their salient findings. It is fair to say, I think, that Fowler gives “Mayor Jim” the benefit of every doubt. Among those in the know, there may be some raised eyebrows at Fowler s conclusion that Walker, though guilty of nonfeasance — of irresponsibility and blindness to graft in his administration — was innocent of om/fcasance. Most readers are not likely to be much put out by the author’s generosity. There is more gain than loss in Fowler s avoidance of a relentlessly elaborate .judicial post-mortem; in his concentration of the spotlight on the bravura charm, the raffish elegance, and the expansive humanity of the man whom New York “wore in its buttonhole” for a decade.

Jimmy Walker is a line catch for a biographer; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is an even bigger one. John Dickson Carr — Carter Dickson to mystery story addicts — is the first biographer to have had full access to the voluminous records which Doyle loft behind when he died in 1930; like Sherlock Holmes, Doyle had “a horror of destroying documents.” In Carr’s pages, Doyle “speaks in his own words out of letter, notebook, diary, authenticated press-cutting.” When the furniture of a room, or the weather, or a gesture is described, ”it is because there is documentation for such statements.” As a result, The Life of Sir Arthur Couan Doyle (Harper, $3.50), without being “novelized,” often reads like a novel.

The writing is undistinguished, but Doyle’s story is too engrossing for this to be obtrusive; and Mr. Carr has told that “story of adventure, sometimes even of melodrama” in arresting detail and with affecting enthusiasm.

Arthur Conan Doyle, appropriately dubbed “the good giant,” was a singularly attractive personality, a man of miraculous vitality and stunning versatility: doctor, authority on heraldry, and all-round sportsman (he excelled at cricket, boxing, football, and was “ a golf inebriate”); criminologist, war correspondent , and milit ary expert (he urged ihe use of foxholes by attacking infantry, and accurately forecast the U-boat blockade); historian, playwright, novelist, and perennial crusader. He also played the banjo, stood for Parliament, and introduced skiing as a sport to Switzerland!

Doyle turned to writing as a young physician with few patienls and no money. One of Carr’s piquant disclosures about the Sherlock Holmes books is that there was a real Dr. Watson. The Holmes stories were but a small fraction of Doyle’s output, and they were written with amazing speed — A Study in Scarlet in a month, the short tales at the rate of two a week. The prices Doyle came to command for Holmes are staggering — a $20,000 advance for a book; $2.50 a word from one magazine.

Doyle, paradoxically, became disgusted with Holmes’s popularity, which, he felt, “ unduly obscured ” his “better” work — his historical novels (also highly successful). The craze for Holmes was such that, when Doyle first killed him off, young Londoners tied crepe bands around their hats. After Doyle was knighted, a parcel of shirts arrived addressed to “Sir Sherlock Holmes.”

Holmes’s creator was himself a brilliant amateur detective, who cleared the reputation of two men wrongly imprisoned. I wish that Carr had told us exactly how Doyle solved those cases. I wish, too, that he had attempted a critical estimate of Doyle’s non-Sherlockian writings — he simply praises them.

There is poignant romance in the life of the robust, walrus-mtislached Victorian. At thirty-eight Doyle fell hopelessly in love with ihe beautiful Jean Leckie. He might have asked for a divorce, having left the Catholic Church as a young man. Hut his mother, who took deep pride in her descent from the Irish nobility, had vigorously instilled in him the spirit of knightly chivalry. Doyle’s relation with Jean Leekie remained platonic throughout the ten years in which his wife, to whom his devolion never wavered, was dying of tuberculosis.

Carr shows convincingly that Doyle’s conversion, at sixty, to Spiritualism was ihe culmination of thirty years of study and experiment. Into this last crusade he poured a million dollars and all his remaining strength.

Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well (Macmillan, $4.75) is the memorable fourth volume of Sean O’Casey’s autobiography, surely one of the finesl of our time. Opening in 1917, it closes in the middle twenties, when O’Casey left Dublin for England. The underlying theme is disillusionment, but the tone — never weary or morose — is quick with aliveness and charged with warmth for the people of the Dublin slums and ihe people who fought for Ireland.

The onetime Secretary of the Irish Citizen Army — “a rough proletarian, well versed in Communism” — sees the “terrible beauty” of the Irish revolution and its promise changing into a parvenu, conservative gentility, decked out in silk hat and black broadcloth: —

O’Casey’s disillusionment is pitched in subtly shifting, subtly complementary keys: satire fierce as well as facetious, bitter anger, romantic nostalgia, and the dancing irony of many such paragraphs as: “Now 11917] the manoeuvring began: the young leaders . . . circled round each other, wary and watchful, eager to snap up a well-considered trifle of position. . . . Spirals of political movement began to appear, with Michael Collins dancing a jig in one; Arthur Griffith doing a new Irish-Hungarian dance in another; and Eamonn De Valera . . . side-stepped from one group to the other, hands on hips, advising them to join hands and foot it featly here and there, pointing a pliant toe himself to show olhers the way now glide! De Valera was very supple.”

The author’s background is sharply evoked in the opening episodes — the death of his mother in a Dublin tenement where “dirt and disease were the big sacraments”; and death’s sequel, a tragicomic tussle with a cabbie who will not endure the stigma of driving to a burial without mourners.

The years covered here are those in which the Abbey Theatre produced O’Casey’s early plays: The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars. Sean found himself drawn into Dublin’s literary circles, but the unworldly young playwright from the slums remained the outsider, critically observant. An entrancing touch ol caricature creeps into his affectionate sketch of the lisping Lady Gregory (once caught surreptitiously reading Peg o’ My Heart) and into the picture of Yeats, surrounded by his canaries — “chatting in a lordly lilt about Ultumara, Brahmin Mohini, birds born out of the lire . . . Yeats murmured about coming through the fire as if it were but coming through the rye.”

There is penetrating humor throughout these pages, and the charm ol Irish vernacular, and the lovely caj deuce of fine Irish prose. O’Casey’s writing, if often overcolored, casts a spell to which even readers allergic to his heresies, religious and political, can scarcely be immune. This reader was utterly enchanted.

Of England’s sensitive women novelists — and how many of them there are! — Elizabeth Bowen is probably the most distinguished. She is certainly, among contemporaries, an artist of the first rank. The Death of the Heart, along with some of her other work, belongs in the small body of really memorable fiction published in the last fifteen years. Her new novel, The Heat of the Day (Knopf, $3.00), is something of a departure from the Bowen vein in that it has a clear-cut and melodramatic plot, which perhaps explains the phenomenon of its selection by a book club with a faible for gusty romances.

Imagine a Graham Greene thriller projected through the sensibility of Virginia Woolf and transcribed with a certain amount of Jamesian overelaboration — that may suggest, impressionistically, the flavor of Miss Bowen’s admirable yet not quite successful novel.

The plot hinges on treason in the London of 1942. For two years Stella Rodney, an attractive widow nearing forty, has been the mistress of Robert Kelway, and they are wholly in love. Both have confidential war jobs. A stranger, Harrison, allegedly engaged in counterespionage, tells Stella that Robert is betraying secrets to the Nazis: to save him from being denounced, she must let Harrison replace him in her life. Is Harrison authentic? And if so, what prompts so compulsive a need for a woman he has only glimpsed that he is ready to condone treason? If Kelway, a veteran of Dunkirk, is a traitor, what has made him one? And how can Stella have known her lover so little as not to sense in him something abhorrent to her?

The novel, like one of Virginia Woolfs, unfolds as a continual reaching for what is elusive, intangible, mysterious in human personality. “One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, not yet what is done.”The phrase, Virginia Woolfs, aptly describes the way in which Miss Bowen brings the life of her characters to the surface.

At its best, and it is often at its best, Miss Bowen’s prose matches the extraordinary refinement of her awareness — awareness of light, decor, movements, nuances of feeling; a totality of experience—with a flawless precision of expression. Sometimes the elusiveness of life is overplayed; the mystery smacks of mystification. A trifling point is held, irritatingly, at arm’s length through pages of innuendo and Jamesian hesitations. The novel grows static and the perceptions are blurred through overrefinement.

Miss Bowen’s double-edged theme is the individual’s need for moorings; the varied losses incurred when the moorings are lacking or destroyed. The answer to the question mark beside each character is that each, in some sense, is a “displaced” person. The sinister and curiously pathetic Harrison has always been, one comes to realize, a sort of secret agent: a man living in a vacuum, anonymous, depersonalized— and therefore unlovable. His hunger to enter into Stella’s life is a hunger for “a place of mv own”—lor human identity. Stella, through a variety of circumstances, has been severed from her background. Robert has become her “ habitat” and life in a “hermetic world” of love has dimmed her vision. As to Robert — it would not be fair to furnish clues.

Through Stella’s son, Roderick, who inherits the decayed family estate, Miss Bowen’s point becomes explicit. Life without a complex of attachments and loyalties — some burdensome, some conventional, some trivial, but together signifying “a place of one’s own” — becomes life lived “in the heat of the day”; and that heat is blinding and destructive.

From South Africa, which exactly a year ago gave us Cry, The Beloved Country, there again comes a first novel of rare distinction: Ceremony of Innocence (Harcourt, Brace, $2.75) by Elizabeth Charlotte Webster. I have seldom hit upon a book by an unknown writer so delightful and so accomplished in its artistry. This is a boldly original morality tale, a lapidary satire aimed at the shams of professional holiness and at pseudoChristians in the service of the Church. Its larger target is the spiritual poverty of present-day Christian society. Though unmistakably the work of a profoundly religious person, it is not likely to escape charges of frivolity and heresy.

The setting is an Anglican convent and the neighboring town of Geldersburg in South Africa. Miss Webster’s portraits of the religious community (and of some members of the laity) are drawn with astringent observation and exquisite irony. Most of the good Sisters are pathetic old children preoccupied with mundane trivia and with spying upon each other; their piety is at best the husk of religion. The Superior is a tyrant. The fatuous Reverend Bucklelhwaite, a schoolboyish exponent of muscular Christianity, worships “a jolly Jesus, good at games ”; zealous in the Boy Scout movement, he is “literally marching to salvation in shorts.” The newly married Reverend Greenhalgh takes pride in being “a bit of a dog.” Canon Hope Dunston is a glut ton and an ecclesiastical Blimp. The author’s answering challenge is the shining faith of Father Nicholas, a figure brought to life with muted eloquence.

Into the convent there comes a young novice, Sybil, who evidences supernatural powers. She heals a palsied woman, foretells the take at a Bazaar, sees into people’s minds. The Superior, who mistrusts miracles, has Sybil bundled off to the Girls’ Hostel; and there the drunken novelist Tearlach comes to find her — and finds he is expected. Presently the novice tells the Superior, “I am with child, and am greatly blessed.” There follow Revelation and turmoil, and many lives are changed before the child is born in a manger on the veld.

Sharp humor, anger, and compassion vitalize Miss Webster’s civilized and reverent book, a spellbinding title into which no sermonizing creeps. Ceremony of Innocence can have no sequel. Its gallant and gifted author wrote it during two years of illness and died just after it was awarded a South African literary prize.

I said here in January that Truman Capote seemed to me one of the two outstanding American newcomers of 1948. That opinion has been strengthened by his collection of short stories, A Tree of Night (Random House, $2.75), some of which I had previously read in magazines and which struck me as even better on a second reading.

Of his highly individual subject matter, Mr. Capote says: “The actual, the unadorned, all so-called naturalistic subjects have for me small interest. So, too, do their opposite extremes: fantasy or pure symbolism. There is in-between a territory uncharted, shifting, imaginative — the country below the surface.”

The frontier between Capote’s world and that of fantasy is often invisible, but that is no complaint. These eight stories are wonderful, and literally so: they keep you in a state of wonder — curiosity about the outcome; fascination with the author’s inventions; amazement in the presence of mysterious happenings.

In “Miriam,” a sixty-year-old widow meets a small girl who later, inexplicably, finds her apartment and moves in on her. Eventually Miriam Miller asks a neighbor to rid her of this sinister child, also called Miriam. The man finds no one in her apartment; as she re-enters, a voice says “Hello.” “Master Misery” — my favorite — is a tender parable about a New York typist who hears of a rich man who buys dreams. She starts to sell hers, then one day she feels “as though some thief were stealing me down to the bone.” She goes to buy back her dreams — but “Master Misery” has “used them up.”

The title story is a waking nightmare — a chilling account of how a girl, traveling at night in a railway coach — is hypnotized by the sheer evil of a loathsome old couple into letting them rob her. “Shut a Final Door,” which appeared in the Atlantic and won an O. Henry award, has to do with the eerie punishment that overtakes a huckster. “The Headless Hawk,” too, is an eerie talc of a young New Yorker hounded and haunted by his conscience — in the shape of a girl who reveals him to himself as a murderer of love. In most of these stories there are terror and poetry; in two a bizarre humor. The ultimate impression is of a world where harrowing dreams have, so to speak, slipped unnoticed into the fabric of everyday reality, bringing with them harrowing truths.

It is scarcely news by this time that Capote has an amazing verbal talent, but it deserves to be repeated. These stories are exceedingly well written.